Steven Spielberg celebrated at the Berlin Film Festival, teases Kubrick’s Napoleon HBO miniseries

Hot off of the awards recognition of his semi-autobiography, The Fabelmans, Steven Spielberg had recently received the Golden Bear Lifetime Achievement at the Berlin Film Festival. According to Variety, the director said in a rousing speech, “I also feel a little alarmed to be told I’ve lived a lifetime because I’m not finished, I want to keep working. I want to keep learning and discovering and scaring the shit out of myself and sometimes the shit out of you. I gotta get back to some of those earlier scarier movies, but that’s another story for later on. As long as there’s joy in it for me, and as long as my audience can find joy and other human values in my films, I’m reluctant to ever say that’s a wrap.”

Spielberg, who had directed the heavy drama, Schindler’s List, and felt changed by that production, particularly wanted to touch on his heritage as he accepts Germany as his home, “If this honor means that my work has found a home in Germany, then tonight, I feel like I’m home too. This honor has particular meaning for me because I’m a Jewish director. I’d like to believe that this is a small moment in a much larger, ongoing effort of healing the broken places of history – what Jews call Tikkun Olam, the repairing and restoring of the world.”

While at the festival, the famed director announced that he is working on a production that is bound to “scare the shit out of him” as he heads up the epic Napoleon project for HBO. “With the co-operation of Christiane Kubrick and Jan Harlan, we’re mounting a large production for HBO on based on Stanley’s original script Napoloeon. We are working on Napoleon as a seven-part limited series.”

Back in 2001, renowned filmmaker Steven Spielberg paid tribute to the late Stanley Kubrick by adapting one of his unmade projects into the feature film, A.I. Artificial Intelligence. The film, starring Haley Joel Osment and Jude Law, was written by Brian Aldiss, Ian Watson, and Spielberg himself based on the notes and concept art that Kubrick had created in two decades of work. Deadline now reports that Spielberg is once again taking on the realization of a lost Kubrick project with a Napoleon limited series.