4 June 2003
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Will
it be SA's Alexander the Great?
By Ben McEachen
ALEXANDER coming to South Australia? Now, that would be great.
The film industry is abuzz at the announcement by director Baz Luhrmann that his $100 million epic, Alexander the Great, could be filmed in Australia.
"It would be fantastic," Judith Crombie, chief executive of the SA Film Corporation, said yesterday.
"We would be absolutely thrilled if any offshore production came to Australia, particularly SA, because it would be an economic benefit to the state."
The film, set to star Leonardo DiCaprio as the ancient ruler and Nicole Kidman as his mother, was due to be shot in Morocco.
But the recent suicide bombings in Casablanca have forced Luhrmann and producer Dino De Laurentis to look to other shores.
Luhrmann made it known he would prefer to move the film – which begins shooting in mid-2004 – to Australia and that location scouts had already visited SA.
While Ms Crombie believed SA offered valuable film-making resources of natural and human talent, she stressed it was difficult to pinpoint actual locations suitable for Alexander the Great without having seen a script.
"SA can offer locations for anything except snow," she said.
Competing with another Alexander story planned by director Oliver Stone, Luhrmann's version would take in the life of the military leader who, by age 25, had conquered 90 per cent of the known world circa 330BC.
With Alexander's campaign taking in Greece, Turkey, Egypt and India, SA's landscape – particularly the Far North – could act as an ideal backdrop.
Burra and its surrounds became South Africa for Breaker Morant in 1980, while Port Lincoln turned into Turkey's Anzac Cove for Gallipoli in 1981.
In the World War I drama The Lighthorsemen, filmed in 1986, Hawker doubled for Beersheba, Palestine.
Celebrated SA film-maker Rolf de Heer, who made use of the Flinders Ranges in The Tracker, believed this state could accommodate Alexander's adventures.
"Areas of the state have vegetation that feels similar to Greece, for example," he said.
"We have olive trees and stuff like that."
"If they were looking at Morocco, obviously they're looking at desert-type stuff; we've got that as well."