After millions of dollars had been spent, with a factory for the costumes designed by the master Ugo Pericoli set up in Mongolia, we restarted everything again and Ken Annakin came in as director, with Antonio Margheriti (Antony M. Dawson) as second unit director.
He went to Rome to meet the producer Renzo Rispoli, then rewrote three two-hour scripts with James Carrington.
Referring to Khan, "He can be a monster as most people know him," said Annakin, "the other side is more like a country boy with a peasant mentality.
Nicholas Rispoli said "He shot for more than a year in four different countries: Mongolia, China, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan.
His shooting is magic and modern, with beautiful colorful scenes and big battles (not all CGI, or super unbelievable like now) with hundreds of horses and extras.
[7] Rispoli said "without a logical reason the various financial institutions involved, who had already financed millions and millions of dollars, didn’t want to cover the post-production costs, and the completion bond insurance didn’t want to pay… It was a very odd happening… strange.
[4] Star Richard Tyson had just appeared in Kindergarten Cop and says making the film interrupted the momentum of his career: It was supposed to come out around the time of Braveheart, and it was just a perfect, biographical story about a real guy.
[8]In his memoirs, Charlton Heston said he had "a small but interesting part" but the film "had gone very badly; indeed it was never finished.
I’m afraid my makeup man, Nick Dudman, and I were the only people in the company who got paid (and that only because my agent, Jack Gilardi, made them put all the money in a U.S. bank before we left the States).