Director Steven Spielberg has revealed that he is working on Napoleon, a miniseries for HBO that was based on a Kubrick project. We tell you all the info here!
The renowned director Steven Spielberg revealed that he is working on a miniseries for HBO call Napoleon, which will be based on one of the lost projects of the great stanley kubrick. kubrick he had to abandon his dream of directing this biography because it was too big and expensive.
At the moment, it is in development but it is already slowly taking shape to become a miniseries of seven chapters. “With the cooperation of Christian Kubrick and Jan Harlan, we are putting together a major production for HBO based on Stanley’s original screenplay, Napoleon.”confirmed Spielberg in it Berlin Film Festival. “We are working on it as a limited series in seven parts”.
In case you didn’t know about this lost project of kubrickthe director planned to release this film after the success of 2001. In order to script the story, he did extensive research on the French revolutionary leader, Napoleon Bonaparte. His intention was to record it in all Europe, including countries like France, UK and Romaniawith about 40,000 soldiers. When it came time to look for a protagonist, there were two names that resonated a lot: david hemmings (deep red) and Jack Nicholson (The Shining). Another of the characters that was going to appear, and that already had audrey hepburn (Breakfast at Tiffany’s) as in charge of interpreting it, was Josephinethe wife of Napoleon.
However, the dream kubrick of being able to film this project was never fulfilled since no production company wanted to invest in a film by the French leader. To give you an idea, they had been released War and peaceand Waterloo, two deliveries that have Napoleon as the lead and did not gross enough to recoup the cost of production. Hence kubrick had to abandon his project, but much of what he planned to do was used in Barry Lyndon.
It is not the first time that Spielberg talk about Napoleon, since it is known about his interest in bringing this work of kubrick since 2013. In 2016 it was confirmed that Cary Joji Fukunaga of true detective I was going to be the director and David Auburn (lost lake) was going to be in charge of adapting the script. However, after being accused of inappropriate conduct, fukunaga abandoned the project and for the moment it has not been confirmed who will be in charge. We could speculate that it will be Spielbergbut the director only commented that he will fulfill the role of producer.
To discover what part of the story the French leader wanted to tell kubrick we will have to wait. For now, Spielberg He only confirmed that the series does exist and that it will be based on the script already written by the person in charge of 2001. We are going to have to wait for the production to advance a little more to be able to know a little more details, such as, for example, if Spielberg decides to take control of the camera or prefers to leave it to another partner.