Stanley Kubrick was and always shall be one of the greatest filmmakers in the history of the moving image. Over the course of a forty-six-year career in directing he made thirteen films, many of them timeless classics and a few undisputed masterpieces that not only influenced generations of filmmakers to come but also forever changed the way films are made and regarded.

Kubrick was a master whose legacy in cinema will endure forever in the continuing impact his films have on the moviegoers who discover them and the directors who studied his works and used the lessons they learned to shape their own careers, including Martin Scorsese, Christopher Nolan, James Cameron, Michael Mann, Wes Anderson, Lars Von Trier, and of course Steven Spielberg.

The Oscar-winner and possibly most famous film director who ever lived is planning to resurrect one of Kubrick’s greatest unmade movie projects – Napoleon, an epic telling of the life of the French emperor and military leader Napoleon Bonaparte – as a miniseries for television. Spielberg revealed the news in a recent interview with the French TV network Canal + but did not state which network he would be developing the miniseries project for.

The director of Jaws, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and most recently Lincoln, has produced for television countless times in the past for multiple networks. His television credits include the mid-’80s NBC anthology series Amazing Stories, the syndicated animated hits Tiny Toon Adventures and Animaniacs, Seaquest DSV, Taken for the Sci-Fi Channel (now just SyFy), Into the West and Falling Skies for TNT, and most importantly the epic World War II miniseries Band of Brothers and The Pacific for HBO. Put simply, Spielberg is as big a deal in television as he is in the film industry, so Napoleon could be going anywhere at this point.

Kubrick first began working on the Napoleon project in 1961 after he had finished shooting the classic historical epic Spartacus. He had intended to make the film after filming 2001: A Space Odyssey and spent the next few years reading multiple volumes written about Bonaparte and meticulously constructing a complete detailed chronology of his life and times. Production was supposed to take place in France and England, Kubrick’s home and preferred filming location for more than three decades, with the battle scenes to be shot in Romania with the Romanian Army promising to provide Kubrick with 40,000 soldiers and 10,000 cavalrymen.

The director courted actors like David Hemmings (Blow Up, Deep Red), Oskar Werner (Jules & Jim, Fahrenheit 451), and his future Shining star Jack Nicholson for the role of Napoleon, and sought Audrey Hepburn to play Empress Josephine. Unfortunately the massive budget required to make the movie was too much for any studio or consortium to put up, and with the disastrous box office reception of another Napoleon film, Waterloo, starring Rod Steiger, Kubrick was forced to cancel development on his cherished project and move on. His next movie, A Clockwork Orange, was undoubtedly one of the best he ever made, while the historical research Kubrick conducted while prepping Napoleon would greatly influence his 1975 epic drama Barry Lyndon.

Spielberg and Kubrick were close friends for several decades before Kubrick died unexpectedly on March 7, 1999 not long after completing his final film Eyes Wide Shut. They had long discussed the possibility of collaborating on a science-fiction epic Kubrick had nurtured for years called A.I. but was unable to move forward on the project until the advances in digital special effects he witnessed take shape in Spielberg’s own Jurassic Park convinced him the time was right for the film to be made. Kubrick desired for Spielberg to direct the feature while he served as a producer. Though that epic team-up never occurred due to the elder filmmaker’s untimely passing Spielberg would ultimately write and direct A.I. Artificial Intelligence and see it released in the summer of 2001 to mixed reviews and decent box office. The final film was a Spielberg feature in spirit and appearance but the eccentricities and dark cynicism of Stanley Kubrick and his greatest motion pictures were as integral to the success of A.I. as the flashy visual effects and unorthodox (for a summer blockbuster) story line.

Spielberg can next be seen serving as the president of the jury at this year’s Cannes Film Festival while his next big sci-fi action movie Robopocalypse is experiencing production delays. I can see Napoleon being a major television event for a network like HBO, TNT, or AMC with Spielberg’s name at the head of the project and some top-notch talent both in front of and behind the camera. Seeing an unmade Stanley Kubrick screenplay the late director hoped would become, in his own words, “the best movie ever made” finally being brought to fruition in a venue that is much more open and welcoming to the concept of epic, long-form, intimate storytelling than it was back in Kubrick’s day would be a dream come true for many of us who have long been devoted to his films and inimitable filmmaking aesthetic.

In the meantime you can read Kubrick’s original Napoleon script here and ponder what might have been, and what could still be.

[Source: THR]