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
“Oliver and his crew took great care to get people armored with due reference to history from the ancient sources and to show the main maneuvers,” says Lane Fox, “and the result is a really terrifying battle that has an exceptional degree of authenticity. In my view, the film’s battle scenes could be circulated to schools, historians and universities for fruitful discussion. They give a splendid impression of the units in action, the blood, the chaos – above all, they give a stunning sense of scale.”
Director of Photography Rodrigo Prieto shot the Battle of Gaugamela with two full camera units, utilizing up to eight cameras to cover the full scope of the action. Prieto notes that he and Stone “didn’t want something that felt imposed upon by the modern eye. Oliver wanted the images to enhance the perception of really being there, of being able to feel and smell the place and the time, so we approached the cinematography in a very subjective way. Any decision made in terms of style had to be incorporated into what Alexander was feeling at that moment in the film.”
There was also the matter of volume, as the actual battle in 331 B.C. was fought by approximately 297,000 soldiers. Although there were more than 1,000 extras in the field in front of the cameras, visual effects supervisor John Scheele later worked for months with the innovative visual effects houses BUF Compagnie in Paris and the Moving Picture Company in London to create digital enhancements for Gaugamela and several other sequences. “Our challenge was to make an entirely believable army fighting in the bright midday sun,” notes Scheele. “Visual effects set in a dark fantasy world have more tolerance, and the audience will accept the look. We had to match the dust and grit of the real world.”
The film’s second pivotal battle is a fierce forest conflict in India where Alexander and his soldiers face dramatic weather, a landscape inhospitable to their military formations, and most incredibly, elephants – the Macedonians had never encountered anything akin to the giant armored beasts that the Indian soldiers employed in combat.
Production traveled to Thailand for this leg of filming. Appropriately for what Stone was trying to accomplish, the country has absorbed considerable Indian influences dating from the 1st century A.D., during which time merchants from the subcontinent arrived in peninsular Thailand, bringing with them their country’s art, architecture, religion and government.
Shot at Phu Kae Central Botanical Garden, a leafy forest some 130 kilometers north of Bangkok, the landscape for the forest battle had to be temporarily altered by production designer Jan Roelfs and the art department. “We couldn’t shoot in a real jungle for practical reasons,” explains Roelfs, “so we had to actually build a jungle inside of the Botanical Garden, which worked better for lighting and staging purposes. We were filming during Thailand’s dry season, so we had to water the section of the forest that we were permitted to use for three months.” Following the completion of filming in Saraburi, the botanical park was restored exactly as the company found it.
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