When most think of BEN-HUR, they think a very tanned and oiled up Charlton Heston standing tall in a chariot in William Wyler’s 1959 classic. As Jack Huston notes, “Even people that haven’t seen BEN-HUR can sometimes identify that it’s the movie that has the amazing chariot race. Whether you’re seen it or not.” Forget about the silent versions that came before in 1907 and 1925 or the Heston-produced animated version in 2003 (in which he voiced Judah Ben-Hur) or the 2010 tv mini-series; the 1959 version and its 70mm Panavision lensing (returning to the cinematic forefront thanks to Quentin Tarantino’s “The Hateful Eight”) is the hallmark telling of the BEN-HUR story. That is until now.
Thanks to script by John Ridley and Keith R. Clarke, this 2016 BEN-HUR directed by visionary Timur Bekmambetov is vastly different than its predecessors, due in large part to Ridley and Clarke returning to the original source material, Lew Wallace’s 1880 best-selling novel. But the one thing that doesn’t change is the thrill and exhilaration of the chariot race between brothers Judah Ben-Hur and Messala (and six other charioteers, each with teams of four horses). Having said that, however, unlike the 1959 chariot race, Bekmambetov is shooting the race in full and at full speed of 46mph with Jack Huston and Toby Kebbell doing their own chariot driving along with six other chariots each with four horse teams (a total of eight chariots and 32 horses on the track at any given moment), with GoPros and other multiple cameras immersing the audience in the speed, the action, the tension of the moment. It is heart-pounding exhilaration at its most thrilling! Speaking with Jack Huston (Judah Ben-Hur) and Toby Kebbell (Messala), with an onlooker’s viewpoint from co-star Pilou Asbaek who plays Messala’s mentor Pontius Pilate, although hard work, it’s easy to hear in their voices that the chariot race was indeed just as exhilarating for them.
It is well known that legendary stuntman Yakima Canutt and Second Unit Director Andrew Marton worked on the 1959 chariot race for two years. The “Circus” set was 2000 feet long and 65 feet wide (3x the size of the actual Circus track built in the Roman Empire), consuming 18 acres on the backlot of Cinecitta Studios in Italy, the same place where Timur Bekmambetov chose to shoot this 2016 BEN-HUR. The race itself in 1959 took five weeks to shoot. With this 2016 version, according to Huston, “We shot for six weeks with first unit, five weeks with second unit. Close to three months just the chariot race, which they managed to take down to 10-12 minutes of film, so you can imagine how much went into it.”
Because of his experience with two-horse chariots on “The Ten Commandments”, Heston trained for a month with four-horse chariots and still with many scenes being shot with his stunt double Joe Canutt in his stead. His co-star, Stephen Boyd who played Messala, with no horse experience, only had two weeks of training. Such was not the case for Jack Huston and Toby Kebbell. During the recent press junket, I spoke with Huston and Kebbell about the chariot race and more, the latter whom took me through the process from training to filming.
“Training began one month before shooting, so we were there three weeks before everyone else. There was a whole process of the way you learn the chariot was, you learn one horse, you learn two horses, and then you learn four horses. That is because your first horse is the horse you’re gonna keep on your outside right flank because we’re running the spina to the left.” Important to the training process is that “[this] was an actual scale spina and in ‘59 they made a triple size so they could have time and space to get these shots of wheel clashing or them whipping each other. We didn’t have that time because we had the advancement of technology which is a light camera. So we had cameras on the chariots, we had GoPros in soccer balls on the thing so you could see the horses’ hooves. We had all this light technology and that allowed us to do it at full speed. We don’t ever have to speed up the film. . . So we knew we were going to be doing this full speed. That was the reason I signed up for the job. Timur said, ‘We are doing this. It’s not CGI. No technology can give me four horse carriages for each of the 8 chariots. It’s too much work so we’re gonna do it for real’.”
Expounding on handling horses, Kebbell intently describes the process. “[T]he reason you learn one horse [first] – twofold – first thing is, if you stamp on the brakes that we had, which were disc brakes, the chariot hops. It’s a physics thing. At the front we have a pole that’s attaching the horse to the chariot. If that pole touches the ground, we’re tumbled over. So you can’t stamp on your brake. So really you have to learn this horse. And this horse learns your voice. He’s on your outside right because he’s your smartest. So he’s gonna be running the full race with you. If we do seven laps, he’s running all seven laps. He’s gonna hear your voice over eight other voices calling and yipping and whoa-ing. Then you’ve got two bulls. They’re just gonna run. They’re runners. They’re just runners, they’re runners, they’re sheep. They’ll follow whatever George or Motsi does. Now Motsi is your inside horse and he’s the laziest horse you’ve ever seen in your life. And the reason he’s lazy is, my strength is nothing compared to one horse. But compared to four? Forget about it. There’s no point. So I have Motsi to break stride. Now Motsi doesn’t want to run. So even on the long straight, he’s still sort of doing this [imitating breaking clop], so he breaks stride. The two sheep follow him. Now it’s me and three horses versus George and George is listening to my voice. So suddenly I’ve got a symbiotic relationship and I can actually leave the horses thinking I’m in charge. Which is not true at all [laughing]. . .You have to know those horses because they can go. It was eight seconds from the gate to the first corner. Eight seconds! It’s quick. ”
LISTEN: TOBY KEBBELL TALKS CHARIOT TRAINING
Pilou Asbaek was on hand for the chariot race, both during filming and off-camera, giving him a unique perspective of the race and both Huston and Kebbell. “I was there every day. [Toby] was incredible with those horses. Jack was awesome. It was just different. He had a different approach. He worked different with horses. With Toby you could see it was very important that he connected with his four horses. That’s the reason why he did so much training and then it was just awesome! It was incredible seeing these guys. And they did it for real! . .They just did it again and again, just for me!”
Huston emphatically agrees. “[There was] a lot of training! Exactly. You know it. It was insane. It was amazing. . . And today, for a modern audience who are so bogged down by so much effects, so much CGI, what Timur, our wonderful director did was – he’s quite an effects driven director in the past, has been – he said, ‘You know what. I’m gonna trick them all. Let’s do it. Let’s really do everything for real.’ We had no green screen or blue screen in that arena. It was built to scale and every time you see us with those horses, that’s us with those horses.”
LISTEN: JACK HUSTON TALKS CHARIOT RACING
In stride with Kebbell, Huston also remarks on the “rigorous training regime, which me and Toby both had to go through for months before we actually started filming. It was all the better for it because you really want the audience to go with you on this ride. And the way you want to do that is if they are feeling everything you’re feeling. If we were in a studio or faking any of that, I think it would have read instantly.”
The excitement in Huston’s voice as he regales the minutiae and experience of the chariot race is palpable. “The difference of actually being with those horses which is incomparable to anything I’ve ever done. It was a very special, amazingly sort of meditation when you’re on those horses because it is very dangerous and you have to be very aware of what you’re doing because it’s not just you [that] you have to worry about. You’ve got another 28 horses running around with you and chariots which weigh over 1200 lbs, some insane amount. They’re very dangerous. But you only focus on the job at hand. So for those brief moments you are completely immersed within the race and within the chariot scenes. So it’s that lovely thing where you’re brain isn’t telling you, ‘Oh, you should have done this, you should have done that.’ You are completely focused.”
As for who was the better charioteer? See for yourself in BEN-HUR.
