How many extras were used in the battle scenes of Stanley Kubrick movie ‘Spartacus’?
The 1960 movie Spartacus started off as the passion project of lead actor Kirk Douglas, who hired blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo to adapt Howard Fast’s 1951 historical novel about the legendary Roman slave leader. After the film’s studio and original director Anthony Mann parted ways, an inexperienced 30-year-old by the name of Stanley Kubrick was hired in his place.
It was Kubrick’s first big-budget movie, with his only previous effort of note, Paths of Glory, a relative box office failure. But rather than being overawed by the $12million he had to spend, the huge expectations the studio had placed on him, and the enormous scope of the picture, he rose to the challenge and imposed his will on production.
Against the wishes of Edward Muhl, the president of the film’s distributor, Universal Pictures, Kubrick insisted on shooting its panoramic battle scenes in Spain. On the dry plains around Guadalajara, a satellite city of Madrid, he assembled 8,800 actual Spanish infantry troops kitted out in Roman soldier dress and five tonnes of armour lent by museums and costumiers in Italy. Kubrick directed the massive assemblies of extras from a tower, shouting instructions as if he were a real army general.
For the earlier parts of the movie set at the gladiator school from which Spartacus’ rebellion begins, Kubrick used 187 stuntmen who he had trained as if they were real warriors destined to die in the arena. And to recreate the sound of tens of thousands of Roman soldiers and slaves raising rallying cries on the battlefield in unison, he had a 76 thousand-strong college football crowd in Lansing, Michigan, shout, “Hail, Crassus!” and “I am Spartacus!”
So, how many extras is that altogether?
Even if you exclude that crowd from the total number of extras included in production, reliable estimates place it at around 50,000 people. It is one of the biggest collective exertions of human labour ever put on film. No wonder leading actors like Tony Curtis find it unbearable to shoot.
In any case, the movie was a storming success upon its release, recouping its vast budget four times over. It effectively ended blacklisting as Trumbo was revealed as the scriptwriter and presidential candidate John F Kennedy crossed an anti-communist picket line to go and see it in the cinema.
It launched Kubrick’s career as an auteur filmmaker, affording him full artistic control over every movie he subsequently made. And it transformed the scope for what was possible in the epic film genre, paving the way for scenes on a different scale altogether once technology caught up with Kubrick’s forward-thinking approach.
