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Alexander the Great (200?)
Plot: The movie would follow the life of the historical figure Alexander the Great. This Macedonian king from the time he took the throne in 336 BC conquered most of the known world by the time of his death in 323 BC.
News:
28 October, 2001
Initial Entertainment Group has grabbed the rights to the McQuarrie/Buchanan script for Martin Scorsese to direct and for Leonardo DiCaprio to star in. The pair recently worked together on Gangs of New York.
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11 May, 2001
Entertainment Weekly is reporting that Jude Law (Enemy at the Gates, A.I.) is in negotiations to play the lead in this movie.
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15 December , 2000
The mighty reviewer of scripts, Stax, got his hands on Peter Buchanan's script and gave it the once over.
Buchman's draft is a visual feast. Every page offers some new breathtaking vista or sequence to behold. But is this story all eye candy and gory battles? No. What truly impressed me is how Buchman manages to keep this an intimate story about a human being despite all the grandeur he's surrounded by. My biggest gripe with the script for Gates of Fire was that it needed a central character for me to become involved with and its secondary characters, while certainly appealing, were similarly lacking. Alexander, on the other hand, manages to provide its anti-hero and his inner circle with numerous moments to humanize them. Alexander may claim to be fighting for the glory of Macedon, and later for the glory of Ammon (Zeus), but his own self-interests remain apparent. The theme of this tale is summed up on the draft's last page: "A Great King having climbed an impossible height – searching in vain for the ends of his empire."
I really don't have anything negative to say about Peter Buchman's script for Alexander. Is it an incredibly long tale? Yes, but you really do feel like you've spent eight years on the warpath with these men and have seen them grow and change (often for the worst). Alexander is an extraordinary basis for McQuarrie's ambitious dream project; I sincerely hope he can pull it off. It's been almost 45 years since Richard Burton starred in Alexander the Great and I think it's high time for Hollywood to revisit this legend.
You can read the entire review here.
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14 December, 2000
Just because Christopher McQuarrie's directorial debut bombed at the box office doesn't mean that Hollywood has lost confidence in him. Quite the reverse actually. McQuarrie will direct a movie based on the life of Alexander the Great for Warner Bros. He will be working from a script by Peter Buckman (Jurassic Park 3).
"I wanted to be part of a film that was similar to the films I grew up on that were larger than life with grand heroic characters at the center. What I find most compelling about Alexander the Great is the notion of a man who had conquered nine-tenths of the known world with the help of his childhood friend before the age of 25," says McQuarrie.
Alexander was certainly one of the more interesting of historical figures. Becoming king of Macedonia at the tender age of 20, he proceeded on a string of military victories that would see him conquer all of Greece, Persia, Syria, Egypt, Babylon and parts of India.
The biggest problem likely to be faced by the filmmakers is narrowing the movie's focus. Alexander did so much in his life that it would be impossible to include it all in one movie. It is almost a requirement that it look at a small piece of his life so as to make the story manageable. Filming will not begin until next year, some time after the resolution of the expected writers and actors strikes.
