Apple’s Napoleonic $269 million gamble on Ridley Scott film about French emperor
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Joaquin Phoenix playing the role of the French emperor in Napoleon.
PHOTO: SONY PICTURES
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PARIS - Apple has coughed up another huge pile of cash to make Napoleon, the latest epic from director Ridley Scott that hits cinemas around the world next week, with Joaquin Phoenix donning the tricorn hat of the French emperor.
The budget – said to be close to US$200 million (S$269 million) – has paid for some gargantuan battle scenes from Austerlitz to Waterloo, though the British director also focuses on the intimate side of Napoleon Bonaparte’s life, particularly his fraught love affair with his wife Josephine (Vanessa Kirby). It opens in Singapore cinemas on Nov 23.
It is the tech company’s latest attempt to earn some Hollywood prestige, following hot on the heels of film-maker Martin Scorsese’s equally pricey Killers Of The Flower Moon.
Both films may struggle to recoup the investment at the box office, but it is affordable PR for a company that generates revenues of nearly US$1 billion a day.
“My hat always goes off to Apple – it’s not inexpensive and they took the risk,” said Scott in an interview.
The 85-year-old mastermind behind classics like Alien (1979), Blade Runner (1982) and Gladiator (2000) took the opportunity to have a swipe at the glut of superhero movies coming out of Hollywood, which he described as “really silly”.
“To do a historical epic like this today with all these superhero movies going around... it’s a big challenge,” Scott said.
The 159-minute Napoleon traces the fortunes of France’s most famous historical figure from his rise among the ashes of the French Revolution through his incredible military victories to his eventual defeat and exile.
Scott denied rumours that a four-hour cut was already being prepared for Apple’s streaming platform, saying that was just a possibility “later, in two years’ time, maybe...”
A history buff, he said Bonaparte was an obvious choice of subject.
“There are 10,400 books on the man – that’s one for every week since he died. Why would you not be interested in this man?“ Scott said.
“He clearly fascinated the world in every shape and form as leader, diplomat, warrior, politician, bureaucrat, and of course inevitable dictator.”
Napoleon remains a divisive figure in France – lauded for modernising the state and his strategic genius, vilified for re-establishing slavery, codifying sexism and leaving millions dead through his war-mongering ambition.
British director Ridley Scott (left) and American actor Joaquin Phoenix at the Odeon Luxe Leicester Square, central London, on Nov 16.
PHOTO: AFP
Some early audiences in France have taken issue with Scott’s account, with historian Patrice Gueniffey calling it a “caricature of an ambitious Corsican ogre” and “very anti-French”.
Scott is not the first director to take on the subject.
Abel Gance’s 1927 silent classic Napoleon runs to seven hours – which a team of obsessives has recently spent more than a decade restoring.
The subject also obsessed and ultimately defeated another famed British director, Stanley Kubrick, prior to his death in 1999.
Napoleon also reunites Scott with his Gladiator star Phoenix - where he played another emperor, the power-hungry Commodus - after more than two decades, with the veteran auteur likening working with his latest leading man to “a toboggan ride”.
“I like stress,” when asked what he liked about the Oscar-winning American actor.
In addition to collaborating with Phoenix, Scott said he also wanted to return to a theme he first explored in his feature film debut in 1977.
“In The Duellists, I end on Napoleon Bonaparte. That’s the reason why. I enjoy that part of France and the whole ambience of that culture. So I wanted to go back to it completely with Napoleon,” he said.
He said his production team was dedicated to making the historical epic look accurate.
“Every aspect of what you see from armoury to horses to saddles to hats, to the wardrobe, it’s all researched. I sit there like an octopus glomming all this stuff coming at me because they’ve researched everyone.
“I’m like a child, I look at picture books. I go ‘I like that’. So, I don’t do anything.”
Filmed during the pandemic, Scott and his frequent collaborator for cinematography, Dariusz Wolski, orchestrated elaborate battle scenes that recounted Napoleon’s conquests in Austerlitz and Moscow and his famous defeat in Waterloo.
“Since the beginning of the pandemic I’ve made The Last Duel, Gucci, Napoleon, and I’m halfway through Gladiator 2. We don’t stop. I had no Covid problems at all,” he said. AFP, REUTERS
