Smash hit

“If I look back on it, it is huge,” says Stone of a shoot that spanned four continents. “When you do it, it is one step at a time. We were shooting in the Himalayas in March 2002, on the borders of Pakistan. We did it with very little time, everything had to work, to click, we put our own money in it to make completion. We did it like an army, we moved like an army. On a set like that you don’t make too many mistakes.”

But rumours spilled out of the production of over zealous partying, of his cast more intent on bed-hopping than performing (all denied), and more seriously, two weeks of hugely expensive elephant footage had been X-rayed at an airport somewhere. It came out blank. Then a first edit was causing concern with the studio. It was confusing, over bloody and long-winded. And just as he re-jigged, a conservative groundswell grew, attacking an unseen film for its bisexual content. Historians have it that Alexander was equally at home with either sex, especially with his best friend Hephaistion (Jared Leto).

“So guys with goose-hunter caps won’t come,” Stone retorted. “I don’t want to make a movie for demographics.”

Again, you have to feel for him — with the film’s release and its slightly coy handling of the issue, he was attacked for shying away from gay scenes.

“I think by the standards of this country and many countries, it is a ground-breaking relationship,” he sighs. “I think there are more important things than sensuality and kissing. I think there is love, trust and brotherhood.” He must feel cursed: being spied with such suspicion, prone to a severe critical eye, and generally sneered at.

Yet Stone has won Oscars and proved a vital, uncompromising spirit in Hollywood. “Oliver Stone has been accused of being unpatriotic and, of course, he is the complete f****** opposite,” starts an infuriated Farrell. “He cares. It’s like someone performing an intervention on someone they love. That’s what he has done with his films.”

It is a great analogy, Oliver Stone staging filmic interventions on a destitute nation. Yet, as easy as it is to read into Alexander a parallel of George Bush’s imperialistic fervour, he bridles at the suggestion. Any comparisons, he insists, are purely coincidental.

“I didn’t write Alexander with that connection in mind,” he grumbles. “It started in 1989, it was developed in 1995, and we solved it, or tried to solve it, in 2000-03. During that period the Iraq War happened but that is coincidental. We were interested in our characters.”

He pauses to lower his guard, his tone more playful: “George Bush’s character will be examined in 20 to 30 years and who knows? Keep an open mind, you don’t know what he is going to go. You may end up saying that he is George the Great or something.”

As for Alexander the Great, he’s a different kettle of foreign policy entirely.

“It was a different attitude to life, and Alexander worshipped freedom. I don’t think it’s fair to use the word liberated as George Bush uses it.”

Which brings us back to the dilemma of Alexander: it is quintessentially a Stone film in its macho aesthetics and hammer-blows of history, and yet you miss the zip and spill of JFK and Nixon. He must be crestfallen, this lost warrior. America still loves to laugh at Oliver Stone, but it would be a poorer place without him.

Alexander is released on Jan 7

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