Ran accross this interesting bit about Stanely Kubrick on The Guardian today…
In 1968, Kubrick embarked on one of his most ambitious and personal projects thus far: an epic biography of Napoleon Bonaparte, with Jack Nicholson playing the emperor. Napoleon was a lifelong obsession and Kubrick intended to cover the entire sweep of his life, with full-scale reconstructions of his battles, requiring some 50,000 extras (Kubrick often noted the similarities between filmmaking and mounting a battle campaign).
The director worked for two years on the film, immersing himself with a team of researchers in a minute analysis of the Napoleonic era, developing a day-by-day account of court life and a catalogue of 15,000 images of the period. With characteristic ingenuity he found special lenses to film exteriors in the evening and low-cost paper fabric for the soldiers’ uniforms. He even got the Romanian army to agree to provide tens of thousands of men for the battle scenes.
In 1969, however, MGM studios balked at the cost of Kubrick’s epic, despite the unprecedented success of his film 2001: A Space Odyssey. Kubrick went to Warner Brothers, where he made A Clockwork Orange, but he never gave up hope for Napoleon. If he had achieved his vision, A Clockwork Orange might never have been made. That film’s success sealed his relationship with Warner Brothers and led to his masterpieces Barry Lyndon and The Shining.