Re:An Interview with Stanley Kubrick (1969)
by loevborg on Sunday October 15, 2017 @05:37PM
(#15479436)
By the way, if you get a chance to see Bondarchuk's 6 hour version of War and Peace, don't miss it. It's epic, beautiful and highly experimental. It's worth seeing just for the aerial shots during the war scenes.
Also Waterloo for that matter. No CGI in 1970.
From Wikipedia [1]:
"To recreate the battlefield authentically, the Soviets bulldozed away two hills, laid five miles of roads, transplanted 5,000 trees, sowed fields of rye, barley and wildflowers and reconstructed four historic buildings. To create the mud, more than six miles of underground irrigation piping was specially laid. [...]
The battle sequences of the film include about 15,000 Soviet foot soldiers and 2,000 cavalrymen as extras and 50 circus stunt riders were used to perform the dangerous horse falls. It has been joked that Sergei Bondarchuk was in command of the seventh-largest army in the world. [...] A selected 2,000 additional men were also taught to load and fire muskets."
> Napoleon was eventually canceled due to the prohibitive cost of location filming, the Western release of Sergei Bondarchuk's epic film version of Leo Tolstoy's novel War and Peace (1968), and the commercial failure of Bondarchuk's Napoleon-themed film Waterloo (1970). (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanley_Kubrick%27s_unrealized...)