‘Napoleon’: Joaquin Phoenix Discusses Reuniting With Ridley Scott and the Creative Partnership With Vanessa Kirby That Led to an Improvised Slap
(L-R) Vanessa Kirby as Joséphine de Beauharnais and Joaquin Phoenix as Napoleon Bonaparte in Ridley Scott’s Napoleon. Image via Empire Magazine.
Ridley Scott’s Napoleon is the focus of the latest issue of Empire Magazine, out this Thursday. As such, the magazine has debuted a new set of images and also snippets of interviews with director Ridley Scott and lead actor Joaquin Phoenix (who spoke to the publication before the SAG-AFTRA strike).
We already saw a trailer for the film earlier this summer, which confirmed that this will be no ordinary biopic. This is also a common theme of the Empire Magazine story, as Scott confirmed that the film will embrace the amount of blood on Napoleon’s hands throughout his entire life:
“I compare him with Alexander The Great. Adolf Hitler. Stalin. Listen, he’s got a lot of bad shit under his belt. At the same time, he was remarkable with his courage, and in his can-do and in his dominance. He was extraordinary.”
Joaquin Phoenix as Napoleon Bonaparte in Ridley Scott’s Napoleon. Image via Empire Magazine.
Joaquin Phoenix also doubled down, saying that they wanted to avoid the tropes of traditional biopics where we would see the Emperor rise through the ranks of the French military. Understanding the historical figure through a single person’s lens will not be an easy task, and Phoenix acknowledged as much to Empire:
“If you want to really understand Napoleon, then you should probably do your own studying and reading. Because if you see this film, it’s this experience told through Ridley’s eyes. It’s just such a complex world. I mean, it’s so fucking complex. What we were after was something that would capture the feeling of this man.”
Phoenix reunites in the film with his Gladiator director, and as he explained, he was very excited to finally do so:
“The truth is, there was just a very nostalgic idea of working with Ridley again. I had such an incredible experience working with Ridley on Gladiator, and I was so young. It was my first big production. I really yearned for that experience again, or something similar.
He’s approached me about other things in the past, but nothing that felt like it would be as demanding for both of us. And so I really liked the idea of jumping into something with Ridley that was going to be that.”
(L-R) Vanessa Kirby as Joséphine de Beauharnais and Joaquin Phoenix as Napoleon Bonaparte in Ridley Scott’s Napoleon. Image via Empire Magazine.
But collaborating with Phoenix again turned out to be a bit more tricky behind the camera than he initially thought, Scott told the magazine:
“He’ll come in, and you’re fucking two weeks’ out, and he’ll say, ‘I don’t know what to do’. I’ll say, ‘What?!’ ‘I don’t know what to do.’ Oh God, I said, ‘Come in, sit down.’ We sat for ten days, all day, talking scene by scene. In a sense, we rehearsed. Absolutely detail by detail.”
As they found out, they key element to unlocking Napoleon’s life was to examine Joséphine, played in the film by Vanessa Kirby; “So I kept reining it in, I kept going back to Joséphine,” Scott said. Vanessa Kirby added the following:
“What was so challenging, and kind of elusive, about her, was that every single book, whether it was first-hand accounts, third-hand stories, documents, testimonies, and Napoleon’s letters… every single one was completely different. She was just this massive contradiction. Every time I thought I’d locked down, ‘Okay, this is who she is, and I think I can get hold of this’, something would completely counteract it.”
Apparently, Kirby and Phoenix reached an agreement to go to whatever dark places the script would take them, which is how an improvised slap was originated. As Phoenix explained it:
“She said, ‘Look, whatever you feel, you can do.’ I said, ‘Same thing with you.’ She said, ‘You can slap me, you can grab me, you can pull me, you can kiss me, whatever it is’. So we had this agreement that we were going to surprise each other and try and create moments that weren’t there, because both of us wanted to avoid the cliché of the period drama. And by that I mean moments that are well-orchestrated and designed.
We never really got to the bottom of it. I don’t know if you can call it love. I don’t know what it was. But we encouraged each other, demanded of each other, to challenge ourselves to shock each other in moments. And that’s what came out of that, that moment.”
Kirby expressed the same enthusiasm about their creative collaboration:
“It’s the greatest thing when you have a creative partner and you say, ‘Right, everything’s safe. I’m with you. And we’re gonna go to the dark places together’.”
Napoleon will debut in cinemas on November 22, with Sony Pictures handling the worldwide distribution.
Miguel Fernández is a Spanish student that has movies as his second passion in life. His favorite movie of all time is The Lord of the Rings, but he is also a huge Star Wars fan. However, fantasy movies are not his only cup of tea, as authors like Scorsese, Fincher, Kubrick or Hitchcock have been an obsession for him since he started to understand the language of filmmaking. He is that guy who will watch a black and white movie, just because it is in black and white.
