The Guardian (London)
March 10, 2001
By John Patterson

When you're sitting in a nice warm movie house watching Enemy At The Gates, spare a thought for the victims. Not the hundreds of thousands of Russians who died defending Stalingrad, nor the even greater number of Germans who died besieging it in a bitter, vicious battle, fought in temperatures that often hit 50 degrees below zero, and which turned every staircase, hallway, rooftop and sewer into a grim, blood-soaked extension of the frontline. Forget about them and think instead of the poor bastards who had to recreate all this misery and squalor for Enemy At The Gates. One can only hope they were well remunerated for their troubles.

"It was minus 15 degrees most days," says Joseph Fiennes of the lm's gruelling shoot at the Babelsberg studio near Berlin. "It gave you the tiniest idea of what they must have gone through at Stalingrad - the cold, the lice, and the sheer misery and abhorrent nature of war. The lth and cold seemed to enter our bodies, so that you could shower all day and still not feel clean." Jude Law, last seen living it up in the sun-soaked Adriatic for The Talented Mr Ripley, was more succinct: "It was harrowing."

And likely it was, since the production's length ended up exceeding that of the infamous battle itself. Lacking a river Volga of their own, the lm-makers flooded an abandoned mine near the set by pumping 10,000 gallons of water into it daily, turning it into something midway between a frozen mudbath and the seventh circle of hell. Two thousand extras worked their way through 17,000 mud-spattered costumes. The stars all underwent SAS combat training (or the thespian-adapted version thereof) and one gets the feeling they were glad to get home.

Sometimes there's no shortage of ways in which ambitious lm projects turn into complete nightmares for the poor creatures trapped on set. Don't believe it? Take the trip yourself.