Napoleon - Ridley Scott's film with Joaquin Phoenix

[KiramidHead]

I've been seeing people mention that Phipps recycled bits of his War and Peace score for this. The spirit of James Horner lives on. 

Also, I'm wondering if naval battles like Trafalgar will come up in the director's cut. The rant about how "you think you're so great because you have boats" feels like it's lacking in context as is.

I doubt Trafalgar would have been filmed, it would have been insanely expensive to recreate and Napoleon was nowhere even close to it.

Napoleon was notoriously inept when it came to naval warfare. In reality, the French ships were superbly built (the British fleet sported several captured French ships) but their gunnery and naval tactics were not up to par with British standards.

Mind you, Royal Navy tactics weren't really all that sophisticated, Adm. Horatio Nelson essentially just waded straight into a naval melee and used the much faster firing rate of the British ships to tear the enemy apart at point blank range.

I was thinking more along the lines of Napoleon hearing about the defeat afterwards. If I want Napoleonic naval battles, I can always rewatch Master & Commander.

[𝔗𝔥𝔢 𝔈𝔦𝔤𝔥𝔱𝔥 𝔓𝔞𝔰𝔰𝔢𝔫𝔤𝔢𝔯]

https://twitter.com/NapoleonMovie/status/1729590994004496831

I get this feeling that his epics will be like that at best: close but no cigar. Should have stayed with films like Alien.

Scott is arguably more well known for Gladiator than Alien among main stream audiences.

[ralfy]

https://twitter.com/NapoleonMovie/status/1729590994004496831

I get this feeling that his epics will be like that at best: close but no cigar. Should have stayed with films like Alien.

Scott is arguably more well known for Gladiator than Alien among main stream audiences.

I think it's because many among these audiences are younger, which is why they also probably also don't know about The Duellists and even the first Blade Runner. This might also explain why producers want more movies that are longer, with lots of spectacle, and things like weird portrayals of historical characters.

[KiramidHead]

Between the uniforms, the haircut, and Phoenix having aged, I kept thinking he looked a bit like Ciaran Hinds in The Terror. 

[𝔗𝔥𝔢 𝔈𝔦𝔤𝔥𝔱𝔥 𝔓𝔞𝔰𝔰𝔢𝔫𝔤𝔢𝔯]

New behind the scenes documentary:

[Ingwar]

Producer Kevin J. Walsh on How 'Napoleon' Achieved the Best of Both the Streaming and Theatrical Worlds

So you started The Walsh Company and signed a deal with Apple TV+ in early 2022. Had you already set up Napoleon at Apple by then?

That's right. We had already done the deal for Napoleon, and a big part of the deal process for Napoleon was led by [Apple TV+ co-head of worldwide video] Zack Van Amburg, [co-head of worldwide video] Jamie Ehrlicht, [head of features] Matt Dentler, Joaquin's agent Boomer Malkin and I. Our relationship grew stronger through that process, but I knew Zack and Jamie from seven or eight years earlier. When I was partnered with Nat Faxon and Jim Rash, I had a TV deal at Sony TV with them. So we had a relationship, but it really was forged through the process of the Napoleon deal, because a lot of people wanted the movie.

Dedicated streamers have always had a complicated relationship with theatrical, and I get it since their priority is to create value for their subscribers and shareholders. If you're splitting box office with your competitors in a way, then you're working against that priority.

Yes.

At the same time, theatrical is the preferred presentation among filmmakers and it just feels more meaningful and eventful. So, with Apple investing so heavily in theatrical, are they more able to do that since they have many other revenue streams besides just streaming?

Absolutely. Apple and Amazon, compared to Netflix, have a different business model, and I think we're getting the best of both worlds now. We have an incredibly supportive home studio paying for this movie, and they've let Ridley paint on this massive canvas. But then we have the great acumen of distribution release with [Chairman and CEO of Sony Pictures' Motion Picture Group] Tom Rothman and [president, motion picture group] Josh Greenstein. So we have two studios that are the best at what they do, and they're working together. So, for us, all boats rise with the tide. When you see a big billboard for this film's theatrical release, that's going to hopefully drive not only money to the box office, but it's also going to drive people to Apple TV+. And when I first made the move to Apple, that theatrical conversation wasn't in the forefront. That's been a development with Zack, Jamie, Matt, [senior VP of services] Eddy Cue and [CEO] Tim Cook over the last six to twelve months. So we really got the best of both worlds. We get to have our cake and eat it, too. The movie is going to do what it does during a good 45-day theatrical window, and then it goes on the service in January.

If Netflix had more arms to their business like Apple and Amazon, I wonder if they'd be more open to wide theatrical releases.

I have a huge amount of respect for those guys. I know [Netflix Chairman] Scott Stuber really well. Ridley and I produced a film [Earthquake Bird] there with my other colleague, Mike Pruss. They have a killer business. They've won the streaming number. They have so many eyeballs, but they don't have another side of the business. Apple's primary business, as you know, is telephones and computers. Amazon's primary business is toilet paper and tennis shoes. We've made movies for all these places, and we're lucky to have them all in the business. They're bringing more movies to the marketplace, and they're supporting filmmakers in a way that we aren't always getting these days. I don't know that I'd get Napoleon done at the price that I got it done if it was at another home, and I don't know if I'd have the full creative support that Zack and Jamie have given Ridley and me and everybody else.

As we addressed earlier, problem-solving is a huge part of your job, and when you're making a film like Napoleon that has multiple epic battles, there's likely a bevy of problems that come with them. So, take the showstopper, the Battle of Austerlitz, for example, what was the biggest production challenge you had to face on that one?

That was really a lot of planning. They're all massive amounts of planning. Ridley leads like a general, and no one can pull these things off in the way that he does. We do a weekly page turn with all of our [heads of department], and each Monday, we go through the problems. But Austerlitz was unique in that we shot it at multiple locations. We shot it in the hillsides of the U.K. where he filmed something from Gladiator, and then we did the second half of it at an old airport field where we did a bunch of the snow sequences and underwater tank stuff. And so it's really just watching Ridley mesh that stuff together. I've worked with very few filmmakers that can visually take different sequences and segments and make them look all seamless.

So that and figuring out the geography were the biggest challenges over the course of two locations with multiple different teams and crews. I've known my other creative producer, Mark Huffam, for over 20 years. When I was an assistant working for Scott Rudin on The Hours in 2000, Mark was the line producer. So I've known Mark for 24 years, and it was invaluable to have a partner like that to figure out these big battle sequences. We were tools in Ridley's toolbox. Mark and I were at his disposal to figure out these issues, whether they're logistical or creative, and that one just happened to come together beautifully. There were gasps at the Paris premiere when the cannon smashed into the ice. It was staggering to see it come to life like that with the challenge of those two locations.

I don't expect movies like this to be historical documents, and even though there's no Hunt for Red October-type transition from French to English, I can still imagine that the characters are hearing French while I'm hearing English. I just want to be entertained. So what's your take on the fuss over historical accuracy?

If you analyze any film, especially any biopic, you're going to see that there's a rounding of corners. You have to take creative license to make these movies engaging. So there are certain things that are heightened, and if you Google the [Egyptian] pyramids, you'll see that Ridley did something specific there that didn't happen. But it's engaging. So it's important to pluck the right moments that you want to portray in these movies, and make them engaging and fun for the audience. We never intended to make a plain biopic, and the biggest influence of any film on this film is probably [Stanley Kubrick's] Barry Lyndon. The comedy and the tone of that film really bleeds into this movie, and a lot of the reviews and reactions have cited the comedy and how it's played. So we're really pleased with that.

The original title of the film was Kitbag. Did you always know that it would be changed at some point?

Not always. Napoleon is just the connection that people know. Tom Rothman very wisely said that the star of this movie died 300 years ago. Everyone knows who Napoleon was, and it just has a much broader consumer-facing approach. But we loved the term kitbag. It came from the idea that every soldier had this baton in his kitbag and could go on to become the emperor. And that's who this guy was. He started from nothing. He was a poor Corsican scoundrel and he rose to emperor. So we love that theory, but when it comes to marketing a movie of this size and scope, you want to capture the widest net. So that's what we did with the title change.

It was probably devastating news when Jodie Comer's schedule shifted, but by some miracle, Vanessa Kirby was available. Was that a huge sigh of relief considering how important Josephine is to the narrative?

Yes. Jodie is a staggeringly talented actress. We just saw her on opening night of her Tony-winning one-woman show [Prima Facie] in New York, and she was incredible. We obviously worked with her on The Last Duel, and it was a really unfortunate thing [when she had to drop out]. And it really was scheduling. There was a Covid delay, and so they wouldn't let her out of the play. But Vanessa,  thank God, was available. When you look at people that can come in and play these parts, it gets really tight and specific. There's not a lot of people that can pull off the sexiness and the power of Josephine and how she commands the relationship with Joaquin's Napoleon. So it was a shortlist that might've been one of one, and it was one of those things that moved really quickly. And thank goodness she responded to it and wanted to meet, so it just worked out. We were able to kind of just swap the deals in and make it seamless, which is a rare thing.

Ridley is known for releasing alternative cuts of his films, and this movie is no exception. Did you guys know pretty early on that you'd be releasing a longer version of this story on Apple TV+?

That's not official yet. The cut that is in theaters is the cut that's going to stream on Apple. Downfield, there might be another thing to look at, and we have multiple longer cuts of the movie that are beautiful. But the movie that people see in the theater is the movie that's going to stream on Apple in January.

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-features/napoleon-producer-historical-accuracy-1235683836/

[Space_Dementia]

Bit of a mixed bag for me, here is my review of Napoleon...

[KiramidHead]

I do wonder why Apple didn't go with a longer cut to begin with. Killers of the Flower Moon shows they don't care about run time.

[ralfy]

As pointed out in an earlier review, one can only depict the character properly through several features, which is the implication of having a longer cut. In which case, they would have been better off doing that or coming up with something like a mini-series.

[𝔗𝔥𝔢 𝔈𝔦𝔤𝔥𝔱𝔥 𝔓𝔞𝔰𝔰𝔢𝔫𝔤𝔢𝔯]

The original title of the film was Kitbag. Did you always know that it would be changed at some point?

Not always. Napoleon is just the connection that people know. Tom Rothman very wisely said that the star of this movie died 300 years ago. Everyone knows who Napoleon was, and it just has a much broader consumer-facing approach. But we loved the term kitbag. It came from the idea that every soldier had this baton in his kitbag and could go on to become the emperor. And that's who this guy was. He started from nothing. He was a poor Corsican scoundrel and he rose to emperor. So we love that theory, but when it comes to marketing a movie of this size and scope, you want to capture the widest net. So that's what we did with the title change.

In retrospect, Kitbag might have been an appropriate title for this slightly campy take on Napoleon.

But I can see why Napoleon would be better from a marketing point of view, his name is a household name.

[PullthePlug]

I do wonder why Apple didn't go with a longer cut to begin with. Killers of the Flower Moon shows they don't care about run time.

Probably because Apple knows an exclusive Ridley Scott cut will generate a large number of sign-ups to their platform.

[𝔗𝔥𝔢 𝔈𝔦𝔤𝔥𝔱𝔥 𝔓𝔞𝔰𝔰𝔢𝔫𝔤𝔢𝔯]

I've been seeing people mention that Phipps recycled bits of his War and Peace score for this. The spirit of James Horner lives on. 

Here we go. The last half of each track. Epic stuff:

[𝔗𝔥𝔢 𝔈𝔦𝔤𝔥𝔱𝔥 𝔓𝔞𝔰𝔰𝔢𝔫𝔤𝔢𝔯]

Interview with the script writer, David Scarpa. Talks a bit about Gladiator II and Cleopatra as well.

Ridley Scott's 'Napoleon': Writer David Scarpa Explains What's True and False
And shorter is better, he says. No soup-to-nuts biopic here.


Anne Thompson: How did this project come to you?

David Scarpa: I had worked with Ridley on a movie called "All the Money in the World," and his producing partner, Kevin Walsh, who ran his company, came to me and said that Ridley wanted to do a movie about Napoleon, and didn't say much else. Like most Americans, I had only a high school basic knowledge of Napoleon or the history of the French Revolution. I had already read the [Stanley] Kubrick screenplay and knew that this was something that a lot of filmmakers had tried to do in the past. I went off and read a short biography of Napoleon.

What's the challenge when tackling a biopic like this?

For us it's difficult in 2023 to make what we call the prestige biopic, like "Gandhi" or whatever, which is the soup-to-nuts, grade-school book report version of some great man's life. There was a time for that in the "Lawrence of Arabia" era, and I'm not sure that you can do that anymore. So the real challenge for me was, how are we going to get into this?

Did Ridley say anything about what he wanted? Or what his angle was?

Particularly if you're Ridley, a lot of writers would simply say, "Well, I'll do whatever you want," right? So [Ridley] wants to know what you're going to bring to it, what your point of view on it is. It was an almost impossible story to tell just in terms of the sheer sprawl of what Napoleon had done and his influence on European history and 45 battles fought and essentially writing the Code Napoleon, which is the basis of much of continental European society. So it would be almost impossible to tell the definitive version of that story within two and a half hours. And what I found myself most intrigued by was this little vignette in the book about his relationship with Josephine, his wife.

She was a notorious figure in Paris at that time?

She had a fascinating story, because she was married at the time of the French Revolution. Her husband was a quasi-aristocrat who was taken away and beheaded on the guillotine. She was taken to the most notorious prison in France, and she narrowly avoided being executed on the guillotine by days, right before what's known as the Thermidorean Reaction, before Robespierre was killed. And so she was let out of prison and became one of the grand dames of Paris. It was a bizarre period in history, as the people who had narrowly avoided the guillotine wound up becoming celebrities in their own right. And so she with three other women became celebrity figures in France, and they wore these red ribbons around their necks to symbolize the blade, and they cut their hair short. The French fashion at the time revolved around reliving the trauma of what they'd just lived through. So she was a much more exalted figure in Paris than Napoleon, who had holes in his shoes. He was a military guy, but he was poor. He had just been promoted to general but he was a nobody in France and he attached to her and they obviously got married, but she almost immediately in a very French way carried on this affair with this man, lieutenant Hippolyte Charles, who was everything Napoleon wasn't. It became this national embarrassment as Napoleon grew more famous.

The relationship between Napoleon and Josephine, how much did Phoenix and Vanessa Kirby bring to it? I understand there was a glint in their eye when it came to the idea that they were a little kinky with each other.

That was always in the script. A lot came from his letters to Josephine, it's pretty well documented. And when you're working with somebody like Joaquin, there will be what's in the script, but he has to make it happen on the day. So it has to be something that he spontaneously creates, as opposed to something that's set in stone. But all that stuff was obviously in the script, in different ways.

Could you remember anything from the letters as an example of something that he would write to Josephine?

They were French. So they were bawdy.

So he would write things like, "I imagine doing this to you."

Oh yeah. Absolutely.

This is what you and Phoenix settled on: this awkward genius who is sexually inept.

That is very much what it was like. Obviously, we took a lot of liberties across the board. But in the essence of it, it's pretty close to what it was, particularly for somebody like Joaquin, who looks for the flaws and the weaknesses as much as the strengths in a character. That was something that attracted him as well.

The question is, what drove Napoleon? Is the movie suggesting that he was conquering the world to win the love of Josephine? Is that really his motive?

Like many narcissistic figures, he was driven by insecurity. And he was driven to conquer her. His emotional attachment to her was as much a part of that insecurity as his desire to conquer Europe. The way you phrased it, that he was driven to conquer the world to win her, is a romanticized version of that. But on some level, she was the most important relationship of his life. And even after he divorced her, it continued in the background. And there was some aspect of having to prove himself to win her, that was present throughout his life.

I was trying to get a sense of where did I stand on on this guy. Like, is he Stalin? Robespierre? More than many other historical figures, there is an argument still ongoing as to whether this guy was a monster, or a genius. We have settled opinions on all these other people. But his legacy is still very contested.

Why is that? What is it about him? Is it because he's ambiguous, ill-defined, that people still speculate about him?

One striking thing is, he's the classic example of the benevolent dictator. There's a dangerous allure to that, as the one military figure who's going to come in and fix it all. Since then Napoleon has led a lot of societies down the wrong path. And yet, at the same time, he was never really a despot. He ultimately didn't even kill the guy who was having an affair with his wife, right? There was just this completely tortured French sex comedy that was going on in the middle of all this. And it underscored how incredibly full and capable he was, and yet also how personally inept he was at the same time.

Okay, so you whittled the script down to something that you could fit into two and a half hours. How many pages was it when you first presented it to Ridley?

It actually was not that long. I was assuming nobody would give us this amount of money to do it. So I came from the perspective of what we're not going to get, we just made a movie for about $35 million. And these days, you don't get $200 million dollars to do something, unless it's a Marvel or a science-fiction movie. So I assumed that we were going to be doing this for $35 million. And lo and behold, it turned out we had quite a bit more. Going into the original version of it, the movies we talked about were 'The Duelist," which Ridley had made, and Milos Forman's "Amadeus," which was similar: it was a movie that approached someone they would normally approach in a reverent way, in an irreverent way. Mozart was this almost infantile figure, he wasn't handled in an overly fussy manner. And that was the approach that we wanted to take as well.

So you show the script to to Ridley and what does he say?

Mind you, before writing the script, I had locked onto this one particular take, and I had gone in and pitched it to him: the idea of a man who is profoundly capable and competent in the realm of battle, and yet profoundly incapable and incompetent in the realm of love, in the realm of human relationships, and how those two things play off of one another. And he loved it. I was writing pages and sending pages to him, he was off shooting "Gucci," but he responds to things along the way. So there was a lot more dialogue along the way to creating a draft.

I love that you started with Marie Antoinette under the blade. It captures everything about that revolutionary moment.

That's not how we originally started it. That's Ridley's own alchemy. We had a different scene that was 10 pages in. And at a certain point, Ridley decided he wanted to pick that up and move that; it all landed on this moment of Napoleon taking in the guillotine, and having this ambivalence about where democracy leads: this is where the rule of the mob leads us. Things in this movie get picked up and moved around, changed and shifted.

Why did you change the name from "Kit Bag"?

Oh, that was Ridley's working title. I mean, it was never going to be called "Kit Bag." But for whatever reason he liked the famous saying that every Corporal carries a General's baton in his kit bag. This is actually a positive cultural thing that Napoleon gave to France, this idea of meritocracy, that anybody no matter how low born, if they had the skills should be able to advance and move from Corporal to General within his army. Previously most of the armies in the rest of the world were run by heredity: you'll be given a generalship based on who your uncle or who your father was, and they weren't necessarily the most skilled people. And he blew that up.

Do you have a theory as to why the Brits like the movie better than anyone else?

Ridley is British. Culturally, the British have always had a weird relationship with Napoleon, a mocking relationship to him, as this imperious French figure who had feet of clay. The movie corresponds more to their view of him.

Were you upset by what was left on the cutting room floor? And have you seen what the longer version of "Napoleon" would look like?

I have seen what's in the longer version. It works better, like most movies, in a tighter form. It gained a lot through the editing. Forget what's on the cutting room floor, there's also what is not there from earlier drafts, a ton of stuff never wound up going before the camera. There were other battles and those I'm glad because we would have bogged down. But, all kinds of material that we generated. And then ultimately, we had to make choices in terms of what got shot, but also what winds up in the cut. I don't think there's any way that in the format of a feature film that you can possibly tell the entirety of this story. You could easily do five seasons of a series on Napoleon, and still not get to the end of it, in terms of the material. So inevitably, you have to make choices. And this is a pretty concise version.

You also wrote "Gladiator 2," which is actually filming?

December 1.

Does it come right after the last movie?

It's a rare case of a sequel coming 23 years after the original movie. Usually they come a little bit sooner. So that should tell you right there. It wouldn't have been possible to tell the story directly after.

Are you involved in Denis Villeneuve's "Cleopatra"?

There's a long history of Stacey Schiff's book by the same title. A lot of writers have taken their shot at that. I have no idea what Denis is ultimately going to do with it. There have been many scripts. And mine was one of them.

Full interview here: https://www.indiewire.com/awards/consider-this/ridley-scott-napoleon-writer-david-scarpa-true-false-1234931486/

[𝔗𝔥𝔢 𝔈𝔦𝔤𝔥𝔱𝔥 𝔓𝔞𝔰𝔰𝔢𝔫𝔤𝔢𝔯]

Wonder if Riddles' French residence permit will be revoked? On the up side, he might now be in line for a dukedom back in Blighty... 

French Historians Slam Ridley Scott's 'Napoleon' Inaccuracies: 'Like Spitting in the Face of French People'.

Ridley Scott's "Napoleon" is a movie that French people love to hate. But despite harsh criticism in France, the historical epic smashed the French box office and grossed over $9.76 million from 1.15 million tickets sold in its first two weeks in theaters.

Ironically, "Napoleon" got the lowest score of all of Scott's recent movies on Allociné, the local equivalent of IMDb, with 2.3 stars out of 5 from 4,659 users' reviews, yet it's one of Scott's biggest hits in France. "Napoleon," starring Joaquin Phoenix as Napoléon Bonaparte, a Corsica-born officer who became Emperor of France, and Vanessa Kirby as his wife as Joséphine de Beauharnais, world premiered in Paris on Nov. 14, a few days after the end of the SAG-AFTRA strike.

Scott's last two movies, "The Last Duel" and "House of Gucci," were warmly reviewed in France, and yet they sold only 425,000 and 800,000 tickets respectively during their releases there. But "Napoleon" isn't totally bulletproof, says Comscore France's Eric Marti. Released by Sony, the Apple production "debuted with a bang in France but lost 50% in its second week, which is a sign of a bad word-of-mouth," says Marti, predicting that it will probably sell between 1.6 and 1.8 million tickets in France, on par with Scott's 2012 movie "Prometheus." It will still be one of his biggest successes in France — over the last 10 years the only Scott movie that performed better is "The Martian," with 2.5 million tickets sold.

[KiramidHead]

If that happens A Good Year will have a different feel to it.