RIDLEY SCOTT ’S NAPOLEON TAKES ON HISTORY’S INFAMOUS INVADER. PREPARE FOR PSYCHOLOGICAL WARFARE

WORDS ALEX GODFREY

Joaquin Phoenix’s Napoleon rides out and surveys his troops

Director Ridley Scott and his star confer on the battlefield;

SHALL WE START WITH THE PILES?

It might make sense to start with the piles. A good a window as any into how Ridley Scott has approached his latest, possibly oddest and definitely most idiosyncratic historical epic.

“Napoleon was a horseman, he suffered from piles,” he tells us, throwing quite the curveball when we ask about the film’s battle sequences. “That’s varicose veins up your butt, right? I don’t have them, but they’re very, very painful, it ain’t funny. It’s like having a toothache up your butt. There’s nothing you can do.”

So there’s a quick primer on haemorrhoids from Ridley Scott, in case you didn’t know, and in case you wondered whether he has them or not. But back to Napoleon.

“We sense history might have been different had Napoleon not had a very bad attack of piles on the day of Waterloo. You heard this one?” We had not. “Okay. So I had him at Waterloo,” he says of one of history’s most famous battles, “sitting on the loo, and it’s pouring with rain outside, and he does his business. He gets up, looks in the loo, there is blood. Then he does the day in battle, sweating and in agony with the piles. David [Scarpa, the screenwriter] said, ‘Isn’t this rather undignified?’ I said, ‘Maybe, but it’s accurate.’ But we took it out of the movie because it became too distracting.”

So, the piles didn’t make it. But this should give you an indication of what Scott is going for here. Napoleon covers a substantial sweep, taking in the Corsican-born French military commander’s ascension from officer to King and Emperor, his conquering of nations, the rise, the fall, and the bogglingly erratic relationship with Joséphine de Beauharnais, who would obsess him from the moment they met until the moment he died, and yes, there are considerably huge battle sequences. But above all, it’s a really rather eccentric character study.

It is not Braveheart. It is not 1917. It is definitely not Gladiator. There are victories, lots of them, but no heroics, not in that sense. No big rousing speeches on battlefields. “That’s definitely something we wanted to avoid,” says Joaquin Phoenix, whose Napoleon, hungry for food and sex and power, starts off nervy and mumbling, becoming increasingly cocksure and impudent as his rises up the dictatorial ranks. “Certainly, speaking for myself, I actively wanted to avoid the conventions of the biopic.”

Napoleon does that. For starters, it doesn’t take sides. It’s all a bit more complex than that, befitting its subject, and the director’s take on him. “I compare him with Alexander The Great. Adolf Hitler. Stalin,” says Scott. “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.”