Ridley Scott Went Back To His Gladiator Days To Film Napoleon’s Masterpiece Sequence: The Battle of Austerlitz
Ridley Scott’s epic historical drama movie Napoleon, starring Joaquin Phoenix, is based on the real-life story of French military commander and ruler Napoleon Bonaparte’s rise to power and his relationship with Empress Joséphine, played by actress Vanessa Kirby. David Scarpa has written the script of the movie, which features six battles out of eight, one in which Napoleon fought, including the Battle of Austerlitz, the Battle of Waterloo, and more.
Columbia Pictures and Apple Original Films released the movie on November 22, 2023, and according to BBC’s Nicholas Barber, the movie is “a proper, old-fashioned historical epic.” It’s too early to say if the movie has had a positive, negative, or mixed response. Ridley Scott had a very specific way of filming the Battle of Austerlitz.
Also read: Director Ridley Scott Did Not Like One Thing About Joaquin Phoenix’s $1 Billion Worth ‘Joker’
Ridley Scott revealed the Battle of Austerlitz was filmed in three and a half days
In a recent interview with Vulture, filmmaker Ridley Scott shared that the epic Battle of Austerlitz for Napoleon starring Joaquin Phoenix as the title character was scheduled to last six days but they filmed it in three and a half days.
Explaining the efficiency, he shared that it’s simple; he shoots with multiple cameras simultaneously. Sometimes he uses four cameras and, on occasion, he has used up to eleven cameras. He explained,
“Every morning, I’d tell my brilliant cinematographer, Dariusz Wolski, ‘I want a camera there and there and there and there. How long to set them up?’ He’ll say ’40 minutes’ and I’m shooting by 9 a.m. Other directors use one camera and they go on forever, but this literally allows me to shoot 4-to-11 times faster.”
Ridley Scott did not hold back from appreciating the extras that were on set for the filming of the Battle. The Battle of Austerlitz involved about 68,000 French troops and 90,000 Austro-Russians but they could not really, do more than 600 foot soldiers in a day.
He added,
“They have to come in at 4 a.m., to be ready by nine and that is with 200 people working as dressers. The extras were great. God bless them, because I wouldn’t want to sit there with a cup of tea waiting all day to walk past something.”
Scott used up to 400 human soldiers and 100 horses and positioned them on the front lines then to expand their ranks, CGI was used to give the audience the exact feel of the battle.
Ridley Scott’s Napoleon has a connection with his 2000’s Gladiator
In the interview with Vulture, while talking about the Battle of Austerlitz, Scott revealed that his process begins with storyboards which he draws by hand, noting that he is still a painter. He said,
“I edged into directing through design and only gradually learned to talk to actors, which took a while.”
The filmmaker revealed that when screenwriter David Scarpa shared the script with him, he would send it back with illustrations of each shot within a day, and then his finished movie looked pretty identical to his drawn sketches. He also noted that if he was looking for a location, he would just draw it and his scouts would look for it.
It was revealed that in Napoleon, for the Battle of Austerlitz, there is actually a digital composite of two locations; the wooden hill that serves as Napoleon’s command post, which is actually a site in Bourne Woods in Surrey, England, and the frozen lake where most of the fighting takes place, which is not a lake at all.
Interestingly, the site in Bourne Woods in Surrey, England is where the filmmaker filmed his 2000’s Gladiator. While talking about the cannons used in the movie while filming the battle sequences, he said they used one made out of carbon fiber with insides solid so that when charges were placed on their muzzles, the blasts would point outward.
Napoleon is currently playing in theatres.
