Shot in 60 days almost entirely in a blue screen environment, the film tells the story of how a band of just 300 battle-hardened Spartans led by their King Leonidas took on the advancing might of the full freakish force of the invading Persian armies. A tale of heroic sacrifice that inspired all of Greece to band together against the Persians, which may help to explain why it broke box office records there too. Accused of historical inaccuracies and banned in Iran, this visually exciting and ultraviolent film has certainly given a much-needed boost to the sword and sandals genre which, having been resurrected by the success of Ridley Scott’s Gladiator, had been falling once again into decline, thanks to lacklustre efforts Troy and Alexander, both also from Warner Bros.
Unashamedly made for movie-goers, this popcorn epic is happy to sacrifice history in the cause of greater cinematic effect, remaining stylistically close to its comic book roots and bringing both martial arts and heavy metal to the ancient battlefields. This modernistic attitude seems to be working for audiences, and is a testament to director Zack Snyder, who is unafraid to take on the kind of projects that usually send fans of the source material into a panic about how their holy icon is going to be desecrated. It was these same Fan-atics (to use a Bruce Campbell expression) who vilified the director as he attempted to remake George Romero’s seminal zombie epic Dawn of the Dead, but then applauded him for delivering a thoroughly entertaining and scary modern update of the genre – although sadly avoiding the socio-political commentary of the original.
I caught up with the self-confessed action geek director in Rio De Janeiro as 300 was being released in Brazil. “The thing about 300 is that the film is both modern and ancient at the same time,” says Snyder. “Frank Miller took an actual event and turned it into mythology, as opposed to taking a mythological event and turning it into reality. That’s the refreshing thing about it.”
Certainly, the ancient story has a modern look (and soundtrack), which contributes to the scale of the mythology. But then storytellers often have a tendency to exaggerate the details of battle, a practice that dates way back to oral traditions that existed long before Homer. The rather individual look of 300 was dubbed ‘the crush’, and is a clear attempt to reinterpret Frank Miller’s original comic book artwork on the big screen. But it also echoes the paintings and comic book work of the hugely influential Frank Frazetta, as well as drawing upon more classical artists such as Caravaggio. Not your usual approach for an action film.
“We wanted the viewer’s experience to be similar to the experience of reading the graphic novel,” Snyder explains. “And felt that was a good way to start to get at the look of the movie and have it relate to the graphic novel by really creating some crazy contrast. I can’t deny that I’ve also been influenced by Frank Frazetta, plus a myriad of classical paintings throughout art history, which is a sort of my mish-mash of my experience. I didn’t want to make a film that looks like a photograph, but rather put you inside the world Frank Miller created in the graphic novel. When you go to the movies, you want an experience that’s different.”
Achieving ‘the crush’ was a major part of the year of post-production that followed the intense 60-day shoot. It also required careful consideration of all on-set design during pre-production. The process, which was distributed as part of a ‘style guide’ to the ten VFX facilities working on the project around the world, basically creates a look that has a super high contrast with enhanced colour saturation. “Every prop and every rock and everything in the scene was designed to have the ‘look’ put on it,” explains Snyder. “For instance, the finish on the metal shields was designed not for the naked eye, but for what the camera sees. Then in post we would take the shadow areas and make them incredibly dark, and we would take the highlights, or the areas where the light strikes heaviest, and make those incredibly bright. Then we would warm the image or cool the image depending on what was required. When you’re making the highlights super-bright in a normal environment, say when you film a normal sequence outside and you want to create a similar high contrast look, the sky becomes white, because the sky is normally the brightest thing in the scene and you’re brightening the light areas. But because we shot the whole thing on blue screen, we were able to lay in new skies that are incredibly contrasty. It’s also the thing that makes you feel like there’s something strange, because people know photographically that when they see something that’s blown out in the highlights that the sky should be blown out too, and they can’t figure out exactly what’s wrong with the image.”
Comparisons are bound to be made with the successful Frank Miller/Robert Rodriguez collaboration Sin City, which was also based on Frank Miller comic books, also shot on green screen (well actually 90 per cent of 300 was shot on blue screen rather than green because of problems with getting a clean matte when the Spartans wore red capes – red and green should never be seen), and which also underwent a radical re-imagining in post production. One big difference between the two projects is that Rodriguez shot HD, whereas Snyder opted to stick with film – shooting on Super 35mm. The digital intermediate process was handled by Company 3, also working on über-summer blockbuster Transformers. Company 3 scanned the footage using a Northlight scanner, transferred it to HDCAM SR tape and HD Quicktime (used for HD preview cuts), at a working resolution of 2K. It had a working aspect ratio of 2.11 (the final projected aspect ratio was 2.35).
“I’ve been shooting film for years,” says Snyder, “and I haven’t switched over to the digital world yet. I feel like there is something still in film that’s organic. We even added more grain to the film because we didn’t want the movie to look like it had just got spit out of a computer. It had a little bit of an organic quality to it, so it didn’t feel so completely perfect. I wanted it to be a little rough around the edges. Plus, we shot a ton of high speed and they hadn’t really cracked the high speed, slow motion digital camera when we shot.”
The punishing fitness training, fight training and body building that Snyder put his actors through before production began, and actively engaged in himself, has already become legendary, but it was designed to enhance the visual aesthetic in terms of both look and movement, as the actors perform all their own fight scenes. This marks a clear attempt by the director to move away from the fairly common US practice of shooting fight scenes in short bursts of four or five movements very close in on the action, where it is difficult for the audience to read what is happening. Instead, Snyder has favoured wider shots with longer choreographed scenes before cutting, very much in the style of Hong Kong cinema (and now adopted by French and Thai cinema), allowing an audience to see the bloody mayhem in all its glory and understand the flow of action, which incorporates martial arts and abandons the documented fighting formations of the Spartans. The violent deaths are made even more visceral by high speed attacks and super-slow-motion kills.
“I really was very interested in trying to get this balletic and poetic fighting style photographed,” explains Snyder. “I tended to use wideangled lenses and high speed photography, so as not to ‘cover’ the action. I wanted to see the whole thing – and allow the actual actors to do the fighting. That’s difficult, but in many ways that is the takeaway of the movie, the way the fights are choreographed, they way they look. I’m a teeny bit of an action geek, that’s really what it was about for me.”
A difficult director to pigeon-hole, Zack Snyder seems one part sports jock obsessed with training and fight action, one part comic book film geek and a third part classical artist – studying painting at Heatherlies School in London, England. To which the director attributes his distinctive visual style. “I’d always made films in High School,” Snyder explains, “and painted and made sculptures. But all of my paintings had some kind of cinematic quality to them and I remember my advisor saying, ‘You know I think you should really make movies because it seems like that’s what you really want to do.’ So that’s when I went: ‘Well, maybe I should go check out film school’. I think painting informs your aesthetic. When you start to think about things you come at it initially visually, and things get created that way. Then the world sort of gets put on top of the pictures, as opposed to the other way round. Like you have an idea and then you try and visualize that idea. It’s the pictures that start it for me.”
Majoring in film at the prestigious Art Center of Design in Pasadena, Snyder then shifted into music video and commercial filmmaking, producing videos for the likes of Morrissey, Soul Asylum and Heather Nova, plus commercials for Budweiser, BMW, Lexus and UPS. British Communication Arts Magazine featured the director as one of the most talented commercial directors in the US, and he has received MTV Awards for his music videos. Debut feature Dawn of the Dead include a Subaru commercial directed by Snyder just before the ‘Special Report’ on TV, a tip of the hat to the 15 years he has worked in the sector and the contribution it has made to his filmmaking.
Snyder had been looking at the possibility of making 300 as his first feature when the opportunity to direct Dawn of the Dead came up. “I was having such a hard time finding a project that I could feel passionate about,” explains the director. “And so it was hard to put my hands around anything that interested me. But when I saw 300 I became very passionate about it very quickly, and it hit me as pretty much the perfect movie for me to do. Originally, no one was interested in the film. Not least of which was because of its R rating, its lack of stars and its comic book origins. It seemed like a no-brainer to me, but when they said no, that’s when I found Dawn of the Dead. I mean, I was ready to do 300, but I’m glad I did Dawn first in some ways, but I don’t think it would have been a different movie.”
Together with producing partner and wife Deborah, Snyder formed production company Cruel and Unusual Films, which recently announced a two-year overall deal with Warner Bros. Sticking with comic books, the next project for Snyder is likely to be the long-awaited Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons graphic novel The Watchmen, which has had many an up-and-coming director’s name attached to it. This time it looks set to get made, as initial concept artwork is already being used to whet the appetites of fanboys and develop the market for the film’s release. Other projects on the horizon include the optioned cult sci-fi comic book Cobalt 60 by Vaughn Bode, and Sucker Punch, the story of an institutionalized young girl retreating into an alternative reality. As with all his projects, Snyder is involved in co-writing or writing the screenplays and also draws all his own storyboards. “It’s about having a complete experience for me, I think. I love making movies, I love every aspect of it, and the only way I know how to do it is to personalize it and just say, ‘I think this would be cool’, and that’s why you end up with the movies that you do. That’s really where the writing comes from for me. I like the story as well as I like the whole… every bit of it.”
• The film 300 was edited on Avid with an HD cut also maintained in Final Cut Pro. Maya, XSI and Lightwave were used for 3D. The 2D composites were created using Shake, Inferno, Fusion and Combustion. Asset management was handled by custom software written in the Panorama development environment, made by Provue. Colour management was handled by Truelight. Most of the film was shot at high speed, between 50 and 150fps.
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David Valentine.David Valentine is a freelance writer and filmmaker currently working with arts organisations and education providers to support community filmmaking projects for young people. He is also a proponent of Free Media. |