Well I was able to talk a little further with our insider over in Thailand concerning a couple of technical details involved with Oliver Stone’s epic Alexander based on the life of Alexander the Great. The film stars Val Kilmer, Colin Farrell, Anthony Hopkins, Angelina Jolie, Rosario Dawson, Jared Leto, Jonathan Rhys-Meyers, Ian Beattie, Elliot Cowan, and Rory McCann and is being directed by Oliver Stone.
We have already posted two set updates from the movie and you can get the first one here and the second one here, and you may want to at least read the second one before reading this one to give you a feel for this update, but either way here goes.
While our other updates concerned what was being filmed this time we got a little more description on a couple of stunts and the “bloody” battles, and our insider speaks up, “You know what was fun to see sometimes in the movie making process was the little things they do for special effects, they had guys dressed like me with a shield that hid fire extinguishers under them that were filled with blood when the fights would start they would shoot little squirts of blood all over. No joke! I got shot in the eye once.”
“Plus, when I say they slathered us with blood I was not joking. They had a team of blood slatherers go in between every shot and coat our shields, swords, faces, arms and legs! Even the elephant tusks got smothered it was sticky stuff! The blood was made of syrup, some was made of sugar water and coloring, other stuff was much, much more thick and was made to look like clotting blood. They had many kinds.”
If you do not know what I am talking about when I reference the steaming pile of elephant intestines check out our second update but this is how our insider describes them, “The steaming intestines were actually steaming, it had a air channel in the middle of it and little holes that would let the steam they pumped in trickle out. It was hard for the blood guys to keep the steam from making the blood drip away.”
As far as the setting of the battles you can remember from our first scoop that they are battling in the jungles of India and “every scene had fog with no exceptions. They had this balloon tube that surrounded the perimeter that they pumped the smoke through. The balloon had small holes every couple of feet to let the smoke out, and in like 20 seconds they could make the surroundings look very spooky as if the warriors went on for forever. The also had a team add small green bushes, trees, and plants to add greenery.”
All the battle scenes take place during the day, but our insider heard a rumor on other scenes being shot in Morocco and Ubon Thani of a night scene in which a “group of elders are having a meeting about a possible coup. The assistant director reportedly kept telling everyone, ‘Remember gentlemen, its very cold, very suspicious, could be your last night…’ in a soft whisper to keep the mood.”
Now about the battle scenes which were made up of over 400 participants, which were made up of a group of people that were trained by a US Marine drill sergeant that “took a group of guys to Morocco and put them through boot camp for 3 weeks. They showered every other day, slept in tents in the desert, and had to prepare there own meals. They would practice marching, changing formations, and reacting to commands, I heard it was no picnic. The stunt coordinator told everyone that the kind of battle scenes Oliver likes are very real and natural. They told us that if we loose our sword to not be afraid to use a shield or helmet to bash some one over the head.”
When he says bashing he is not joking, “When I say that we were slashed and bruised it was from battle, the helmets and shields look real but are plastic, if you get bashed with one of them you might get a bruise but that is the way the cookie crumbled. Regardless of plastic or not I have cuts all over my body! We were never really hit directly with the weapons to flesh because they were heavy and metal but everything else went.”
If you are wondering how those large battles you see in movies are made well it can’t all be choreographed, “Some takes were longer than others, you might find your enemy dead before they stop shooting, that means that you gotta find someone else to kill. There was absolutely no way you could choreograph that, you just had to go balls out. There were guys running all over killing people, when they called cut and signaled the siren everyone was out of breath and looking like they truly just got out of a fight.”
With all this fighting going on did Colin Farrell actually get involved? “Nah, he filmed the shot when Alexander is riding through the battle and slashing people with only the handle of a sword and then they re-filmed the shot with the stunt guy doing the actual slashing of the men. But it was pretty cool how they filmed it, they had a guy driving a small four wheeler, which had a camera guy strapped to the front with a big ass movie camera following the action.”
“But some of the guys did do some fighting. Jared Leto gets jacked up in the end of the battle after taking on like 3 guys, it was a special choreographed fight though with close ups and Rory McCann also did several scenes where he was fighting.”
There was more to the fighting though than just swords clashing and blood did get spewed. “They had fake bodies laying everywhere on set. In one scene they even speared a fake body with the elephant tusks so it looks like the elephant has the body speared up in mid air like a shish-ka-bob with blood flowing freely from the body. Also, they had this mannequin of an Indian warrior that could be propped up to a standing position and had controls for the arms to make it look like it was moving. There was a hole in its face where a blood pack was placed and they got a close-up of one of the stunt guys stabbing a short sword through his face and blood shot out of the face all over.”
Some actors weren’t even relieved of being shot with arrows, “Some guys would strap on thick leather vests under their costumes and during battle would be shot with the wooden arrows that had small framing tacks coming out of the end. They would pierce the leather and look pretty real.”
Not even elephants were left out of the acting as “in one scene an elephant gets killed and flops on his side while there is a guy riding on top of him, they did it like three times. Also, one of the elephants that got slashed up by the assault team, while retreating held his leg up and ran away with only three legs. I thought I was seeing things when watching this huge animal run with only three legs, but then the take ended and the elephant put his other foot down and walked back to do it again.”
Our insider was also told that Stone was not totally satisfied with the battle scenes and there may be a couple more days of shooting in Thailand, so if that happens we will be sure to get you the info.
