Oliver Stone is exhausted and a little out of his gourd. He just turned in the final print of his epic dream project, “Alexander” (it was more or less pried from his hands), and, truth be known, he isn’t sure he has succeeded in telling the story of the man he calls “history’s greatest idealist.”
Will Stone ever be done with “Alexander”? It’s a question that lingers heavily in the air after the months he has spent editing the half-year’s worth of footage he shot last year and early into 2004 in Morocco, London and Thailand. Stone’s “Alexander” has gone through three major cuts, whittling a good 45 minutes from first edition to last, forcing Warner Bros. to delay its release from early November to Thanksgiving. (The line from the studio: The later date will be better for Oscar campaigning.)
Finding a cut everyone can tolerate, much less like, has been problematic. For some, the film is–take your pick–too violent, too gay, too confusing. Much of the violence and overt homosexuality that was present in Stone’s first cut has been excised.
Stone knew it would be a nightmare to make a movie about Alexander the Great, the Macedonian king who conquered the Persian Empire and spread Greek culture (while ruthlessly destroying everything and everyone in his path) into the Mideast and Egypt, before contracting malaria, dying and leaving a beautiful corpse at age 32 in 323 B.C.
“Possibly he’s too big for life,” Stone muses about why so few dramatists have taken a stab at Alexander. “People want more ordinary. Too famous, too known, too successful, too much. I don’t know. He’s sexually ambiguous. He’s a thorny character. He has mother-father issues. He has sexuality issues … but ‘issues’ evokes a modern sense of problem awareness.”
“The biggest problem is that he lived a five-act life, at least,” Stone continues. “There were 50 battles. We started thinking about this movie in 1989, but I could never solve the script. We finally brought it down to three acts. That was my problem. People talk about the competition with this other film. My mind was always on the prize, which was the script.”
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That “other film,” an Alexander biopic from director Baz Luhrmann (“Moulin Rouge”), was but one of several Alexander-related projects being discussed at the beginning of the 21st Century. Mel Gibson had plans to produce a mini-series for HBO. Martin Scorsese toyed with the idea of a feature film. Stone’s version had a 10-year head start, and although his financing was shaky (the film cost at least $160 million, with most of the money coming from foreign investors), his “Alexander” was first out of the gate. Luhrmann’s project, which, like Stone’s, was green-lighted after “Gladiator” revived interest in the sword-and-sandal epic, will likely never be made.
Luhrmann never did have a script, but he did have an A-list star, Leonardo DiCaprio. Stone went with Colin Farrell. Apparently, the fact that Farrell didn’t in the least resemble the fair-haired Alexander intrigued Stone. Producer Moritz Borman calls casting Farrell a “giant leap of faith.”
This would also explain signing Angelina Jolie to play Olympia, Alexander’s tempestuous mother. Jolie is 29; Farrell, 28.
Though it’s hard to move beyond the strange casting, stranger accents, Stone’s trademark scenes of animalistic sex and drunken bacchanals, the blood-soaked battles, the strange contrast between Farrell’s dancing, dark eyebrows and his feathery, platinum hair and the coy depiction (by Greek standards) of Alexander’s bisexuality (a line early in the film sets the tone: “It has been said that Alexander was never defeated except by Hephaistion’s thighs”), there is some great, teeming history in Stone’s film.
However, the director is just not sure if anyone who doesn’t have some background in ancient history is going to be able to figure it out.
“There were scenes we had to recut, shorten or simply take out,” he says. “It’s there if you’re careful and observant.”
Says Farrell: “Look, Alexander wanted to achieve immortality, and look at us–we’re talking about him here, two and a half thousand years later.”
“Sadly,” Farrell continues, “all some people want to focus on is that this is a ‘gay movie.’ It’s not hidden. But it’s not hit on the head, either.”