The movie Oliver Stone called “the biggest challenge of my life”
Every major film director is sure to face a few big challenges throughout their career, but Oliver Stone is one who has faced many due to his often controversial, political subject matter. But it wasn’t any of his films based on contemporary wars that he called “the biggest challenge of his life”. In fact, most of us probably already know which film he struggled with the most.
Studying at NYU while Martin Scorsese taught there, Stone’s career got off to a great start when he wrote a few majorly successful films in the 1970s, including Midnight Express and the iconic drug epic Scarface. But it wasn’t these writing credits that challenged him.
Nor was it his plethora of political films, including three features on the Vietnam War, that tended to challenge the Western view of contemporary warfare. Between 1986 and 1999, a span of 13 years, Stone made 28 films, each with only a year or two between them, but still, it was his historical epic based on Alexander the Great that proved the most challenging of all the films in his illustrious career.
With four Academy Awards and a number of classics already under his belt, Stone seemed primed to become an auteur of his generation. And with Hollywood’s obsession with historical epics in the Noughties – off the back of the success of Ridley Scott’s Gladiator – it seemed Stone was the ideal director to take on this mythical feat.
However, Baz Luhrmann seemed to have the same idea, with Leonardo DiCaprio partnering with him to create their own take on the historical figure. This proved to be one of Stone’s main issues, as he was up against the clock to get his version through first. Speaking to BBC, he described it as “the biggest challenge of my life” and explained that his race “was always with the script”.
He still hoped that he could do the story of Alexander the Great’s rise and fall “some justice” and acknowledged, “It’s very hard to do. I’m not sure that I have, but I’m about to take the shot”. Ultimately, despite this prophetic eye to the difficulty of such an epic, the risk he took in creating Alexander did not pay off.
Not only was it a box-office dud, but it was critically panned. Even though the director released an additional three cuts of the movie, it did little to improve its credibility.
Lead actor Colin Farrell, who had so much faith in Stone that he was dreaming of award-season glory, did garner a nomination for the film, but it was for ‘Worst Actor’ at the Golden Raspberry Awards, not the ‘Best Actor’ Oscar he’d been hoping for.
And, adding insult to injury, Luhrmann never got to tell his story of Alexander The Great. His film had been the passion project of Leonardo DiCaprio, who had always dreamed of playing the ancient Macedonian king. It surely would have been a spectacular, decadent epic, but Oliver Stone did foresee issues the director may have faced, stating, “It certainly would have been more difficult for them if they’d gone first with Leo DiCaprio because he’s a bigger star”. But sadly, Colin Farrell’s “true grit” was not enough to make the film a hit.
