"It's how I originally imagined Alexander's story, but I'd felt under pressure to keep it under three hours, " he says. "I loved the version that was originally released two years ago, but during World Trade Center it kept bothering me that so much footage had been unused." He did a partial re-edit for the subsequent DVD release. "But I felt something more was there, something I had lost."

Now he's put back 45 minutes he'd originally been forced to leave on the cutting floor to ensure Alexander didn't exceed three hours. An intermission, followed immediately by the spectacular action sequences in India, prevents the three hours four minutes running time becoming arduous. The youth of Alexander . . . and of Colin Farrell's performance . . .now become the film's strength, as is the muchderided casting of Angelina Jolie as his young and sexy mother, egging him on to kill his father. "If you hesitate, he will strike, " she warns. Stone has completely restructured the narrative in a non-linear way so that the action cuts forward and back to key moments in Alexander's story in a much more cohesive and dramatic way, fleshing out much that was passed over before, particularly Alexander's homosexuality.

"Warners were pissed off because he was gay, " he says. "They rushed it out. They subverted it from within. They black-listed me. I wasn't allowed in the door. The irony is Warner Home Video were delighted with the success of the DVD and kept backing me."

Alexander Revisited took Stone six months to reedit. He worked for nothing, determined to prove the begrudgers wrong. "Alexander was really slagged and maligned in the US, despite being a commercial success. It did much better abroad. I suppose my timing was not good for today's America."

While Alexander . . . not unlike George Bush . . . saw himself as being on a mission "to free the people of the world, " he did not share a prevailing "contempt for a world older than ours". He wanted to learn from the East, not reshape it in his own image. He sought to rule by consent, not domination. "In his presence we were better than ourselves, " says the narrator Ptolemy who, portrayed by Anthony Hopkins, now emerges as a much more pivotal dramatic element.

"Fortune favours the bold, " Virgil said in a quote used in the film. It could also be said of Stone: not many film-makers have managed to make three versions of the same movie.