It took over three months to complete, using 8,000 extras on the largest film set ever built, some 18 acres. Eighteen chariots were built, with half being used for practice. The race took five weeks to film and Charlton Heston spent four weeks learning how to drive a chariot. He was taught by the stunt crew, who offered to teach the entire cast, but Heston and Stephen Boyd were the only ones who took up the offer (Boyd had to learn in just two weeks, due to his late casting).

At the beginning of the chariot race, Heston shook the reins and nothing happened; the horses remained motionless. Finally someone way up on top of the set yelled, “giddy-up!” The horses then roared into action, and Heston was flung backward off the chariot.

To give the sequence more impact and realism, three lifelike dummies were placed at key points in the race to give the appearance of men being run over by chariots. Most notable is the stand-in dummy for Boyd’s Messala that gets tangled up under the horses and battered by their hooves.

This resulted in one of the most grisly death scenes in motion pictures at that time and shocked audiences. The race itself is a spectacle of such savage intensity and suspense (the sound track is full of the pounding of hooves, cracking of whips, exhortations of the charioteers and, of course, the tremendous roaring of the crowd in the overflowing galleries of the stadium) that Music Director Miklos Rozsa desisted from giving the sequence a background musical score.

One of the best-remembered moments in the race came from a near-fatal accident. When Ben-Hur’s chariot leaps over another which has crashed in its path, the charioteer is seen to be nearly thrown from his mount and only just manages to hang on and climb back in to continue the race.

Stuntman Joe Canutt, son of stunt director Yakima Canutt, was considered fortunate to escape with only a minor chin injury. Nonetheless, when director William Wyler intercut the long shot of Canutt’s leap with a close-up of Heston clambering back into his chariot, a memorable scene resulted.

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