Director Steven Spielberg has revealed at the Berlin Film Festival that he will be releasing a Napoleon Bonaparte miniseries for HBO. The project will have seven episodes. The cinematographer’s words pass Deadline.
The series will be based on a script by Stanley Kubrick, who planned to make a movie about the French emperor after the success of A Space Odyssey. The director wanted to work on a project in France, the UK and Romania with around 40,000 soldiers.
In various stages of production, David Hemmings and Jack Nicholson would play the role of Napoleon, while Audrey Hepburn would play the role of his wife Josephine. However, the project was abandoned because MGM refused to finance it. Therefore, much of Kubrick’s work was used in the 1975 film Barry Lyndon.
Spielberg has been involved with the project since 2013, planning to turn it into a miniseries. In 2016, True Detective director-producer Cary Fukunaga and screenwriter David Auburn began development. It is unknown if they are now assigned to the project.
Steven Spielberg is set to produce a documentary on Star Wars composer John Williams. He wrote music for many of the director’s films. We talk about it in more detail here.
