2 January 2003
Sydney Morning Herald  - click here for link to original source

Clash of the titans

Great expectations: Baz Luhrmann hopes Leonardo DiCaprio will star in his take on Alexander the Great. Digital mischief by Herald Design

Since the success of Gladiator, the sword-and-sandals epic has thundered back into fashion. Next year sees Achilles, Alexander the Great and Hannibal brought to life. Oliver Poole reports from Hollywood.

Hollywood is preparing for battle. Elephants are to be pitched against Amazons. Achilles will struggle with Alexander the Great. The men of Troy, Sparta and Carthage are being sent to fight it out for the biggest opening weekend at the box office.

It is a war that will feature hundreds of horses and chariots and catapults. In which battle flags will be hoisted over conquered lands and men with swords caked in fake blood will issue heroic calls to arms while dressed in sandals and pleated miniskirts.

After almost 40 years in which the sword-and-sandals historical epic languished unloved and almost forgotten by Tinseltown, the genre is back in favour. Having tired of science fiction, overdone the gangster opus and moved on from their brief obsession with World War II, the studios are falling over themselves to transport us to ancient times.

At Warner Brothers, Wolfgang Petersen, director of The Perfect Storm, is filming Troy, an adaptation of The Iliad with Brad Pitt as Achilles. Universal is sending George Clooney to lead his 300 Spartans into battle against the Persians at the Battle of Thermopylae. Sony Pictures has Hollywood's latest favourite action hero, Vin Diesel, in Hannibal, taking his elephants on a jaunt across the Alps.

James Cameron is working on a story about the Amazons and two films are in production about Alexander the Great. Oliver Stone has hired Colin Farrell for the title role, after being turned down by Tom Cruise, while Baz Luhrmann has earmarked Leonardo DiCaprio to play the conqueror of nations.

Luhrmann, fresh from the success of Moulin Rouge's nomination for a best picture Oscar last year, is set to start filming first in Morocco this northern spring. He may not yet have a guaranteed leading man, but he has the co-operation of Morocco's King Mohammad VI, an Alexander the Great buff who has promised to provide 1500 soldiers for the battle scenes.

There will be no musical interludes or legions of dancing Macedonians. Instead, Luhrmann says he wants to do justice to the scale of the achievements of the man he has described as "the world's first rock star, a fantastic freak of nature". By the end of 2003, audiences everywhere are going to be wallowing in gallons of Persian blood.

It is a remarkable turnaround for a genre that had seemed destined to become a footnote in film history. The darling of the 1950s cinema, when films such as Ben-Hur and Spartacus won awards and raked in millions, it fell from grace as quickly as Cleopatra fell out of cinemas on its 1963 debut. The film had cost $US44 million to make, or $US250 million ($450 million) in today's money.

In comparison, Titanic, the film credited with being the most expensive ever made, cost $US200 million when it was completed. When Cleopatra failed to earn back a quarter of its cost, the studios were unwilling to touch anything that carried with it the risk of a similar financial disaster.

To the extent that the genre survived, it did so on the cheap, with little-known bodybuilders such as Steve Reeves, Reg Park and Gordon Mitchell fighting it out with stop-motion animated monsters and casts of inaccurately costumed extras.

By the 1970s, directors such as Scorsese and Coppola were coming to the fore, with their sights set more on street life than clashes with titans. After Star Wars, the future not the past became the setting for epic battles between good and evil.

But every fable needs its hero and for the historical drama its white knight came by the name of General Maximus Decimus Meridius. Ever since Gladiator stormed the world 18 months ago and snared $US450 million of box office booty, every executive in Los Angeles has been trying to decide if Sandra Bullock would make a good Helen of Troy or Jean-Claude Van Damme could hack it as Augustus.

"For years studios will say 'no, no, no' to these kinds of historical projects," said Mark Gordon, the producer of Braveheart, whose next feature is also a historical one, directed by Ridley Scott. "Then you have a phenomenon like Gladiator and suddenly, studios are saying 'yes, yes, yes'." It opened the doors not only for stories set in ancient Greece or Rome but for the entire field of historical epics. There had been Mel Gibson's Braveheart in 1995, but studios had considered its success a one-off. The Patriot, another Gibson film based on the American War of Independence, took $US120 million when it was released in 2000, but it had cost $US105 million to make and was considered a disappointment.

Now, suddenly, studios have started commissioning period pieces left, right and centre. Russell Crowe was told to pack away his breastplate and go to Mexico to play Jack Aubrey in the filming of Patrick O'Brian's first Napoleonic seafaring adventure, Master and Commander.

The Civil War has been recreated in Gods and Generals, with Robert Duvall as Robert E. Lee, which opens in the US this February. The Alamo is being reshot. Tom Cruise's next role is as a visitor to 1870s Japan in The Last Samurai.

Peter Weir, the director of Master and Commander, recalls how projects that previously couldn't be made were suddenly having money thrown at them. "When a movie executive would ask if I had any pet projects, I'd say, 'Just one: a story set on board a British man-o'-war in the time of Nelson.' Until last year, it was usually followed by a profound silence. Then suddenly people were clamouring to make it."

Despite the newfound enthusiasm for making epics, the fate of Cleopatra still hangs over them. Recreating the Trojan wars or sending an army of elephants to sack Rome does not come cheaply. Luhrmann's Alexander the Great is budgeted at $US160 million, Petersen's Troy at $US16 million more. For Master and Commander, Fox purchased a replica warship and built four 2250-litre water tanks to churn up the waves on a 3.5-hectare pond.

Modern computer special effects may mean that directors no longer need to dress thousands in white sheets to fill a coliseum, but in Gods and Generals more than 10,000 extras were still used to create battle scenes.

The worry is that there is not a big enough audience who want to go again and again to see different versions of Greek soldiers pillaging their way across Asia Minor. If they don't, there are a lot of public flops in the pipeline.

Luhrmann, however, is confident that the zeitgeist is right for his picture. "It was the first time that the pendulum swung away from Eastern culture," he has said of the period of Alexander the Great. "What's going on in the world today is directly applicable to Alexander's time. The level of contemporary resonance is unbelievable."

Scott is also certain that the trend he started by directing Gladiator will flourish. Now filming Mark Gordon's $US160 million epic Tripoli, which deals with a US army officer named William Eaton (Russell Crowe - again) who helps the heir to the throne of Libya overthrow the government in the first decades of the 19th century, he says that developments in computer technology ensure that audiences can be freshly dazzled every time.

As a child, he never liked the sweeping cinematic histories because "those worlds looked theatrical and not real". But now "I could create worlds that were real to the audience. When Russell stood in front of the troops in Gladiator, those watching knew it was real... Gladiator created the next wave of epics - I'm just surprised it took so long."

The truth is that big-shot directors and film producers like historical epics. They may be dangerously expensive, complicated to shoot and rarely lend themselves to a sequel (T2: Troy Strikes Back, anyone?) but they give an opportunity for cinema immortality. For when they work, they work big. They wow audiences, eat up awards and prove you are great enough to make cities rise and fall, marshal elephants to the middle of nowhere, build your own Royal Navy. They give, as Scott discovered with Gladiator, a chance to become the biggest name in the business. That film won five Oscars and gave him the power to make pretty much anything.

Those responsible for the productions it spawned may be wincing at the cost and fretting at the administrative burden of finding room on set for the lion tamer, but they will already be clearing trophy space on their mantelpiece.

The Telegraph, London

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