Stanley Kubrick’s ‘Napoleon’: A Lot of Work, Very Little Actual Movie

One night during the pre-production phase on A Clockwork Orange, Malcolm McDowell asked Stanley Kubrick why he was eating ice cream at the same time as his main course steak. “What’s the difference?” said Kubrick. “It’s all food. This is how Napoleon used to eat.”

Well, that’s how McDowell tells it anyway. There are lots of near-mythical stories about Kubrick’s comprehensive research. That he was probably the most meticulous of film directors known to man is not open to debate, and Napoleon, the film he tried and failed to make for decades, is the best example of his attention to detail. Kubrick believed nobody had ever made a great historical film, and planned to change this with a three-hour epic, telling the story of the French emperor’s entire life.

Kubrick thought Napoleon was the most interesting man to have ever walked the Earth. He called his life “an epic poem of action,” thought his relationship with Josephine was “one of the great obsessional passions of all time,” and said, “He was one of those rare men who move history and mold the destiny of their own times and of generations to come.” Getting to work on the film in the mid-60s, after 2001 was released, he sent an assistant around the world to literally follow in Napoleon’s footsteps (“Wherever Napoleon went, I want you to go,” he told him), even getting him to bring back samples of earth from Waterloo so he could match them for the screen.

He read hundreds of books on the man and broke the information down into categories “on everything from his food tastes to the weather on the day of a specific battle.” He gathered together 15,000 location scouting photos and 17,000 slides of Napoleonic imagery.

He would shoot the film in France and Italy, for their grand locations, and Yugoslavia, for their cheap armies. These were pre-CG days, and he arranged to borrow 40,000 Romanian infantry and 10,000 cavalry for the battles. “I wouldn’t want to fake it with fewer troops,” he said to an interviewer at the time, “because Napoleonic battles were out in the open, a vast tableau where the formations moved in an almost choreographic fashion. I want to capture this reality on film, and to do so it’s necessary to recreate all the conditions of the battle with painstaking accuracy.”

He wanted David Hemmings and Audrey Hepburn for the leads, with Alec Guinness and Laurence Olivier as supporting characters, but it all came crashing down when, partly as a result of another Napoleon film, Waterloo, being released in 1970, studios decided Kubrick’s dream was too financially risky. In the early 1980s, he still talked of wanting to make the film, but it wasn’t to be. Although he died in 1999, there’s a chance his vision may see the light of day; it’s been offered to the likes of Ridley Scott and Ang Lee.

You could make it yourself if you want, as every single bit of information pertaining to the project has recently been published in the form of a book called Stanley Kubrick’s Napoleon: The Greatest Movie Never Made. It’s ten books in one (literally, with nine books sitting inside one enormous carved out fake book), limited to 1,000 copies, and costs $1,000. All the location scouting photos, all the research pictures, costume tests, correspondence with historical experts, Kubrick’s script–-everything’s in there. It’s amazing. I went to the HQ of the publisher, Taschen; they let me touch it. They wouldn’t give me one for free for some reason.

Tony Frewin was Kubrick’s assistant from 1965 until the director died (and beyond). I called him up for a first-hand account of what it was like to be in Kubrick’s Napoleonic vortex.

VICE: So tell me how your life with Stanley began. You were an office boy for him, right?
Tony Frewin: Well, a runner. Office boy I think rather glorifies it.

How did you come across him in the first place?
I grew up in Borehamwood and he’d just moved in to MGM Studios down the road on the pre-production of 2001. My father had just quit the management at MGM but he’d gone to work for Stanley, and he just kept on at me, saying, “Come down, we need a runner on this.” I think I said something crass–in those days, in the mid-60s, we only ever went to see foreign language films, French films: Antonioni, Fellini, Bergman, Bunuel. Terribly snobbish. And I think I said something crass like, “Well if it was Jean-Luc Godard I might be interested.” Ah God. What a prick.

The pretentiousness of youth.
Oh absolutely. You squirm when you think of it. Oh God. Anyway, I went down one Sunday afternoon and my dad showed me into this office, which was absolutely full of books on fantastic art, surrealism, Dadaism, cosmology, flying saucers, and I thought, “Fuck, I wouldn’t mind working here just to have access to these books.” And then Stanley came in, who I thought was an office cleaner, with a baggy pair of trousers and a sports jacket with ink stains all over it. And we got chatting, for about two hours, and he said, “When can you start?” and I said, “When do you want me to?” and he said, “Seven o’clock tomorrow morning.” I said, “You’ve got a deal.” That was a week after my 17th birthday.

What sort of running work was it? Anything that was required?
Yeah, and it was always like that. People used to say, “What’s the management structure like there?” at Hawk Films, or whatever we called ourselves, and I’d say, “Well, there’s Stanley at the top, and then everybody else.” There were no tiers of middle management, there was Stanley at the apex and all the rest of us on the bottom line. But it was a tremendous education working for Stanley; he was an intellectual Catherine Wheel of ideas and projects and ideas and enthusiasm. You really earned your nickel working for Stanley, but as [Full Metal Jacket writer] Michael Herr says in that lovely little book [Kubrick]: nobody earned their nickel more than Stanley himself. He lived by example, not by dictat.

When do you remember him first talking about Napoleon?
I remember when we were working on 2001, he had a sort of fascination with military figures, he was always very interested in Julius Caesar, particularly the invasion of Britain, but this ability to be a man of action, an intellectual, a strategist, with political objectives, and how you balanced all this and did what was right, I guess Napoleon grew out of that.

Did he relate to these types of people?
I don’t think he related to them, but he found them tremendously fascinating. How, ultimately, flaws in their character, particularly Napoleon, would bring them down. You see this in people in positions of public trust or power anyway; you know, Harriet Harman getting out after that car crash and imperiously saying, “I’m Harriet Harman. You know where to contact me.” You know. I mean, what a cunt.

The research and planning he did for Napoleon is near legendary.
Yeah. He did a lot on all his films, not least of which was on the abandoned project, Wartime Lies, about the Holocaust. We spent nearly two years, day in day out, researching that. And in that same period Spielberg got the idea for Schindler’s List, did the pre-production, made the film, released it, and we were still shuffling index cards.

So Schindler’s List just killed it for him?
Well, he’d always wanted to do a film about the Holocaust, but it presented certain problems. As Stanley said, if you really want to make an accurate film about the Holocaust, it’s got to be unwatchable. But he thought Schindler’s List was a hard act to follow, and it wasn’t the right time to do Wartime Lies. You know what [historian] Raul Hilberg said about Schindler’s List? He wrote this massive three-volume study of the destruction of the European Jews, quite witty and funny too, but he said Schindler’s List was a success story. A feelgood picture.

That’s one way of looking at it. In terms of Stanley’s fascination with Napoleon, what do you know of Malcolm McDowell’s story about him eating dessert and steak at the same time, because that’s how Napoleon used to eat?
I’d take that with a pinch of Bolivian marching powder.

Do you think the levels of research he carried out and his attention to the smallest detail was all part of the fun?
Well, it was a means to an end. He said, “God is in the detail.” But he knew when to cut his research, when to stop it. Barry Lyndon is a wonderful example of a historical film correctly done, right down to the lighting. Unlike all this crap you see on the BBC now. What he aimed for was for that it actually looked like at the time. It’s a wonderful film.

Do you think if he was making films today he would have utilised CGI?
Oh absolutely.

What about for extras? He’d hired 40,000 or so troops for Napoleon; do you think now he would have done that with CGI, or would he still have hired all those people for authenticity’s sake?
I think it would depend very much on the shot. Some shots you might need a couple of thousand, and then some CGI. Although I don’t think he would have automatically thought, “Let’s CGI everything.”

Was he enthusiastic about new technology in that area?
Oh absolutely, from the word go. He used to say anything that saved time was worth its weight in gold. The rest of us were sort of luddites, but he wasn’t. In 1980 he bought us all IBM green screens. These were the first PCs that were generally available, little 12″ screens. You didn’t even have a hard drive, you had two floppies. And Stanley said, “This is the future, this is what we’ll be using.” And I told him, “No, I like to type something and take out the piece of paper and see what’s on it,” and he said, “No, listen, you’ve got to get rid of that, this is the future, it’s arrived now.” He wasn’t at all conservative in that way; we had fax machines before anybody else did. People would say, “What the fuck do you want a fax machine for?” But he’d grab anything that saved time and made things look better.

How would you feel about Ridley Scott making the film?
Well, he’s a very competent director, but it would be a very different film from Stanley’s. There’s only one Stanley who could make a Stanley Kubrick film.