2023-08-01 21:06:46
The filming of the biopic “Napoleon” gave a hard time to its main interpreter Joaquin Phoenix. Director Ridley Scott reveals that the ‘Joker’ star had doubts until the last moment regarding how to portray the character.
Joaquin Phoenix “didn’t know what to do” two weeks before filming the film “Napoleon”, revealed director Ridley Scott (“Blade Runner”, “Thelma and Louise”, “Gladiator”) in an interview published this week in the Empire magazine.
The actor had so much no idea how to approach his character of Napoleon Bonaparte, that Ridley Scott says he had to discuss each scene in depth with him.
“When he said, ‘I don’t know what to do,’ I said, ‘Oh my God. Alright, come sit down.’ We sat for ten days, and all day we were doing everything, scene following scene. It was kind of a rehearsal. We took everything down to the smallest detail,” he said.
Ridley Scott’s choice to play the title role of his biopic fell on Joaquin Phoenix following seeing him in the film “Joker”, which won him the Oscar for best actor in 2019. “I watched Joaquin and I repeated to myself: This demon is Napoleon Bonaparte, he looks so much like him”.
During the design of the film, Joaquin asked for a lot of script rewrites, also says Ridley Scott. “With Joaquin, you can rewrite a whole damn script if he doesn’t feel good with it,” he says. “And that’s more or less what happened with Napoleon. We undid the whole film to help him focus on who Bonaparte was. […] And that made the whole thing even better and more ambitious,” he added.
A controversial figure
Still for Empire magazine, Ridley Scott also returned to the complex personality of Napoleon Bonaparte, an ambivalent and controversial historical figure, risking a strange comparison: “I compare him to Alexander the Great, Adolf Hitler or Stalin. He has many pans to his credit. At the same time, he had this remarkable courage, this way of dominating. As such, he was extraordinary.
The director promises a historical fresco which should depict the great battles and the horrors he perpetrated, as well as his intimate life with Joséphine de Beauharnais (played by Vanessa Kirby).
Joaquin Phoenix nevertheless warns that it will not be a question of retracing the history of the controversial character in its entirety: “If you really want to understand Napoleon, you should do your own research and reading. Because with this film, you will see that experience through Ridley’s eyes. It’s such a complex world.”
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