OLIVER STONE and the Hollywood establishment have never exactly seen eye to eye. He has stomped about, often brilliantly, always noisily, like a problem child determined that his parents should never sleep easily.

Some see him as a crazed oracle, ranting through his dissections of recent American history, such as Platoon and Nixon. Others view him as a genuine threat to stability given the furore over his JFK diatribe against the single assassin theory.

So the announcement that he was off to make a historical epic of Alexander the Great — that impetuous Macedonian youth who conquered most of the world — must have been greeted with relief. For once he was leaving the scabs of American history well alone, and, surely, for his own sake, he would finally be judged as a film-maker, not a tearaway.

“It was a delight to work on this movie and it was a pain in the ass,” announces Stone with some pride. “There was something that quickened the pulse every day. Imagine it, we were making Alexander. This was the big one for me.”

Some context is required. This interview was carried out in the plush confines of a Los Angeles hotel before the film’s launch in America. Hopes were riding high, Stone was tired but buoyant, expectant but nervously pressing journalists on what they thought of the film. “My film is coherent,” he insists, “whatever else you say about it, it is coherent.”

Yet time has told badly for Stone’s Alexander. The establishment has turned on him again: reviews, frankly, have been terrible, regarding the film a mess, sending up Colin Farrell’s blonde hair and Irish accent in the lead role; the film’s failure at the box office was elevated from industry disaster to lead news story. Could it be that Alexander was just too great to conquer? Why try at all? Because he’s Oliver Stone, that’s why.

“I don’t mean to be pretentious, but what the f***, no one has done Alexander,” he grins. “It is a conundrum. Why not the Greeks? No plays. Why not Marlowe or Jonson or Shakespeare? What a great character. I wanted the whole life. He was a true general, he never asked men to do what he wouldn’t do.”

They seem to fit well, Alexander and Oliver, two driven figures, obsessives in their own way, dreamers, even tyrants, but genuinely great men.

“There was no doubt at times, Oliver can seem tyrannical,” admits Colin Farrell of his director, “he is a driven, driven man. He was under a world of pressure, because of the scale, and the budget and the scope of it. He is honest, though, that is the thing. It was an absolute honour and a pleasure and a pain to dance with him for six months.”

Heartbreakingly, as it turns out, Alexander has been a passion project for the Manhattan-born director. It has taken him 15 years to get it made, a period in which, as Stone puts it, he was unable to solve the script. He had flirted with Tom Cruise, Johnny Depp and Heath Ledger as potential Alexanders, but the film wasn’t coalescing and his attention drifted to more contemporary dramas. But there’s nothing like competition to focus you and, o ut of nowhere, Baz Luhrmann announced he was to make his own version of Alexander with Leonardo DiCaprio and Nicole Kidman.

“That period was tough,” Stone recalls ruefully. “I was writing the screenplay, finally, on my own. And the press was very bad because Leonardo was hot, Nicole was hot, Baz was hot. It focused us. Everyone worked harder.”

Given the weak box-office performance of Stone’s film so far, Luhrmann’s version seems unlikely to be made. Again, looking back on the interview, a cruel irony envelops Stone’s humble reaction to “winning” the battle of the Alexanders: “The problem in this business is it is one against the other,” he says. “I hope we don’t have a disaster and they make fun of us, I hope it stands the test of time.”

You could never cite a lack of effort. Here was a $150 million shoot re-creating antiquity, not with the gleaming artifice of the swords’n’sandals epics of the 1950s and 1960s, but starkly real. Stone keeps emphasising that this is history, not fantasy, and he had the renowned classical scholar Robin Lane Fox on board to inspect its veracity.

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