As armies mass again on the borders of Mesopotamia, film-makers are fighting to be first over the top with a movie about the original and most rapacious western imperialist of them all – Alexander the Great.
Four of Hollywood’s most prodigious talents have long wanted to measure themselves against the upstart Macedonian who conquered nine-tenths of the known world in his 33 years. But for decades film-makers have shied away from fully portraying the complex personality of the most feared and revered leader in history.
Now at last the time seems to have come for the first bisexual action hero – with Alexander hopping, in one script, from the bed of his boyhood friend and lover Hephaestion, to that of the Queen of the Amazons and onward through a host of eunuchs and catamites.
Oliver Stone, Martin Scorsese and Ridley Scott have all laboured on pet projects about the messianic king who led a modest army out of his father’s Balkan kingdom and brought it to the borders of India, demolishing empires and civilisations in his wake.
More than 2 300 years on, the very name Alexander still sends a shudder down the spine of Iranians and central Asians weaned on tales of his cruelty, while barely a decade ago Greece almost went to war with its newly independent neighbour, the Republic of Macedonia, over its use of his star on its flag.
Ridley Scott’s Roman blockbuster Gladiator proved to sceptical studios that swords-and-sandal epics – which went out of fashion in the late 1960s – could still sell. But their prohibitive cost and the risk of being beaten to the screen has set off a cat-and-mouse game of false starts and shifting alliances among the chief players to rival Alexander’s own battle of wits with the Persian emperor Darius.
Having done a deal with Scorsese, and watched Scott bail out, Buz Luhrmann, the maker of Romeo and Juliet, Moulin Rouge and Strictly Ballroom, now looks favourite to be the first off the blocks.
Typically Luhrmann’s Alexander will not be short on flamboyance, despite being based on the Italian historian Valerio Manfredi’s trilogy of novels about the all-conquering hero.
After taking three male lovers, and diverting himself with the odd eunuch, he will be shown putting politics before pleasure to do his duty with the single-breasted queen of the Amazons, according to scriptwriter Ted Tally. Leonardo DiCaprio is in the process of signing on the dotted line to play him. But as in war, nothing can be taken for granted.
Luhrmann was to start shooting the $150m saga in Morocco in the early spring, having persuaded King Mohammed VI to lend him 5 000 soldiers and 1 000 horses for his battle scenes, but filming has been put back to the autumn.
In a bold flanking move, Vietnam veteran Stone, who has admired Alexander since his days as a GI, has stepped into the breach.
Only a month ago his own project seem to be dead in the water, but now he is back with the Irish actor Colin Farrell in Bucephalus’s saddle, and a big studio budget. Stone hopes to start shooting in Morocco in June, having abandoned his first choice of locations in India. Neither he nor Luhrmann would be drawn on whether there was room for two big Alexander films.
While Luhrmann and Tally’s script is believed to stick closely to Manfredi’s take on Alexander as the great expander of Greek and thus western cultural influence, Stone’s take is more heretical, as one would expect from the man who made JFK. It also gives full play to the whirl of conspiracy theories that surrounded Alexander’s life and death.
Pointedly, Stone believes Alexander was probably poisoned by his own generals, fearful of his increasing megalomania and cruelty.
”I was intrigued to discover that his famous father, Philip II, had been assassinated under mysterious circumstances,” Stone said. ”Alexander, not far from his side that day, was immediately suspect. The assassin himself was quickly slain, and the murder remains an enigma. In Alexander’s own untimely death at 33 we have again strong evidence of a conspiracy of family clans. Did he die of fever or from poisoned wine? I choose to believe the latter.”
There are however, two more Alexanders waiting in the wings. Mel Gibson, who rekindled the vogue for historical martial epics when he covered himself in woad for Braveheart, has a $120m 10-part TV series for HBO, the US cable channel which made Steven Spielberg’s Band of Brothers, ready to roll.
It was due to start shooting in the autumn but was delayed without any reason being given. Gibson, a Catholic who is also trying to get a film about the Passion shot in Aramaic, the language Christ is believed to have spoken, is unlikely to dwell on Alexander’s omnivorous sexual appetite.
A fourth, relatively low-budget project by Alfonso Arau, which will be shot in Mexico, is also awaiting the green light.
But the race for who will be first is only half the battle. The other, with Greece and the former Yugoslav republic of Macedonia at each others’ throats over the right to use the word Macedonian, is about the much more thorny question of who the real Alexander was. Was he a Greek, or was he an ancestor of the Slav-speaking people of the former Yugoslavia and northern Greece who now call themselves Macedonians?
Some Greek nationalists have already protested at the mention of Alexander’s supposed homosexuality, describing it as a ”disgrace” and a ”slur on Greece” – although the ancient Hellenes had a more relaxed view of these things. Stone has blamed the Greek government for orchestrating the outrage, and its culture minister, Evangelos Venizelos, has withdrawn support from the project. But he has stopped short of condemning it outright. Faced with protests from opposition MPs, he said: ”We cannot censor Hollywood. I don’t know what I can do.”
The Macedonians are also worried about how the film will portray their hero. While they seem more relaxed about his sexual preferences, activists have bombarded studios with letters and emails pointing out that Alexander was not a Greek but a Macedonian, who spoke a different language and who was regarded by the ancient Greeks as different.
Alexander the Great has inspired surprisingly few biopics, chiefly because of the extremity of his character and personal peccadillos scared off the directors of historical epics, which tend to be made for family audiences.
Richard Burton donned the golden armour and plumed helmet for a workmanlike but creaky attempt to do justice to Alexander’s amazing achievements. A stellar British cast that included Claire Bloom and Michael Hordern couldn’t hide the fact that battle scenes shot in Spain were more cast-of-hundreds than thousands.
The Greek master Theo Angelopoulos won a Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival for his long, plodding and pretentious meditation of the great general filtered through the story of a 19th-century Macedonian brigand and folk hero. Like Angelopoulos’s two best-known films, Ulysses’ Gaze and Eternity and a Day, Megaleksandros was shot in the haunting mountain landscape of Greek Macedonia.
Of the multitude of failed attempts to bring Alexander and his exploits to the screen, the most unlikely had William Shatner – aka Captain Kirk from Star Trek – leading the Macedonian phalanx across Asia. Alexander’s name, however, has been used to sell a number of films with little or nothing to do with him. The best of these was by the Swedish director Mauritz Stiller, the man who discovered Greta Garbo, who made a biting silent social satire in 1917, set in the Alexander the Great hotel. –
Guardian Unlimited Â