Oliver Stone and Colin Farrell provoked a media scrum Monday night as they arrived at the Marrakech International Film Festival to talk up the Alexander the Great epic, which Stone is shooting just outside the city.

Stone was in an expansive mood at a packed media conference on both his current film and his recent documentary about Cuban leader Fidel Castro, "Commandante."

Stone said he was happy with progress so far on the shoot of "Alexander," with Irishman Farrell in the title role as the Macedonian king.

"Knock on wood, it's going very well," he said. "We're on schedule and on budget. The weather's been a little tricky, with sandstorms and rain that surprised us. But we're pushing on."

The director said Morocco was the key location for "Alexander," which will later move to Thailand for scenes involving elephants and England for studio sequences. Stone paid tribute to the film's producer, Moritz Borman.

"He was the only producer who didn't pull out of Morocco after the bombings (in Casablanca) in May, when other Hollywood producers pulled out and bad-mouthed the country," Stone said, to applause from Moroccans present at the conference.

Stone received a tribute from the festival Monday evening, followed by a screening of "Commandante" in the sublime setting of a ruined palace within the city's medieval walls.

HBO co-produced the 90-minute film, but the cable channel pulled the documentary in May after Castro had three hijackers executed and imprisoned some 70 dissidents. Stone was asked to return to Cuba to reinterview the longstanding Cuban president.

"It was probably one of the lowest points of my life to be censored in America," Stone said. "That is a rare document, and I don't know why it can't be seen by the American people."

The new footage has, however, yielded a second film, the 50-minute "Looking for Fidel," which Stone said HBO "seemed to like."

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