Oliver Stone has revealed the REAL reason why his movie Alexander bombed:
LONDON – Often-controversial director Oliver Stone has blamed the failure of his epic film Alexander on the "raging fundamentalism" in the U.S. South.
But that doesn’t explain why the film was also repudiated in the North, East and West.
The film, which stars Irish actor Colin Farrell in the story of the Macedonian conqueror Alexander the Great, was greeted with derisive reviews.
It was also a failure at the box office. Budgeted at roughly $150 million U.S., it has pulled in only $34 million so far.
"I was quite taken aback by the controversy and fierceness of the reviews about a character we don’t really know too much about," Stone said before the film’s British premiere on Wednesday.
"I operate on my passion and sometimes I’m naive. I don’t think about the consequences."
Some conservative groups objected to Alexander‘s portrayal of the famous warrior as a bisexual.
Stone, the director behind such controversial pictures as Natural Born Killers and JFK, believes the hostile reaction to the film is linked to "a raging fundamentalism in morality in the U.S."
"From day one, audiences didn’t show up," he said.
Perhaps they were smart…
"They didn’t even read the reviews in the South because the media was using the words ‘Alex the gay.’ As a result, you can bet that they thought, ‘We’re not going to see a film about a military leader that has got something wrong with him.’"
Adding that the film is "the epic of my life,"
Then get a life..
Stone says he thought Farrell’s acting was "extraordinary."
"He’s had some tough reviews but he’ll ride it out," the director said.
For his part, Farrell said that friends of his who have seen the film tell him "It’s not exactly Gladiator."
Even if some critics didn’t think Farrell was a great actor, that quote proves one thing: he is a master of understatement…..
(FOOTNOTE: Be sure to check out the Outside the Beltway Traffic Jam.)
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.