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Starring: Colin Farrell, Rosario Dawson, Val Kilmer, Anthony Hopkins, Angelina Jolie
Directed by: Oliver Stone
Screenplay by: Oliver Stone
Release Date: November 24, 2004
MPAA Rating: R for violence and some sexuality/nudity.
Box Office: $34,297,191 (US total)
Studio: Warner Bros. Pictures
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Tagline: Fortune favors the bold.
"Alexander," Oliver Stone's sweeping historical saga that charts the life and legend of one of the greatest figures in world history. The story is an epic that is as daring and ambitious as its subject, a relentless conqueror who by the age of 32 had amassed the greatest empire the world had ever seen.
He was many things to many people -- a dashing warrior king, filled with ambition, courage and the arrogance of youth, leading his vastly outnumbered forces against the massive Persian armies...a son desperately longing for the approval of his stern, battle-scarred father, torn and conflicted by his mother’s legacy… a relentless conqueror who never lost a battle and drove his soldiers to the very edges of the known world...a visionary whose dreams, deeds and destiny echo through eternity, helping to shape the world as we know it today. He was all that and more. He was Alexander the Great.
Oliver Stone’s Alexander is based on the true story of one of history’s most luminous and influential leaders (Colin Farrell) -- a man who had conquered 90% of the known world by the age of 25. Alexander led his virtually invincible Greek, Macedonian, and later Eastern armies through 22,000 miles of sieges and conquests in just eight years, and by the time of his death at the age of 32, had forged an empire unlike any the world had ever seen.
Set in Alexander’s pre-Christian world of social customs and morals far different from today’s, the film explores a time of unmatched beauty and unbelievable brutality, of soaring ideals and staggering betrayals. The film takes a bold, honest look at Alexander’s life and his relationships with his mother, Olympias (Angelina Jolie), his father Philip (Val Kilmer), his lifelong friend and battle commander Hephaistion (Jared Leto), Roxane, his ambitious and beautiful wife (Rosario Dawson), and his trusted general and confidant Ptolemy (Anthony Hopkins).
His extraordinary journey begins when Alexander launches his invasion from Macedonia, first leading his armies to wrest Western Asia from Persian control, then driving his enormously outnumbered troops to an impossible victory over the mighty Persian army itself.
Alexander expands his empire into the unknown lands of modern day Central Asia before venturing across the Hindu Kush, further than any Westerner had ever gone, continuing his conquests into the exotic world of India. Incredibly, and possibly unique in the annals of military history, Alexander was never defeated in battle. He relentlessly pushes his army across the sands, mountains and jungles of strange and mysterious lands, conquering every enemy who dares oppose him and weathering near-mutiny by his own men.
The film chronicles Alexander’s path to becoming a living legend, from a youth fueled by dreams of myth, glory, and adventure, to his intense bonds with his closest companions, to his lonely and mysterious death as ruler of a vast Empire. Alexander is the incredible story of a life that united the known world and proved, if nothing else, fortune favors the bold.
Introduction
Alexander the Great conquered the world not only by virtue of his military genius, but perhaps even more importantly, with the power of his ideas. What Alexander accomplished in his near 33 years on earth have reverberated through the centuries, still informing how life is lived throughout the lands he conquered more than two thousand years ago. Although he was the ultimate warrior, Alexander had the soul of an explorer – in his 22,000-mile march, he sought not to destroy, but to re-invent each society in the mold of his own vision for a new world, and perhaps a new destiny for the human race. Through his actions, Alexander temporarily united East and West, spreading Hellenistic thought and culture throughout the Eastern world with lasting effect.
His accomplishments were astonishing by any standards. His empire included lands that now comprise the countries of Greece, Albania, Turkey, Bulgaria, Egypt, Libya, Israel, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Cyprus, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Pakistan and India. In 323 B.C., the year of his death, it comprised well over two million square miles.
Alexander has been the subject of an enormous body of written works, historical, fictive, psychological and even practical (as evidenced by two recently published books that translate Alexander’s military strategy into a guide for modern businessmen), but except for one attempt by Hollywood nearly 40 years ago, no filmmaker has found a way to translate Alexander’s extraordinary life to the screen – until Oscar-winning director/screenwriter Oliver Stone took on the challenge of telling the story in the epic Alexander.
The film’s production incorporated a multitude of disciplines, all designed to bring the exact quality and look of Alexander’s world to life. The numerous sets included detailed re-creations of lavish palaces, the extraordinary Alexandria Library and the magnificent city of Babylon, including its legendary Hanging Gardens, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. Additionally, each actor’s accent was specifically chosen to reflect the interconnected languages and wide array of dialects of the time.
In preparation for their roles, all the actors portraying soldiers, including stars Colin Farrell and Jared Leto, underwent extensive training in ancient battle strategies and the use of exact replicas of Macedonian and Greek weaponry. The battles are epic in scope – recreated for the screen are the Battle of Gaugamela, where Alexander’s heavily outnumbered troops resoundingly defeated the vast Persian army, and a vicious battle in the forests of India in which his troops fight against enormous elephants.
“The beauty of Alexander is that he won,” says Stone, whose acclaimed films include Any Given Sunday, Nixon, Natural Born Killers, JFK, The Doors, Born on the Fourth of July, Wall Street and Platoon. “He’ll always be known for at least two reasons – that he conquered the world without ever suffering a military defeat, and as a visionary and a man of remarkable and generous spirit. He was perhaps the greatest warrior of all time, greater than his mythic heroes Achilles and Herakles. He grew up under the influence of these mythological Greek figures and he believed in them as no other child. Out of that belief and faith grew this monumental drive and destiny, which he actually achieved.”
Fascinated by Alexander since childhood and inspired by Greek mythology, Stone dreamed of making Alexander’s story for years. “I had frustrated student fantasies of going back in time with documentary cameras and a small crew to actually film Alexander’s military campaigns,” he recalls. “32 years later, I finally had one chance to go back in time and actually recreate the period as best I could.”
Alexander producer Moritz Borman was intrigued by the extent to which Stone had delved into Alexander’s mind in his screenplay. “Most of us have some historical knowledge of Alexander,” Borman notes, “but don’t know much about the man himself, his soul, his inner workings. Oliver’s script asked where he came from, what were his trials and tribulations, how did his cultural environment form him, what happened when he encountered different cultures and confronted apparently impossible situations. This was not just a history lesson, but a script about a man who all of us could very well relate to today, with many of the themes of our time. The whole story of Alexander just came alive in the script, a truly dramatic and glorious tale.”
Serving as historical advisor to Stone was Robin Lane Fox, a fellow of New College, Oxford, whose 1972 biography of Alexander has sold more than a million copies and is considered one of the finest contemporary works on his life. Lane Fox’s encyclopedic knowledge of Alexander’s life provided the filmmaker with information for his screenplay and occasional on-set expertise.
“I first met Oliver three years ago in London,” Lane Fox recalls, “and he bombarded me with questions, a process that went on for months. He wanted to understand everything from how Greeks would behave at a dinner party to what Aristotle meant to Alexander. “I think Oliver’s strength as a historical dramatist is that his mind has a real feel for the character. He has an epic eye and dimension. Oliver has aimed high to present the greatness, and it will surprise historians to the degree to which he’s tried to convey the balance of Alexander’s accomplishments, both good and bad.”
Stone’s film is by definition interpretive, as are all works of historical fiction. Alexander lived in ancient times, and even his earliest historians could only take their best guess at the truth. “Cramming every incident of Alexander’s extraordinary life into one feature film would be quite literally impossible,” notes Lane Fox, “and there are also mysteries that may never be solved. I understand why Oliver made the decisions to omit certain incidents in Alexander’s life, or to make slight changes in the sequence of events. One of the fascinations about Alexander is the gaps in what we can know – they give such scope for the imagination.”
Stone doesn’t see the story of Alexander as belonging solely to the ancient world. “The incredible thing about Alexander was that he knew all of the Greek myths, and then acted them out in his real life. He had a lot of demon drives that modern people have, and one of my hopes is that the movie will bring back some sense of history that there were other times and places, empires that ruled the earth and men who were great dreamers and visionaries. Everyone, especially young people now, should be given a sense of history and the possibility of idealism; that should never be corrupted.”
Finding Alexander
How does a filmmaker cast a role that is larger than life? In the case of Alexander, it meant finding an actor who was eminently human, yet physically impressive and who possessed the range to paint a full portrait of the complex character. Stone found his man in Irish actor Colin Farrell, star of such films as Tigerland, Minority Report, Phone Booth and The Recruit.
“Like Alexander, Colin has the spirit of a rebel and the confidence of a warrior and a leader. He became Alexander on many levels – he led the actors as a group, he built himself up physically, mastered the horse and sword, and fought like a lion to give his best. I often offered to replace him with a stuntman, both on horse and foot, but he truly wanted to hang in there himself and do as many of his own stunts as possible. As crazy as he might be sometimes, he is one of nature’s noblemen. It’s an honor to have met him at such a moment in his life.”
“Oliver wrote an incredible script,” says the actor. “I never in my life read anything as dark and as light and as full of potential as that script. It was, very simply, the best I had ever read in my life.
“Alexander was a man who would stop at absolutely nothing to achieve his dreams,” Farrell continues, “which I truly believe were based on much more than greed and the desire for conquest. All his life, Alexander was looking for answers, and I also think that he was looking for love all his life. Alexander had an almost insane passion for everything he did. He could have lived a fine life in Macedonia in his palace, taxing his people and enjoying the luxury befitting a king. But there was a hole in his chest that couldn’t be filled, and his search for answers took him to the ends of the earth.”
Farrell took his inspiration not only from the man he was portraying, but also from the man who created the film. “Oliver is more Alexander than I could hope to be,” the actor states. “He strives for excellence at any cost. He’s an amazing filmmaker and he’s a brilliant leader. Oliver is always working his arse off. We wrap, and while we all bitch about what a long day it’s been, he’s off to the editing suite. The man is a complete inspiration to be around.”
Central to Alexander’s character are the expectations and deeply held beliefs put upon him by his mother, the intense Olympias. “Part of what the movie deals with is Alexander’s bargain with his mother,” says Stone. “In our script, Olympias tells Alexander, ‘In you lives the light of this world. Your companions will long be shadows in the underworld, when you will be the one, forever young, forever inspiring – never will there be an Alexander like you – Alexander the Great.’ Olympias put the mythology into Alexander’s head that he had a destiny that was equal to Achilles, and that like Achilles, he would die young. That was the trade-off. Great fame, but early death, as opposed to long life and little glory.”
It was essential that Stone find a talented actress who possessed the intensity, presence and passion to play the woman who would set Alexander the Great on his path to destiny. His choice was Academy Award-winning actress Angelina Jolie. “I met Angelina soon after she did Gia,” recalls Stone, “and I thought she was a spectacular young actress. A lot of modern actresses play the polite middle, but with Angelina, you have more of the Bette Davis tradition. She goes for it in a strong, determined way, and it’s rare to see that with young actors. They don’t have that confidence. But Angelina had developed a strength that was just right for Olympias.”
Jolie was attracted to the challenge of bringing to life a woman who has intrigued readers of history for centuries. “I think you have to love every character you play,” says Jolie, “and understand them or at least support their flaws. If you think they’re crazy or just wrong, you can’t play them with conviction. I am a mother now, so I simply saw Olympias as a mother. A lot of people say that she was insane, but I don’t know that I wouldn’t do exactly the same for my son. That might sound scary, but in 330 B.C., when people were being murdered left and right, it was a harder way of living and so Olympias was a hard, sometimes frightening woman. But in the end, she wanted Alexander to be as great and as strong as he could be, and I identify with that.”
Characteristically, Jolie plunged full force into her character. As a worshipper of Dionysus, the Macedonian queen was accustomed to being surrounded by snakes, and Jolie had to quickly become comfortable having a number of serpents draped around her neck and writhing at her feet during filming.
While it might seem anti-intuitive to cast Jolie as the mother of an actor only one year her junior, the scant age difference between Jolie and Farrell made little difference, as most of her scenes were filmed with the child actors who portray Alexander at different stages of boyhood. Although no one really knows how old Olympias was when she gave birth to Alexander, Robin Lane Fox surmises that, typical of the era, she may have been only 16 or 17 years old. Thus, in Jolie’s few scenes with Farrell, she’s playing older – with an assist from the hair and makeup departments – while he’s playing younger.
Also influential in Alexander’s life was his father and Olympias’ estranged husband, King Philip II of Macedonia, played by multi-talented actor Val Kilmer. Kilmer had previously portrayed Jim Morrison in Stone’s The Doors to critical raves more than a decade before, and was excited to re-unite with the filmmaker. “Oliver’s vision is really vivid, and he’s the perfect director for this story,” says the actor. “He and I talked about Alexander when we were doing The Doors together. He plays it as a very personal story, which is unusual for screen biographies, especially epics. The film has a kind of intimacy that we’ve never seen before. The makeup of the character of Alexander is really the subject of the story, told against the backdrop of a world in which myth was very much alive.”
Whereas many of the actors were required to buff up for their roles, for Kilmer it was the opposite: to portray the formerly powerful, now dissipated king, Kilmer was required to gain weight, much as he had done before for sequences portraying an increasingly unhealthy Jim Morrison in The Doors. Kilmer also had to undergo an hour of daily makeup to don the scar tissue that covers the eye that Philip lost in battle.
“Philip established all of the foundations for what made Alexander great,” says Kilmer. “He was from all accounts a grand character – loud, an insatiable lover, and a drunk, but he obviously had unimaginable power in battle, as his son did. Philip keenly understood human nature, and once he had taken over an area he established peace and connections through marriage. He was a prisoner of war for several years, during which time he learned and refined new, advanced and very successful techniques for war, and he was able to employ them in a way that made his people richer and more secure.”
Cast as Alexander’s closest lifelong companion Hephaistion is Jared Leto, rising star of such films as Panic Room, Requiem for a Dream and Girl, Interrupted. “It was my first audition since Panic Room, which was a couple of years before, and I was completely petrified,” confesses Leto. “There were 50 other people there to meet Oliver, and it was incredibly intimidating. But when I auditioned, thankfully, he saw something in me that he thought might be right for Hephaistion. I’ll be eternally grateful to him for believing in me and giving me this experience. He works harder than any other person on the set. He’s obsessed, he’s a mad genius, like Van Gogh or Beethoven. He’s taught me a lot on this film, and I’ll carry those things with me for the rest of my career.”
Leto also appreciated the presence of his co-star. “Making the movie with anyone other than Colin wouldn’t have been such an incredible experience,” says Jared Leto. “First of all, he’s a friend. He’s also a tremendous actor, really generous, and incredibly committed. He raised the bar for all of us. He’s got a lot of Alexander in him, and it was easy for us to see Colin in that part.”
“Colin was Alexander,” concurs Rosario Dawson, who was cast by Stone as princess Roxane, Alexander’s first wife. “Colin’s just got that presence, and you can see the Pied Piper in him. It was magic, and it was really wonderful for me. Young actors don’t usually give you that much – they’re not that generous, or prepared, or confident in their own talent.”
Working with legendary director Stone drew Dawson to the project immediately. “I always wanted to work with Oliver,” she enthuses. “When I first heard about the film, I wondered what kind of roles there were in it for women. We talked for a while, shot a screen test, and after an hour-and-a-half he was calling me ‘Roxane.’”
For two relatively brief but crucial roles, Stone reached out to two of the world’s most distinguished actors. As the elder Pharaoh Ptolemy, the film’s storyteller and central voice, Anthony Hopkins was only too pleased to reunite with Stone eight years after their fruitful partnership on Nixon. “Oliver Stone is one of the most extraordinary directors, and I’ve worked with some really great ones,” notes Hopkins. “There’s nothing safe about Oliver, and there’s nothing safe about his films. They are brilliant and outrageous.”
“Once Anthony gets it right, he doesn’t let go,” Stone says. “He’s like a dog with a bone. He works quietly, methodically, and as he goes, sucks more and more of the marrow. On his last day in front of the cameras, Anthony worked until three or four in the morning to finish, which means it was an eighteen to twenty hour day. It killed everybody except him – Anthony loved it. He said ‘I love to work hard, and I don’t like to sit and screw around on set. I wish you had come to me with seventy days of pain!’”
“They were pretty intense days,” Hopkins confirms, “but I felt fantastic at the end of it. Working with Oliver is intense, because he drives and needles you in a good, constructive way. But it was the most satisfying time I’ve had on a set for a long time.”
For the role of the immortal Greek philosopher and naturalist Aristotle, who as Alexander’s boyhood tutor influenced the king throughout his life, Stone approached Christopher Plummer, an actor whose remarkably prolific career spans several decades and dozens of films. Although the role would require that he journey from his home in the United States to Morocco to be on camera for just two days, Plummer was excited by the prospect of breathing life into Aristotle, and undaunted by the notion of portraying the great thinker. “He is a difficult creature to play because we can’t really know him,” the actor notes. “It’s impossible to research a character like Aristotle, because there are millions of argumentative thoughts on the chap. So I gave up searching and put myself in the trustworthy hands of Oliver Stone. I tried to infuse the character with as many colors as I possibly could to suggest Aristotle’s intellect, his wit, and also his energy and mesmeric powers of teaching.”
Aristotle’s lectures to Alexander and the boys who will later become his closest companions – including Hephaistion, his lifelong best friend – touches on many subjects: geography, politics, the gods, and sexuality as it was understood in the ancient Hellenic world, a time in which contemporary definitions were meaningless. Alexander deals with the sexual mores of the era naturally, with neither apology nor sensationalism.
“There was a philosophy in that period that the sharing of knowledge and the physical was a very pure thing between men,” explains Farrell. “It was Eros, pure love, about growing, sharing and educating. There was no ‘homosexuality’ or ‘bisexuality.’ There was just an inevitable sexuality whenever it happened. Hephaistion was a friend who Alexander grew up with, and someone who, from the start to the finish, never had an agenda. He was the only one in Alexander’s life who in the truest sense of the word was a real companion and a true friend who just wanted the best for him.”
“I think that Alexander and Hephaistion had an instant kinship and brotherhood that transcended mere ‘friendship,’” adds Leto. “Most important was the love they had for each other, which wasn’t based on the physical, but on spiritual kinship. They played a part in each other’s destinies, which was a source of real tension between Hephaistion and Olympias, and later Roxane.”
In the wake of casting his leads, Stone had to come to a carefully considered decision about how the language in his script would be spoken on screen. Ancient Greece and Macedonia were melting pots of different dialects – people moved around the ancient world constantly, mixing their own dialects with the local tongue. Philip extended the borders of Macedonia to include territories in which people from different backgrounds had settled.
As a result, the people of Macedonia in Alexander’s time had varied ways of speaking. Even the high-country Macedonians and the low-country Macedonians spoke in different dialects. To southern Greeks, Athens being the center of Greek culture, Macedonian Greek would have a pronounced accent. To reflect this, the actors portraying the Greeks and Macedonians speak with outlying English accents (Irish, Scottish, Welsh). The modern equivalent would be the way in which English is spoken in different dialects throughout the British Isles. As Greek royalty from an outlying Greek kingdom, Angelina Jolie as Queen Olympias has her own distinctive accent in the film.
Stone enlisted the aid of British dialogue coach Catherine Charlton to work with the actors, and she in turn worked with Robin Lane Fox to ensure that all the pronunciations of ancient names and places were correct. The end result is that while all the film’s Greeks, including the Macedonians, speak a master English tongue, their accents synchronize with the various outlying kingdoms from which they hail.
The Music of Alexander
During filming, Stone employed a technique familiar to him throughout his career: the playing of appropriate and often haunting music between scenes on set as an aural backdrop, setting tone and mood for the actors and crew. Although on previous films Stone would often utilize “temp music,” for Alexander, he played music that was being composed simultaneously, a thousand miles away in Athens, by famed Greek composer Vangelis.
Inspired by the story of Alexander, one of his personal heroes, Vangelis dug deep into the roots of Greek and Macedonian musical heritage. The composer scored not only with his famed synthesizer, but also for such ancient instruments as bagpipes (which, although associated with Celtic music, probably originated north of Macedonia in what is today Bulgaria), drums, lutes and lyres.
“There’s a whole mixture of musical influences in the melodies and rhythms,” explains music supervisor Budd Carr (who has worked with Stone on every one of his films since Salvador), “blending the cultures that Alexander encountered: Persia, Afghanistan, Egypt, India. Since we’re depicting 320 B.C., you can’t go to your CD collection and pull out material. Oliver has always written music into his scripts, so we had several scenes with groups of musicians playing in Macedonia, Persia, Balkh (Afghanistan) and India. In order to provide the authentic feel Oliver wanted for these scenes, composer Vangelis, who has a deep knowledge of the musical history of these areas, composed, recorded and produced original music for the musicians to play. His powerful score for the film evokes the past and includes diverse ethnic influences and instrumentation.”
The Journey's End
At the end of 94 days of principal photography, the production of Alexander had echoed in more ways than one the intentions of its subject. “The whole movie kind of paralleled the story itself,” says Jon Kilik. “It has been this melting pot of cultures and people – British, Irish, American, French, Moroccan, Thai – who all brought a different voice and style to the film.”
The final moments of shooting were emblematic of the spirit with which the entire film had been undertaken. “I’ll never forget my very last image of Colin,” says Stone, “standing there on crutches, stage blood running all over his face, body and armor, with his broken ankle, that wonderful smile of his, and his mad, Irish eyes dancing. We had done it. We had made it to the end of one long, precipitous gamble – and Colin certainly looked like he was at the end of the line. It was a very special moment for both of us. And maybe it sounds portentous, but like Ptolemy at the end of the film, I feel like saying, ‘In his presence we were better than ourselves.’”
With tremendous effort and skill on the part of the film’s massive cast and behindthe-scenes visionaries, Stone was able to finally realize his dream of capturing the vivid spectacle of Alexander the Great’s extraordinary life, from his earliest days to the time of his death, a life in which he traveled across a world that he first conquered, and ultimately united.
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Alexander
Production notes provided by Warner Bros. Pictures.