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
Says Dye, “The tactics of the phalanx were so good that it was the primary infantry formation employed on the battlefield for 150 years. The only ones who finally beat it were the Roman legions. It provided a field commander like Alexander with a very strong, rigid yet flexible tactical element on the ancient battlefield.”
The training camp proved to be an historical laboratory of sorts. By virtue of experience and practical implementation, Capt. Dye, his staff and the filmmakers discovered the truth behind accounts of how wars were fought in Alexander’s time. This intense period of training and preparation then allowed Stone to stage onscreen battles that are as true as possible to historical and military reality. “We were learning so we could teach, essentially,” says Dye. “Oliver and I worked with the classical scholars, and once we had heard their opinion, we were able to actually put that knowledge into practice on the field and see what worked.”
In addition to realistically depicting the bearing and deportment of soldiers who lived thousands of years before their own time, the film’s actors had to be readied to enact two monumental battles. “Captain Dye worked us all day,” recounts Farrell, who began his training in the United States and Spain six weeks before the start of the film’s official training camp. “Then every night we would stand down and he talked to us about Alexander’s tactics and strategies, the history of various battles, and explained the mind of the warrior. We definitely got stronger physically, and it got us ready, because the first scene we shot was the Battle of Gaugamela, which was tough going on everyone.”
A vast stretch of the Moroccan desert, eight miles in circumference, was selected as the site on which the Battle of Gaugamela was staged. The film’s base camp on the location was massive, and included an actual military encampment for the Royal Moroccan Army, which had contributed several hundred personnel (many of them cavalry) with the full cooperation of His Majesty King Mohammed VI. Swirling dust, the sounds of men in desperate hand-to-hand combat, and the thunder of pounding hooves permeated the filming of the Battle of Gaugamela, in which Alexander achieved the seemingly impossible, defeating King Darius III’s 250,000-strong Persian army with only 40,000 infantry and 7,000 cavalry. Darius fled, and the victory opened up the east to the Macedonians and crystallized Alexander’s status as a living legend.
“Oliver wanted realism,” stresses stunt coordinator Gary Powell. “He didn’t want exaggerated fight scenes, like you see in swashbucklers. If you’re going for realism, most individual fights don’t last that long, especially when you’ve got the weapons that we’re using. It’s fast and rough, and for Gaugamela, we had more than a thousand people packed in very tight using practical weapons.” The first time historian Robin Lane Fox caught a glimpse of an extra mounted on horseback in the full regalia of a Macedonian Companion Cavalrymen, he wasn’t just a witness to this recreation – he was a participant. Part of his arrangement with Stone was that he would play a part in Alexander’s immortal charge at the Persian center.
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