Napoleon, monster or genius? Ridley Scott’s screenwriter deciphers their “benevolent dictator”
David Scarpa details his work with the filmmaker to tell the life of the Emperor from all angles.
During a long interview for IndieWirescreenwriter David Scarpa returned to the development of the scenario of Napoleondirected by Ridley Scott. The character of the emperor, played on screen by Joaquin Phoenix is a very ambiguous historical figure, both military genius and tyrant.
“For us, it seemed difficult in 2023 to do what we call ‘a prestigious biopic’a film Gandhi or other, a sort of final thesis retracing the entire life of a great man, he explains in the preamble. There was a time when these kinds of films were in their place, in the era of Lawrence of Arabia, but I don’t think we can continue to do that today. So the main challenge for me was finding how to tell the story of this journey.”
David Scarpa explains that they began by comparing him to other tyrants to try to gauge Napoleon and the representation that should be made of him.
“I was trying to get a feel for where I stood on this guy, he continues. Like, is it Stalin? Robespierre? More than many other historical figures, there is still debate over whether this guy was a monster or a genius. We have strong opinions about all these other people. But his legacy is still very contested.”
“They were French, therefore debauched”: how the sexuality of the emperor found its way into Napoleon
It always seems tricky to represent these controversial men in cinema, without falling into the trap of making them too heroic. David Scarpa has thought a lot about this question, and considers that Napoleon is “the classic example of a benevolent dictator.”
“Characters of this type have a dangerous attraction to this, this way of seeing themselves as the only soldier capable of taking power to ‘fix’ things, he elaborates. Since then, it has been understood that Napoleon led many societies down the wrong path. Yet at the same time, he was never really a despot. In the end, he didn’t even kill the man who was having an affair with his wife (…) This underlined how incredibly whole and competent (militarily speaking) he was, and yet how he was personally dumped (privately).”
Hence the importance of portraying Napoleon through his relationship with Joséphine.
The screenwriter also says that Ridley Scott was immediately seduced by the angle of a Napoleon torn between his strategic talent and his profound lack of confidence regarding intimate relationships: “Like many narcissistic figures, he was driven by his insecurity, and his need to conquer her. (…) I had become attached to this particular idea, and I pitched it to him: the idea of a man who was profoundly capable and competent in the field of combat, and yet profoundly incapable and incompetent in the field of love and human relationships (…) and he (Ridley Scott) loved it.”
On the screen, Joaquin Phoenix is accompanied by Vanessa Kirby who plays Napoleon’s wife, Joséphine de Beauharnais. Their tumultuous love story is the common thread of the biopic of Ridley Scott. Napoleon is still in theaters.
Is Ridley Scott’s Napoleon realistic? His historical advisor answers us
