New ‘Napoleon’ from Warner Bros. and Ruper Sanders – A “Scarface-Style” Look
A new bio-pic based on the life of Napoleon Bonaparte, that little French man who only conquered most of the known world at the time of his rule in the early 19th century, is going into pre-production from Warner brothers. They’ve tapped Snow White and the Huntsman director Rupert Sanders to take charge, using a script done by Jeremy Donner, who has previously worked on AMC TV’s The Killing.
Sanders only has the one major film credit to his name – mostly he’s directed commercials before – though he already has set-up 90 Church, a thriller about a narcotics squad in the New York in the mid to late 1960s, at Universal, an adaptations of the short story The Juliet at Sony, and Frederick Forsyth’s , a thriller novel, respectively.
There’s no telling which project he will actually tackle first – IMDb.com also features a listing for a Van Helsing movie (again?) but that’s one of the films where it’s an attachment without so much as a projected year for release. One will have to wait to see more movement on casting for any of the projects, or solid word on production.
Napoleon is one of those iconic figures who filmmakers have been trying to get just on the screen, let alone with some vibrancy and artistic flair, for years, going back to the silent era:
Abel Gance’s epic Napoleon, a film who’s *short* version, which is the only one available on VHS today (and a rare one at that), stands at 3 1/2 hours, was a big and powerful story that stopped just as Napoleon was starting to get into his taking over border nations (it also had the innovation being the first *widescreen* film, as the director, for the final battle sequences, knew that his square box needed to be a rectangle to capture all of the action, and put three of them together! It’s a masterpiece worth seeking out if interested in the history of the golden era of silent film by the way as it came out near the end in 1927.)
Stanley Kubrick also famously worked obsessively after 2001: A Space Odyssey on bringing a film of Napoleon to life, and came as close to writing a full script and scouting locations. Sadly, the box office failure of a film like Waterloo, starring Rod Steiger, made Kubrick’s backers nervous, and they pulled out. How obsessive Kubrick got with Napoleon is sort of legendary in film-buff circles – there’s even been telling the story of its making and including a screenplay recently, which showed how he cataloged EVERY DAY OF NAPOLEON’S LIFE on index cards. Jack Nicholson was also originally tapped to star in this aborted film (though recently as of this year, and a little ironic though coincidental to see this new news, Steven Spielberg has set up a development deal to take Kubrick’s Napoleon script and make it into a TV mini-series, though that’s all so far).
For this new Napoleon, however, Warners looks to do what Deadline.com calls “a Scarface Style look” and produced by Gianni Nunnari (Se7en, 300, Shutter Island). Something like this could just be Hollywood simplification, that they need to relay what sort of film it will be for modern audiences that think a Napoleon is just a pastry – or a character obsessed with water parks in . This could also mean just the sort of story it implies: a rise and fall saga of a sort of “Gangster” of his times, coming up from relative obscurity and use his wherewithal to conquer the world, only for it to fall near the end. One can only hope this doesn’t mean a grisly set-piece with a chainsaw.
