HOWZAT

Stone acknowledges that the film conflates events, battles and characters, but he strenuously denies distorting history. “What do I care, anyway?” he says. “I’ve been falsely accused on many occasions, and have made people think again about JFK and Nixon. I haven’t been proved to be an idiot these past few years. Still, you have to understand that being a dramatist comes before being an ideologue.

“Some directors believe in being cool. I believe in making movies about people who transcend and move the world.

I can make funky ones, too, like Natural Born Killers,” he adds, “but it’s a relief to go from a neurotic contemporary to a neurotic ancient.” He erupts into laughter and thumps the couch again.

The trick for the film-makers was to re-create a sympathetic character far removed from modern sensibilities. Here was an implacably violent warrior who pitilessly wiped out tens of thousands of enemy soldiers and innocent civilians; a devout believer in the gods who, nonetheless, had an overwhelming obsession to surpass them. In this sense, he was a modern hero ahead of his time. Instead of obediently yielding to the will of these gods, he took his destiny into his own hands, even though he remained plagued by self-doubt.

Stone admits that he has committed the usual mistake of attributing contemporary psychological drives and attitudes to his pagan, pre-Freudian characters. “It’s difficult to frame ancient behaviour,” he says. “We don’t know it.”

For Colin Farrell, who plays Alexander, he was a tragic character: a lonely, troubled soul, ripped apart by jealous, squabbling parents and racked with insecurity. “He never really felt he deserved his own achievements,” says the actor. “It was always the work of the gods, or his father, or fate.”

It may be, as Ptolemy wistfully concludes in the film, that Alexander’s ambition came from being both blessed and cursed with an eternally unsatisfied longing that even he could not fathom, that he was perpetually racing the gods, with his destiny right where it served him best — just out of reach.

Alexander v Oliver Stone: lives of the greats

Alexander the Great

356BC Born in Pella, son of Philip II. Tutored by Aristotle

336 Philip assassinated

335 Wins control of Greece