No./6 Napoleon vs Napoleon

Two A-list directors are marshalling projects about the French military commander. Who will emerge victorious?

RIDLEY SCOTT’S NAPOLEON

IN THE NEW Napoleonic Wars, Ridley Scott will fire the first shot. The 85-year-old director has already finished shooting his 28th film, which reunites him with his Gladiator star Joaquin Phoenix, donning the bicorne hat as the legendary French Emperor, alongside Vanessa Kirby as Empress Joséphine. It’s a period of history Scott has been fascinated with since his 1977 debut The Duellists, set in the same period — and with Apple’s impressive war chest behind it, Napoleon promises to be as massive in scale as Napoleon was supposedly diminutive in height. (Scott has promised six major battle sequences.) But it will also zero in on Napoleon the man, with a meticulously researched performance from Phoenix, who helped shape the script. “With Joaquin, we can rewrite the goddamn film because he’s uncomfortable,” Scott told Empire last year. “That kind of happened with Napoleon. We unpicked the film to help him focus on who Bonaparte was.” A release date is yet to be set, but expect Apple’s military strategists to aim for an awards-season deployment.

STEVEN SPIELBERG’S NAPOLEON

STEVEN SPIELBERG MAY not have the pre-emptive strike, but he has been on reconnaissance for a long time. The filmmaker has spoken of his Napoleonic dream for at least a decade, and he will be basing this adaptation

— a lavish, seven-part limited series for HBO — on a never-completed film by Stanley Kubrick, which the director himself once humbly claimed would be “the best movie ever made”. The story of those unrealised efforts is as legendary as any war tale: Kubrick filled his Hertfordshire mansion with 25,000 index cards of research; tapped Jack Nicholson to play the Emperor; and hoped to feature 50,000 extras from the real Romanian army in his battle sequences. Sadly, prohibitive production costs meant Kubrick finally faced his Waterloo, the project stalling in 1972. Spielberg — who previously took over an unfinished Kubrick script for A.I. Artificial Intelligence — is in early development for the revived project, with the cooperation of Kubrick’s widow Christiane and her producer brother, Jan Harlan. If the legends surrounding Kubrick’s script are true, Ridley Scott may win the first battle, but Spielberg could just win the war.