The film that continues to hold the record for figuration is Gandhi (1982), a 1982 biographical film directed by Richard Attenborough about the life of Mahatma Gandhi, a leading figure in the Indian independence movement and defender of non-violence . In the film , Attenborough used more than 300,000 people in the funeral scene . The producers had hoped to gather 400,000 and to do so they ran numerous advertisements in the New Delhi press, where the sequence was filmed. In total, 200,000 extras were volunteers and the rest worked under contract. On the other hand, the movie has the largest number of bald extras – roughly 15,000.
Another brilliant film was Ben-Hur , by William Wyler, shot at the Cinecittá studios in Rome in 1959. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer opened a casting office in the Italian capital in mid-1957 to select 50,000 people to perform in minor roles and as extras in the film, which featured a particularly crowded scene.
A total of 365 actors have dialogue in the film, although only 45 were considered main interpreters. When casting, Wyler emphasized characterization rather than the appearance of the actors or their film career. He selected British actors to play the Romans and Americans for the Jewish roles to clearly highlight the difference between the two groups. The Romans in Ben-Hur are patrician aristocrats, so Wyler thought that American viewers would assimilate the British English accent as patrician.
Today, it is difficult for any film to beat these figures from the days of the big studios, because today computers have eliminated the need for so many real human beings . For his Lord of the Rings trilogy, Peter Jackson used software called Massive, which allows him to create large crowds on the computer and control their movement. Some 20,000 extras worked in the trilogy, but 200,000 digital extras appear in the battle scenes.
