In the 1990s, Sergei Bodrov picked up “The Legend of the Black Arrow,” a book about the Mongols and the Turks by the eminent Russian historian Lev Gumilev. By 2000, Bodrov had added a movie about Genghis Khan to his wish-list of projects. “I’m always interested to take a famous character and dig a little; to take a cliché and find what happened in real life. I want to know: if this is such an awful man, who is accused of killing millions – how did it happen? How did he become Genghis Khan?,” he explains. “His childhood is really an unknown story. Then you learn that he was an orphan, he was a slave, everybody tried to kill him, his wife was kidnapped, he got her back when she was pregnant. For me, immediately, it’s the beginning of a very compelling story about an extraordinary character.”
Bodrov spent several years researching his subject, reading everything he could find about Genghis Khan. The only Mongol history from the era is “The Secret History of Mongols,” a lengthy poem written by an unknown author sometime after Genghis Khan’s death in 1227. For centuries “The Secret History of the Mongols” was considered lost; a copy, believed to date to the 14th Century, was finally discovered in China in the 19th Century.
In 2004, Bodrov began work on the screenplay with Arif Aliyev, his collaborator on PRISONER OF THE MOUNTAINS. Bodrov continued to be inspired by Lev Gumilev’s histories, which approached “The Secret History of the Mongols” as a work of literature as well as a historical reference. For Gumilev, ‘The Secret History of the Mongols’ was not a sacred book. I used a lot of his theories regarding the gaps of time in the ‘Secret History.’ For example, there’s a gap in Genghis Khan’s story of ten years; suddenly he disappears and nobody knows what happened or where he is. And Gumilev theorized that maybe he was captured, maybe he was imprisoned. Which I thought was great for the story, so in MONGOL Temudgin spends many years in the Tangut prison.”
Production on MONGOL began in 2005, and filming took place largely in remote locations in China, Mongolia and Kazakhstan.
Bodrov paid a visit to Mongolia’s chief shaman, who is based in the capitol, Ulan Bator. “He has his tent in the main square, where people can come to talk to him,” reports Bodrov. “We went to him and explained what we wanted to do. We brought all these offerings, and did everything properly. And he said to us, ‘You know, many people wanted to make a movie about Genghis Khan -- Japanese, Americans … many people have thought about it. You’re the first who came to me to ask permission. And you did right.’”
Production on MONGOL began in 2005, filmed in some of the most isolated places on earth; it was not uncommon for the nearest town to be 12 or even 15 hours away by car, on rough, rudimentary roads.
Production logistics, not surprisingly, were daunting. Hundreds of people had to be transported to isolated areas, fed, housed iand, where necessary, trained. “My crew was around 600 people. Plus 1,000 extras, horses … that’s an army! You could fight with this many people, and go invade some territory!”
The 21st Century was far, far away and the filmmakers continued to follow the ancient shamanistic customs whenever they set up in a Mongol homeland. In each location, they would visit the special ceremonial site reserved for requests and offerings. “We would bring offerings and say: ‘We come here with good intentions. Please, we ask permission of the spirits: Can we work here?,’” says Bodrov. “I believe it was the one way to do it, because this was a very difficult movie to make. How we survived sometimes, I don’t know.