France’s first Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte is like Adolf Hitler, British director Ridley Scott said ahead of the release of his biopic movie on the French military leader in the fall.
“I compare him with Alexander the Great. Adolf Hitler. Stalin,” Scott said in the upcoming September edition of the British monthly magazine Empire.
Napoleon — who reinstated slavery and whose military campaigns ranged from Spain to Russia and were responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths on the battlefield — has got “a lot of bad shit under his belt,” Scott said.
“At the same time, he was remarkable with his courage, and in his can-do and in his dominance. He was extraordinary,” Scott added.
After first rising to power following a coup in 1799, Corsica-born Napoleon Bonaparte led France through a series of bloody wars to briefly become a hegemonic power in continental Europe, until he was finally defeated by an alliance of European nations led by Britain in the 1815 Battle of Waterloo in Belgium.
The first French emperor then died in exile in Saint Helena, a small island in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, in 1821.
Focusing on the rise to power of the French military leader, Scott’s movie — the poster of which shows the emperor wearing a two-pointed hat — will come out in November and features Hollywood legend Joaquin Phoenix as Napoleon.
In his Empire interview, Scott said he first thought of Phoenix for the role while watching the actor’s Oscar-winning performance in “The Joker.”
“I’m staring at Joaquin and saying, ‘This little demon is Napoleon Bonaparte.’ He looks like him.”
