Ridley Scott, Joaquin Phoenix And Vanessa Kirby On Napoleon

By the time Ridley Scott flew to Paris to present his new film, Napoleon, with Joaquin Phoenix in the title role, the legendary director had already edited 90 minutes of his upcoming -untitled- sequel of Gladiator. The 85 year-old-director seems tireless and always reminds us that he still has many more stories to tell. Filmmaking holds no secret for Scott, and nothing, from the placement of cameras on set to the use of music throughout the movie, is left to chance. While Napoleon Bonaparte’s life as a military, strategic genius and conqueror is depicted in the film, it really much is his relationship with his wife Josephine de Beauharnais as well as his complex personality -at times childish but always tyrannical – that are at the heart of Scott’s Napoleon.

The film opens in 1793, with a scene everyone will recognize and will be able to place on a historical timeline: the execution of Marie-Antoinette. In the middle of the cheering crowd, observing from afar the last Queen of France walking up to the scaffold as she approaches her fate, is a young officer named Napoleon. In reality, he wasn’t actually there when Marie-Antoinette was guillotined. But does it really matter or change the rest of the story at this point ? Probably not. We could even argue that this opening scene sets Napoleon’s ambitions and goals, as he will make sure that his country will never have to face a period of time as traumatic and chaotic as the Reign of Terror. ‘’Historical inaccuracies’’ called out some historians. ‘’Were you there ?’’ answered Scott.

It’s true, Scott’s movie isn’t a documentary, and there isn’t a single documentary made about Napoleon Bonaparte that will also be completely historically accurate: Napoleon still is one of the most controversial character in French history. He is one of these characters whose life you will study every year at school, and every year, you will get a new version of his personality. So much is known about his life as a conqueror, but understanding who he really was behind the scenes is another story. Napoleon draws a very fine line between historical inaccuracies and creative interpretation. Ridley Scott knows it very well, and he’s fine with it. As always, his plan was clear from the start and every single second of every single shot has been planned, drawn and written with the utmost precision.

‘Well, the most important thing to get as a storyteller is what you’re gonna get on paper ‘ tells me Ridley Scott during our interview. [If you don’t have a script], you’re beginning a nightmare. If you have that, the rest is fun and much easier. There were thousands of books written about Napoleon: (They) said ‘Which book did you read?’, and I said ‘ Well, how about none ? ‘ I looked at all the paintings of Napoleon Bonaparte because they’re a time capsule of history, they’re so accurate, it says everything.’

Jean Louis David’s painting “Le Sacre de Napoleon” inspired the crucial coronation scene of Napoleon in the film, and as famous and glorious as the original painting is, it is not free of mistakes either: For example, Napoleon’s mother is depicted in the painting, when she didn’t actually attend the ceremony. But this scene in the film is so beautifully shot, and truthful to the painting, it actually is the perfect representation of Napoleon’s words when he first saw David’s work: “This is not painting; you walk in this work’.”

Speaking of historical inaccuracies, as mentioned before, the film opens with Marie Antoinette’s death, for which the filmmaker made the brilliant choice to anachronistically use the French revolutionary song ‘’Ça Ira’’ by Edith Piaf, to accompany the French Queen during her last walk: ’That wasn’t sung (by her) until the 1930s or 40s. ‘’ said the director when I mentioned this scene. Scott is a storyteller first and foremost, who has always been able to express himself with drawings. He could have been a designer or an architect, hadn’t he become one of the greatest filmmakers of all time. While his movie sets are some of the most distinctive and recognizable, from the futuristic, neon-lit streets in Blade Runner, to the eerie and enchanted castle of Darkness in Legend, Scott always made it a point of honor to tell his stories through every single detail of his films, from the costumes to the music, which has become as emblematic as the movies themselves: There probably is not a single cinephile who will not recognize Gladiator’s theme ‘’Honor Him’’ from the very first two notes, or Vangelis’ End Titles from Blade Runner.

For Napoleon’s score, Scott used this same precision and storytelling skills, as soon as he started working on his storyboard. “The music, I have it on my mind when I’m storyboarding. (…) He’s a though guy. He may be short but he’s a tough guy. You can’t forget that. So I wanted to find a voice that reflected that: If he sang, what would he sound like ? So I thought ‘Like a shepherd, singing to his sheeps at night to keep them quiet’. So it began there. We got the tune, used most powerfully, right in the middle of Waterloo chaos. We got a silence, on his face, and you know he’s gonna ride into the battle, hoping to get shot. Because he knows he has lost. And so that is where the thematic really plays very well. From that, you then get versions of that theme, orchestrally.” explained the filmmaker.

Very few directors can do ‘’epic’’ like Ridley Scott. Some of the best battle scenes ever made for the big screen come from his movies, and he never does anything halfway. Scott is well-known for his use of multiple cameras when filming -up to 11 cameras were used in Napoleon-, particularly for the shots that take us inside the battle: ’They’re all hand held at that point. But some of them might be a drone. Some may be on a rig, but most are hand held.’’ continued Scott.

At this point, the spectators are no longer neutral, watching the story from outside, but they are seeing it from the soldier’s point of view, falling down on the ground with them. They find themselves in Napoleon’s shoes for a short but intense moment, and suddenly, we realize that perhaps, this movie isn’t made to be seen with a historian’s point of view, but with Napoleon’s. Maybe this is what his life would look and sound like, if he were telling us his story himself.

Such raw, uneasy shots can also be seen in his 2005 Kingdom of Heaven, which made me curious to know what bringing the cameras and the spectators inside the battle, meant for him as a storyteller: “I can really draw. So I draw everything because it’s a preparation for me, like filming on paper, in my head. And so the board is thick, but on each page is 9 frames. So it’s like a super comic. When I am doing that, I’m already thinking of Waterloo, and I’m saying: ‘This will start with a landscape, with clouds and wind.’ So it’s already beautiful. It was a bad day but I got perfect weather because that wind was real and the rain was real. So I got dead lucky. Because that’s what it was like. And then you look a bit at that section orchestrally, working at visually what you’re gonna do. Close ups, inside, hand held… then you have Napoleon being studied by Wellington through a telescope, two men stare at each other through a telescope. Did they do that ? I have no idea, but it didn’t matter. ‘’

‘So much of his life is up for interpretation’’ told me Joaquin Phoenix, when I asked him where and when he felt like he had to draw the line between what he had found about Napoleon in his research, and where his creativity as an actor was going to take over. ‘Right from the beginning, I put my own curiosity and interests on it. I mean, they were probably some things that were critical, you can’t really defy the facts, but I remember very early on, I was watching this video of two academics that had written books about Napoleon, it was just them, literally arguing for an hour and a half about facts, about his life, on which they did not agree with each other on. So there are some things where there is a general consensus, where people accept certain facts.”

He continued: “But when you get into the idea of relationships, you understand ‘Ok he was immature, he did not know how to be with a woman (…) How can you apply that to this particular scene? Sometimes you’re literally like ‘Here’s the point of the scene, here’s the information (we have), and it’s so fucking boring, who cares ? You just have to think ‘This seems like it’s more interesting’, and maybe it’s not, maybe you fail, and sometimes you make the wrong choice, but if you’re just being rigid, and just sticking to facts… sometimes that’s the film you want, some people want to make that, and I personally enjoy watching those films. This was not the film. I’m comfortable in strange sex scenes here, because it feels like, this is the moment to see this side of their personalities, that feels really unexpected. ‘

The ‘’uncomfortable’’ sex scenes in question are so revelatory of Napoleon’s complex personality, where on the one hand, we are watching a film about a man who wanted to take over the world, and on the other hand, got incredibly frustrated and jealous when his wife was on the other side of the planet. His obsession with Josephine started one night at Le bal des Victimes or Victim’s ball, which allegedly -some historians claim these balls never existed-, were created after the Reign of Terror in France. ‘Are you staring at me?’ says Josephine to Napoleon, when she saw that this brooding figure was watching her from across the room. Just like Napoleon, Josephine de Beauharnais is still a controversial figure and we probably know less about her and about her relationship with Napoleon than we actually think we do. Their marriage -and divorce because they couldn’t conceive an heir together- is still really hard to understand, and the film proves that the two of them probably didn’t even know what they really were or meant for each other, even though Napoleon’s famous last words were ’France, the army, head of the army, Joséphine’.

When an actor portrays a historical character, there sometimes is a certain key moment where they know they have truly become one with this person, by putting on a wig, a dress, or saying certain words. Vanessa Kirby told me that this was a completely different experience this time around, when I asked her about it on the red carpet of the beautiful Salle Pleyel in Paris during the World Premiere of Napoleon: ‘It’s interesting with her, because every single thing I read was so different, there were so many versions of her and different parts of her life, it was never consistent, she was many different things, transformed in many ways, in a mercurial kind of way, so it was interesting because every version in different scenes across the years was extremely different. So I wouldn’t say there was one moment. I remember in The Crown, I put on a wig, and suddenly I was in this costume, I really felt like Margaret, but Josephine, I understood that perhaps the job I had to do was to try and embody a continual shift and center for her. So it’s a long way to answer there wasn’t one key moment.’’