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Napoleon achieved a kind of fame very people in history ever attain, but in Ridley Scott’s take Bonaparte’s life and personality is filtered through his addictive and often volatile relationship with his wife Joséphine.
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“It always came back to the relationship between Joséphine and Napoleon,” editor Sam Restivo said during a panel discussion for the Academy Conversations series. “We wanted to contrast this really brilliant military strategist with one who is so inept in his personal life.”
Speaking to IndieWire’s
Jim Hemphill on the Toolkit podcast, the director elaborated on his reasons for making
this version of the famous saga.
“The man was all powerful, all
conquering, great politician, a great bureaucrat,” Scott said. “A lot of French
laws are still Napoleonic. But I’m not interested in people who have it all.
I’m interested in people who have a fragility to them. And the one thing that
seemed to be the Achilles heel was Joséphine. And so I began exploring why and
how such a powerful man can have such a vulnerable center.”
Restivo is one of two editors on the epic, the
other being Scott’s regular, Claire Simpson. The British editor, who won an
Oscar for Platoon, has earned the reputation as a legendary
collaborator for first Oliver Stone then Ridley Scott (via Tony Scott), a
mystique embellished because she rarely gives interviews.
Restivo first worked with Simpson as her assistant editor on Scott’s TV series Raised by Wolves (2020). From there, she brought Simpson as her assistant to Scott’s The Last Duel and then House of Gucci (2021) before getting the promotion for Napoleon.
“I’ve been working for Claire for the
last five years and she’s one of the greatest filmmakers of all time,” Restivo
told Hemphill. “She’s the one that promoted me on this film. Having two editors
was really the only way we were going to survive the amount of footage that
that we were getting hit by on a daily basis.”
While the great Stanley Kubrick harbored plans to make a Napoleon biopic, it was his period drama Barry Lyndon that served as the “North star” for much of Scott’s creative team. In particular, that film’s “ironic sense of humor” was the main thing the editors leaned into, as Restivo explained in an excellent chat with Matt Feury, host of The Rough Cut podcast.
One example, bordering on the
“ludicrous,” as Feury puts it, is when Napoleon retorts to a British General,
“You think you’re so great because you have boats!”
Restivo admits, “We were threading
the needle a bit with that. They are definitely lines that are very literal and
very funny. When we got the dailies, Claire and I were just kind of seeing what
the actors were giving us. So whenever something really amused us, [we decided
to] see if it could stick.”
Another instance is when Napoleon is
courting Joséphine and she draws their own battlelines. “The one where
Joséphine says ‘look down, you’ll see a surprise,’” Restivo says. “The first
time we showed Ridley he was in stitches, but he said, ‘This is it. This is the
tone. This is what we want.’
“Because it’s just a beautiful
contrast of the stately, presentational kind of way of people had to go on a
date versus [the crudity of her actions]. She’s also showing the power that she
has and being kind of a seductress toward him.”
The film isn’t meant to be a detailed historical
account but it is clear from interviews with Scott that he has done his
homework, rifling through many of the 1,000+ books on his subject. The
filmmakers also employed historians to guide and fact check the narrative. At
the same time, Scott is clear on wanting to make an entertainment and to short
circuit the story to keep it within a reasonable runtime.
The truncated opening sequence that
brings us up to speed on Marie Antoinette and the French revolution was one
such instance.
“We were trying to figure out exactly
how many lines there should be to set the world in which we begin the film
with,” Restivo recounts. “We needed some element of letting people know that
Napoleon himself was not actually French that he was Corsican. And then we were
trying not to overwhelm people with dates and settings. But we knew that there
had to be a level of that just to accomplish the passage of time and to orient
people with what was going on.”
Certain key characters like Charles
Talleyrand are given titles on screen explaining who they are. “Again, we
didn’t give more cards [to more characters] because we didn’t want to overwhelm
people with too many things,” Restivo adds.
Even at over two-and-a-half hours,
there’s a lot of story to tell considering that the film attempts to convey the
strategic genius of the military commander in epic battles and his somewhat
more inept and intimate relationship with Joséphine.
Unsurprisingly, the first assemblies
of the battles were twice as long. “Not because there were more story beats,
just because there’s more battle,” Restivo said.
Scott’s penchant for multi-camera
work went to the extreme of rolling 11 cameras for the scene recreating the
battle of Austerlitz. That meant the editors had to review 11 frames for each
shot.
“When we were watching earlier cuts
of it, it’s like, ‘Man, this is exhausting stuff,’ and we needed to rein each
of them in to a certain degree, so that we could lean into more Napoleon and
Joséphine and try to always center it back on their relationship.”
Apple TV+ has apparently lined up a four-hour
Director’s Cut, signaling that this film, like Martin Scorsese’s Killers
of the Flower Moon — also for Apple — straddles the line between
theatrical feature and streaming series. It’s a problem that perhaps neither
filmmaker manages to resolve.
Restivo says, “In this case it was
always our intention for a theatrical release and we thought two and a half
hours was basically the most we could put onto a captive audience. Having said
that, the screenplay was like 130 pages long with 239 scenes in it, which is
crazy. Like it was just such a huge thing. So we had a lot of different
options, editorially, that we could go in. We were not going to have a
25-minute version of Waterloo. We were always going to focus on the
relationship with Napoleon and Joséphine. But for a streaming environment,
there are plenty of different extra bits that people at home might actually
enjoy seeing if they’re fans of the film.”
In the September issue of Empire Magazine, Zack Sharf reports at Variety, Scott reveals that he has a “fantastic” cut of
the movie that runs nearly four-and-a-half hours.
As reported, Scott’s near 270-minute
cut “features more of Joséphine’s life before she meets Napoleon.” The director
said he would love for Apple (which funded the film) to eventually screen it.
Scott drew the entire movie as key
frames, or “Ridleygrams,” which formed a reference for the edit as well as
cinematography.
“He gives us the roadmap for what the movie is,
these hand drawn storyboards, in conjunction with the screenplay,” Restivo
informed The Rough Cut. “So we know kind of where he’s going. But
he lets us run wild with it and go in the direction that we want. That that
very first screening we show him is always the most important because we are
trying to show him what he shot, but also something out of the box as well,
some kind of some kind of surprise, and he absolutely loves that.”
The sheer amount of footage made it
almost a necessity to have two editors. Restivo explained that during
production the pair endeavored to keep up to camera despite “the breakneck pace
of shooting” by dividing up the dailies and showing each other work in progress
before receiving feedback from Scott each week.
“Once we got to that point where we
had the assembly done, then it was the two of us sitting together at one Avid
and we would trade who’s driving on a certain day and just go start to finish
the whole movie. Ridley would come in and watch something. That’s how it was
for the entirety of the rest of the cutting.”
There’s an economy to shooting
multi-cam, which is fewer takes. That and thorough planning, along with a
director who is energized by restlessness, meant that they filmed the whole
picture in 62 days.
“This would normally be 110. Some think 130,” Scott
told IndieWire. “The multiple four cameras every day is four times
faster. I discovered quite a long time ago that actors do not want 39 takes.
And if you cast well, any actor you’ve already cast properly, will have done
their goddamn homework.”
You also get the impression that for Scott, the shoot may be the most boring part of production. He has already shot the whole thing in his head and then onto those Ridleygrams.
“I do something rare, I think, that no one else
does. I personally storyboard all my movies. I don’t publish volumes with stick
figure drawings and shit like that. These could be comic strips. So this
storyboard of Napoleon is probably two inches thick. It’s an
eight frame for each page with close up, medium shot, wide shot. The film is
already filmed in my head.”
Not always though. Relating how the iconic image from Gladiator of Russell Crowe’s hand brushing the field of corn came about to Mike Fleming Jr. at Deadline, Scott said it was simply chance.
“It was discovered the last day of shooting, spontaneously. I consider spontaneity to be essential to what I do, you’ve always got to be watching. That’s not on paper. And so suddenly that becomes the editing room and then the theme happens.”
One
little bit of magic wasn’t planned on Napoleon either. In
Egypt, shooting a scene in which Napoleon confronts a mummified Pharaoh, which
draws obvious parallels to Bonaparte’s own aspirations, Joaquin Pheonix climbed
up on a box and took off his hat.
“He put it on top of the casket, and stared closely at the Pharaoh. Then he reached out gently to touch the surface of this skin that looks like brown paper at this point. And the Pharaoh suddenly slipped to one side and gave Joaquin a hell of a shock. But I let it run. And he played with that momentarily, got down off the box, and when I said, cut, he said, ‘did you do that?’ I said, no, it was an accident. It was fantastic. It scared the sh*t out of him. I said, ‘no, no, no, I didn’t do that.’”
Fleming also encouraged Scott to talk about some of
his other career highlights, including Bladerunner and Alien.
The director is currently in production on the Gladiator sequel
with Simpson editing. Fans of the Oscar-winning original will be pleased to
hear his comment to IndieWire, “It’s good. It’s gonna be good.”
He has also already drawn his next
one. “I’ve used the downtime of the strike to quietly sit down and address the
next script. So I’m already about 100 frames in on what I’m doing.”
The 84-year old dismisses criticism of his film by
historians and says he doesn’t care what film critics say either. He recalls
to Deadline that he was stung by a review of Blade
Runner by Pauline Kael. “She taught me a lesson. I thought I’d done
something very special. And I had. I know Blade Runner is very
special. It’s evergreen. So many big ideas in there that now people feed off it
constantly for other movies. I was very happy with it. I’m not a person with a
big head, conceited. I’m not like that. I knew it was tricky, but I knew it was
special. And she destroyed me, in four pages. You could not ignore it, and so I
was down for a while. I was wounded, and then later I framed it to keep it in
the office to remind me the only thing that matters is, what did I think of
it?”
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