Steven Spielberg is a bit long for the Best Director Oscar this year (hey, he already has two!), but he’s already making big plans. They happen to be for the small screen. According Deadlinethe legendary filmmaker returns to something he did two decades ago: making one of Stanley Kubrick’s unrealized dream projects a reality.
During a speech at the Berlin Film Festival, Spielberg revealed he was teaming up with HBO to create a seven-episode limited series from Napoleon, one of the massive projects Kubrick never got to pull off. The project still doesn’t have a series order, but Spielberg promises it will be a “grand production”, worthy of the destructive/diminutive French emperor who plunged Europe into chaos in the early 19th century.
The series will be based on Kubrick’s screenplay, which he originally hoped to shoot after 1968. 2001: A Space Odyssey. Jack Nicholson and David Hemmings were both considered for the lead role, with Audrey Hepburn to play his wife Josephine. Alas, after the disastrous reception of the big budget Waterloo in 1970, which starred Rod Steiger and Orson Welles, Kubrick dropped it. He later scratched his itch to make a period epic with one of his best films, 1975 Barry Lyndon.
Spielberg and Kubrick were close, surprising those who thought the former was sentimental (he’s not) and the latter freezing cold (ditto). After Kubrick’s death in 1999, shortly before the release of Eyes wide closedSpielberg was quick to shoot one of his favorite projects, AI Artificial Intelligence in a depressing summer blockbuster, and one of his most underrated films. Since Spielberg did not ruin AIit’s a safe bet that he won’t screw up Napoleon either.
(Via Deadline)