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Some people have objected to the monsters in the film and those are probably the people who haven’t read Frank Miller’s graphic novel. Does that worry you at all?
“You know it doesn’t. I believe the movie is a different thing for different people. I think the movie for some people I really wanted for just the fantasy part of the movie to come across. I wanted this fantasy adventure with all the little themes that Frank wants, but I also wanted the experience to just push it even further you know, just so the experience was total. Like you never you really went somewhere else. And also, in my mind, the justification is that this story’s being told by Dilios to the Spartans and these guys have never probably left home. They don’t know what a Persian looks like; they don’t know what Xerxes looked like. I’m sure that Dilios just made all that up to make the story better.”
Like a fireside tale?
“That’s exactly what it is. Exactly what it is. In some ways it’s funny because Bettany Hughes, who’s one of the historians who’s on the DVD who talks about the movie, she said that it’s funny if you think about it from an historical standpoint. The Battle of Thermopylae was mythology before it was actual history because before it was written down, it was just told like fact. And then later Herodotus went, ‘Oh, let’s write it down and I’ll give you my take on it.’”
