“Really terrible”: The classic movie Stanley Kubrick hated
Making 13 movies over the course of a filmography might sound like good going for any standard director, but Stanley Kubrick was not such a middling creative. A dedicated perfectionist known for his artistic dynamism, Kubrick crafted some of the greatest movies of the 20th century, including 2001: A Space Odyssey, Paths of Glory and A Clockwork Orange, yet cinephiles still mourn the projects he wasn’t able to complete before his untimely death.
Having almost made A.I. Artificial Intelligence before handing over the reins to Steven Spielberg and coming close to releasing a holocaust drama titled Aryan Papers, Kubrick’s back-catalogue of unmade projects is extensive. But, truthfully, none of his unrealised projects are as notorious as that of Napoleon, a film that was to retell the extraordinary life of the French emperor and military commander, Napoleon Bonaparte.
Becoming fascinated by the concept following his success with the sci-fi movie 2001: A Space Odyssey in 1968, Kubrick sought a vast budget for his project that would delve into the psychology of one of history’s most fascinating figures. Infatuated by the individual himself rather than the possibility of a grand war epic, the director did what he does best and extensively researched the man behind the emperor.
“He fascinates me,” he told Joseph Gemlis in an interview back in 1969, “He was one of those rare men who move history and mould the destiny of their own times and of generations to come — in a very concrete sense, our own world is the result of Napoleon, just as the political and geographic map of postwar Europe is the result of World War Two…Forgetting everything else and just taking Napoleon’s romantic involvement with Josephine, for example, here you have one of the great obsessional passions of all time”.
Reading over 500 books about Napoleon, Kubrick became a sponge for all things French in the 18th and 19th centuries, constructing a formidable research portfolio in the process. Containing 30,000 illustrations of what the final film might look like, as well photos that suggested possible shooting locations, the document was enough to give any financier heart palpitations.
As part of his research, Kubrick revisited some older films about the figure, looking for inspiration as to how he should go about capturing the historical icon. Though, Kubrick being Kubrick, he wasn’t too keen about what he saw.
“I’ve tried to see every film that was ever made on the subject, and I’ve got to say that I don’t find any of them particularly impressive,” he told Gelmis, “I recently saw Abel Gance’s movie, which has built up a reputation among film buffs over the years, and I found it really terrible. Technically he was ahead of his time and he introduced new film techniques — in fact, Eisenstein credited him with stimulating his initial interest in montage — but as far as story and performance goes it’s a very crude picture”.
Considered a classic movie of silent cinema, Gance’s movie, Napoleon, was released back in 1927 and focused on the early years of the emperor, from his youth through to his military career. A landmark of cinema, Gance’s movie introduced a number of revolutionary new techniques that would soon become commonplace in mainstream cinema, such as the use of fluid camera movement.
Seeing as Kubrick hated Gance’s classic, we would love to know what he would have thought about Ridley Scott’s divisive 2023 epic that focused on the very same historical figure, albeit with a little more glitz and glamour.
