filming of every cannon fire and every attack scene, thus helping everything to fall in place under his unique order. His movie Mihai Viteazul was considered the best of the Romanian historical movies and is one of the most appreciated world-wide of this kind (for example, considering imdb ratings) . The film was released in 1970 in Romania, and worldwide by Columbia Pictures as The Last Crusade. A TV sequence in Steven Spielberg's "E.T." (original, uncut version) show images from "Mihai Viteazul" (scenes with the Battle of Călugăreni). While creating such historical movies he was supported by the Romanian Ministry of Defence with large numbers of extras and war equipment. He documented his historical movies meticulously, to this end seeking the advice of military consultants and distinguished historians of the Romanian Academy. Regardless these films have aesthetic qualities too, and are the expression of Sergiu Nicolaescu's vision as both a film director and a writer. His 1985 film The Ring was entered into the 14th Moscow International Film Festival. For this movie, Nicolaescu performed a very intensive boxing training with a former European boxing champion. The intensity of his training for this movie was similar to what the Romania's Olympic boxing team at that moment performed. At that time Nicolaescu was 50 years old and its boxing matches and the hits during this movie are real and against strong opponents. His huge work capacity was widely admired by his colleagues and crew. Another merit of his filmmaking is considered to come from his taking huge - yet, still well-calculated - risks while filming. For instance, for the war scenes, he used real dynamite and as well as real blood. In such situations there was always a high likeliness of the actors or the camera operators being afraid to fulfill their tasks. It was a big merit of Sergiu Nicolaescu that, for all difficult or very risky tasks, he was able to show in detail to any actor or camera operator exactly what they had to do before they did it. In such circumstances, during his 50 years career as film director and actor, Nicolaescu experienced several accidents or illness: still he went on performing and finished his movie projects with courage and sometimes at great personal cost (e.g., while producing Mihai Viteazul). After Mircea, Nicolaescu expands on historical themes, directing films that shed positive light on Ion Antonescu, Romania's Axis-aligned