Napoleon with Hollywood sauce, Abel Gance better watch out. At the wand, nothing less than the most famous director of the last 50 years. Steven Spielberg said on Tuesday that he was working on a television series adaptation project from an original screenplay by Stanley Kubrick on Napoleon, which has been in his drawers for years. We “are in the process of setting up a production kid” for a series in seven episodes for the American channel HBO from this script written in 1961, he assured at a press conference in Berlin.

Spielberg had already mentioned ten years ago the fact that he was developing for a mini-series this script written by the director of “2001: A Space Odyssey” and “A Clockwork Orange”, and which has already inspired him “AI: Artificial Intelligence” (2001). Kubrick, who died in 1999, never completed his own Napoleon Bonaparte “biopic” project.

Kubrick had originally planned to embark on this film after the success of “2001” and had then carried out extensive research on the ex-revolutionary general turned emperor. He had planned to shoot the film across Europe, in France, the United Kingdom and Romania, with no less than 40,000 extras. In the casting, we should have found the actors David Hemmings and Jack Nicholson to embody – at different times in his life – the head of state, who dominated Europe between 1804 and 1814, while Audrey Hepburn was to play the role of his wife Josephine.

However, due to the enormous cost of filming, the release of the adaptation of “War and Peace” by Sergei Bondarchuk and the commercial failure of “Waterloo” by the same director in 1970, the project was abandoned.

Much of Kubrick’s preliminary work was eventually “transferred” to his film Barry Lyndon in 1975.

In addition, Steven Spielberg is to be awarded a Golden Bear of Honor by the Berlinale for his entire career which has changed the history of cinema, from “Jaws” to “ET” passing by “Schindler’s List”.

He also returned to the set of “The Fabelmans”, his last quasi-autobiographical film which is released on Wednesday in France, and tells the story of a child who tries to cope with the separation of his parents, and the parallel birth of the vocation of a filmmaker. At 76, Spielberg says he is “still so excited” about cinema: finding a story to film, “it surpasses everything else in my life, except maybe the birth of a child”, he added. .