Epic: A Cast of Thousands! Timeshift

Big.

Widescreen.

Loud.

Technicolor.

Long.

Charlton Heston.

Charlton Heston.

The Hollywood epic had it all!

Literally, a cast of thousands.

People always have to die for epics, don't they?

The largest sets, the most wonderful locations, the best scores.

But the epic wasn't finished there.

Like the films themselves, the list of ingredients grew longer and longer.

The romance, the happy ending, the good moral story.

I think an epic has got to knock your socks off.

I mean, if doesn't do something that really stretches your eyeballs,

then, it's not doing its job.

The glory days of big cinema were the '50s and '60s.

This was the age of Cleopatra and Ben-Hur,

films so gigantic their very names seem to capture the essence of the epic.

This was their heyday - when epics entertained the world

and everyone was drawn into the orbit of their stellar openings.

Nothing succeeded like excess, and each new film added to

the lustre of the genre with its own attempt to up the ante.

Join us as we share with you now:

The Ten Commandments Of Big Film Making.

The epic story is always larger than life.

It has to stage an important event from antiquity.

It has to show you the fall of the Roman Empire, or the Red Sea parting.

Something vast and violent occurring - the Circus Maximus.

Maybe, if you're really lucky, some Christians being attacked by lions.

The setting of choice was the ancient world,

a place where good and evil faced each other.

Often in open-toed sandals.

Primarily, and I think what most people think of as epics

were dubbed "swords-and-sandals" kind of movies.

And these could cross, you know, from Quo Vadis and Spartacus,

sort of great stories of the Roman Empire or classical Greece.

Often real history, heavily adapted for the movie requirements.

I ask nothing for myself.

I humble myself before you!

Have pity on a proud old man.

These stories hooked the audience with the epic struggle

of a charismatic protagonist.

You choose a hero, who's almost invariably male,

who has some terrible tragedy befall him,

and spends a very long part of the film

trying to recoup his earlier position.

He usually fights against an Emperor.

He's motivated by the love of his family.

He usually has a romance.

No self-respecting epic was content without a dash of romance -

of epic proportions.

Oh, what will I do?

I'm not as strong as I thought I was.

I have not learnt to live without you.

In the '50s and '60s, families were going.

And so, you'd have to give something for everyone,

as patronisingly as give something for mum, ha-ha!

There was a reason Hollywood championed epic stories.

Television posed an unprecedented threat.

Cinema's best defence against this upstart was size,

in every meaning of the word.

The little box in the living room looked on in envy as the epic grew.

And grew.

And grew.

We attack again tomorrow.

You will need time to recover your strength!

Must be tomorrow.

The enemy will only grow stronger while we grow weaker.

It's that time when cinema is fighting back against the television,

and asking, "What can we do that TV can't do?

"Where can we take the audience where that flickery black-and-white thing

"in the corner of the living room is powerless to take them?"

And the answer is, the classical world.

And tales from the classical world carried their own inbuilt bonus,

they contained a strong religious element,

and in more churchgoing times, audiences flocked to see them.

It was like being inside a Bible story, you know.

You could read it in the Bible, but my goodness, this brought it to life.

And these films really did serve that function, I think.

They were kind of an illustrated Bible.

The story of Quo Vadis, the first big epic of the age,

had it all, as its trailer proclaimed.

Witness the infamous revelry of the night in Nero's court.

You will stand with the Christians in the catacombs.

See the battle of the giants.

You'll know the love of Marcus and Lygia.

The spectacle of Nero's circus.

The terror of the arena when Ursus stands alone against death.

One of the great features of Quo Vadis is it's set during the period

when Nero, you know, set fire to the city.

So you get a really kind of spectacular burning of Rome.

# Take now this, Rome

# Oh, receive her lovely flames

# Consume her as would a furnace

# Burn on. Oh, ancient Rome

# Burn on. Burn on! #

He's a violent, repressive ruler who destroys people's lives at a whim,

who erases the city at a whim.

And yet, we can enjoy the spectacle of the city toppling.

We can enjoy this falling masonry.

There's fire everywhere, extras running about all over the place.

Incredible sets being demolished and destroyed before our eyes.

There's a fantastically spectacular image of a city on fire,

one that would really be meaningful to an audience in 1951,

that would still have memories

and who'd have seen images of the burning of cities in the Second World War.

Quo Vadis was an instant hit, helped in no small part by the sheer

variety of spectacle its story offered.

These lions start pouring out of these pits

concealed beneath the surface of the arena.

Very cleverly constructed with

special-effect shots,

so that the actors playing the Christian victims

aren't in too much danger, I hope!

As with all epics, the effect would be unimaginable without

the presence of armies of extras.

The Persians.

In big cinema, even the extras demand attention.

The cast of thousands had an active role to play -

they are the children of Israel, the people of Rome,

the slave army.

Hail Caesar!

Hail Caesar!

Hail Caesar!

If you were an extra in an epic, you could expect to be doing

all sorts of things - galloping around on a horse,

running away from somebody on a horse,

breaking rocks at some terrible place of forced labour,

or cheering as a Christian was disembowelled by a lion.

Making an epic required the same level of organisation

as waging a small war.

Or perhaps even a big war.

Soldiers!

Citizens of Valencia!

We have starved you! Now you are weak!

But we do not wish to attack you!

We are not your enemies!

It's a forgotten art, I think, in certain ways,

that level of crowd scene,

that level of containment of thousands.

So your camera is going to... Imagine the amount of aides you are going to have to control, you know,

2,000 people, 5,000 people,

getting them not to kind of stare into the camera, not to pull a silly face.

You are the unity which is Rome.

'When you think there must be someone sticking their tongue out somewhere.'

Crowds are notoriously difficult to control. You can have someone at the back,

looking the wrong direction, and they might not be spotted

when the director is looking through the viewfinder.

An entire scene can be ruined by people in the back.

So it is obviously much easier not to have to corral all these people,

and shout through a megaphone, "You at the back, take your sunglasses off!"

So I think that I love it when I see that.

I love seeing all this, cos I like to marvel at it

and also I like to imagine that I'm really there.

Crowds don't come much bigger than the mass exodus

in Cecil B. DeMille's 1956 version of The Ten Commandments.

The film's biblical story shows Moses leading the Hebrews out of slavery.

You have these thousands of extras playing the Israelites,

flowing through this desert space with sphinxes and everything.

It's a vast mass of people on the move.

And, you know, this would have been overwhelming, I think,

for its original audience.

Marshalling 20,000 extras and their livestock was a unique challenge.

So what the special-effects people did was to run hot wires

down either side of what would be the avenue down which the extras had to walk,

so that anyone touching it would be forced to move away.

And in that way,

they kept a kind of clear track down the centre of the screen.

For the epic, the sky is the limit.

Or the sea.

The Ten Commandments showed Moses parting the Red Sea,

a scene of typically modest ambition requiring only cutting-edge effects

and a huge crowd of extras for its impact.

There's no way you could part the Red Sea and just send the dribble of extras through to do it.

These are films, these are stories that required casts of thousands.

In fact, the volume of the cast was something that these films

sold themselves to audiences with.

Audiences were compelled by the idea that enormous numbers of people

had been corralled and marshalled about to make these pictures.

In 1961, El Cid revealed a Hollywood secret.

If you want an army of military-trained extras,

go to Spain to hire them.

One of the most spectacular scenes in Anthony Mann's El Cid

is the battle of Valencia, where you see this vast mounted army

pouring out of the city gates and down onto the beach.

And these 11th-century warriors are belting down this beach

and they meet the opposing army.

And you see a rain of arrows coming down.

El Cid is the story of a Castilian knight who played a vital role

in the unification of Spain.

The film was shot in Spain

and cashed in on the inexpensive labour of General Franco's army.

The battle on the beach deployed around 3,000 troops,

as well as over a thousand mounted police.

They also brought their own horses.

One of the advantages of using an army is that

they're already trained in combat, they're trained in horseback,

they respond very well to direction from second unit directors and stunt coordinators.

They do what they're told in ways that ordinary civilians often don't.

Despite having professionals on hand,

the battle scenes were still a dangerous place to be.

I would imagine directing a battle scene

before the days when you can enhance it afterwards in post-production

must be the worst job in the world.

In those old days, you know, Health and Safety were not quite the twin gods of everything as they are now.

And they're obviously using not real axes, but they're using something.

They're all hitting each other with something, aren't they?

There's one moment, if you look carefully in the background of the shot,

where one of the soldiers is knocked over by Rodrigo's horse

after he's been wounded as the Cid is riding back,

with an arrow in his chest, to the castle.

He runs straight over an extra who gets trampled into the surf.

I hope he got danger money, but whatever it is, it makes for a great moment.

To stand out from the crowd, epic stars needed to be larger than life.

One actor has become synonymous with the genre - Charlton Heston.

Well, that was certainly a pretty hectic ride.

Did it nearly come off?

Fortunately not, or I wouldn't be here.

It's very easy to be have it turned into a...sort of a

turgid minestrone of

extras running around waving torches or, in this case, spears.

And principle actors running around waving swords.

And, as I said earlier, I was determined, if I did this,

not to have it just a series of sword fights, all of which I want.

Heston is, of all actors,

the one most closely identified with the epic form.

And Charlton Heston himself defined the epic as any film that he was in.

Your colours are no longer black.

He had a kind of formidable quality, an authoritarian quality,

but also one of a kind of moral authority.

If you are forsworn, may you die such a death as your brother did.

Struck from behind by the hand of a traitor!

Say Amen!

You press me too far, Rodrigo.

Say Amen.

Charlton Heston is your man, because he looks so imposing.

He's got an amazing physique, and actually, an old-fashioned physique.

Not like the kind of gym-toned, bodybuilder physique

that all American male actors have to have now.

Those days, he just looked like he played a lot of sport, which

it's so much more true, probably, to the time,

when he was playing a gladiator or whatever else.

I mean, he wasn't always the best actor in the world,

but he was a great star.

Come! We'll look for your hidden place

before the others find it.

And it wasn't just the stars who were big, the screen itself

was bursting its bounds.

The epic helped change the shape of cinema.

Until now, the choice for visual entertainment had been limited to either the black-and-white

of the television screen, proudly expanding to 10 or even 12 inches,

or the equally cramped, almost square screen of the cinema.

Like proud parents, the studios sought ways to show off

their shiny new epics.

They began to develop rival screening technologies.

Widescreen cinema was born.

Because size mattered.

The huge curving screen is adjustable to accommodate any picture show.

Widescreen, cinemascope. In fact, everything.

The new cinema is the perfect house to show, in all their splendour,

those epic spectacular films which are today the pride of the cinema.

In 1953, 20th Century Fox became the first studio

to release a dramatic film in their own widescreen format -

CinemaScope.

A huge Technicolor epic was needed to do justice to the vast size of the screen.

And they chose The Robe.

The Robe is the story of a Roman military tribune, played

by Richard Burton, who commanded the unit that crucified Jesus.

Fox hyped the opening of The Robe.

But then, they were expanding the audiences' horizons.

The first shot of The Robe, the first CinemaScope film, is of a massive red curtain.

Very much like the curtain that would just have parted

in the auditorium itself where the audience were seeing the film.

The red curtain carries the opening titles of the movie,

and, after the end of the titles,

the curtain on the screen parts.

Rome, Master of the Earth, in the 18th year of the Emperor Tiberius.

The screen gets bigger,

and bigger, and bigger,

and BIGGER!

And before you know it, the screen is enormous.

And you're in the middle of a gladiator arena.

The sound is loud, it's stereo.

There's speakers all over the cinema, it's coming out of everywhere.

And you hear Richard Burton's booming voice telling you

this is the height of the Roman Empire.

I think the experience would have been extraordinary.

The makers of The Robe pulled out all the stops to create

a splash with their new format - they even cheated a little

in post-production by adding shots from another film.

The opening shot of the gladiator arena,

that wasn't from the film itself.

It was actually from Demetrius And The Gladiators, the sequel to The Robe.

And they just thought, "Hang on, we need a really big image,

"big kind of epic scene to begin with.

"Let's just stick this shot from the sequel in, to kind of like..."

There isn't... That shot with the gladiator arena...

There isn't a gladiator arena in the rest of the film.

It just appears in that one shot.

Fox believed that the experience of watching The Robe in CinemaScope

should be more immersive, like watching it in 3D but without the glasses!

And some critics thought it would be more honest

and more realistic cinema

because, as a spectator,

you would be able to pick out for yourself

what you would be looking at.

So when you get something like this sort of slave market scene.

And has the protagonist kind of walking along through this scene,

and really observing Roman life,

I think the idea was that you could, as a spectator,

find the position almost for yourself in that screen.

Look here, look here! A singer, a dancer, a companion for a noble lady, or a noble gentleman.

Stop, gentleman!

A priceless gem for your household.

Look here...

The Robe was a winner for 20th Century Fox.

The Robe was a box office hit, it was the biggest hit of the year.

CinemaScope has come. Widescreen is the future of cinema.

Following this success, the other studios scrambled to

create their own widescreen formats such as VistaVision at Paramount.

The vast expanse of these new bigger screens needed filling with

something that would convince the audience that

what they were watching was actually happening.

Rome wasn't built in a day.

And neither were the sets that anchored these extraordinary stories in reality.

They may not have been historically accurate,

but, God, they felt authentic.

When one looks back on these films and, for example,

you see stills from them or stills of the main sets,

you are just amazed, really, by the vast, the sheer scale of them.

It's a very important factor, I think,

that the money is spent on creating those sort of backgrounds,

cos it gives a veracity to the whole thing.

To entice viewers away from the telly,

the studios dangled their remarkable sets like a carrot.

Senators of Rome!

The fact that the sets are huge is endlessly publicised

in the sort of pre-film publicity.

So a lot of the advertising that was enticing people

to come into the cinema was kind of telling them,

how much money was spent on the sets the costumes, the set designs.

So, partly, making these elaborate sets is about creating

a sense of anticipation, creating a sense that what you're going to see is an event in itself.

Epics had been made since the beginning of cinema itself.

Silent classics like DW Griffith's Intolerance

had all the scale of the Technicolor epics, only in black-and-white.

In 1916, in Hollywood, Griffith builds Babylon, full size,

a city actually built to contain

hundreds and hundreds of extras.

You could drive a chariot along the walls of the Babylon set.

He shot it with this phenomenal kind of early crane,

whereby the camera could move towards the set and through the set and down,

so that you get this sense of being like a bird flying

above this vast city in which there's continual movement.

And the sheer size of it, the elephants holding up the roof,

the vastness of the design,

the beauty of the way the patterning had been done in the walls and so forth,

is saying continuously, "Look at the money we've spent."

In 1959, MGM chose to remake a silent classic.

Ben-Hur became the archetypal epic, sweeping the board at the Oscars

including the ultimate prize in cinema - Best Picture.

The film tells the story of Ben-Hur being sent into slavery by Messala.

The defining moment is when the two men square off in a chariot race.

It's like seeing a sporting event, cos you're actually looking at a stadium.

And it's been built for you, and some sport is laid on for you, you know.

It's a...imagine that!

If hearts were set racing by the speeding chariots,

the eyes were dazzled by the set of the circus.

It was an enormous set.

I think it was, it was something like 2,000 feet long

and 650 foot wide.

I remember that shot where the chariots are lining up at the start of the race.

It's against such a massive entrance, and it's been shot and edited so logically,

it feels that they are not showing you a huge bit of set,

it really is a stunning shot.

Those wonderful statues, they still have some copies of them,

which I've never seen in any antiquity any statues like that.

Yet, they seem perfectly right, they really look terrific on the screen.

The scale of the sets of Ben-Hur sometimes had a surprising effect on the audience.

I must have been about eight or nine when I saw Ben-Hur in a cinema - the State Cinema in Grays.

What I remember particularly was that I wasn't scared by

the close-ups or the violence or anything like that.

I was scared by the big stuff, the huge sets gave me a kind of vertigo,

which I actually found quite difficult to watch,

and I had to keep the rest of all the heads of the audience

in my field of vision, but quite often I was just sitting

there like that, and almost all the way through I was sitting like that.

With Ben-Hur safely Oscared, the epic now reached for new territory.

For David Lean's Doctor Zhivago Moscow rose again in 1965,

just outside Madrid.

The seasons were cast aside as a snow palace was prepared.

Unfortunately, it didn't snow that year, and they waited,

and waited, and waited.

And no snow fell. A little bit of snow fell, but nothing like enough.

So they had to get to work with all

the devices of, you know, laying carpets, spraying things, simulating snow.

Nobody, of course, who sees the film doubts for one moment

that this is not the depths of snowy Russia.

It is magnificently done, and it's probably one of the great

pieces of trompe l'oeil, of making us feel that we are in a freezing Russia.

Turning a dusty Spanish plain into a winter wonderland was

a masterclass in production design.

Zhivago is interesting because of the techniques that were used to

create this winter.

They did sort of the icicles in fibreglass and then coated them

with paraffin wax, so the appeared to be melting.

And then, I think, they had some winter trees in the foreground,

and that gave the impression of a huge winter landscape.

This is the lie that cinema tells,

but would it be any better, if it had been done somewhere else?

I don't think so. It doesn't matter. It what it looks like, and it looked absolutely amazing.

With so much on offer, there could be only one outcome

in the small matter of the duration of these films.

One of the things about epics is they are really, really,

really long.

Four hours, you know, they can be four hours long.

If it's less than two hours, it's not an epic.

It's just a film with some Romans in.

Over two and a half hours.

Over three and a half hours.

It's possible with an intermission.

Ideally, with the first cut by the director that was about five hours long,

the studio laughed out of the screening theatres.

Long running times made the audience feel

they were getting their money's worth.

And cinemas cashed in by selling more refreshments.

And I do remember that, you know, you chew your way through,

continuously, these films.

And quite often, there were epics about people having trouble finding anywhere or any food to eat.

And there you are, stuffing yourself.

There's somebody crawling across the desert, starving, towards you.

Or, you know, entire crowds of people crying out for bread.

And you're sitting there, thinking, "Oh, poor love, terrible."

Epic films were SO long that the audience required a break.

The human bladder has limits.

The cinematic intermission was born, endowing the epic with a sense of grandeur.

The intermission says this film is really long, right?

It's like a theatre play. This is, I think, what the intermission is all about.

It gives the illusion that you are actually at the theatre,

so it makes it posher and better, because all theatres have intermissions,

all plays have intermissions.

During the intermission, the audience could discuss the film,

including what the leading ladies were wearing.

For epic extras, costume was a case of "one size fits all".

I've seen a few kind of battle scenes being done,

and the efficiency with which sets costumed their extras is a marvel to behold.

There are kind of these really long tents. There's a queue lying on one end.

And a queue going out the other.

In plain clothes, there's kind of normal people stepping on one end,

and out the other end come Romans.

There's a certain identikit, kind of toga/ancient Roman costume,

kind of "one-size-fits-all" kind of effort.

But when it came to the stars, nothing was impossible.

For Cleopatra, 20th Century Fox had to dress the biggest star of the day,

Elizabeth Taylor.

Both the actress and the character were flaunted in the publicity material.

Elizabeth Taylor as Cleopatra, Siren of the Nile.

Her stunning beauty and notorious intrigue

turned the tide of civilisation.

Cleopatra's lavish costumes became famed for both quality and quantity.

The film won an Oscar for costume design,

and Taylor held the Guinness world record for most costumes changes.

I'm sure that the studio were very keen that Elizabeth looked sexy.

It would have been pointless making the film

if she'd looked like Old Mother Frump.

And Cleopatra, of course, prettiest woman in the world, and all those things.

So there had to be some bosom on display,

there had to be the marvellous swan neck.

That had to be the profile.

Then accept it, Caesar.

I have never before settled for half a victory.

Nor will you now.

Caesar, mighty Caesar...

All I can say to you is what you've taught me:

Take a little, then a little more

until finally you have it all.

Crucially, to emphasise Elizabeth Taylor's rather ample cleavage,

they keep putting a slit in her costume.

That's absolutely not an ancient Egyptian,

that's Elizabeth Taylor.

Although they were set in the past,

canny epics ensured they tapped into a modern zeitgeist.

Elizabeth's costumes look very much of the 1960s.

Some are more successful than others. They were an awful lot of them, 65.

And I read that 40 costumes, in addition, were never actually used.

"Liz Patra" became a fashion icon -

women everywhere wanted to get the look.

In magazines, it was sold the idea of the Cleopatra look.

Hairstyles, kohl eyeliner, Egyptian style,

sort of art-deco-ish kind of costumes.

And these were all items that you could go out and you could buy,

and in particular the make-up and the cosmetics really took off as a style.

Eyeliner, you know, I don't know which came first,

but the heavy kohl eyeliner of Cleopatra.

The wacky eyeliner became very, very fashionable in the '60s.

Now, today the girls are going for the Cleopatra look, including Holly Elwis.

I have with me David Aylott, who was in charge of all the make-up

on the film Cleopatra when it was being made in this country,

and did, in fact, make up Elizabeth Taylor herself.

I'm going to be a guinea pig, and perhaps you will be kind with

the help of our assistant, Claire Wallace, to make me up as Cleopatra.

Let me see how you do it.

Well, there you are - Cleopatra.

My, my... Hollywood, here I come!

Cleopatra's costumes had to be up to making a grand royal entrance.

Cleopatra's entrance to Rome is one of the great spectacular sequences.

Through the Arch of Constantine, which, by the way,

wasn't built until 250 years later, never mind.

Through the Arch of Constantine,

pulled on this giant sphinx mobile, you know,

a huge sphinx on wheels pulled by countless Nubian black slaves.

She sits on this sphinx, in this gold costume,

with the sun disc on her head, covered in sort of gold leaf.

And then, when she actually gets there, after all this pomp

and wonderful music, you know, fanfares and marches, she winks.

So we are not being that pompous - we're being Elizabeth Taylor as well.

It's one of the great spectacular scenes in epics.

To stand out from such a spectacle, designer Irene Sharaff

had to create a costume that was a cut above.

In the world of the epic, the logical answer was a dress

fashioned from 24-carat gold.

Incredibly elaborate, beautifully made.

I've held it, and it's amazingly light.

It's an applique on to a

virtually transparent black net,

And it's like scales.

It must have taken a whole gang of ladies to embroider.

You know, weeks and weeks of work.

And then, at the end of the film when Cleopatra kills herself,

of course, that's what you would kill yourself in. I mean, it's quite logical, isn't it?

You would wear your best, because that's how you wanted to be remembered.

And the Roman asked, "Was this well done of your lady?"

And the servant answered, "Extremely well."

As befitting the last of so many noble rulers.

There's no question, the epics looked the part...

so the music had a lot to live up to!

There's a remarkable amount of music in these epics.

Sometimes scores that last 100 minutes.

I mean, an incredible amount of music.

And they give an extra kind of grandeur to what

you're seeing on the screen - an extra sense of scale.

To infuse the epic with a sense of occasion,

the studios stole another idea from the theatre.

The overture warmed the audience up for the forthcoming entertainment.

Now, Ben-Hur, for instance, had a massive overture,

specially written,

which contains most of the themes you'll hear later on in the film.

So it's doing what an overture will do for any opera.

It unspools over about eight minutes.

During that time, it's on the soundtrack on the film,

but there's no pictures on the soundtrack.

So the film is actually starting in the projector,

and what you get is eight minutes of music with the curtains closed.

It think this was... This made sense if you'd already announced

to people there would be an overture of so-and-so.

But when I went to see Ben-Hur, I think I was amongst a whole audience of people who couldn't

understand why the curtains weren't open, because the film had started.

Well, actually, no. What we were treated to

was the equivalent of the orchestra in the pit,

giving us the music we were going to be getting later.

And then, the curtains open, off it goes.

I'm sure there were projectionists out there who just cut off that

eight minutes of leader film.

The rest of the film was full of dramatic scoring

to heighten the action.

DRAMATIC MUSIC

Hollywood invented the sound of ancient Rome.

What we think of as Roman music is really 19th-century classical music,

filtered by geniuses, particularly like Miklos Rozsa,

who scored Quo Vadis, scored Ben-Hur.

And kind of came up with a chord structure

which sounds like it could be ancient, it sounds like,

it starts sort of "pum-pum-pum, pum-pum-purum" sound.

It sound like what we think Rome ought to have sounded like.

It's probably about as unlike the ancient world as you could possibly get.

But not all epics were set in the pomp of Rome.

And a new setting required the search for a new sound.

As David Lean found with Lawrence of Arabia.

Seeking out the score for Lawrence of Arabia, David Lean

had an idea in his head that he could never vocalise to anyone.

He said, "I know what score I want. I need someone to give it to me".

And they went through a lot of the big composers of the time,

and David would sit there and the composer would say, "This is what I thought of..."

And he'd shake his head and go, "Yeah, it's nice, but I've heard it before."

And he couldn't find it, until these various networks of people said,

"There's this young French guy, you know, he's just starting out,

"you should give him a try.

"His name is Maurice Jarre."

He comes in and David Lean goes, "Who is this young child?"

And he sits down at the piano and he wipes his hands,

and he begins to play the great, you know, Lawrence of Arabia theme.

Lean stands up, puts his hand on his shoulder, and goes, "You've got it."

Jarre sounds expensive and glamorous.

And that I think it's part and parcel of what the epic is.

This must have a terrific amount of money spend on it. It's a Faberge egg,

and the music sounds like it is coming from somewhere very luxurious.

And in that wonderful scene, when Lawrence blows the match out

and kind of blows the song up over the desert,

you give this build of music.

Bild-bild-bild-bild-bild-bild, and then a cut.

Push! To a full summer light.

MUSIC BUILDS TO CRESCENDO

And it's like, "We are in the desert, and it's gorgeous.

"It's not hot, it's not killing, it's nothing of those things, but it will be later."

But for now, we're in the Hollywood desert.

I remember buying the piano music of Lawrence,

and also learnt how it worked.

That sweep of sound.

That's something that could really have come from the movies, I feel.

Everything about the epics was rich and lavish.

Rich, lavish and expensive.

In the war against TV, Hollywood had waged a no-expense-spared campaign.

When they made epics, they went for broke. Almost literally.

The budgets of historical epics, I think, are governed by a whole

different area of mathematics that doesn't apply with other

forms of calculation, because they always got massively out of hand,

and that, weirdly, they became one of the appeals of them to an audience.

When you remember in the 1950s,

the average cost of a movie,

of a major studio Hollywood film

was around a million or million and a half dollars.

And a film cost 13 and a half million dollars,

as The Ten Commandments did, or 15 million dollars, as Ben-Hur did.

These are huge, huge sums.

None had a bigger budget than Cleopatra.

At an estimated cost of 44 million dollars,

it was the most expensive film ever made.

Adjusted for inflation, it still is today.

Nobody could have really foreseen the problems with Cleopatra.

They built the sets in this country,

but unfortunately, Elizabeth Taylor wasn't well.

She had a tracheotomy or something.

They had to stop production, actually close it down.

This is just unthinkable - the amount of money they wasted,

and then they moved it to Italy and rebuilt it in Rome.

They basically built the sets twice.

Now, that sounds like a lot of money wasted to me!

One of its interesting features for us now

is that you can read all the letters backwards and forwards

from the studio in America and the producers in Italy at the time,

saying how the huge cost of sustaining Elizabeth Taylor

in her villa outside the city of Rome.

She was described as having "cushions and furnishing covers

"that had to match the cigarettes she smoked each day."

That kind of cost is clearly going to spiral out of control,

as indeed, it did.

Taylor became the first ever film star contracted to earn

a million dollars for a single film.

Elizabeth told me that she was quite proud of the fact that

she was the highest-paid film star of that time and I think that

the original fee that was negotiated was for a million dollars,

which in the early '60s must have been an enormous sum of money,

but I think she eventually earned seven million

because of overages and because it went on for so long.

Hoping to replicate the success of Ben-Hur, 20th Century Fox

threw good money after bad.

But this was the tipping point.

Cleopatra nearly bankrupted its studio.

It was so expensive that, even with packed houses, it took years

to return its investment.

Then, in 1964, came Samuel Bronston's aptly-named

The Fall Of The Roman Empire.

The choice of title proved fatally prescient.

The Fall of The Roman Empire is the last of the big epics

of the post-war period.

One of the reasons for that is the huge amount of money

that it invested in its spectacle,

the spectacle, particularly, of the Roman Forum.

And what we see is the Emperor Commodus, in triumph,

moving through the Roman Forum set.

So you get a very strong sense of the money

that was spent on creating a full, huge set of this kind.

The set that was built for it still holds the record

of being the biggest set ever constructed for a motion picture.

It has a cast of thousands of extras

and not enough people went to see it.

This is the moment when the bottom falls out for the epic.

When audiences develop a kind of fatigue and don't want to see

Romans any more and don't want to see the classical world.

The Fall Of The Roman Empire cost 16 million to produce,

God knows how much to market,

and it grossed less than 2 million at the American box office.

The public just got sick of epics, because there were too many.

I am leaving with my husband, and soon I'll be far from this city.

I think it's like having a rich banquet, really.

You can't have three rich banquets in a row. You need a little snack.

It wasn't just familiarity that had turned cinema-goers away.

By the mid '60s, the cinema audience had changed.

Whereas in the early '50s, going to the cinema

was a family experience,

by the mid '60s, there had developed a suburban life,

DIY had taken over from cinema-going for the adult community

and it was largely teenagers who were going to the cinema

and what they wanted to see was their own lifestyles on screen.

So, we get the teen flick, the horror films, much more violent,

much more sexually explicit cinema.

'This was the beginning of the fall of the Roman Empire.

'A great civilisation is not conquered from without

'until it has destroyed itself from within.'

Which is what the epic had seemingly done.

Traditionally, when people write the history of the epic,

they draw a line under The Fall Of The Roman Empire

and say, "See - that was the fall of the epic".

And in a way, it was, for a time.

But the epic is always ready to bounce back and although it did mark

the end of a period of epic production,

it was only a temporary halt.

Hollywood may have turned its back on the epic,

but other countries were ready to take up the reins.

So the epic moved eastwards and it shifts to countries

where you can afford a large army, where you've got crafts skills,

where you've got a landscape that doesn't have telegraph poles

so you can have a 360 with the camera without examples of modern civilisation.

Epics don't have to be Judeo, Christian, Roman.

They can be other things, too

and there are some very interesting epics made in other cultures.

An international tradition of epics had grown alongside

the Hollywood version.

The Russian War And Peace featured 120,000 Red Army troops,

temporarily distracted from their day job of global domination.

The film was so long, it had to be released in four parts.

Japan's Kurosawa was in the epic game by 1985.

Ran, the most expensive film made there to that date,

retold the story of King Lear, set in feudal Japan.

Ran does what all the best epics do.

It transports us back to a barbaric past and it does so

on an epic scale.

It's got fantastic costumes, a marvellous sense of the movement

of armies and, of course, they're more exotic for us

than the Roman armies that we're used to in many epics.

Like its Hollywood predecessors, Ran treated the audience

to spectacular set pieces.

Most memorable is the burning of the castle.

This was reminiscent of Rome in flames in Quo Vadis.

They build a castle and they set fire to it

and you get the destruction of the castle in shot.

So, Ran is an example of conspicuous production

and with conspicuous production, you get conspicuous destruction.

It's like car chases. They like watching car crashes.

You can't do it in real life, but you can enjoy it vicariously in the cinema.

You can't burn down a castle in real life

but it's great to watch it on the screen.

More recently, Russian Sergey Bodrov filmed the epic Mongol

in remote locations in Kazakhstan and Inner Mongolia.

The idea of making a film about Genghis Khan, who conquered

most of Europe in the 13th century, is a story just waiting to be made.

The great thing about making an epic about the Mongols

in Kazakhstan is that you're in a land

where feats of horsemanship are still running in people's blood

and so, I think, what Mongol has to draw on

is the great tradition of eastern horsemanship

and you do see it on the screen.

This is horsemanship of a kind that we haven't really seen

since the great days of Hollywood epics in the 1950s.

It actually gets to the heart of what made the Mongols so successful.

They were great horsemen.

Mongol was filmed in the east, where extras were cheaper.

But the budget could still only stretch to some 1,500 people.

A far cry from the glory days of the Hollywood epic.

But this was a 21st-century production.

Mongol could expand its crowd scenes

with the occasional use of Computer Generated Imagery. CGI.

The very technology that invited Hollywood

back into the world of the epic.

Ridley's Scott's Gladiator was the first classic

Hollywood epic for decades.

It was greeted as a long-lost friend.

40 years after Ben-Hur, Gladiator swept the board at the Oscars.

Once more, an epic was awarded Best Picture.

Gladiator is one of those landmark films that led everybody to say,

"Where has the epic been? It's come back!"

Director Ridley Scott was able to make Gladiator on an epic scale

as he recreated Rome through CGI.

Rome still wasn't built in a day, but it WAS built in a computer.

When everyone was waiting to see what CGI could do

for the reconstruction of past worlds, and in his film,

we finally get to see the Coliseum, but we see it with the gladiators

on ground level, as the camera moves in a 360-degree circle

and they are amazed and aghast at the images they see before them.

All they did was build half a Coliseum and then,

using computers, build the top tiers

and it was one of the early examples of building crowds with CGI.

An interesting use of crowd technology,

so the top two tiers of the Coliseum aren't real people,

they're CGI versions.

The spirit of the resurrected epic had also spread

to the work of other directors.

James Cameron's Titanic employed set-building on a scale

not seen for 30 years.

But seamlessly integrated CGI helped sink the ship.

Most recently, Cameron has taken it one step further,

restyling the epic in Avatar.

I think Avatar is basically how the epic is going to become.

It's going to show, "Let's do CGI to build huge worlds virtually,

"in a virtual environment.

"It's not going to be new sets, nothing physical,

"let's just make it in the computer

"and our only limits are our imagination."

The climax of Avatar may be a virtual 3D image,

but this well-choreographed battle scene is highly reminiscent

of the scale of the battle of Valencia at the end of El Cid.

We have the most extraordinary sensation of going into battle

against this great machinery of the Earth forces

who are trying to conquer the Na'vi

and I think it delivers that sense of being on the weaker side,

who will triumph because they're fighting for their livelihood

and their beliefs.

The qualities that set the epic apart were many years in the making

and this heritage will continue

to contribute to our cinema-going experience.

They aimed for the stars, and we loved them for taking us beyond

our imagination...even if they did try a bit too hard at times.

But it's those elongated entertainments of the '50s and '60s

when film makers did it the hard way that will always hold

a special place in the epic hall of fame.

In these films, you can see the blood, sweat and tears on screen.

It is the 11th unwritten commandment that makes them truly epic.

"Thou shalt keep it real."

It's interesting. Digital film can do anything.

You know, you can paint in a million Orks

or you can paint in the Titanic or whatever, and in a funny way,

it's taken a step back from the point of view of suspension of disbelief.

There's something about knowing that, physically, that set was built,

that there really were thousands of people there, that makes you

suspend your disbelief and really get lost in the story.

It's like "Do you believe in Walt Disney cartoons?"

No, you can admire them, you can enjoy them, you can cry, but they're not really happening.

Whereas these epics were really happening.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd

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