London’s famed Pinewood Studios housed enormous environments created by Jan Roelfs and company for the film, crafted and constructed with enormous care and attention to detail. The first was the exotic courtyard of an Indian palace. Due to the fact that the Indian people constructed their palaces of wood, no architecture from Alexander’s era is left, leaving the design of the courtyard of the Indian palace open to interpretation. To better illustrate the monsoon rains that Alexander’s troops experience on their journey, Roelfs chose an open air concept with a grand courtyard, accented with pools of water.
On the next soundstage resided the interior and the courtyard of the royal palace of Pella, Macedonia’s capital and Alexander’s boyhood home. Olympias’ chambers – in which Alexander would spend his earliest days – contain powerful frescoes from Homer’s The Iliad, and the floor is comprised of painstakingly inlaid pebbles, with hand-painted bas relief human figures decorating the walls.
Roelfs’ piece de resistance proved to be the magnificent city of Babylon. “Babylon is definitely the richest set I’ve ever done,” enthuses the designer. “Alexander’s entry into Babylon is the pinnacle of his career. He’s never seen such splendor in his life, never before encountered a culture which in many ways is superior to his own.” The lush Hanging Gardens of Babylon, one of the Seven Wonders of the ancient world, were incorporated into the design. Set decorator Jim Erickson called upon his gardening skills and horticultural knowledge to acquire plants appropriate to the historical time and place. Scenic artist Steve Mitchell painted a 150 foot long, 45 foot tall, wraparound cyclorama depicting a photo-realistic, microscopically detailed panoramic view of Babylon as seen from the palace terrace’s apex.
Perhaps the most dazzling part of the set is Darius III’s bedroom, which Alexander takes as his own after defeating the Persian King. The intricate wooden screens were all hand-carved in Morocco, as was the huge overhead fan featuring the woven image of the Persian supreme deity Ahura Mazda, and all of the canopies and drapings, fabricated in Pakistan.
Shepperton Studios played host to the incredibly ambitious re-creation of one of the world’s lost treasures, the Alexandria Library. The geometrically designed marble floor offsets mosaic frescoes depicting Alexander’s heroic deeds. The massive shelves that lined the walls held over 25,000 different scrolls, each made from real papyrus imported from Egypt to simulate the library as it was 2,500 years ago. So exacting was Jan Roelfs’ team’s attention to detail that there was a separate papyrus scroll to represent each and every single work that would have been enshrined in the ancient library, with each scroll bearing a unique identifying label noting the name of the work.
This meticulous and painstaking attention to detail is emblematic of the care taken by everyone involved with the production, ensuring that Alexander the Great’s ancient world was faithfully recreated for modern audiences to experience as never before.
"Alexander" will be released on November 24, 2004, and distributed by Warner Bros. Pictures, a Warner Bros. Entertainment Company, and Intermedia.
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Prepared and provided by Warner Bros. Pictures in support of "Alexander," starring Colin Farrell, Angelina Jolie, Rosario Dawson, Val Kilmer and Jared Leto.
