Alexander revisited

Few directors have been accused of letting down fans so spectacularly as Oliver Stone for his epic box office flop Alexander. And the disappointment was made all the greater for our initial high hopes. In November 2004, when the theatrical release of Alexander was announced, the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation issued a statement praising the film: “For a big-budget Hollywood movie about historical figures, Alexander breaks new ground. Not only are there sexually charged moments between Alexander [Colin Farrell] and Bagoas [Francisco Bosch], but Hephaistion [Jared Leto] is clearly portrayed as the true love of Alexander’s life—and their romance is one of the central themes of the movie.”

In concept, yes, it was great. But in reality, there were problems. First, the accents—Jared Leto's Irish brogue; Angelina Jolie's nasal Romanian, which sounded like an ancient precursor to Natasha from Rocky and Bullwinkle. They seemed out of place and confounded audiences who expect the King’s English from their epics. There was Colin Farrell’s hated blond locks that apparently no one bought. And of course there was that whole gay thing. It is widely believed that Warner Bros. blamed the film’s poor domestic box office—roughly $34 million for a film that cost $155 million to make—on Stone’s inclusion of Alexander’s much-debated homosexuality.

Facing the biggest disappointment of his career, Stone retreated in his 2005 DVD Alexander: The Director's Cut, paring the film down from 176 minutes to an apparently more digestible 167 and specifically cutting some of the few references to Alexander’s sexual relationships with men. GLAAD and LGBTs turned on Stone for what amounted to nine minutes of footage and for describing his new version as an attempt to make the film “more accessible.” The blogosphere erupted in outrage that such a champion of the truth (JFK, Nixon, Born on the Fourth of July) had found the one truth he was not willing to stand behind. That was pretty much it: Stone had lost, the studio had won, and the movie would forever be a blight on his career and a sore spot for his gay and lesbian fans. That is, until this week, when Stone and Warner Bros. release yet another version of the belabored epic, Alexander Revisited: The Final Cut.

I must admit that I have been a champion of the film since the beginning. It’s not his best effort technically or otherwise, but I have always applauded such audacity. After all, how can one film capture the life and legend of history’s most influential leader? We are talking about a man who united the world for the first time, bringing together disparate cultures across continents. And for us, capturing the world's most famous homosexual, bisexual, or queer (call him what you may) sets the bar even higher. No matter what you might think of the film, Stone proves his similarity to Alexander: “His failures tower over other men’s successes,” as Ptolemy says.

I reached Stone on the phone as he was driving from one appointment to another and gave him an opportunity to put the Alexander outcry to rest. He sounded enthusiastic to talk about a film that most of the country, and surely the film industry, would just as soon forget. In the beginning of the third and final version of the film, Stone tells the viewer that this is the film (all 220 minutes of it) that he intended to make all along. And still, Stone is not completely at peace. In our interview he laments the limitations of the American film audience and our inability to accept the story.

So have you been doing a lot of interviews for this DVD yet?
No, you’re the first one. I’m surprised you saw it so quickly.

I’ve been tracking it for a while, trying to get my hands on it. I got it on Saturday and watched it on Sunday.
I think [The Advocate] is an important publication.

Did the original theatrical release of Alexander turn out the way you wanted it?
The first version that [audiences] saw was the theatrical cut of two hours and 57 minutes, which was the best that I could do. I was held to the limitation of it being handled in two hours or less. That was sort of the unwritten rule, it was in the contract to some degree…people won’t tolerate the 3:20 or 3:30 movies anymore, and certainly they don’t encourage intermissions anymore.

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