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
Few aspects of the Alexander shoot were as daunting as the need to re-create the elements of the world that surrounded the young king, covering more than 30 years of ancient history and crossing much of the world as it was known during his lifetime. Jan Roelfs and his art department team were being stared down by historical necessity and artistic veracity. The question was how to re-invent this ancient world with both authenticity and cinematic imagination, and Roelfs was determined to find a balance. What resulted are some of the most detailed re-creations of the ancient world in motion picture history.
On an 8-mile stretch of desert outside Marrakech, Morocco, the art department constructed Alexander’s magnificently decorated headquarters in his tented camp on the edges of the Gaugamela battlefield. Alexander was inestimably influenced by stories of Greek heroes from his youth, so the designers mounted the mythical Shield of Achilles above his throne and encased the scrolls of The Iliad and The Odyssey in an ivory box by the side of his bed.
Also shot in Morocco were scenes in the Macedonian horse market in which young Alexander first encounters and then tames his lifelong equine companion, Bucephalas. The art department added terraces, stone roads and cypress trees to the lush green valley. More than 50 horses and donkeys were placed in the market, as well as autumnal fruit and vegetables in stands and pavilions lining opposite sides of the horse ring. Extras dressed in simple white linen to portray country peasants dappled the landscape like moving sculptures, some with flocks of sheep on the hillside, presenting a beautifully bucolic vision of ancient Macedonia.
Built on a nearly sheer bluff above the glinting ocean in Morocco was a small, ruined temple to Pallas Athena, which contained the rudimentary map of the world that intrigued a young Alexander, and was the site of Aristotle’s lectures to him and his friends in the Gardens of Mieza. In Boufarziza, a Macedonian amphitheatre and 20 four-walled ancillary buildings, including another, larger temple to Pallas Athena were constructed. The amphitheatre was built to be determinedly modest in scale, as befitted a regional city. The vividly colored buildings and statues served as a reminder that the past wasn’t as devoid of color as is commonly believed. As part of a ceremony in the amphitheatre, Roelfs team created polychromatic statues of each god, almost garishly colorful, more theatrical than artful by intention.
Some of the sets were impractical to shoot on location, and so London’s famed Pinewood Studios housed several of the enormous environments constructed by Roelfs and company. Pinewood’s hangar-like “007” stage is the largest such permanent facility in the world, and the Alexander crew filled up nearly every inch of space to erect these elaborate replications of the distant past.
The first of the two grandest sets erected at Pinewood was the exotic courtyard of an ornate Indian palace. Due to the fact that ancient Indians constructed their palaces of wood, no architecture from Alexander’s era is left, leaving the design of the Indian palace courtyard open to interpretation. Inspired by Indian shrines that incorporate steps into their design, Roelfs chose an open air concept, with stepped walls leading down to the courtyard, which was accented with pools of water. The Indian Palace required four months of construction, with an average of 150 people working on a daily basis building, plastering, painting and carving. A huge, embroidered canopy covered the central area of the Indian palace courtyard and adjacent pools.
Movie Database
In Theaters
