Kubrick wanted to shoot his "Napoleon" with natural light whenever possible, and found lenses that would allow the sex scenes between Napoleon and Josephine -- and Napoleon and queens and the wives of various rulers -- to be shot with only candles for illumination. Six years later Kubrick would use the very same techniques for the acclaimed candlelit interiors in "Barry Lyndon."

In production notes accompanying his screenplay of 1969, Kubrick noted four elements that would add most to the cost of filming his epic spectacle: the large number of extras required, the fact that all extras would require military uniforms, the prolific expenses incurred by constructing period sets of French and Russian palaces and, finally, "overpriced movie stars."

But Kubrick, ever the strategist, found many financially creative ways to reduce the budget.

He had no desire to try to match the budget extremes of the last great historical epic, 1963's "Cleopatra," still probably Hollywood's greatest financial debacle. If MGM was going to give Kubrick the money he needed to make his film, he had to show them how willing he was to compromise.

After his birth by fire in playing the director for hire on "Spartacus" a decade before, Kubrick knew the impossible expenses of staging a sea battle, even in miniature. In his screenplay he came up with the idea of using maps to show Napoleon's naval battle with the English and limning the disastrous results with simple haunting shots: two French ships lying on the bottom of the sea; a drowned French admiral floating in his cabin, surrounded by a drift of papers, books and a roast chicken.

He could live without a realistic sea battle, but Kubrick planned nothing less than full-scale re-creations of Napoleon's finest military moments.

And Kubrick knew he could do them for a reasonable price, despite the logistics. To replicate Napoleon's battles, Kubrick decided he would need at least 40,000 infantrymen and 10,000 cavalrymen, as many as Napoleon actually used.

When shooting "Paths of Glory" in 1957, Kubrick hired 800 German police officers (who were trained by the military) to play soldiers. It worked so well that Kubrick decided he must find a country that would hire out its armed forces to him. Fifty extras to a truck would mean the production needed 1,000 trucks to ship 50,000 soldiers to a location, so not only did Kubrick need locations with the proper terrain to accurately stage his battles, the sites also needed to be within marching distance of barracks or a city with enough accommodations.

But Kubrick's dream to shoot on actual Napoleonic battlefields was scuttled almost as soon as location scouting began. Few sites were found to be suitable for filming; industrial and urban development had overtaken most and the rest were ringed by modern buildings. Kubrick did, however, take samples of the soil from the battlefields of Waterloo so the color and quality of the dirt beneath Napoleon's feet could be duplicated at the new locations.

So how, exactly, did Kubrick expect to persuade a government to lend him 50,000 soldiers for a movie shoot?

"One has to be optimistic about these things," Kubrick told Gelmis. "If it turned out to be impossible I'd obviously have no other choice than to make do with a lesser number of men, but this would only be as a last resort. I wouldn't want to fake it with fewer troops because Napoleonic battles were out in the open, a vast tableau where the formations moved in an almost choreographic fashion ... [The battles were] so beautiful, like vast lethal ballets, that it's worth making every effort to explain the configuration of forces to the audience."

To do so Kubrick included not only scenes of epic confrontations in his screenplay but also maps, charts and vast tracts of voice-over, supplying concise history lessons on each battle as well as explanations of the psychology of war that Napoleon used to trounce his enemies.

By the end of 1968, Kubrick had found suitable locations for his battles in Yugoslavia and the Romanian government was willing to supply troops in the tens of thousands for no more than $2 per man per day. Yugoslavia, no doubt put off by the thought of having multitudes of Romanian soldiers tromping through its countryside for Kubrick's epic, offered to supply the same number of men for only $5 per man per day.

Both Yugoslavia and Romania also came to Kubrick's party in reducing his monstrous military-costuming budget. They each quoted him less than $40 per uniform, one-fifth the price Kubrick had been quoted in England. But Kubrick managed to find an even cheaper way to dress the majority of his troops.

Recent Stories