HANNIBAL Barca has been ranked alongside Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Napoleon and Genghis Khan on the list of history's greatest military leaders.

So it was only a matter of time before a film crew focused their attention on the great Carthaginian general to make an epic production of his adventures fighting the mighty Roman Empire.

But when English director Ed Bazalgette started looking at the historical figure, with the intention of making the docu-drama Hannibal, he came across a bit of a hurdle.

The official accounts of Hannibal's campaigns were rather one-sided because they had been written by the Roman historians who were from the civilisation he considered to be his greatest enemy. "We wanted to get a real sense of who Hannibal was as a person, not the man who was portrayed in the historical texts which were written after his death, so we gathered together a handful of the top historians in England," Bazalgette says.

"Together we were able to read between the lines of those recognised Roman histories and cross-checked that with the other sources we had that told the story of his campaigns.

"Because he comes from a time in history that's now so far back he was teetering on the brink of becoming a myth but, the more we got into the psychology of the man himself, the more real he became to us.

"In the end we decided to make Hannibal the story of his life that he would have told himself."

Bazalgette says that once the team had decided on the story they had to find a location to film a tale that was essentially a road movie punctuated by the battles Hannibal fought with his army of men and elephants.

Bazalgette looked at locations in the UK, South Africa and Tunisia for the five-week shoot before settling on Bulgaria because it not only "approximated the Alps" but could depict the different countries that Hannibal travelled through with his troops.

The elephants were another big part of the story and Bazalgette was determined that he wouldn't have animals that just plodded along, trunks linked to tails.

"The idea was that Hannibal didn't have circus elephants," he says.

"While I was doing my research I saw a film on Hannibal that was made by Mussolini in the 1930s and the elephants in that behaved fantastically, just what I wanted for Hannibal.

"I found some people in Germany, who were the family that supplied the elephants from Mussolini's production all those years ago, and they were confident they could get the animals to do what I needed, to run and take javelin hits.

"But the biggest problem for them was getting the elephants from Hamburg to Sofia and it took eight days in big trucks with lots of time spent stopped at borders."