US moviegoers may have shunned Oliver Stone's Alexander over fears of gay sex scenes, but the director is hoping for a more reasonable reception in the UK. Steve Pratt reports.

THE battle lines have been drawn. On one side, American movie critics and cinemagoers. On the other, controversial film director Oliver Stone and the mighty army of Alexander the Great.

The first skirmish resulted in defeat for Stone - his $160m biopic about the warrior king who'd conquered 90 per cent of the known world before he was 25, flopped disastrously at the US box office in the face of attacks from historians and critics, and public indifference.

Battle-weary, but still full of fighting talk and hopeful that European audiences will appreciate Alexander more than his countrymen, Stone arrived in London for this week's UK opening and admitted he'd underestimated the opposition.

"I move forward on my passion. Sometimes I am naive, I don't think of the consequences. I can't see it coming," he says. "I thought Alexander would be a safe subject because it's an amazing one. I was taken aback by the controversy of the film that people don't know much about."

The poor reaction in the US must be particularly upsetting as Stone has wanted to make a movie about Alexander's exploits for several decades. He beat to the screen other planned films about the conqueror, including one from Moulin Rouge director Baz Luhrmann. Being first hasn't done him any favours, although he has one champion in historian Robin Lane Fox, an expert on Alexander the Great and author of the most widely-read history of the subject.

He acted as historical advisor on Stone's film, which he describes as an "epic drama with an unusually strong reference to history". That means he believes it's an accurate portrayal of Alexander's short but action-packed life.

"Of course, this is a movie with a limited time. It's all very well for critics to say, 'Why didn't you put in so-and-so', but Oliver has spun drama like Shakespeare spun drama like Henry V," he says.

Three-times Oscar winner Stone is no stranger to controversy, through films such as JFK, Born On The Fourth Of July, Nixon and Platoon. In real life he served in Vietnam and was decorated with the bronze star for valour. You can understand, with his background, why the epic tale of Alexander was fascinating. "As a young man I read about him in one of the Random House series of books for youngsters. It was a simplified life but through the years he was a hero of mine," he says.

"It was really when I read Professior Fox's book in the 1980s that I really understood the man better and began to admire him more and more and more. Why make a movie about him? Perhaps because he was the most unique man in history, more things happened to him of a strange nature and extraordinary nature than to any other human being I know of. He was involved in dozens of battles and is a great dramatic figure that's never been done as a movie."

Not quite true, as Richard Burton played the Macedonian king in a 1956 film, but Stone's movie is far more ambitious and expensive. So the rejection by US critics and audiences must have been especially disappointing. "For me this has been a long process and we created - 1,000 people put their hearts into this - something that will last in many forms," he says, no doubt mindful of the upcoming DVD release.

"It's the epic of my life because as a film student you take one genre at a time. This is my costume epic and I am very happy because I was able to chose one person that I admire. I am very proud of the film."

What went wrong in the US, he feels, is that everyone concentrated on the issue of Alexander's sexuality. The film shows the king, played by Irish actor Colin Farrell, as being bisexual.

"The film shows another world to America. It's pre-Christian. Mores are different, sexuality is different. Having come from 24 foreign countries in the last few months, it wasn't an issue in those places but it was an issue in America," says Stone.

"There's raging fundamentalism in sexuality. From day one, audiences didn't show up because there was one phrase in the media - Alexander the Gay. As a result, you can bet your ass, people are not going to see a leader who, in their head, has something wrong with him. We took quite a beating in America from day one. The Americans don't study history as Europeans do."

At one point Greek lawyers threatened to sue Warner Bros and Stone for depicting Alexander the Great as bisexual. They abandoned trying to get the film banned after admitting that it didn't contain the explicit scenes they had feared.

In America, distributors have long known that the majority of cinema audiences tend to go for the lowest common denominator and have a lower tolerance level of sexual behaviour that strays from the straight and narrow. Alexander producer Moritz Borman says that they always knew the US would be more difficult with this kind of material. He can produce figures to show that in the 22 territories in which the film has opened so far, it opened at number one in 21. America, of course, was the exception.

He goes as far as to say that perhaps they should have made two films - a shorter, less controversial version for the US and another for more sophisticated European and foreign audience. Stone, who's sitting beside him, doesn't go along with that idea. "I would not have done that," he says.

He believes movies, paintings, books can work in different ways. The bond between Alexander and his male friends in the film is only hinted at, there are no explicit scenes. "I think that bond can be suggested in various ways. That's film-making," says Stone. "I will continue to work on this film in its DVD form."

Elsewhere, Stone has argued that people were distracted by comparisons between Alexander the Great's forays into the Middle East and President George W Bush. He felt the US invasion of Iraq contributed to the film's failure at the US box office.

The stars of Alexander rally round to support Stone and his movie. Colin Farrell, the former star of BBC's Ballykissangel who's become an international movie star, was caught up in the director's passion for the project after an initial meeting that didn't go as planned. "I had dinner with Oliver but what happened was that I was skint and had been in the pub for four hours with me mates and arrived very drunk. I don't think I was what he considered to be a regal king of Macedonia," recalls Farrell.

"Subsequently, his passion for the piece won me over. I auditioned and got the part. It was one of the most amazing things I had read. It was draining just to read the script. The journey of Alexander as a human being and force of nature was one of the most incredible and inspiring things I had read. I jumped at the chance to work with Oliver."

Source material about Alexander was in plentiful supply, which was helpful at the start but which began to cloud the issue later on. "There was a lot to reference as far as literature goes. All the actors on the set had a copy of Robin Lane Fox's book," he says. "But there were so many conflicting opinions that you had to come back to Robin's book or Oliver's script because that was the perspective we were describing."

What's got lost amid all the adverse critical reaction and audience indifference is that people may not have gone to see Alexander because, despite all the power and the passion of Stone, it's just not a very good film.

* Alexander (15) is showing in cinemas now.