![]() ![]() Standing in for Paris’s Notre-Dame is England’s Lincoln Cathedral, which was used for Napoleon ’s coronation. Photograph: Sony Pictures Releasing The coronation scene was filmed at Lincoln Cathedral Lincoln Cathedral, Lincolnshire Scott has already recreated these events once in his career – in 1977’s The Duellists – on that occasion the snow was very much real, with the scenes set during the retreat from Moscow shot in Scotland’s Cairngorms mountains. Filming there took place in March 2022, so of course, the snow is fake. And while ‘the retreat from Surrey’ doesn’t have quite the same ring to it, Scott’s team found a place to stage the bedraggled Grande Armée’s trudge back to France just to the south west of London. Napoleon’s infamous retreat from Moscow in 1812 required somewhere suitably forbidding. ![]() Ironically, the Maltese fort itself was captured from the French IRL in 1798 and ended up in British hands. In the film, it stands in for the French port of Toulon, seized by Napoleon in the 1793 military engagement that helped make his name. (As an aside: Sergei Bondarchuk’s huge-scale 1970 Waterloo was filmed on farmland in Uzhhorod, Ukraine.) Photograph: The Siege of Toulon was recreated at Fort Ricasoli in Malta Fort Ricasoli, MaltaĪnother old Ridley Scott location that the filmmaker revisited on Napoleon, this imposing 17th century fort appeared in Gladiator and has been used in a variety of other period epics (it starred as the Red Keep in Game of Thrones ). A footpath was diverted, presumably to avoid curious dog-walkers stumbling into the middle of Marshal Ney’s cavalry charge. ![]() Napoleon decamped to the farm in April 2022 under the production name ‘Marengo’, with locals advised of ‘heavy machinery, cannons and gunfire’ on site for a ‘large scale period battle scene’. 'Churn Farm' sounds like the kind of place you’d have a battle and Ridley Scott did exactly that, using this corner of Oxfordshire’s countryside – part of James Dyson’s Dyson Farming Estate – to stage his version of Waterloo. ‘We used many of the same areas and spaces that we had before, but in much different ways.’ Photograph: Churn Farm in Oxfordshire Churn Farm, Oxfordshire ‘It was like an old friend, an old pair of shoes,’ says production designer Arthur Max. It was here that he shot Gladiator ’s opening battle, as well as scenes in his 2010 Robin Hood. To recreate the Battle of Austerlitz, Napoleon’s defining victory over the Austrians and Russians in 1805, Ridley Scott turned back to an old stomping ground: Surrey’s Bourne Wood. ‘It was very special for that reason, so we decided to use that as Napoleon's chateau.’ Photograph: Forestry England Bourne Woods in Surrey Bourne Wood, Surrey ‘It looks just like a French chateau in a beautiful estate, with hundreds of acres, with sheep and horses grazing and beautiful old oak trees everywhere,’ says Max. A perfect spot, in other words, to film Napoleon’s in March 2022 (not to mention, the 2012 Les Misérables ). Take a tour of Scott’s Napoleon itinerary below Photograph: Sony Pictures Releasing Boughton Manor, Northamptonshireīuilt in the 17th century by the 1st Duke of Montagu, a former ambassador to France, Broughton Manor wears its French influences on its sleeve – especially that of the Palace of Versailles. ‘There is enough ‘neoclassical architecture in England to make it possible,’ says Arthur Max, the film’s production designer, ‘probably because a lot of the design that comes out of France and England is based on Italian classic Palladian architecture.’Ī Covid-era production, staying in the UK had obvious practical benefits, but it also reunited the filmmaker with some favourite old haunts from Gladiator and other past movies. Instead of France, Napoleon was filmed in England and Malta. This time, with bigger battles to stage and a larger chunk of French Imperial history to capture, the legendary filmmaker has kept it local. His 1977 debut film, The Duellists, tackled the same period of Napoleonic France but recreated it in France’s Dordogne region. With his new historical epic, Napoleon, Ridley Scott has gone full circle.
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