If any director was worthy of creating several masterpieces, then Stanley Kubrick would likely be at the top of the list. After all, throughout his remarkable career, Kubrick established himself as one of the most important and talented filmmakers of all time with a series of works of striking quality.

Kubrick seemed to be comfortable in whatever genre he worked in, whether in the sword and sandals drama of Spartacus, the science fiction of 2001: A Space Odyssey, the horror of The Shining or the eroticism of Eyes Wide Shut. Quite simply, Kubrick mastered the cinematic medium time and time again.

While there are indeed so many movies that Kubrick handled that are well worth the masterpiece tag, it’s also true that there were several films that the director had wanted to make that never quite made it onto the big screen. Perhaps the most notorious of these unrealised projects is his biographical film about Napoleon Bonaparte.

Following the success of 2001: A Space Odyssey, Kubrick had set about watching all the films made about Napoleon and conducted widespread research about the French leader’s life. The production was said to be going ahead with Kubrick wanting to make the best movie ever made, but it was eventually scrapped due to a lack of funds, even though the Romanian People’s Army had agreed to providing 50,000 soldiers for the battle scenes.

In addition, the release of Sergei Bondarchuk’s War and Peace and the financial failure of the Russian director’s Waterloo had put Kubrick’s financiers off his Napoleon project, though much of the research he had put in would later be used for Barry Lyndon. Kubrick also once spoke of an important film about Napoleon, the 1927 eponymous movie by Abel Gance.

The silent epic historical movie is a seminal work in the history of cinema having been shot in fluid motion, when most of the cameras at the time were static. In addition, several techniques were used that would become mainstays of cinema, including fast cuts, close ups, handheld camera use, point of view shots, shooting on location and split screen, to name but a few.

Discussing the film, one that Kubrick had watched extensively when conducting research for his own Napoleon movie, the director once noted (via BFI), “I know that the film is a masterpiece of cinematic invention and it brought cinematic innovations to the screen which are still being called innovations whenever someone is bold enough to try them again.”

Napoleon focused on the early years of his life, including his attending military school and his presence in the French Revolution as a young lieutenant and went on to his imprisonment, falling in love with Josephine de Beauharnais and eventual invasion of Italy. However, Kubrick explained that he found issues with Gance’s movie from a narrative perspective.

He noted, “But on the other hand, as a film about Napoleon, I have to say I’ve always been disappointed in it.” Gance had planned his Napoleon movie to be the first in a series of six that explore the French leader’s life, although the costs of making it soon but that idea to be a problem that Kubrick himself would fall victim to.

Kubrick’s Napoleon movie never made it to light, but it was clear that he longed to make it, perhaps as a response to Gance’s “masterpiece” movie. Ridley Scott managed to make his own Napoleon movie, so it might have been interesting to see what Kubrick might have made of that as well…