Battle To Film Alexander The Great

As armies mass again on the borders of Mesopotamia, film-makers are fighting to be first over the top with a movie about the original and most rapacious western imperialist of them all - Alexander the Great.

Four of Hollywood's most prodigious talents have long wanted to measure themselves against the upstart Macedonian who conquered nine-tenths of the known world in his 33 years. But for decades film-makers have shied away from fully portraying the complex personality of the most feared and revered leader in history.

Now at last the time seems to have come for the first bisexual action hero - with Alexander hopping, in one script, from the bed of his boyhood friend and lover Hephaestion, to that of the Queen of the Amazons and onward through a host of eunuchs and catamites.

Oliver Stone, Martin Scorsese and Ridley Scott have all laboured on pet projects about the messianic king who led a modest army out of his father's Balkan kingdom and brought it to the borders of India, demolishing empires and civilisations in his wake.