Go Behind The Scenes Of <i>Exodus: Gods And Kings</i> In A New Featurette

With less than three months to go before the film premieres overseas, Yahoo! Movies has released the first behind-the-scenes clip for Ridley Scott’s Exodus: Gods and Kings. It’s called ‘The World’ and it focuses on director Ridley Scott and production designer Arthur Max, both of whom explain how they went about making what might be the biggest film of their careers.

In addition to the usual behind-the-scenes stuff — actors doing their thing in front of greenscreen backdrops, etc. — the clip includes two shots from the film that were not included in the trailer. Interestingly, however, the dialogue in those shots was heard in the original trailer. Check it all out below the jump.

First, here is the behind-the-scenes clip itself:

And here are the two new shots, in which Moses approaches a sword-bearing Ramses — in an apparently otherwise empty room — and tells him, “I came to tell you that something is coming that is out of my control”:

Here, as best as I can make it, is a transcript of what Scott and Max say:

Ridley Scott: First of all, it’s epic in scale. And second of all, the Moses story was a massive challenge, which I really love. I wanted to explore the complexity of his character, and I was stunned by the giant lifespan story, and what he went through. The idea they were brothers, and then rivals, and then later go to war with each other, was very interesting. The process of creating this film, it’s really difficult.

Arthur Max: It’s an immense production. Everything is as big as we can build, but at the same time, Ridley has bigger ideas in mind.

Ridley Scott: What attracted me to the material is I felt there was a beauty to the massive scale. You’re working with at least 700 crew, plus the 4,000 extras, and of course the army will be expanded exponentially. Four thousand will be tiled and grown into 20,000.

Arthur Max: It’s quite elaborate. It’s the biggest film I’ve ever done.

Ridley Scott: Pretty amazing.

I have to say, this featurette doesn’t really give me a very good sense of what the movie will be like.

We already know Ridley Scott is great at battle sequences, and that the film will begin with a battle sequence against the Hittites. (Just to be clear: I don’t mind the inclusion of non-biblical battle sequences from Moses’ days as an Egyptian prince. There’s a precedent for this in the writings of Josephus, among other things.)

But what about the biblical story? What sort of relationship will Moses have with his fellow Hebrews? What sort of relationship will he have with their God? What will his relationship with Jethro be like? That’s the sort of thing that interests me, but there’s almost nothing in this featurette that even begins to answer those questions.

Still, no need to worry just yet. There are almost three months to go, after all.

September 5 update: There is a YouTube version of this featurette now: