Page 3
Was the most difficult challenge or the hardest scene to shoot?
Zack Snyder: “Probably the hardest thing to do was the beginning of the movie, I think, when we were in Sparta and all that – just getting in the groove. It’s funny, by the end of the movie when the Spartans have their last stand, I felt like we were pretty in the groove. When you look at it in the movie, it’s not here, but when you see it it’s an ambitious part of the movie. But surprisingly by then everyone kind of knew where to go, what to do, why, where everything was, so it was really the early stuff, the stuff actually with more sets which was strangely more stressful. For me, anyway. That’s not logistics, but I think it translates into logistics when no one knows where they are or what’s happening.”
Have you finalized what your marketing campaign is going to look like so that the public knows this is different than your normal genre movie?
Zack Snyder: “I think that when you see the trailer - my feeling is anyway and maybe I’m not objective because I live it – but I think when you see it you immediately go, ‘Okay, this is another sort of way of doing this.’ I think in every aspect, in its attitude, in its visual style, in its sort of unapologetic violence, all those things I think… And also I’ve got to say in the movie Gorgo, who is the Queen, she has also a part that is – I think – I don’t want to say, ‘Oh look, it’s multi-quadrant,’ and all this. I believe that it is because I think my dad can see this movie and go, ‘F**k yeah! Freedom, I get that.’ And I think also some college kid can just go like, ‘What the hell? This is nuts!’ My aesthetic is probably closer to a 15-year-old’s than my dad’s, but I get his conviction.”
Were you concerned about sticking to reality in regards to how the people of the time would actually look and the clothing they’d wear?
Frank Miller: “I’ve never been accused of being realistic. It’s never my goal. I mean, putting together the Persians I looked over the way they really looked. Frankly, whole armies of them were apparently rag dolls or just had rugs or something. So I just looked at the coolest warriors there were and a number of them just happened to be Japanese. ‘Should I do that?’ So when I was putting together my version of this, I just wanted it to look cool. The same with in Sin City, for instance. I defy anyone to pick what decade it takes place in because it’s got cell phones and ‘53 Cadillac Eldorados. I know you’re all from Los Angeles so you’re used to that, but the rest of us aren’t.”
Zack Snyder: “I think Sin City is a good example. Nobody would accuse Sin City of being historically inaccurate because it takes place in modern times. When you look at the book and you look at the immortals, you say, ‘Okay, they look like ninjas sort of.’ I personally also feel like that’s cool, those little tassels. That’s cool. You have to have that. But also you have this narration that kind of covers the whole film. I imagine the film as if I was a Spartan and I had never seen an immortal or a Persian, or an elephant or a rhino for that matter, and I was waiting and Dilios was telling me about it, what would I picture?”
Frank Miller: “And also if you were a Spartan at the time, it seems really unlikely there were 70 foot elephants in Thermopylae, okay? There haven’t been a lot of them spotted. But how would you remember it when you first saw this monster? It would be 70 feet tall because nobody from the Greek side had ever seen an elephant. So I think taking liberties and thinking more and more abstract really falls into historical tradition.”
Zack Snyder: “In the Making Of book there’s a guy named Victor Davis Hanson who is a…”
Frank Miller: “We’re his fan club.”
Zack Snyder: “He’s a frickin genius. He’s a Greek historian and we showed him the movie because I wanted him to write a forward to the Making Of book. I was a little nervous to be honest, because I wasn’t sure how he’d react. And Kurt Johnstad who he and I worked on the screenplay together, he actually also is a huge fan of Victor Davis Hanson. He went up to show him the movie at his house. And about halfway through the movie, it’s the scenes where the Spartans are leaving for Thermopylae and they’re walking out of Sparta, Victor turned to Kurt and said, ‘Are the Spartans just going to be naked like this the whole time?’ And Kurt kind of went, ‘Yeah…,’ thinking that Victor was like, ‘Okay, wrong.’ But at the end of the movie he said, ‘You know, I’ve got to say that the movie in some ways,’ and I’m going to post on the website just a little excerpt from it because I feel like it’s a cool thing for people to read because it actually puts a lot of it in perspective as far as from an historical standpoint. He says that, ‘Look, if you have a problem with distilling the Battle of Thermopylae down to freedom versus tyranny, you need to read Herodotus because he’s the one. It’s his fault, not modern culture’s fault. He did it.’ He references a lot of things like that because he feels like the spirit of the book and of the movie are very close to the Spartan aesthetic. That’s really kind of what he feels.”
Frank Miller: “When I started work on the comic book I said, ‘Okay, let’s see how the accurate version works.’ Imagining 300 slow-moving beetles wearing skirts coming across the field to face off, rather than these huge, muscular guys running with these red capes and those really scary Corinthian helmets. I mean, jumping back to Victor Davis Hanson, it was right in the middle of maybe our first conversation that Zack brought his name up, not realizing that he was citing my favorite non-fiction writer in the whole universe. I kind of felt we were starting to get along.”
Page 4: Frank Miller and Zack Snyder on Future Projects
