Oliver Stone’s highly-anticipated film "Alexander" is based on the true story of one of history’s most luminous and influential leaders, Alexander the Great – a man who had conquered 90% of the known world by the age of 25. Alexander led his virtually invincible Greek and Macedonian armies through 22,000 miles of sieges and conquests in just eight years, and by the time of his death at the age of 32 had forged an empire unlike any the world had ever seen, or has seen since. The film chronicles Alexander’s path to becoming a living legend, as he relentlessly pushed his army across the sands, mountains and jungles of exotic and mysterious foreign lands, conquering every enemy who dared oppose him. Incredibly, and possibly unique in the annals of military history, Alexander was never defeated in battle.
“Alexander was perhaps the greatest warrior of all time,” says "Alexander" director/screenwriter Oliver Stone. “As a film student, I had frustrated fantasies of going back in time with documentary cameras and a small crew to actually film Alexander’s military campaigns. So, 32 years after film school, I finally had my one chance to go back and recreate the period as best I could.”
In order to achieve the extreme level of realism that Stone was looking for, Captain Dale Dye, USMC (Ret.), Stone’s longtime collaborator and perhaps the film industry’s foremost military expert, was brought in to train star Colin Farrell and the rest of the key performers who portray Alexander’s comrades in preparation for the film. (In recent years, military ‘boot camp’ for actors preparing to portray soldiers has become commonplace, but it was an unprecedented undertaking when Captain Dye invented it for Stone’s "Platoon" nearly 20 years ago.) During a long, hard month of work, the cast gained expertise in such archaic specialties as sword fighting, wielding shields, bows and arrows, slings, javelins and sarissas (fearsome lances that measured up to 18 feet long), as well as mastering cavalry horsemanship, standard bearing and military formations.
“I don’t train actors,” states Captain Dye unequivocally. “I train people who become soldiers, and hopefully they have some talent as actors. These kids came in and the first thing they did was learn that there is something more important than themselves. They learned to live with other gents who were in a military unit and support the mission of that unit. My job was to turn them into credible Macedonian soldiers, with an emphasis on the word ‘soldier.’ They had to understand that concept before they could understand anything else.”
“Captain Dye worked us all day,” recounts Farrell, who began his training in the United States and Spain six weeks before the start of the film’s official ‘boot camp.’ “Then every night we would stand down and he would talk to us about Alexander’s tactics and strategies, the history of various battles, and explain the mind of the warrior. We definitely got stronger physically, and it got us ready, because the first scene we shot was the battle of Gaugamela, which was tough going on everyone.”
One of the most significant challenges facing the actors was their varying degrees of experience on horseback. Macedonian cavalry rode bareback, without the benefit of saddle or stirrups, which even for experienced riders is an exceedingly difficult skill to master. Horse trainer Ricardo Cruz Moral and his team first trained the actors on saddles before moving them to bareback. Finally, he taught the cast how to employ weaponry while riding, for battle sequences in which they had to wield 14-foot-long sarissas while maintaining their positions in historically accurate formations, often in the midst of dust storms that seriously restricted their line of vision.
Key to the training of actors, stuntmen, extras and soldiers was the re-creation and execution of the “phalanx,” the strategic military formation developed by King Philip and later perfected by his son Alexander. A phalanx consists of 256 men formed 16 by 16 squared, carrying 18-foot-long sarissas, assembled into a nearly impenetrable formation. (The phalanx’s modern-day equivalent would be a tank.) Philip’s use of the indomitable phalanx and his concept of maintaining a standing army of paid soldiers ensured that when Alexander rose to power, he had the tools in place to conquer the world.
