Ben-Hur is a remake of a remake: the Roman epic has been adapted for the big screen twice before, in 1925 and 1959. Yet director Timur Bekmambetov says his version goes way back to the source - Lew Wallace's 1880 novel.
The 2016 edition, Bekmambetov says, is more historically accurate than its predecessors.
"We were trying to reconstruct how it was in Jerusalem's Circus Maximus [chariot-racing stadium] 2,000 years ago," says the 55-year-old Russian. His inspiration: Formula 1 races and YouTube clips. It's all about creating "a different energy" for his take on the tale of slavery, betrayal and revenge, Bekmambetov says. "With Formula 1 cars you have a camera inside the car, it's vibrating, and that shaky footage makes you feel like you're actually inside it."
As well as POV shots, he wanted a feeling of spontaneity, a sense of events being just about caught on camera. "Mistakes make a shot look real," he says.
The "mistakes", of course, were meticulously planned and executed - Bekmambetov's set, built a few kilometres outside Rome, was 300 metres long, and the chariot race took 45 days to film.
The crew used CGI as minimally as possible, mostly for shots that would have put the animals in danger. Still, the sequence involved 32 horses galloping around together simultaneously, so nothing could be left to chance.
"There was no room for improvisation," he says. "In the original 1925 film there was an accident and some horses, and a person, died. We tried to avoid that!" Here's how they pulled it off.
- Horse-mounted camerasTo give the chariot-racing scenes more energy, the Ben-Hur film crew attached GoPros to the horses' heads
- Drone filming Before launching UAV cameras on-set, the horses were trained to become used to the constant buzzing
- The chariots Bekmambetov made the vehicles more realistic: "In real races, there were no railings - you were really exposed
Ben-Hur is released on August 26.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
