Joaquin Phoenix and Vanessa Kirby told Empire magazine they made a pact to shock each other while filming Ridley Scott’s “Napoleon” in order to ensure the film did not feel like a boring, overly-planned biopic. This agreement led Phoenix to slap Kirby during the filming of a heated divorce scene between their characters, Napoleon Bonaparte and Joséphine de Beauharnais, Empire reports.
“We were using the real words from their divorce in the church,” Kirby said. “When that happens, you can faithfully go through an archival re-enactment of it and read out the lines and then go home. But we always wanted to surprise each other.”
“She said, ‘Look, whatever you feel, you can do.’ I said, ‘Same thing with you.’ She said, ‘You can slap me, you can grab me, you can pull me, you can kiss me, whatever it is’,” Phoenix recalled about his talks with Kirby before filming kicked off. “So we had this agreement that we were going to surprise each other and try and create moments that weren’t there, because both of us wanted to avoid the cliché of the period drama. And by that I mean moments that are well-orchestrated and designed.”
Kirby added, “It’s the greatest thing when you have a creative partner and you say, ‘Right, everything’s safe. I’m with you. And we’re gonna go to the dark places together.’”
“Napoleon,” which reunites Scott and Phoenix after “Gladiator,” centers on the volatile relationship between the French emperor and his wife. The script was penned by David Scarpa, who also wrote the screenplay for the Scott-directed “All the Money in the World.” But Phoenix and Kirby would go off script in the moment, which was the case during the slap scene.
“We encouraged each other, demanded of each other, to challenge ourselves to shock each other in moments,” Phoenix said. “And that’s what came out of that, that moment.”
Ridley Scott previously told Empire magazine that Phoenix felt clueless two weeks before cameras were set to roll on “Napoleon.”
“He’ll come in, and you’re fucking two weeks’ out, and he’ll say, ‘I don’t know what to do,’” Scott said about Phoenix. “I’ll say, ‘What?!’ ‘I don’t know what to do.’ Oh God. I said, ‘Come in, sit down.’ We sat for 10 days, all day, talking scene by scene. In a sense, we rehearsed. Absolutely detail by detail.”
Apple and Sony are releasing “Napoleon” in theaters on Nov. 22.
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