Thermopylae gets the blue screen treatment

If you're wondering why the new movie 300 looks like nothing you've ever seen, the basic reasons are as old as civilization itself: art and commerce.

Director Zack Snyder was determined to render the drawings of Frank Miller's graphic novel, about the 480BC Battle of Thermopylae, as faithfully as a movie could.

Warner Bros, which has been burned recently on such sword-and-sandal epics as Troy and Alexander, wanted the tale of the 300 Spartans who stood against a quarter-million-man Persian army made inexpensively.

The solution to both concerns? Shoot the actors in a converted locomotive factory against a blank bluescreen in tax-break haven Montreal. Then fill in ancient Greece digitally.

"The idea was to create a world, more than anything, that you hadn't seen before," says Bernie Goldmann, one of so many producers of the movie that they jokingly refer to themselves as 300, too.

"The thinking was that the epic was dead and needed to be reinvented. This movie was made at a third of the (usual) cost of those movies, and that was part of it. But it was also to make something that was going to ignite an audience and bring them into that world; to create the world of 480BC, or, more accurately, a fantastic version of that world."

Doesn't sound all that different from what Robert Rodriguez did with his movie version of one of Miller's graphic novels, Sin City.

Except that it's in color. And was shot on film instead of videotape to give it a grittier, more naturalistic look.

And there's the fact that 300 is based on an historical event. Although, by sticking to the comic's narrative, Snyder sees the film more as a piece of heroic propaganda, told by one escaped Spartan for the purpose of rallying other Greeks against the invaders.

"I would say 90 percent of the scenes in the movie are from the graphic novel, and the dialogue as well," says Snyder, a commercials/music video veteran whose first feature was the well-received Dawn of the Dead remake. "I was really conscious of that. It was my goal to get the tone of the graphic novel — not just the shots, but the feeling that you get from it."

That feeling is one of masculine bravado, with one strong gal added to the mix. Scottish actor Gerard Butler plays Sparta's King Leonidas, and England's Lena Headey is his wife, Queen Gorgo. While he heads off with his personal guard to hold the Hot Gates, she tries to convince the city-state's council to back the war.

The rest of the movie is pretty much mayhem, with the Spartan soldiers fighting off all the troops (plus a few creatures that seem to have wandered in from Middle-earth) under the command of Persian Emperor Xerxes (Brazil's Rodrigo Santoro, from TV's Lost).

Sporting their famous shields and clad in little more than helmets and capes, the Spartans had to look and move like the superb fighting machines that the culture made of its men. To buff up the actors, Snyder brought in world-class sadists ... er, physical trainers.

"Mark Twight is this nut-job mountain climber who trains other mountain climbers, cage fighters and undercover operatives," Butler growls. "We would do competitive circuit training against each other, running around with very primitive tools such as Kettlebells and medicine balls. You were dead by the end of it.

"That was mental conditioning, too; you really had to endure exhaustion and pain."