The long-awaited one arrives Napoleon by Ridley Scott (which opens in Spain next Friday) wrapped in an exciting acrid smell of gunpowder and controversy. The filmmaker has done the trick of trying to put the entire life of the Corsican in a film and of course, everything has been a bit accelerated (he is introduced to the archduchess María Luisa and in the next scene they already give him the son he had with her; Waterloo It is a head-on clash in which there is no fighting for the Haye Sainte farm or the castle of Hougoumont and in which the Prussians arrive immediately). And with the haste and excess of ellipses, some little issues have fallen through: like the entire Spanish war, although it is true that Bonaparte would have agreed to draw a thick veil over “the Spanish ulcer.” Despite that and some license such as showing the emperor leading cavalry charges with saber in hand at Borodino and Waterloo, where he suffered from hemorrhoids, Napoleon It is a great show, with battles, sex, hussars — the director prefers to focus on Hippolyte Charles, Josephine’s handsome lover (an extreme athlete) instead of showing the iconic hussar (although he suffered from alopecia), General Antoine de Lasalle , fallen in Wagram and not from bed)—, and even mummies, and cannons, many cannons. The director’s Napoleon does not put his hand in his shirt; instead, his iconic gesture is to cover his ears when firing cannons.
Ridley Scott (South Shields, 85 years old), who shows in the film the influence of Barry Lyndon by Kubrick (the candlelight, the music, the care in the costumes), he is especially satisfied with the interpretation of the protagonists, Joaquin Phoenix (in the role titre) and Vanessa Kirby (Josefina), despite the fact that some French press has maliciously compared them to Kent and Barbie (for adults, with some leg-crossing type moment in Fatal Attraction: “If you look down you will see a surprise that you will not be able to forget, general citizen”). Scott’s (British and Sir) response has been to tell all critics, especially the French, to hell. “A film cannot be a history lesson,” he stressed this afternoon in an interview with this newspaper. Tonight, he and Phoenix will attend a preview at the Prado Museum.
Ask. Isn’t it a bit contradictory that Wellington reproaches Napoleon in the film for not being able to resist launching a frontal charge (at Waterloo) and that, on the other hand, he is shown with such preference to go from behind with Josephine?
Answer. Napoleon is a strategist, his greatest virtue is having great intuition. And in battle intuition is everything.
Q. Yes, but I was referring to the shocking and somewhat vaudevillian scenes in which he is shown having sex with Josefina from behind. Then he will complain that the French are angry at him…
R. Ah, like a little dog! (laughs). We decided to do it that way, those scenes, so that not everything was military action, battles, and to remove a little significance. With Napoleon there is a tendency to make everything very solemn and boring. We look for a tone of humor in these sequences, which do not betray what appears in the intimate letters, some of which are very explicit regarding sex. I am also very satisfied with the scene in which he gets under the table and advances on all fours towards Josefina. There the actress, Vanessa Kirby, didn’t know what Joaquin Phoenix was going to do, and she came out like that, she came out very well! She is very good. Another sequence in which we introduced a touch of humor was in the Brumaire coup d’état, when the deputies fell on him fiercely. There is great violence, but it is also comical. We shot it all in one take, with 8 cameras.
Q. Napoleon had to endure many jokes, it was a golden age for caricaturists (especially those from outside France). Of course, if the English catch you with intimate letters in which you tell Josefina not to wash, you’re coming…
R. Everyone wants to laugh at politicians, look at America now. You can laugh at everything, except Israel, and Ukraine.
Q. The film seems to have failed to settle on a vision of Napoleon. “Corsican bully” or generous with the enemy? Abusive—he smacks Josefina during the divorce—or romantic? Rude boor — “It’s a pity that such an important man has no manners,” comments the English ambassador — or fine intellectual? (a great reader, he was eventually a member of the Institute of France and author of the Civil Code).
R. Napoleon is a Corsican and the Corsicans are very tough. He has an aggressive character and lacks elegance. But I insist again that he was very intuitive, that is his main trait. So is the influence of his mother.
Q. His speeches and harangues show that he knew the value of words. “Soldiers of the “Grand Armée”he wrote after Austerlitz, “before this day passes and is lost in the ocean of eternity, your emperor wants to speak to you.”
R. And his letters reveal a lot about him, many are preserved, there are some very moving ones to Josefina.
Q. He could be very inspiring, do you identify with that quality of Napoleon that you have in your films moments like the monologue of tears in the rain of the replicant Roy Batty in Blade Runner, those of General Máximo in Gladiator or Balian’s harangue in the kingdom of heaven? (“This is your oath, and this so that you do not forget it.”)?
R. There is strength and beautiful metaphors in Napoleon’s texts, he had inspiring moments. As to Blade Runner, the original novel by Philip K. Dick [¿Sueñan los androides con ovejas eléctricas?] It already had very beautiful dialogues, with a melody, that suggested what needed to be said in the film. I also have great admiration for the scriptwriters. About Gladiator, I remember that when I said I was going to make a film about Ancient Rome, they thought it would be sword & sandals, a gender peplum. “They were wrong.”
Q. He has made many historical films.
R. The danger in doing them is that you don’t realize that they can’t be a history lesson. They are movies. The characters must dialogue normally. In Napoleon It went very well. I used four cameras to shoot the dialogues and the actors felt they had a lot of ability to improvise and had a lot of freedom. I warned them to be ready for anything. And so the scene came out that talked about Napoleon crawling under the table.
Q. You can see the same fascination with the Napoleonic era, the uniforms, the weapons, as in his first film, the unforgettable The duelists (1977).
R. The fascination continues. You know, everything comes from Rome.
Q. He says it because he is with Gladiator 2.
R. No, no, Napoleon got all his inspiration from there. The eagles, the magnificence of the equipment, the discipline, the corps sprit. Also the Germans in World War II, by the way. It is interesting to see everything that began in Rome, in imperial Rome.
Q. Napoleon is a cannon movie.
R. ?
Q. Of cannons, and their bullets.
R. Balls?
Q. Also (laughs). But I was referring to artillery. You have to see how Napoleon’s cannons roar. Tremendous, in battles and also when he mercilessly shoots against the French people at the beginning of his career in the Vendimiario.
R. Ah, he was a gunner, and that was always noticeable. He knew everything about cannons. How to place and shoot them, but also how to melt them. That’s what he showed he did at the siege of Toulon.
Q. That battle is very shocking, it shows a very human Napoleon, hyperventilating before the fight, fighting hand to hand and having his horse killed (historical episode) in a brutal scene. In total it shows five battles, Toulon, Pyramids, Austerlitz (accepting the legend of the disaster of the Russians and Austrians on the ice), Borodino and Waterloo. What is the secret to offering a good battle in cinema, you who have done so many?
R. Draw it before. I draw and I’m very good at it. I went to an art school, Lucian Freud taught me, and I had David Hockney as a classmate.
Q. Well, here he competes with another David, Jacques-Louis, and with Gros. I don’t know what he is reproached for more, that he made the French shoot at the Pyramids of Giza (now that we had put an end to the myth that he shot the nose of the Sphinx!) or that the war did not leave Spain; Let’s see what Goya will say tonight at the Prado.
R. Look, I lived in Hartlepool, in the northeast of England, a very industrial town that influenced me a lot. There was a big cinema, the Odeon, and I painted the posters. I made one for Pride and passion, by Stanley Kramer, which was about the war with the French, with Cary Grant, Sofia Loren and Frank Sinatra (as a guerrilla). So you could say that I have already touched on that topic…
Q. That 1957 film that mentions, precisely about a large cannon, the largest in the world (a kind of peninsular Navarone cannon), which the guerrillas dragged to demolish the walls of Ávila and help the English, was based on the novel The Gun, by CS Forester.
R. I have always loved Forester’s stories, especially those of his Nelson navy captain, Horace Hornblower.
Q. Wow, the throat-clearing gentleman of the seas! And Sharpe, the British rifleman from Bernard Cornwell’s Napoleonic novels? The sequence of Napoleon The one where a sniper puts a hole in his hat at Waterloo seems like a tribute.
R. I know him, yes, but I prefer Captain Hornblower!
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