In 1969, fresh from the critical and commercial triumph of 2001: A Space Odyssey, Stanley Kubrick set about preparing for the film he felt sure would be his biggest and his best. For some years he'd dreamed of filming a life of Napoleon, one of his great heroes, and at last he was in a position to do so. His biopic of the singleminded Corsican would run to at least three hours, and he had already decided that he would cast the then relatively unknown Jack Nicholson in the lead.

He had arranged to film in the Balkans, and had negotiated the services of some 50,000 Yugoslav and Romanian soldiers who would act as extras in his lavish re-enactments of battles like Austerlitz and Eylau. Ever the obsessive, Kubrick had compiled an index-card file crammed with information about the 50-odd key characters in his script -- there were some 25,000 index cards in all. The filmmaker had even applied the Method approach to preparing for the film, alternating forkfuls of his dessert and his main course in imitation of Bonaparte. And in typically modest communiques with his financial backers, Kubrick stated that he expected his film would be "the best movie ever made".

But sadly it would remain perhaps the best movie never made, because Kubrick's backing fell though and he was forced to abandon his ambitious project indefinitely. By the end of the 60s historical epics had gone out of style. The commercial failure of Sergei Bondarchuk's Napoleon-themed film Waterloo, in 1970, didn't help, and financiers were also worried about Kubrick's difficult reputation and his insistence on working in London rather than Hollywood.

Having spent several years on the project, Kubrick was forced to move on, but he used some of his period research and visual ideas in his next film, the 1975 historical drama Barry Lyndon. However, he never quite gave up on his Napoleon project, and as late as 1987 said that he'd read almost 500 books on the diminutive general and that a film worthy of the subject had still not been made. The fact that he never got to make it would be one of his great regrets.

Kubrick's working script survived, and forms the basis of a lavish and absurdly expensive new limited edition coffee table book called Stanley Kubrick's Napoleon: The Greatest Movie Never Made (it's selling on Amazon for a tidy $700). But Stanley was not the only one who nursed unrealised grand projects that might have turned out to be masterpieces.

In his excellent new film Me and Orson Welles, which is released here next week, Richard Linklater and actor Christian McKay portray the difficult and monstrously egotistical side of Welles' character, and when it came to his film projects he was often his own worst enemy. Welles' mercurial temperament and insistence on total creative control made him very unpopular with the Hollywood studios, and for most of his career he was obliged to raise funds for his films himself. This became harder and harder as he grew older, and as a result a good number of his pet projects never got finished.

An atmospheric opening clip is all that remains of his plan to film Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness -- Francis Coppola would later adapt the novella for his anti-war film, Apocalypse Now. In the 1970s, Welles began working on an ambitious drama called The Other Side of the Wind, a tale of an ailing Hollywood director who's determined to complete his final film. John Huston played the central character, who was loosely based on Ernest Hemingway, and Welles had shot most or all of it by the end of 1972.

But for one reason or another he dragged his heels over the editing of it, and it would never be released. A print of it sits in a Paris vault, and if a legal wrangle is resolved it might just see the light of day in 2010. Orson Welles also attempted an adaptation of Don Quixote, but abandoned it when his lead actor died.

Terry Gilliam has also suffered from what could be called Cervantes' curse, as his attempt to film The Man Who Killed Don Quixote in 1999 was dogged by bad luck. First his lead actor, Jean Rochefort, suffered a herniated disc in the first week of shooting, then a flood destroyed Gilliam's Spanish set and resulted in a $15m insurance claim. The film was abandoned and Gilliam's career suffered, but the doughty director has not given up on his Quixote dream, and is planning to resurrect the project in the near future with Johnny Depp.

DT Thomas's The White Hotel is another novel that seems to carry a filmmaking curse. A dark tale of psychoanalysis and mental illness that forms an allegory for the Holocaust, it has attracted the interest of some formidable cinematic talents. Terrence Malick, Woody Allen, David Lynch, Bernardo Bertolucci, David Cronenberg and Pedro Almodovar have all attempted to make a film of the novel, but none have got beyond planning.

In the mid-1960s Michael Powell, the director of such masterpieces as The Red Shoes and A Matter of Life and Death, embarked on an ambitious attempt to film Shakespeare's last play, The Tempest. Illustrator Gerald Scarfe would design the imaginative sets, and a tentative cast included James Mason, Mia Farrow, Telly Savalas and Frankie Howerd. But Powell had been rounded on by the British establishment after the release of his 1960 film Peeping Tom, whose themes of child abuse and serial killing were too far ahead of their time. His Tempest project met a wall of hostility, and he was forced to abandon his plan.

Martin Scorsese has played a big part in restoring Michael Powell's tarnished reputation, funding the restoration of The Red Shoes and other films. But even as celebrated a director as Scorsese can struggle to realise cherished projects. As we reported recently he is still wrangling with the Sinatra family over the casting of his Sinatra biopic, and his plan to make a film about Dean Martin has proved even more problematic.

Stanley Kubrick's Napoleon: The Greatest Movie Never Made, by Alison Castle, is published by Taschen pwhitington@independent.ie

Irish Independent