Eugene de Beauharnais, the 12 year old boy who requests his father's sword from Napoleon in the film, became an able politician and military commander in his own right. Napoleon cared deeply for Eugene even formally adopting him in 1806 and making him heir presumptive to the Italian throne and Viceroy of Italy where he was de facto ruler. Eugene followed Napoleon on most of his campaigns. In 1809 Eugene commanded his own campaign with the French 'Army of Italy' beating the Austrians in nearly every battle.
While never directly addressed, the black French general who appears in several scenes, played by actor Abubakar Salim, is credited as General Dumas. This was the real figure of Thomas-Alexandre Dumas, a biracial general who commanded troops during the Napoleonic Wars, and was the father of writer Alexandre Dumas. A brilliant tactician in his own right, he was nicknamed "The Black Devil" by contemporary revolutionaries.
Sir Ridley Scott and screenwriter David Scarpa rejected Stanley Kubrick's Napoleon script as being underwhelming, but kept 80% of the structure, scenes, and development. The rest Scarpa wrote was unhistorical and for pure entertainment. Kubrick had a lifelong fascination with Napoleon, and began planning a film of his life after directing 2001 : L'Odyssée de l'espace (1968). He did extensive research, and watched other Napoleon films, including Napoléon (1927) and Guerre et paix (1965), both of which he disliked. He intended to shoot on location in France and Romania, with the Romanian People's Army providing 50,000 men. Jack Nicholson and Audrey Hepburn were eyed to play Napoleon and Joséphine, respectively. The project was canceled after the box office failure of Waterloo (1970), but Kubrick's research went into Barry Lyndon (1975), which ends in 1789, 14 years before the Napoleonic Wars began. Steven Spielberg, a longtime friend of Kubrick's, has been developing Kubrick's script as a miniseries for HBO since 2013, and said it was still in development as of 2023.
Sir Ridley Scott said the battle scenes utilised 11 cameras, all filming at the same time.
The film was shot in 61 days. Ridley Scott said that this was remarkably fast for a film of this scale. He credits the speed of the shoot down to being prepared and "not having ridiculous numbers of retakes".