Napoleon

After the commercial and critical success of 2001, Stanley Kubrick convinced MGM to advance him the sums necessary for his work on a new project: Napoleon. Kubrick, fascinated by the French emperor since childhood, bought the rights to the biography written by Felix Markham, an Oxford professor and specialist on Napoleon. This work constituted the point of departure for his script, which he finished on 29 September 1969. "Kubrick aimed to downplay the heroics and to depict Napoleon "as more of a man, with all his male feelings, and less as a crusading hero [...]. Kubrick wanted the audience to find out what it was like to be Napoleon, on and off the battlefield"" (1).

Kubrick planned to begin shooting during the winter of 1969. He wanted to start with the battle scenes on location, estimating their duration at three months. As for the interior scenes, he allowed four months to complete them.

By the time Kubrick turned over his script to MGM, after a long period of preparation and research, the studio had lost interest in the project. Following several commercial flops, Hollywood was going through a crisis that did not allow for investing in such a large budget. Furthermore, the president of MGM, Robert O'Brien, who was in favour of the project at the time, had been replaced by Louis Polk, who "had no interest in committing the studio to a historical spectacle" (2). Kubrick definitively put his scenario aside, and one can imagine that his desire to film History and, in particular, the era following the French Revolution, would continue in Barry Lyndon, of which the last shot takes place in 1789.