The movie, from a children’s book, sounds more hysterical than historical. But with Al Pacino inked to play Napoleon (per The Hollywood Reporter), a mythic, never-made epic comes tantalizingly into view. Stanley Kubrick’s Napoleon is the project that most obsessed the late director. He researched Bonaparte for years in the 1970s, built a huge card catalog detailing every day in the emperor’s life and even speaks of Al Pacino in this 1980 interview with Michel Ciment:
It would also be nice to do it as a twenty hour TV series, but there is, as yet, not enough money available in TV to properly budget such a venture. Of course, there is the tremendous problem of the actor to play Napoleon. Al Pacino comes quickly to mind. And there is always the possibility of shooting the twenty episodes in such a way that he would be fifty by the time he got to St. Helena….
Al, I’m joking! I’m joking!
Kubrick’s obsession with Napoleon is a key window into the director’s perfectionistic process. A superexpensive Taschen book exclusively devotes itself to the unmade film; meanwhile, here’s a PDF of Kubrick’s original screenplay, dated September 29, 1969.
