Napoleon
All actors and roles (10)
Short description
Napoleon is a historical drama centred on the French military commander's rapid and uncompromising rise to emperor, told largely through his turbulent marriage to Josephine. The story traces his origins as a soldier and follows his path to power alongside the obsessive, unstable bond he shared with the woman he considered his one true love. The film blends action, drama, history, romance and war as it moves between his public conquests and his private life.
Ridley Scott directed, working from a screenplay by David Scarpa; Scott also produced alongside Mark Huffam and star Joaquin Phoenix, whose credited cast includes 96 performers and a crew of 116. Phoenix plays Napoleon, with Vanessa Kirby as Josephine, Tahar Rahim as Paul Barras, Rupert Everett as the Duke of Wellington and Paul Rhys as Talleyrand. The film was made across the United Kingdom, Malta and the United States, with a budget of 200 million US dollars, and it was released on 22 November 2023.
It runs 158 minutes. Scott's thirty-first directorial feature, it followed House of Gucci and preceded Gladiator II. Its worldwide box office of roughly 222 million dollars fell short of its reported budget. On IMDb it holds 6.3 out of 10 from around 185,000 votes, and on TMDB 6.3 from roughly 3,300 votes. The film critics' rating stands at 6.2 from 341 reviews, close to the audience scores.
What's left behind the scenes
- According to director and producer Ridley Scott, 11 cameras were used simultaneously during the filming of the battle scenes.
- Filming took 61 days. According to Ridley Scott, this is short for a film of this scale. He attributes the relatively short shooting period to the fact that everything was carefully prepared, and the number of takes was minimized.
- According to Ridley Scott, he deliberately tried to make the length of the version of the film intended for theatrical release as close to 2.5 hours as possible. Scott believes that this is exactly the amount of time that the average viewer can watch a film without interruption, after which the seat starts to seem hard and uncomfortable, and the film – drawn out. In any case, Ridley admitted that he plans to make a director’s cut of the film longer.
- The film begins with Napoleon watching the execution of Marie Antoinette, but in reality, he was not present at the execution.
- According to Ridley Scott, he tried to make the runtime of the theatrical version as close to 2.5 hours as possible.
- The runtime of the director's cut of the film is 205 minutes.
- In several scenes, a Black General Dumas appears on screen, played by Abubakar Salim. During the Napoleonic Wars, there was indeed such a General Thomas-Alexandre Dumas, a native of Haiti, the father of writer Alexandre Dumas. A brilliant tactician, he was known to his contemporaries as the “Black Devil”.
Similar movies
Auditions in India
Casting calls in USA
Castingi w Polsce
Кастинги в Україні
