None of Stanley Kubrick’s other films—finished or unfinished—cost as much time or money in pre-production or generated as much research material as “Napoleon.”

Stanley Kubrick’s Waterloo

Having just tackled the end of the world and the mysteries of the universe, the obsessive director set his sights on Napoleon. Tens of thousands of index cards later, he waved the white flag

By Sam Wasson

Photo Illustration by Chop Choppish Shop

A new Napoleon—Ridley Scott’s—is upon us, so naturally I think of the rhododendrons. The rhododendrons that were the source of a “protracted argument,” as Stanley Kubrick biographer John Baxter tells us, between the director and his stage designer Carl Toms. As Kubrick prepped his never-made, obsessively researched “Napoleon,” his seemingly essential question to Toms was whether or not the flower species had come to Britain by way of India. The ensuing argument—whether the manner or very fact of it, Baxter does not say—was evidently so unpleasant that Toms and costume designer John Mollo “cracked” and resigned from the project despite Kubrick’s offer to double, then triple Toms’s salary.

I think of the rhododendrons, and of that strain of perfectionism, often mistaken for artistry, that turns on itself, and eventually on the audience—that is, if the project in question ever sees the light of day. It is the hidden fear that is beneath the artist’s impulse to research endlessly, the terrible feeling that his or her own original instinct is not good enough, second to “getting it right.” But the artist’s charge is not accuracy. It is, however it may be defined, much, much bigger.