Napoleon Bonaparte – most people have a vague idea of the historical figure and what he accomplished (and lost) in his lifetime.

But who was he at his core? Screenwriter David Scarpa and director Ridley Scott take on the French emperor in Napoleon, starring Joaquin Phoenix in the title role and Vanessa Kirby as his beloved Josephine. An epic film that tracks the general’s life and career from the Siege of Toulon to the Battle of Waterloo, the story is just as much about his tumultuous relationship with his wife as it is about his military prowess… and about the insecurities that fueled both his political and personal goals. I spoke with David Scarpa about the film and what he learned about history and humanity in the making of it.

The film opens with a quote about the frustrations and hardships of the people at that time…did the story feel relevant to today in terms of the political and economic state of late 18^th century France?

It was clearly very turbulent times. In a strange way, turbulence is sort of a constant in society… so it may feel timely, but I think they were also very unique times. It was the middle of a revolution and blood was running in the streets. You had fifty thousand people being sent to the guillotine. There were bread riots – people spent ninety percent of their income on bread just to survive. So it was an extremely chaotic era in French history. We, in America, have a slightly realized vision of our own American Revolution, and the French Revolution is much more complicated in terms of the mythology surrounding it. There was an enormous amount of turmoil.

Given the complexity of Napoleon’s character and the sheer scale of this project, it could be considered quite daunting. What were your thoughts going into it and how did you approach the story?

Ridley Scott, his producer Kevin Walsh, and I had just done All the Money in the World together. And we had a number of other projects that had sort of come together or not… near misses and things like that. Kevin said that he really wanted to do a story about Napoleon and frankly I knew very little about the topic. Like many, I had more of a high school level understanding of his life. I knew him as the guy with the hat or Waterloo… a few choice quotes and things like that. But I didn’t really have a deep knowledge.

David Scarpa

So, I went off and read a short biography and said, “How are we going to do this? Are we going to do a traditional prestige picture?” It struck me that it’s almost impossible to make that kind of movie anymore. Like Lawrence of Arabia or Gandhi. The great man’s story. Those are great movies, but the time for that kind of thing has pretty much ended. I think what we quickly discovered was that we wanted to do something much more psychological, and a little bit more skeptical of him, and of the mythology that surrounded Napoleon. That was really where things launched from.

Tell me about your research. What were some of your sources?

I started with a very simple short biography by a guy named David Bell called Napoleon: A Concise Biography. It was about a hundred pages long. Oddly, I found myself having more questions coming out of it than answers. It really took a surprising amount to fully understand and grasp the topic. I wound up going through a stack of books, all these very thick, major biographies, that represented completely different points of view. Andrew Roberts is very pro Napoleon. He’s called himself a Bonapartist. Adam Zamoyski is not and presents a more jaundiced view. I wound up absorbing all of these different views and, from these and other books, built up a body of knowledge and research surrounding it. I also watched a lot of YouTube videos about the battles which had elaborate map renderings. Those were really fantastic and not a resource they would have had forty to years ago.

So there was a ton of material out there to make use of. We talked to a number of different experts in the field, and also brought on a consultant named Michael Broers full time. He’s an Oxford professor and author of a three-volume biography of Napoleon. He guided us and talked us through a lot of these things during pre-production. It really spread out over the course of the entire movie.

I imagine there was a lot of content on Napoleon, but what about Josephine?

There was a fantastic book that really made a big impact because Josephine was a huge part of the story. At one point it was practically equal time between those two characters. The book Ambition and Desire: The Dangerous Life of Josephine Bonaparte was a biography by Kate Williams, which is exclusively about her, and from her point of view. That really was a great resource, and one of my top books.

Josephine (Vanessa Kirby) and Napoleon (Joaquin Phoenix) Photo courtesy of Apple

What would you say were some of the most noteworthy or lesser-known characteristics of Napoleon that you learned while making this film?

I think there’s a lot of weird mythology that we have… like the idea of the Napoleon Complex. The idea that he was short and that that was what drove him to do all these things. In reality, I think he was around 5’ 7”, and that would have been a very average height in France at that point in history. He had an enormous grandiosity and, at the same time, a lot of insecurity. Those two traits often go together, and I think that what we talk about as the Napoleon Complex is really a modified version of that kind of insecurity. The idea of somebody who’s driven by profound internal, psychological insecurity to conquer the world. You see it in a lot of very successful people even today.

Did you have to alter any of the historical facts to better serve the screen story?

I think the biggest issue, at least in the creation of the first draft of the screenplay, was simply deciding what to put in. And what to leave out – this is somebody who fought forty-five different battles. We can’t have forty-five different battles in the film. Like the Louisiana Purchase. Most of the United States exists as it does, in part because Thomas Jefferson bought Louisiana from Napoleon for $25 million. There’s no way to cover all of that in one movie, so it was a question of what story we were going to choose to tell. And we were never going to leave his point of view. We stayed with him the whole time.

That meant making choices in terms of what we chose to show. We ultimately opted to zero in on three major battles that basically represented the beginning, middle and end of his life. There’s the Toulon battle in the beginning, which brought him to fame and essentially “made” him as a general… and then Austerlitz, which is considered his masterpiece. Which is a really kind of perverse, weird way of thinking about it because so many people died there. That was an interesting contrast that we wanted to mine – the idea of war as an artistic achievement. It was morally complicated and something that we wanted to get into. And then, of course, there’s Waterloo.

Austerlitz didn’t unfold in exactly the way that it does in the film – there’s the legend of Austerlitz, which is what we chose to do. I like to quote The Man who Shot Liberty Valance: when you’re given a choice between the truth and the legend, print the legend. At the same time, I think when Ridley came on board, we got much deeper into it. His attitude was more along the lines of “history is what I say it is.” If he wanted Napoleon to attend the beheading of Marie Antoinette, which didn’t really happen, he was going to do that. It’s like the court painters of old – he painted it his way, not necessarily in a completely documentary way.

How did you balance the political story with the love story?

I didn’t think that we would ever have the budget that we did, which meant it was going to be much more intimate. It was going to be much more about Napoleon and Josephine, that was really at the center of the whole thing. The big elements really came later on. So in a strange way, the epic, sweeping material was always secondary to the psychological part, the romantic part. Ultimately, what was most interesting to me was their marriage. That was at the center the entire time. I think the two elements just balanced.

Tell me about your use of humor in the film.

When we got into it, we didn’t want to be overly reverent, or for it to be stuffy theater. The movies we talked about were films like The Duellists and Amadeus, which treats its subject as this kind of bawdy, libidinous figure. We wanted to have a lot of humor and satire in there. There’s also material in the movie that is improvised, things that Joaquin came up with on the day, or lines that would never work in an actual screenplay, but just came about naturally.

This must have been a very collaborative project. What is your personal writing process like?

There’s always a process of conversations and talking, but eventually you’ve got to go off and do it on your own. One of the things they don’t tell you when you’re new is how much of the job of screenwriting is not just about getting it right the first time but about being able to get it right the first time and get the movie made, stars attached, directors on board, and get the money. Then those people show up and they blow it up. They throw grenades into the thing and it winds up getting torn apart. And the real challenge of the job is being able to have the movie torn apart fifty different ways and then reassemble it over and over and over again and still have it. That’s really the incredibly challenging thing about it – the hard part starts once you’re finished writing your version of the movie.

What do you like about writing in this genre of historical drama?

We have an idea of what drives human beings; they’re all rational actors, right? So if you’re making a murder mystery, somebody’s in it for the money, power… or whatever it is. And what you ultimately discover, when you actually look at human beings and what really drives them, is that they’re often driven by much more irrational things, such as insecurity. They’re much more interesting than I think most writers – except the very best ones – give them credit for. When you’re doing historically-based material, it forces you to contend with the reality of who people are rather than an abstracted idea of who they are.