Production Companies Warner Bros. Pictures, Intermedia Films, Pacifica Film, Egmond Film & Television, France 3 Cinéma, IMF Internationale Medien und Film GmbH & Co. 3. Produktions KG, Pathé Renn Productions
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.”
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