Cary Fukunaga might direct Kubrick’s ‘Napoleon’ For HBO
Cary Fukunaga might be returning to HBO, after rocking our collective asses with the first season of True Detective. The director (dare I say…auteur?) is rumored to be taking on Kubrick’s Napoleon for the channel.
“It’s impossible to tell you what I’m going to do except to say that I expect to make the best movie ever made,” director Stanely Kubrick once said of Napoleon, a passion project of his that was never made due to a variety of reasons. The picture would’ve been a costly epic, which made some studios hesitant. Kubrick — who wrote the first draft of the script in 1961 — continued to work on the project throughout much of his career. In 2013, it was reported that director Steven Spielberg, a friend Kubrick’s, would turn his script into a miniseries for HBO. Now, it’s rumored thatBeasts of No Nation director Cary Fukunaga might direct Napoleon, based on the life of French leader Napoléon Bonaparte, who was Emperor of the French from 1804 to 1815.
Learn more about Stanley Kubrick’s Napoleon below.
The Spielberg-produced miniseries is based on Kubrick’s old script with the cooperation of the director’s surviving family members. The last we heard regarding the project was that Baz Luhrmann (The Great Gatsby) was eyeing the director’s chair, but nothing more ever came of that news. Deals were “a long way from being made,” but clearly a deal with Lurhmann never materialized.
Cary Fukunaga, who directed all of True Detective season one for HBO, is possibly involved in Napoleon. Last Friday, a Stanley Kubrick retrospective was held at De Montfort University in Leicester, England. In attendance was Kubrick’s brother-in-law and executive producer, Jan Harland (The Shining, Eyes Wide Shut), and he revealed to “Stanley Kubrick and Me” author, Filippo Ulivieri, that Fukunaga would direct the entire six-hour miniseries. Ulivieri posted the story on his Tumblr page (via Collider), where he also mentioned that David Leland (Mona Lisa) wrote the most recent draft of the script.