Heeeeere’s Napoleon: Spielberg Developing Kubrick Script as TV Miniseries

Warner Brothers/Associated Press Stanley Kubrick

While another collaboration between Stanley Kubrick and Steven Spielberg would seem to require a time machine, a Ouija board or some sort of interdimensional extraterrestrial monolith, plans are nonetheless underway for these two celebrated filmmakers to work together again.

Speaking to Canal+ Television in France, Mr. Spielberg said that he intended to turn an unproduced creenplay by Mr. Kubrick about the life of Napoleon into a television miniseries.

“I’ve been developing Stanley Kubrick’s screenplay for a miniseries, not for a motion picture, about the life of Napoleon,” Mr. Spielberg said in the interview. “Kubrick wrote the script in 1961, long time ago, and the Kubrick family â€" because we made ‘A.I.’ together â€" the Kubrick family and I, and the next project we’re working on is a miniseries, is going to be ‘Napoleon.’”

Mr. Kubrick, who died in 1999, spent years researching Napoleon, reviewing more than 18,000 documents and books while assembling a card file that cataloged every significant moment in the French leader’s life.

It was announced in 1968 that Mr. Kubrick would direct “Napoleon” for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer; then in 1970 it was reported that he had put that project on the back burner in favor of “A Clockwork Orange.”

In 1972, Mr. Kubrick (who had not yet made “Barry Lyndon” at the time) told Sight & Sound magazine that “there has never been a great historical film” and that he still intended to make “Napoleon.” But the project was never realized.

The two filmmakers worked together on the 2001 science-fiction film “A.I. Artificial Intelligence,” which Mr. Spielberg was producing for Mr. Kubrick, and which he directed after Mr. Kubrick’s death. One could also argue that the Kubrick influence hovrs over Spielberg films like “Minority Report,” and its world of oppressively ubiquitous technology. Both directors also appreciated space aliens as well as Tom Cruise.