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| Colin Media and News thread #2- Cuz the boys hot new right now!
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From the lovely Flohman
From EW
Wild Things
Inside the making of ''Alexander'' -- Here's how the epic adventure overcame casting doubts (Angelina as Colin's mom?!?), on-set catastrophes, and those pesky tabloid rumors by Daniel Fierman
SNAKE CHARMERS Unsurprisingly, tabloid favorites Farrell and Jolie made headlines while making ''Alexander''
It's a January afternoon in Thailand, two hours north of Bangkok in a sweltering nature reserve that serves as the Indian jungle set for Alexander. The scene today calls for a massive battle during which Colin Farrell charges a group of carefully trained war elephants on horseback. The problem is that elephants and horses turn out to be like cats and dogs — except, you know, a couple of tons heavier. So when director Oliver Stone calls ''Action,'' the Irish actor spurs on his steed, only to be thrown, trampled, and squashed by 1,400 pounds of whinnying, terrified horse. A gasp echoes across the forest as animal trainers rush in. The horse is removed. The elephant subdued. And Stone's Alexander the Great lies on the black ground in a puddle of his own blood.
On most movies, this would be a disaster. Production would stop. Medics would be dispatched. Agents called and producers disemboweled. But on Alexander — Stone's independently financed, $150 million dream project — it's just a blip. After all, the peripatetic production has already weathered wild rumors of on-set sexual merry-go-rounds, brushes with total financial catastrophe, travel from Marrakech to London to Thailand, and some very, very bad blond hair. Is the project visionary? Quite possibly. The work of great passion? Unquestionably. An exercise in near madness? Without a mother-loving doubt.
Stone sighs and looks his friend and leading man over. ''Will he be okay?'' he asks no one in particular. ''Okay, then. Let's keep going.''
Do not underestimate Oliver Stone's drive to make this movie. Alexander is the man of Stone's dreams — a conquerer, a uniter, a great leader with a passion for Asia (and Asian women), and the son of an iron-willed mother. All of Stone's great themes about leadership and manhood reverberate through the Macedonian king's spectacular story — there's even a quick flash of Alexander's face in The Doors — and he had a lust to tell it.
Still, it took 15 years for Alexander to develop. As Stone set about assembling a vast filmography that ranges from the smart (JFK) to the startling (Natural Born Killers) to the simply bizarre (his Castro-sympathetic Looking for Fidel), scripts were written and discarded, sets designed and abandoned.
Finally in 2000, with Intermedia's Moritz Borman on board to secure financing, Stone went off to write a script. What he ended up with was a 142-page behemoth showcasing two sprawling battle scenes, a re-creation of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, a cast of thousands, and an honest, fairly explicit treatment of Alexander's famous bisexuality. The movie started with Alexander's childhood and quickly flashed forward to his conquest of Persia — covering his rule over Asia, his marriage to a Bactrian princess, the near revolt of his men, and ultimately his death in Babylon. To the surprise of everyone — including, in his honest moments, Stone — Borman signed off. And then the director took a meeting with Colin Farrell.
''He came in looking like a Dublin street thug,'' remembers the director, laughing. ''He broke two or three wineglasses during dinner just making his points and yelling. I walked away with a headache. I was like, 'I quite enjoyed his company, but my God! I could never make a movie with him!'''
Despite the fact that he looked nothing like the fair-haired Alexander, Farrell slowly changed Stone's mind. At the urging of their common agency, CAA, he screen-tested in a warehouse in Los Angeles. ''I was wearing a wig you wouldn't buy in a joke shop,'' says Farrell. ''And they put mascara in my eyebrows, which did make them look a little more blond, but it volumized them about four times. I looked ridiculous. I couldn't believe I got offered it.''
The rest of the cast filled out around him. Val Kilmer signed on as Alexander's one-eyed father, King Philip. And in one of the oddest casting decisions since 53-year-old Jessie Royce Landis was chosen to play 54-year-old Cary Grant's mother in North by Northwest, Angelina Jolie was tapped to play Olympias, Alexander's power-crazed, cult-worshipping mother. (For those scoring at home, Jolie has one year on her costar.)
''Oliver hadn't seen me in a few years and [when we met] he said that I had gotten old,'' says Jolie. ''It may sound stupid, I know. But he saw another divorce, a baby, a separation from my father, things I've seen in the world. I have age in my face now. I jumped on it.''
Jolie, Kilmer, and Farrell? It was a dream team of tabloid mainstays — Hollywood practically burst into laughter. (Stone took to calling his trio the Addams Family.) And to make it worse, Stone and Co. had to face down rival projects: Most troubling, Baz Luhrmann (Moulin Rouge) and producer Dino De Laurentiis (Red Dragon) had their own movie in the works — with Leonardo DiCaprio attached as Alexander and Nicole Kidman as Olympias. (Luhrmann still has no start date for his version.)
Through sheer force of will, Stone brought Alexander in on time and on budget — but the closing days of production did not go well. For starters, after the cast and crew left Morocco for London, the tabloids started swirling, homing in on an alleged love affair between Farrell and Jolie. Shots of them on camelback were taken over Christmas in Egypt — and that was only the start. By the time the production got to Bangkok, Jolie had been also linked with Kilmer and Jared Leto (who plays Alexander's best friend and lover, Hephaistion). Rosario Dawson (who plays Alexander's wife, Roxane) was said to be Farrell's new bedmate, and Farrell himself was supposed to have slept with the majority of the Asian subcontinent.
As much as the cast and crew denied it or tried to ignore it, the rumors were distracting as hell. ''They had all of us sleeping with each other and half of Thailand,'' says Kilmer, who thinks that Jolie got the worst of it. For her part, the actress just laughs. ''I'm so used to being attached to every single person I work with, it's almost insulting if I haven't slept with somebody,'' she says. ''But the tabloids didn't come close. They couldn't make up the stuff that went on.''
Then there was the whole Colin-breaking-his-leg-and-arm thing. Just weeks after he was trampled by that horse in Thailand, Farrell went out celebrating in a small town on the Laotian border where the final scenes were being shot. He drank more than his share of scotch, stayed out until 5 a.m., fell down a flight of stairs, and broke his heel and wrist. ''I couldn't believe it, I'm such an idiot,'' says Farrell now, contrite. He was airlifted to Bangkok and returned two days later to finish the film with a cast and a pronounced limp. ''What can I say?'' says Stone. ''I never got down on him for his bad-boy behavior. How could I? Who was I to throw stones at a glass house?''
But that was all small stuff compared with the larger problem: finishing a version of the movie that everyone could agree on. People close to Stone, including his producer and his studio, became concerned when they saw the first cut of the movie. They became concerned because the first major battle scene — where Alexander defeats the Persian Empire — was disjointed, ultraviolent, and confusing. And they became concerned because of the implicit, and at times explicit, gay content.
The battle scene was fixed through careful reediting. The gay content was trickier. It wasn't like Stone had taken historical liberties. His rendering of Alexander's life is, given the paucity of reliable material about a man who died in 323 B.C., more or less in the mainstream of scholarly research. By most accounts Alexander did like men, women, and eunuchs — his best friend Hephaistion was his longtime lover; he married at least twice; and he had an intimate relationship with a Persian castrato named Bagoas.
''It wasn't Deep Throat or anything,'' says Stone. ''I don't think you need to do that. When Colin says a line like 'Stay with me tonight, Hephaistion,' that's five words, that's all you need.'' But lines like ''It was said...that Alexander was never defeated, except by Hephaistion's thighs'' and some light man-on-eunuch action were more than a little ballsy — and, from a marketing point of view, dangerous. Given the proliferation of antigay ballot initiatives around the country, one can easily imagine the near heart attack the PR team had when they saw what they had to work with. ''I don't know how people are going to respond, I really don't,'' says Warner Bros. president of production Jeff Robinov. ''But I do know Oliver didn't run from who this guy was.'' (Not surprisingly, no one had issues with the prolonged, raw sex scene between Farrell and Dawson midway through the film.)
''Oliver never wanted to make a picture that would have more explicit gay moments than what you would see in Will & Grace,'' says Borman. ''I don't think that there is more [in the movie].''
''In an ideal world we could have and would have shot the movie with [more graphic] stuff in it,'' says Farrell. ''You would have seen me have a relationship that was not just based on the spirituality of deep kinetic friendship and absolute reliance that is Hephaistion and Alexander, but you'd also see a side that did exist. Which was sexual. But I don't think it would have been aggressive. I think whatever the sexual relationship was would have been very gentle and very loving. I think the relationship with Bagoas, on the other hand, would have leaned toward the Kama Sutra of gay sex.''
Two reedits later, the content is tamer. But everyone involved with this $150 million movie wonders if it's too much for the mainstream audience they want to attract. ''So guys with goose-hunter caps won't come. I mean, what do you want me to say?'' says Stone. ''There are a--holes who don't come because of whatever. I don't want to make a movie for demographics. Once I start doing that, I'll die in a gutter!''
(This is an online-only excerpt of Entertainment Weekly's Nov. 19, 2004, cover story.)
Last edited by Hybrid-Angel : 11-14-2004 at 11:54 PM.
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