Trivia

Another problem concerned the color of the water in the pond holding the boat; it was too brown and murky. They hired a chemist to develop a dye to color the water Azure Mediterranean blue. The chemist dumped a huge sack of some powder into the pond, which, instead of turning the water blue, formed a hard crust on the surface of the water, which had to be chiselled off the boat at great expense. They finally found some dye that would make the water blue. During one of the battle scenes, an extra who fell into the water and spent a bit too much time there turned blue, and was kept on the MGM payroll until it wore off.

Although there were presumably white horses in Italy, the white horses used in the film were brought in from Lipica, Slovenia, the original home of the snow-white "Lipizzaner" horse breed. Glenn H. Randall Sr. trained 78 horses for the film, starting months before photography began.

Shot over a period of nine months at Rome's Cinecitta studio. The outdoor sets built for the chariot race were the largest built at the time.

By the time filming had finished, MGM's London laboratories had processed over 1,250,000 feet of 65mm Eastman Color film, at the cost of $1 a foot.

The large "island" in the stadium was great for filming, since a backdrop of a stone wall is cheaper to film than a backdrop of thousands of extras. However, such an "island" in a real stadium prevents spectators from viewing the race properly at all angles and would not normally exist.

The chariot race has a 263-to-1 cutting ratio (263 feet of film for every one foot kept), probably the highest for any 65mm sequence ever filmed.

Cesare Danova screentested to play Ben-Hur.

William Wyler was a renowned stickler for detail. Charlton Heston recalled one particular scene where Judah Ben-Hur simply walks across a room upon his return from slavery. Such a simple scene required 8 takes before the actor finally asked Wyler what was missing. The director informed him that he liked the first take where Heston had kicked a piece of pottery to give the scene its only sound. Heston on the other hand had assumed that Wyler didn't like the kicking and had therefore deliberately avoided doing it again.

Robert Ryan was considered for the role of Messala, with Burt Lancaster as Ben-Hur.

MGM offered Universal-International $750,000 for the loan-out of their contractee Rock Hudson. Hudson seriously considered accepting the part until his agent explained to him that the film's gay subtext was too much of a risk to his career.

This is the only one of the three movies which have won 11 Academy Awards (the others being Titanic and The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King) to have won an Oscar for acting performances.

Upon reading Karl Tunberg's original script, William Wyler had written in the margins "awful...horrible". Consequently, he brought in Gore Vidal - who was on contract with MGM at the time and hated being so - to rewrite the screenplay. Vidal also thought that Tunberg's script was dreadful and initially didn't even want to take on the project. He changed his mind when Wyler promised to get him out of the remaining two years of his contract. Christopher Fry then polished up Vidal's work on the screenplay and wrote a new ending. Neither Fry or Vidal received screen credit for their work on the film, something which infuriated Wyler so much that he leaked the story to the press.

The second of ten films shot in the MGM Camera 65 cinematographic process. It was intended to be the first, but production delays let to MGM using it first on Raintree County. Like the Todd-AO format (introduced in 1953), MGM Camera 65 used 65mm negative stock that was then printed to 70mm film for roadshow release prints, or optically printed down to 35mm for general release. Unlike Todd-AO, though, Camera 65 operated at a standard speed of 24 fps from the beginning, and utilised 1.25x anamorphic lenses to optically squeeze an aspect ratio of 2.76:1 into the 2.20:1 Todd-AO frame. These lenses were developed and manufactured by Panavision, a natural evolution on their work to improve the quality of anamorphic camera and projection lenses for the CinemaScope system. The extra 5mm of film between the 65mm negatives and 70mm prints was comprised of 2.5mm outside the perforations on either side of the film, allowing for up to four stripes of magnetic oxide carrying up to six discrete channels of sound - offering greatly superior sound quality in comparison to the mono optical tracks on 35mm prints at the time. When MGM sold its camera department to Panavision in 1961 the Camera 65 process was renamed Ultra Panavision 70 but remained technically identical. The complexity of anamorphic photography and post-production however meant the system was short-lived - especially due to the use of unique 1.25x anamorphic lenses rather than the 2x power used for CinemaScope - and the process was last used for _Khartoum_ in 1966. Most of the cameras were used on Super Panavision 70 productions - Panavision's exact copy of the non-anamorphic 24 fps Todd-AO process - before being replaced by the Panaflex 65 cameras used in Panavision System 65. Notably, due to the complexity and cost of projecting anamorphic 70mm prints, recent re-issue 70mm prints of Ben-Hur have been printed from optically-desqueezed negatives to allow their projection on normal 70mm equipment with only slight cropping of the sides of the picture.

For some sequences in the chariot race, some of the chariots had three horses instead of four. This enabled the camera car to move in closer.

An infirmary was created especially for the filming of the dangerous chariot race scenes. However, in the end, very few injuries were actually sustained, most of them being sunburns.

MGM acquired over 40 scripts for the film.

Leslie Nielsen made a screen test for the part of Messala, part of which can be seen in the documentary Ben-Hur: The Making of an Epic.

Producer Sam Zimbalist died two months before production ended, with William Wyler handling his duties afterward.

Director William Wyler decided that the Romans should have British accents, and that the four Americans in the cast would play Hebrews. This was a technique later used in Masada.

According to his memoirs Stewart Granger was offered the role of Messala but claimed that he turned it down on the advice of his agent who recommended Granger not to play a supporting role to Charlton Heston.

Director William Wyler had previous experience with Ben-Hur. He served as an assistant director under action specialist Breezy Eason (B. Reeves Eason) who was one of the directors for the chariot race in MGM's mammoth silent version of the story, Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ.

This is believed to be one of only three MGM films where the studio's trademark Leo the Lion did not roar at the beginning of the opening credits, apparently because of the religious theme in the film. The others were The Next Voice You Hear... (another film with a religious theme) and Westward the Women. (The lion used in 1968's 2001: A Space Odyssey was the new illustrated logo first used in the credits for that film, not a real lion. But this logo was shortly discarded permanently, and so doesn't count.)

During filming, director William Wyler noticed that one of the extras was missing a hand. He had the man's stump covered in blood with a false bone protruding from it for the scene where the galley was rammed by another ship. Wyler made similar use of an extra who was missing a foot.

Although William Wyler was Jewish, he particularly wanted to make a film that would appeal to all religious faiths.

Such was the expense of the film, nervous studio executives flew out to Rome on a weekly basis to check on the progress of the production.

One thing William Wyler was completely unable to do was get his leading man to cry on-screen. You'll note in Ben-Hur's crying scenes that Charlton Heston covers his eyes.

Wyler left all the details of the chariot race - every shot, crash and stunt - in the hands of his second-unit director Andrew Marton. When he saw the final version of Marton and lead stuntman Yakima Canutt's work, Wyler remarked that it was "one of the greatest cinematic achievements" he'd ever seen.

Originally William Wyler had planned only to film the first unit and leave the second unit duties to producer Sam Zimbalist. These plans were scuppered by Zimbalist's premature death. MGM persuaded Wyler to see the film through to completion by offering him a sizable amount of money.

Stephen Boyd wore lifts in his shoes to make his height more on a par with Charlton Heston's.

The desert sequences were all set to be filmed in Libya until the Muslim Libyan authorities realized that the film was promoting Christianity. The unit was ordered out of the country, only to show up in Israel.

The chariot race was shot without sound. This was added in post-production when the decision was also made to not have any music throughout the sequence.

William Wyler was an assistant director on the original Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ and 34 years later directed its remake, Ben-Hur.

In the Roman galley scenes, Ben-Hur is referred to as "number 41." In the original General Lew Wallace novel, he is "number 60" (Book 3, Chapter 3, page 123, Harper Brothers 1922). In the Dell Movie Classic comic book, he is referred to as "number 40" (Dell Comics #1052-5911, 1959, pages 15 and 16). And in both Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ and the 1958 Classics Illustrated comic book there is no reference to any number, either by scene decor, dialogue, or intertitle.

Urban legend claims that 4 stuntmen were killed during the filming of the chariot race. There is no truth to this note, whatsoever.

MGM was unsatisfied with the script even as the film was shooting, and hired Ben Hecht to "polish" it. They flew him to Rome, set him up in a house and paid him approximately $15,000 for a week's work. It's not known if any of Hecht's dialogue made it into the final film.

Rock Hudson was offered a record $750,000 to star in the movie, but turned it down in order to star in A Farewell to Arms.

Several times during the film, Judah touches a box on the door frame of his home. This is a Mezuzah, a case containing a passage from the Torah (Deuteronomy 6:4-9 and and 11:13-21), which Jews traditionally affix to the door frames of their houses as a constant reminder of God's presence.

Robert Taylor was originally supposed to star in the film.

Charlton Heston was initially offered the role of Messala.

Charlton Heston had learned how to handle a two-horse chariot when he was making The Ten Commandments. When he arrived in Rome, he instantly began lessons in four-horse chariot racing with the film's stunt co-ordinator, Yakima Canutt.

William Wyler used to joke that it took a Jew to make the ultimate film about Jesus Christ.

The rumor that Stephen Boyd's double was killed during the chariot race is false. According to second-unit director Yakima Canutt, the "Messala" that was run over, a Roman soldier standing on the center island who was hit by a chariot and the driver of a spilled rig who jumped out of the way of one chariot but was immediately run over by another one were all articulated and weighted dummies (made with movable arm and leg joints), so when they were hit they "reacted" the way a normal human body would in that situation. A combination of adroit placement and expert editing made the dummies look like real people being run over.

In the scene where Ben-Hur confronts a dying Messala after the chariot race, William Wyler insisted on multiple takes. He wanted Ben-Hur to show complete indifference to his dying former friend, something that Charlton Heston found hard to deliver.