"Painless" Peter Potter (a.k.a. Paleface), Jessie W. Haywood (a.k.a. The Shakiest Gun in the West), to say nothing of Gov. William J. Le Petomane and his disloyal subjects, your legacies are secure. Writer-producer-director-star and all-around Renaissance man Seth MacFarlane, from whose loins A Million Ways to Die in the West hath sprung (actually, given the movie’s obsession with all things anal, it might have sprung from somewhere else), has gushed a lot in junket promotional interviews about how much he loves Westerns. And he’s obviously seen enough of them to know that his movie needs to hit all the obvious touchstones—gunfighters, grizzled prospectors, saloon fights, a score nodding toward the majestic direction of Elmer Bernstein, Max Steiner, Dmitri Tiomkin, and of course the wide-screen panoramas of Monument Valley intended to inspire his presumably self-aware audience to put a check mark next to "John Ford" on the laundry list of the movie’s references. (Almost as if MacFarlane were worried about kick-starting comparisons to Blazing Saddles before the comedy actually began, he’s consigned his would-be-rousing theme song, sung by Alan Jackson, to the end credits instead, and it turns out to be a wise move— Jackson comes off pretty tepid next to the straight-up whip-cracking Frankie Laine turning Mel Brooks’ deceptively straightforward lyrics into sly, satisfying satire.)
Yessir, all the pieces seem to be in place for another rip-roaring comedy western. But then the action begins--Albert Stark, the hostile wise-ass played by Seth MacFarlane himself, in his first (perhaps his last?) leading role, steps into a confrontation with a cranky citizen bearing a very big pistol. Stark, a sheep farmer who likes to carry on about how shitty and dangerous life is in the American West (hence the cumbersome title), begins trying to distract his adversary with rapid-fire riffing that wouldn’t be out of place in the mouth of Peter Griffin, and whatever goodwill the director may have carried over from his previous hit, the raunchy teddy bear comedy Ted, begins to leak out of the movie in a panic.
The only thing more tiresome than MacFarlane the actor is MacFarlane the writer-director, who not surprisingly relies on that relentless pattern of caustic asides and observations, often followed by cutaways to wacky illustrations of same, which will be familiar to anyone who’s ever grown weary in front of an episode of Family Guy or American Dad. At least in the context of the Old West it’s harder for the triple hyphenate to mindlessly riff on current pop culture, but he still gets his licks in on the old school—one riotous flashback features Gilbert Gottfried as Abraham Lincoln—and somehow that context doesn't prevent the rest of MacFarlane’s dialogue from sounding like it’s coming out of the mouths of pampered Hollywood douchebags circa 2014 who wouldn’t know a saddlebag from a swag bag. At one point Charlize Theron, playing MacFarlane’s love interest, who also happens to be the wife of murderous gunslinger Clinch Leatherwood, underlines her director’s radical thesis that "the West fucking sucks," and all I could do was admit that it certainly does, as far as MacFarlane has dared to imagine it anyway.
There is a positive about MacFarlane’s presence in this picture though-- it underlines just how important Mark Wahlberg and Mila Kunis (and Sam Jones) were to Ted, a very crude, very funny movie which gave the audience something to cling to besides its creator’s juvenile wit, a wit which itself was sharper for having to bounce off of personalities as strong as his own. MacFarlane is the whole show in A Million Ways to Die in the West, and he seems bent on testing the audience’s limit on his very special mixture of self-loathing schlub and self-satisfied smarm. Separated from his ironic Oscar show emcee persona he’s charmless. He, and the snotty personality with which he invests the movie itself, wears the audience down to a nub.
MacFarlane also wastes a game cast. Sarah Silverman and Giovanni Ribisi are sidelined with probably the movie’s best idea. They’re a sweet Christian couple—he repairs shoes for a living, she bangs cowboys (loudly) in the second-floor bedrooms of the local watering hole. But they’re saving the consummation of their own romance for their wedding night. It seems like a nifty comic premise, especially well-suited to Silverman’s own way with wide-eyed, inappropriately forthright observations, but the joke never expands-- repeated too often, it drifts away along with the characters themselves. Liam Neeson glowers impressively as Clinch, but he never gets a moment where he gets to turn the notion of a burly bad guy (with an Irish accent!) inside-out. And all apologies to those who worship at the feet of Charlize Theron, but her appeal continues to escape me. She’s always self-serious, but here she’s stuck in the role of the good girl redeemer, and she doesn’t have much in the way of instinct for climbing on board the movie’s raunchy wavelength—in fact, she’s the only performer who doesn’t appear to have a sense of humor at all. And most damningly, she eagerly guffaws at all of MacFarlane’s jokes and charming asides, the glamorous Old West equivalent of all those hapless soldiers in Good Morning, Vietnam who were contractually bound to find everything Robin Williams said hilarious in the extreme.
All the envelope-pushing in the taste department just seems desperate here too, as it does on MacFarlane’s TV shows. The obvious fixation on the rectum isn’t unexpected — rampant diarrhea, anal sex (at one point Silverman demurs from sitting at a table, opting to "give my asshole a rest") and, of course plain old flatulence, they’re all showcased. (Bad gas was funny around Brooks’ campfire, but here’s it’s just another way the West is out to kill ya.) What’s really surprising is how tedious it all is, how quickly the movie flat-lines because of it, and how conservative, for all its "Look, Ma! I said ‘fuck’ in the Old West!" flaunting of propriety, the movie reveals itself to be— there isn’t a hint of the meta-maniacal auto-destruct impulse that reduced Blazing Saddles to such memorable madness. There also isn’t a moment in this movie that can stand beside Madeline Kahn channeling Marlene Dietrich, or Alex Karras punching out a horse (MacFarlane tries, and fails, to up the ante here), or the groundbreaking/wind-breaking aural-olfactory assault of that bean-heavy campfire menu. The cowboys in Blazing Saddles may have smelled bad, but MacFarlane’s just whiff.
The following interview with Oliver Stone was conducted three years ago, in March 2011, when it looked as if the director had finally settled on the "final cut" of his maligned 2004 epic Alexander. Upon its original release no one was calling Alexander great, let alone even good, but some, including Stone, certainly believed there was a better movie somewhere within whatever compromised remnants of Stone's concept had eventually made it to the screen. Through two separate versions shaped since then, Stone refined and restructured that concept, and in 2011 he arrived at what I believed (and still believe) was a fascinating masterpiece, Alexander Revisited: The Final Cut. I was privileged to be able to discuss with him at length this brilliant movie and feel that our talk revealed a lot about what he was thinking at the time he made it, and how he still feels about shepherding this unusual movie through a modern Hollywood environment which is hardly welcoming to an individual's vision. Like Stone, I'm revisiting this interview on the occasion of yet another refinement to Alexander's march through film history, and I hope you enjoy reading it again as much as I'm honored to present it again to you.
And now, in celebration of the 10th anniversary of the release of the theatrical version, Stone has fashioned yet another version of the film, Alexander: The Ultimate Cut, which screens this week in Los Angeles at the Arclight Cinemas in Hollywood in conjunction with its Tuesday, June 3 release on Blu-ray. Commenting on this new cut, Stone reiterated his purpose: “I’ve tried throughout this process to achieve what I believe is the appropriate balance between the inner and outer journeys undertaken by this extraordinary man. Free from earlier constraints, I’ve continued to pursue this great story, and I think I have at last achieved a film that tells a story as it has never been told.” The Blu-ray set will also include an all-new historical documentary The Real Alexander and the World He Made, plus new Ultimate Cut audio commentary by Stone, theatrical cut commentary by Stone and Robin Lane Fox, and five detailed featurettes-- Resurrecting Alexander, Perfect Is the Enemy of Good, The Death of Alexander, Vangelis Scores Alexander, and Fight Against Time: Oliver Stone’s Alexander. And for those in Los Angeles, Monday night, June 2, Stone will appear in person at the Arclight Hollywood to discuss the film after the screening. Tickets are still available at the Arclight Web site. In answer to the question “Why a third Alexander?" (and now, presumably, a fourth) Stone wrote in a letter to the members of the Museum of the Moving Image in New York expressing that it has been a film which has haunted him ever since the release of the first two versions, a film he hasn't been able to exorcise from his system. Stone looks upon his adventure with the film as “an experiment, one of trial and error,” in which he is constantly striving for theclearest, most expressive interpretation of Alexander’s life. “For those who didn't appreciate the original, rest assured this is my last pass, as there is no more footage to be found,” said the director in 2011, when Alexander Revisited: The Final Cut screened at the Museum of the Moving Image for the first time. And indeed, this new "Ultimate Cut" is approximately eight minutes shorter than the version Stone and I talked about three years ago. If it’s true that, as Anthony Hopkins’ Ptolemy intones in the movie’s narration, “all men reach and fall,” then Stone's continued refinement and restructuring of this epic represents one of modern movies’ great obsessives picking himself up, dusting himself off and continuing on a quest that most would dismiss as madness, remaining true to a vision that in the end, to evoke another grand movie warrior (and mix a metaphor), results in an smell very similar to victory. In the following interview, conducted in March 2011, I think it's abundantly clear just how much Alexander means to the man who made it, even though to some it may not seem to be a personal endeavor on its surface. During our conversation Stone was gregarious, engaging and candid, and especially articulate on the subject of mythology, history and the essential unknowable quality of history, both ancient and modern. (It’s telling that even on the subject of Richard Nixon he talks about his film being “closer” to the truth than people realize, a tacit acknowledgment that even such a pervasively documented figure, who resides only 40-50 years in our collective rearview mirror, is a slippery foundation on which to base claims of absolute, objective truth.) In fact, as I got further into the interview, and particularly as I was transcribing it into the form you see here, I was struck by just how much a talk with Oliver Stone, with the director hopping from one subject to the other and back again, juxtaposing ideas from a chain of thought previously abandoned and repositioning the ideas as the response to other notions and questions, can come to resemble the thundering, free-associative experience of immersion in an Oliver Stone film. The director’s candor and openness in speaking about a film for which he has a continuing and tremendous passion ensured a lively and thoughtful exchange. If nothing else it is my hope that this interview conveys even just a small portion of that passion, which I share, for Oliver Stone’s Alexander Revisited: The Final Cut. ************************************************* DENNIS COZZALIO: One of the things that’s immediately striking about Alexander is how personal it seems as an Oliver Stone film while not particularly resembling the template of what we’ve come to think of as the films closest to your experience and politics, films like Platoon, Born on the Fourth of July or even The Doors. OLIVER STONE: I’ve wrestled with Alexander for so damn long, and at this point it’s probably my favorite movie. I loved Nixon too, and I appreciate that it’s the one you think most of too. I watched it recently because Disney is preparing an iTunes digital version that I had to check, and I ended up watching the whole thing! I couldn’t believe I directed it! Somebody else must have, right? (Laughs) DC: No, I'm pretty sure you did! The movie approaches the subject of Nixon as if it were the man’s horror-filled, self-loathing home movie playing out inside his head. Matt Zoller Seitz suggested that the movie is really Nixon’s fevered perception of the way the world sees him, as a failed leader, as a failed man. It’s a non-talking heads, non-docudramatic way of boring into him as a character study which allows you creative breathing room to examine the familiar facts and historical figures in a more speculative but no less truthful way. OS: I actually thought we were closer to the historically accurate Nixon than has been written, that we caught something unique about Nixon—I mean, I remember the Nixon administration like it was yesterday because I was a young man. I still think we were closer than people realize, certainly on the Cuba stuff, the more I find out about Cuba. I mean, Eisenhower did give the go-ahead to kill Castro, so who’s kidding who here? DC: The more you vary from a typical biographical approach, the more nervous people get. OS: Certainly that’s true. But in terms of the complexity of its structure Alexander is right up there with Nixon. I’m so far removed now that I couldn’t even tell you off the top of my head all the differences between the theatrical version and the director’s cut, or the theatrical version and this longer, final cut. But the structural changes are enormous. It’s much like the cutting in W-- you go back to the past, then you come forward. DC: Yet Alexander doesn’t settle into that predictable rhythm of chronology the way W did. OS: W is double linear, but it’s not as complex because it does go from one to two, two to one. But in Alexander, like in Nixon, you’re going inside and then inside inside. The biggest deal on the new version was starting with the battle at Gaugamela, which to me works so much better ‘cause it really focuses on the heroic concept of who Alexander was and brings the viewer immediately to a moment in time where they have to consider, what has he achieved here? Then you move back into the past where he’s formed by a conflict between mother and father—the ominous clouds of patricide and matricide are starting to form, both of which go back straight into the heart of Greek myth and Greek tragedy, which are themselves the basis of all, or most of our writing today and throughout history. DC: When you start with a big battle scene like that, it’s there to grab the audience, but it’s also a way of setting into place the mythology of Alexander that we’re all most familiar with—Alexander the conqueror—and then, as you say, digging into the subject of the mythology surrounding the person. Where was the battle placed in the narrative of the theatrical version? OS: It was more linear. After the introduction by Ptolemy, we shot into Alexander’s life as a baby and a young boy and then eventually culminated with the battle. But that was definitely the more conventional approach. I don’t know why I backed off—I’d have to go back to 2004 to remember exactly why I made that change, but at the time I was facing enormous pressure from all sides. I had to make Warner Bros. happy in the States, and at the same time the homosexuality and the violence—they were very much opposed to those elements. DC: And you were also dealing with the talk of another production which was going on at the time as well. OS: Yeah, that was always a pain in the ass because, frankly, they did not have a script—they never did. But Dino De Laurentiis kept pushing us and was announcing his project in order to cut off our financing. We did this movie wholly independently and structured it out of Europe with Moritz Borman. It’s one of the largest independent movies ever made and generated enormous publicity. But I did lose my balls, frankly. Warner Bros. is intimidating. I’d been through so many battles on Nixon and Natural Born Killers, and the reviews in my career have not been very friendly overall, so you do get scars. I talked about that in my essay, about how I didn’t carry through on some of the stuff that I should have carried through. (The afterword of Responses to Oliver Stone’s Alexander is written by Stone, in which he responds to the published articles in it and the general reception of the film—DC.) After the film failed in the English-speaking countries, it freed me up to go all the way, and I did that two and a half years later in 2007. Nobody paid attention, but it’s on digital now and I’m very happy with the result. DC: I was mesmerized by the movie, both as a physical feat and an engrossing attempt to reconnect with a style of filmmaking that last found its richest, most popular expression in films that are close to 50 years old. And one of the things that grabbed me about it is how you’ve fashioned the storytelling methods of the period—Ptolemy’s recounting of history to his scribes as the film’s narration; Philip’s recounting of the myths drawn on the cave walls to the young Alexander—as reminders both of the cinema and, more importantly, the process of becoming mythologized and how we can never have an objective grasp on history. Yet you don’t use that realization as an excuse to go completely off the boards into a grotesque fantasia. What do you see as the storyteller’s responsibility toward historical accuracy when even the first historical accounts of a life may not necessarily be seen as objective truth? OS: Well, the key to the film, as you say, is this cave scene between Philip and Alexander, and you register it more keenly because the movie goes from this battle at Gaugamela, itself the subject of much historical recollection and representation, back to the origin of the myths. DC: There’s a connection forged between actual event and mythical representation.
OS: Yes. Alexander is an amazing, original man because he is an amalgam of all these figures—Achilles, Jason, Prometheus. Prometheus was the one I brought into the discussion. Hephaestion calls him “a friend to man,” and through the film that’s what we learn. Prometheus was a friend to man. He brought fire, but he paid for it with his life—he was fed to the eagle every day. It’s the greatest love of man— and that’s why I love the Greeks, the love of man. They conceptualized this idea that you could love man, and I suppose in a way they—I’m not that familiar with Babylonian myth, but in that mythology I just don’t feel the love of man that I felt in the Greek mythology. DC: Or in the more familiar Roman mythology either, come to think of it. OS: Oh, there’s no comparison. Yes, Alexander’s empire became— And by the way, that’s a bullshit mythology that his empire didn’t last. It did last. The cultural cross-fertilization he began went on for centuries, and although it fell into four parts, the kingdoms and Alexander’s influence existed and went on. Although there were civil wars, people generally lived a better life—trade was up, the economy was up, prosperity was up. Those four empires existed until they became the Roman Empire, and the Romans were militarists. It’s a whole different way of seeing life and the world. Half the historians hate Alexander and go after him because he’s pre-Christian and go on and on about how bloodthirsty he was. But he was actually one of the least bloodthirsty of historical conquerors. He put the whole world together into one unit, like a return to the womb, and then after he took power he let autonomy reign. He had local satraps, local people run the show and mix the cultures. His idea was to mix. DC: It seems incredibly unlikely, yet the historical research bears it out, the degree to which he delegated his authority in a very modern way, and the movie does a good job of illustrating this strategy and delineating the ways in which it works against Alexander’s vision too. OS: There were a few betrayals, which he dealt with harshly. But once the deal was made, it made for a great life and Alexander left a rich empire behind him. And he was running it all while on the move. The explorer part of him kept him going. He could have easily returned to Babylon, had he wanted to, brought his mother and entourage, consolidated his empire as king and achieved enormous historical renown. But he chose to continue with the exploration because he was restless in his soul. DC: The cave scene strikes me as just one more potent metaphor, along with the scribes detailing Ptolemy’s descriptions, for the power of perpetuating mythology and enriching it with meaning, to which the movies can be included. What is the importance of that cave scene to the narrative structure of this final version of Alexander? OS: It clarifies the importance of mythology both to Alexander and to Philip. DC: And for the audience too, I would think, in determining how best to understand the spirit and will and yearning of Alexander, the man. OS: In thinking about the mythological precedents for Alexander, I wrote down the names “Achilles, Oedipus, Heracles, Jason, Prometheus and Medea.” Jason and Medea are linked to each other and to Alexander because Medea was Jason’s wife, the mother of his children, and to Heracles because Alexander did go mad, he did turn on Roxane, his own wife, and say “I never want to see you again.” So he never saw his son. He cut himself off from Roxane, a very “Heraclean” thing to do. Heracles, one of the great heroes, goes mad and kills his own children. In much the same way, Alexander cuts Roxane off because he thinks she’s responsible for the death of his lover, his soul mate, Hephaestion. And Oedipus is in there too, because he’s blind in his heart and his soul. He doesn’t know if his mother participated in his father’s death. He always must question himself, because his mother openly exalted—and that is historically correct—at his father’s death. Olympias, of course, says Alexander isn’t even his father’s son—she says he’s the son of Zeus. So Alexander questions himself. Should I kill my mother and do like Orestes did with Clytemnestra and kill his mother? Which would make him guilty of two crimes—patricide and matricide. So you see how the mythology is a huge issue in the movie, which works out entirely in India when he goes up against the elephant and sacrifices himself. DC: The movie is fascinated with the idea of conquest as not so much geological or cultural domination but as migration. Is it simply that the world was as yet unknown, or that Alexander was relatively cognizant of not destroying the culture of the peoples he conquered, that is the difference for you between Alexander’s bloody migration and that of, say, pioneers in the American West or George W. Bush’s disastrous distractions in Iraq and Afghanistan? OS: The word “simply” throws me a bit. The fact that the world was unknown is unbelievable. It’s literally hard to conceptualize. According to Aristotle’s maps, if you reached the edge of the world you fell off! But here was a man who was thinking about pushing past those boundaries near the end of his life. Not only was he going to conquer Saudi Arabia, but he talked about the Straits of Gibraltar and Rome. If he’d lived a long life he probably would have founded six or seven global centers, from Spain to Rome to Carthage. And each one of those centers would have respected the local culture. Every other emperor goes back to Rome, goes back to Paris, goes back to Berlin, wherever. He didn’t sack the places. That’s why he got into such problems with the Macedonians. They wanted to consolidate the wealth. They wanted to be rich. Ptolemy relates that the generals tell him at one point, “What do we have to gain after all this travel?” I also imply in the voiceover, as heard in the long version, that Ptolemy is very likely part of the conspiracy to kill Alexander because Alexander just kept going and the generals couldn’t stand him anymore. DC: As I see it, it’s this difference that you see in Alexander, the one between exploring and pillaging or exploiting, that makes him a ripe subject for an Oliver Stone movie. OS: No one ever ruled like him. He married three princesses of Eastern origin, one of whom, Roxane (played by Rosario Dawson), antagonized the army. By right he should have married a Macedonian girl first, but he didn’t. Another difference: Why wouldn’t he have brought his mother to Babylon? Historians don’t seem to even ask that question. He doesn’t want to see the bitch. And Angelina Jolie— Fuck ‘em. She was great! DC Yep. She was mesmerizing. Yes, she pitched her performance high, but so what? That wouldn’t exactly be a first in a historical epic. But some people also had a problem with the fact that there’s only a couple of years difference in the ages of Jolie and Colin Farrell. OS: So she was sexy! She wasn’t some old coot, the typical representation of pent-up female royalty in movies like these in the past. She was a young, hot chick who wasn’t sure she could actually get her son on the throne, so there was a lot of motive for her to get rid of Philip, who had his own son later who was fully Macedonian. DC: I really think she nailed the part and gives the movie a jolt of sinister spirit. And I recall she was one of the things that even naysayers liked about the original version. OS: She loved the role, and she won’t back down from it. DC: It’s a really fearless performance in many ways, because she does take it to the edge of camp, with the sinuous Eastern European-type accent and everything. But I like Jon Solomon’s point in his essay in the book on the popular reception of the movie in retort to all the flippant criticism of her choice of an allegedly silly accent. He wrote: “For all the amusing jokes about Angelina Jolie’s inappropriate 'Transylvanian/Count Dracula' accent, have any of these critics looked at a map of Southeastern Europe, or do they have a Molossian Epirote voice coach they could recommend to the next actress who portrays Olympias?” OS: And what of all the Irish? The Macedonians were all portrayed with Irish accents, the Greeks English, being the establishment power. DC: A nice twist on the curious tradition of the whole of Europe being portrayed by anyone with a British accent. OS: And Olympias was the outsider, the outer tribe, so she’s got to have an accent completely unlike theirs. But this whole “camp” business is a cheap shot. You’re telling me from the feminist point of view that there’s no room for a caricature of a dominating woman? You have to allow for Joan Crawford, Bette Davis and Faye Dunaway and the like, because we do have those figures in our lives, and in the movies, and they do represent a certain truth. DC: What’s great about The Final Cut is that it’s got room to deal with all this stuff, all these elements pushing at the edges of the frame. It’s not in a hurry, but at the same time it’s the furthest thing from stodgy and remote. Did you have a hard time talking Warner Bros. into letting you go back a second, and then a third time to try and get this movie into the shape you wanted it to be? OS: The DVD did well all over the world, so I actually went back and talked with the head of Warner Home Video, Jeff Baker, a department under the nose of the Warner Bros. theatrical film division, who would not have supported the idea of going back into Alexander. Because the DVD had done so well, Jeff Baker let me do this. No money. I just did it on my own, supported by them. They made The Final Cut possible, and we did a lot of work on it, remixing, editing. We worked on it a long time, the original editors and I. Warner Bros. issued the DVD and Blu-ray and it turned out okay, because without any advertising, as a catalog item, they’ve sold close to a million in the United States alone. But still nobody knows about it. Matt is so kind to allow us to do this. The Museum of the Moving Image has a great new theater, so this is a big thing for me, to get the movie talked about a little bit by people like you who care about movies. It’s a huge effort. DC: Hopefully it’ll be a big deal for people in the New York area who may not realize this is probably their one chance to see this version of the movie on a big screen. OS: I hope so. Michael Wilmington, bless his soul, called the movie Lawrence of Arabia in hell. That was in his original review. He got it. He got how mad this film was. DC: It really does connect up to that epic tradition and honors it, but it’s also very modern, it’s very much of your filmmaking style, and the way you play with the chronology not only emphasizes elements of the story with more power, but opens up the movie’s allusive possibilities. You’re seeing images and scenes juxtaposed with each other that allow you to see things you might not have had the scenes been separated by time in a more conventional way. With Alexander you’re consciously reaching for the visual language of the cinema epic which you’ve suggested is a bit of a cultural anachronism these days. You’re evoking the templates and spirit, if not remotely the same style, of a master of the form like David Lean, and even affording the technological advantages, yours feels like a movie that could have come from that time, even if it clearly would have shocked people. OS: I think I knew in my deep subconscious that we were dead in the water. We never even opened in America, especially in the South, and that didn’t have anything to do with reviews. That was because the subject matter was “Military” and “Gay.” It’s like Brando in Reflections in a Golden Eye. There’s no fucking way you’re gonna get a movie to open with a gay military theme. Brokeback Mountain is one thing, but it better not be the military. But I just love those epic movies, that epic style. I loved them as a kid, even the ones that were panned, like The Robe. Victor Mature! I love that shit! Love it, love it, love it. I miss it. It’s sensual, extreme, fun. DC: And those movies really let you see what it is they wanted to show you too. There was a chance for the viewer to absorb the wealth of beauty (some will call it cheesiness) and information on that wide screen. That’s another thing that surprised me about Alexander Revisited: The Final Cut too. It’s a grand movie that’s finally allowed the time to mentally sift through all the history and the characters and take in visually the rich, sensuous imagery you and DP Rodrigo Prieto managed to get on screen. OS: We went to India to shoot some of those landscapes. Did you notice when he’s looking out at the mountain range that you see his face in the contours of the mountainside? ** DC: Yes, I did! In fact, I thought I was seeing things when that image snuck up on me. It’s a beautifully hallucinatory image, and for a moment you actually entertain the thought, the hope that it might have been one of those divine accidents, like the shadows of the raindrops on the window sill appearing to make Robert Blake cry in In Cold Blood. Yet it is so deeply connected to the character that he would project himself onto the landscape like that. Now, that’s how you use CGI. OS: (Laughs) Yes. DC: And all throughout the movie demonstrates a pretty judicious approach to computer-generated imagery. It allows the epic scope, but I don’t remember a moment where it jolted me out of the story. But beyond wrestling with the film intellectually in terms of trying to structure life not necessarily lived in three or five acts into a manageable script, the sheer physical size of this production must have been daunting. OS: I’ve never experienced anything like it. Three continents, a massive amount of military— It was like being a general but at the same time trying to keep it intimate. We ended up shooting on the border of Laos and Thailand. That’s right on the banks of the Mekong River where he’s at when he delivers that wonderful speech where he says, “These are the things that destroy men.” And then we were in England in the winter, Morocco in the late summer/fall, and we finished up in Thailand in early winter. And the sets we built in England—It was an amazing experience to go from the rainy, cold, miserable outdoors of England at that time of year— gray, gray, gray—and then walk into a set at Pinewood Studios and see all those lush interiors. I’d love to do that period again. The dancing, the choreography, the attention to detail in all the cultures-- Indian, Greek. We were back in ancient Bactria, which was an incredible cultural capital. And Balkh, an unbelievable city. If the Afghani thing ever ends, they’ll be able to continue some excavations that will reveal they were a much more advanced civilization than people know, as was the Macedonian, by the way. DC: According to Joanna Paul in her essay “Alexander and the Cinematic Epic Tradition,” the Director’s Cut of Alexander did come under heavy criticism from the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation for what it termed your compromised artistic integrity regarding the toning down of the film’s sexuality and the deleting of certain scenes. But one of the things that heartened me about The Final Cut was the way in which the whole subject of Alexander’s sexuality was approached. It couldn’t have been more nonjudgmental, and it certainly didn’t amount to the gay camp spectacle that everyone was predicting before the movie came out. OS: As you say, nonjudgmental. It was what it was. People especially hated the character of the eunuch Bagoas, most particularly that we showed him kissing Alexander. That’s in the third version, but it didn’t make it into the theatrical cut. He was muted down to nothing in the first two versions. But Bagoas is a major character. Mary Renault wrote about him in The Persian Boy, one of the great books she wrote. Bagoas was the main squeeze in Alexander’s life. You sense, in the third version, the great bond between them. But I think Bagoas the eunuch is instrumental in demonstrating that Alexander went beyond even homosexuality. He was an explorer. With Bagoas he approached a third gender. DC: As depicted in the movie, his entire worldview seems to be encapsulated in that kind of openness. OS: It’s beyond feminine or masculine. When you get into the idea of a third gender, it’s important to note how Bagoas physically occupies a space between the two—he’s not transgender, he behaves like a woman, but he’s also masculine— he’s a great, athletic dancer, and he identifies with the female. Alexander, in his relationship with Bagoas, goes beyond masculine and feminine definitions. And because of his upbringing, with his mother and father being so strongly opposite, you feel the place from where that exploratory tendency emerged. That was the great quest of his life, getting back to the womb, trying to make it all one—one world, one sexuality. DC: Given the effort and inspiration that inform this movie, particularly this version of this movie, and many other movies of yours, do you think that it’s in you, at this point in your career, to make a movie that could be, rightly or wrongly, seen as a straight entertainment sans political themes or concerns, something like Any Given Sunday or U-Turn? OS: Absolutely. It’s all temporary, this matrix, this tyranny of popular fashion shows, who’s hot, who’s cold, what kind of movies should be made, all that crap. Nixon was a tremendous letdown. I love that movie, and I know you love it. I feel that few people saw through all the fog surrounding that movie and picked up on what it really was. In the same way, Any Given Sunday is filled with the same kind of detail. If you love football, you’ll see that detail and appreciate it. Currently I’m doing a 12-hour documentary regarding the forgotten history of the United States. Three years of work so far and the culmination of all my themes in contemporary American history from 1945 till now. But I am working separately on a film called Savages. Totally fun entertainment—Southern California, young people, drugs, violence, sex, Jules and Jim-- (Laughs) Personal? No. I was never that, but I love that kind of movie, like U-Turn or Any Given Sunday. I’m comfortable in all those worlds. ***************************************************** RECOMMENDED FURTHER READING AND VIEWING
The trailer for Alexander Revisited: The Final Cut.
** The image to which Stone refers at this point in the interview is visible in this trailer
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