Oliver Stone is under attack. The maverick Hollywood director, pilloried for promoting the Kennedy assassination’s multiple-gunmen theory in JFK, for portraying Nixon as a foul-mouthed drunk and for glorifying serial murderers in Natural Born Killers, is being skewered in America for Alexander, his latest lesson in earnest psychohistory. “Puerile writing, confused plotting, shockingly off-note performances”, complained The New York Times.
“The best thing that can be said is that it’s better than Troy,” said The Boston Globe. “Vast, riveting, madly audacious movie biography,” ventured the Chicago Tribune, in rare dissent. The author Gore Vidal also lauded the film for its ground-breaking treatment of Alexander’s bisexuality. British audiences will have to wait until the film’s opening in January to make up their own minds.
How could this have happened? It is not for lack of trying. Stone has been labouring to realise his Alexander film for nearly two decades. After Martin Scorsese and Mel Gibson dropped their own Alexander projects, and Baz Luhrmann put his — with Leonardo DiCaprio — on hold, the field was wide open for Stone.
Nor is the problem bending the facts to fit an idiosyncratic, sensationalist agenda. The Oxford historian Robin Lane Fox, author of a bestselling 1973 biography of Alexander, made sure the film stuck as close as dramatically possible to the historical record. (As well as receiving a consultant’s fee, Lane Fox rode at the head of the cavalry charges, filmed in the Moroccan desert.) Even the financing, which had been shaky almost up to the last minute, fell into place when Warner Bros came up with the final third of the hefty $150m budget in a co-production with the Munich-based Intermedia Films, along with the smaller investors Pathé and Egmond, a Dutch production company. With a disappointing US box-office take of less than $22m in the crucial first five days, the film’s backers will be counting on international audiences to recoup their investment.
Stone’s reputation is riding on Alexander, by far the most ambitious, most expensive movie of a 30-year career that has earned the feisty director Oscars for Platoon and Born on the Fourth of July. One of only a handful of mainstream film-makers to retain final cut in the editing of his movies, Stone could face the risk of artistic and financial restrictions for any future projects. The movie industry will be paying close attention to Alexander for clues as to the public’s interest in historical epics such as Kingdom of Heaven, Ridley Scott’s forthcoming film about the crusades, and Vin Diesel as Hannibal.
A few months ago, on the set at Shepperton Studios, outside London, the manic Stone, dressed in a purple polo shirt, khakis and a baseball cap, was racing to wrap up Anthony Hopkins’s scenes before getting his production cavalcade on the road to Thailand. As Vangelis’s soundtrack wafted through the studio, Stone ducked into an alcove, where he studied the monitor for a few minutes before consulting with the cinematographer, Rodrigo Prieto, about the complicated tracking shot following Hopkins. Later, Stone praised Hopkins’s endurance in scenes that dragged on until 3am.
In the library scene, Ptolemy, portrayed by Hopkins as a world-weary old soldier, says that if Alexander’s men did not literally poison their leader’s body (as one largely discredited historical theory goes), their refusal to follow him deeper into India poisoned his spirit. “I never believed in his dream,” says Ptolemy. “The dreamers exhaust us.”
True enough, no conqueror ever dreamt so exhaustively as Alexander the Great. In the 4th century BC, the Macedonian warrior king attacked the Persian empire, the most powerful realm in the world, with almost 50,000 soldiers, then ranged across three continents for more than a decade, subduing millions. By the time Alexander died — probably of malaria — in June 323BC, six weeks shy of his 33rd birthday, his empire stretched from the Balkans to the Himalayas. Six weeks after his death, his widow, Roxane, gave birth to Alexander IV. Both were murdered a dozen years later.
Historical novelists such as Mary Renault and Valerio Manfredi have eagerly mined the Alexander legend, but few film-makers have tackled the subject. The director Robert Rossen’s 1956 Alexander the Great, with Richard Burton, was a heavy-handed dud. Since the success of Gladiator in 2000, however, sword-and-sandals epics — last in vogue with Ben-Hur in 1959 and Spartacus in 1960 — are back.
Shot in Morocco, Thailand and the UK, Stone’s Alexander is an old-fashioned extravaganza and a military-style campaign in its own right. Not content with reconstructing the ancient Library of Alexandria, the director had a huge replica of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon built on sets at Pinewood Studios, near Slough. Mounted regiments from the Moroccan military filled in as extras for cavalry charges shot in the desert outside Marrakesh, with 2,000 people and 120 horses. The wardrobe department fashioned 20,000 costumes. Weapons-makers churned out 3,000 swords and shields, 4,000 bows, 9,000 arrows, 200 lances and 350 clubs and axes. Covered with padded armour, 20 bloodied elephants and riders trampled Macedonian infantry underfoot in the Thai jungle in the re-enactment of the battle with the Indian king Porus. “I wanted to do the film as an experiment,” says Stone, “to try to rediscover the roots of mankind, to find out whether people in the age of Alexander were like us and to see if Alexander’s motivations hold up today.”
Realising how pompous he sounds, the director flashes his gap-toothed grin and guffaws. “After all, what is film? Not always a sordid business, but a scientific investigation in which we’re allowed to play with models, ideas, history, what worked, what couldn’t have worked. With some history, we discover as we shoot if it’s true or not.”
Taking a break from editing the movie, the director sounds like Alexander’s most star-struck fan. “He was the sun god, the star of all time,” he enthuses. “Some historians put him down in a class with Genghis Khan and Attila the Hun, but they miss the point. No tyrant ever gave back so much. His life was not about money for himself, but about his growing curiosity, fulfilling his intellect, his consciousness, always pushing outward.”
The same might be said for Stone, who seems as intent on packing in mythic allusions as he was co-conspirators in JFK. Take Cronus’s desire to eat Zeus, the father devouring the son. Or is it the other way round, asks Stone. “Then there’s a great Prometheus theme,” he cries, banging so hard on the couch that he topples a nearby incense-burner. “It’s the pièce de résistance. I just hope it comes across.”
