Sunday Times (UK)
February 25, 2001
By Garth Pearce

First the director Jean-Jacques Annaud wrestled with depicting the siege of Stalingrad in 1942 by the German army; then he and the cast of Enemy at the Gates found themselves under a siege of their own. After battling to finance the film and re-creating scenes of stark realism in freezing temperatures and knee-deep mud, they are now defending themselves against those who question the central theme of the film. Is it true that an ill- educated former shepherd from the Urals called Vassili Zaitsev became a deadly sniper who killed 149 in a matter of weeks, mostly high-ranking German officers? Did the Wehrmacht command send in their best shot, a Major König, to hunt him down in a duel among the ruins of the city? Was Zaitsev involved in a love affair with a beautiful Russian student, who, like many women, joined the front-line fight?

With the resounding answers being no, no and no again from the historian Antony Beevor, author of the bestselling Stalingrad, Annaud could be forgiven for taking to a bunker. Instead, he bullishly points towards the 1973 book Enemy at the Gates, by the late journalist William Craig, as his source material. Craig, unlike Beevor, was content to recount the Russian version: not only did Zaitsev exist and become a hero, later giving lecture tours, but the telescopic rifle sight of "Major König, head of the Berlin Central Snipers School", is still displayed at the Armed Forces Museum in Moscow. As for the love story, Annaud declares: "A woman told Craig she was this man's lover, and he quotes it in his book."

Annaud goes one step further, however, by turning the love affair into a duel within a duel. Zaitsev (Jude Law) has a rival in his political officer, Danilov (Joseph Fiennes), for the attentions of the feisty Tania (Rachel Weisz). "As a film-maker," Annaud explains, "I am only interested in the close-up - where I can dive into a character and see the emotions - or opening the screen as wide as I can to show a spectacle. Two men are hunting each other, and two men are trying to win the love of the same woman: these are my close-ups. The scenes of battle and slaughter and the sheer terror of the whole place are my spectacle."

The 57-year-old Frenchman, who in 1986 revived Sean Connery's career in The Name of the Rose and four years ago forced Brad Pitt to climb mountains in Seven Years in Tibet, clearly enjoys a fight. He has a shock of white hair and a wide smile, lending his face an almost comical energy. He gives the impression that the dispute over authenticity was - and is - the least of his problems in a film that has taken six years to deliver.

First he had to secure handsome financial backing for a project that would be filmed more than 6,000 miles from Los Angeles in, of all places, the heart of the old East Germany. Then he hired Brit pack twentysomething actors, despite heavy hints that he should look towards the likes of Johnny Depp. "It made perfect sense to me," he says. "I asked the actors to deliver their own accents, because I did not want any false dialects, for either Russians or Germans. An American just would not have sounded right, somehow. And Ed Harris, as Major König, makes a perfect Nazi. That is not an insult. He's such a fine actor."

The cast was not spared when it came to re-creating horrific scenes of war. The 180-day siege of Stalingrad, which finally ended in February 1943, was one of the defining moments of the 20th century. Many of the population of half a million fled. Of the remainder, only 1,000 escaped slaughter or starvation. The German army, suffering losses of 800,000 men, finally surrendered to the Russians, who lost about 1.1m. Both armies were involved in hand-to-hand fighting amid ruins; some were reduced to eating horses or even human remains.

The film locations were chilling in appearance. The Volga river was matched in open-pit mines near the Polish border. A derelict factory in the German industrial town of Rudersdorf was chosen as the site for a showdown between the snipers. More than 10,000 gallons of water were pumped in daily to create thick mud. The 2,000 extras got through 17,000 costumes, after scenes in which their clothes were torn apart. Such detail helped bump up costs to $90m during a filming schedule that lasted longer than the siege itself, from November 1999 to April of last year.

Fiennes recalls: "The filth and cold seemed to enter our bodies, so that you could shower all day and still not feel clean. To think that those involved also had to fight and never knew where their next meal was coming from shocked us all." All the Brits were trained in survival techniques by the SAS, where Weisz, ironically, discovered she was the best shot of the lot.

Beevor insists the key plot lines are based on myth, not fact. "It is a great story, beloved of Soviet propaganda," he reports. "General Chuikov, the commander of the army at Stalingrad, recounted it in his memoirs. But there is no trace of it in the relevant reports at the time. The story probably stemmed from a brief battle of wits between Zaitsev and a German sniper, but all the trimmings added subsequently, especially the König figure and love story brought in by Craig, are pure fiction."

Annaud's more pressing concern is the anticipated box office, particularly in America. "I expect this movie to be trashed by some critics," he says, not looking in the least concerned. "But I made the film I wanted in the way I wanted. There's nobody to blame for any of it, apart from myself."