The epic race in ‘Ben-Hur’ gets down and dirty
Since he was putting his two stars on speeding chariots pulled by four powerful horses each,
Ben-Hur director Timur Bekmambetov figured he should have a turn with the reins, too.
“It’s very important to understand the feel. There is no suspension, no brakes, no air bags. It’s just shaky and dirty and everything flies in your face,” says the filmmaker, the latest to take on an adaptation of Lew Wallace’s 1880 biblical novel.
“You cannot control those four creatures in front of you. In a car, you know if you turn the wheel, the car will turn. In this case, you never know.”
The new Ben-Hur (in theaters Friday) casts Jack Huston as Jewish prince Judah Ben-Hur, a man forced into slavery for years who goes on a mission of revenge after being betrayed by his adopted brother, Messala (Toby Kebbell). After a long journey back home, Judah meets Messala in a dirt-ridden face-off in the Roman circus in Jerusalem, with honor and their lives on the line.
The movie re-creates the iconic chariot race between the characters that marks the earlier 1907 and 1925 silent films as well as the Oscar-winning 1959 movie starring Charlton Heston. Kebbell says that scene is why he took the job. “That’s probably not the most sensible thing for an actor to say. I should talk about how wonderful the story was or how incredible the history of it is, but the opportunity to pull four real horses was astonishing.”
But trying to live up to the past was “one of the hard bits,” says Steve Dent, stunt coordinator and horsemaster on the new
Ben-Hur. “I hope we’ve done the ’59 version justice.”
For the visual spectacle this time around, Bekmambetov used a variety of cameras, including small GoPros, to put the audience right in the middle of the action and was influenced by NASCAR, Formula 1 and even Fast & Furi
ous- style street racing to make it an edgy and visceral experience.
There was also a chance for filmmakers to improve on the beloved chariot so well-known in Hollywood circles. Dent points out that the arena in the old movie was built wrong, and the horses “had to slow on the corners. If you look at it again, you see them coming almost back to a trot.”
That wouldn’t fly for this one. Smaller chariots were used that were lower to the ground and more resembled the ones ridden by the ancient Romans.
Dent pulled Huston and Kebbell aside early on and asked them if they wanted stunt doubles. They declined, which meant three months of chariot training and another three months of filming the racing sequence.
There were downsides, especially working with horses. “Every now and then, you get a pleasant gift of an entire faceful of phlegm from their mouths. It’s beautiful,” Kebbell says with a laugh.
And the day Huston was dropped to the ground chin-first, dragged by horses going 40 mph and nearly spun underneath one of the chariot wheels is a day imprinted on his memory.
While he was just trying to survive at first, later on the scenes became “a bit of a meditation,” Huston says. “For those few moments when you’re just tearing around that arena, you’re not thinking about life. You focus on just the job at hand because you realize the severity of what you’re doing.”