That comic-book look

That comic-book look

300 director wanted his movie to come across like the graphic novel from which it is drawn, with characters talking that talk

JAMIE PORTMAN, Canwest News Service

Published: Tuesday, March 13, 2007


If a movie like the current 300 makes you feel that you're entering a new world and immersing yourself in a different cinematic language, that's what director Zack Snyder wants.

And he hopes for a similar impact when he begins work later this year on Watchmen, an on-again, off-again project which over the years that has seized the imagination of many filmmakers - among them Joel Silver and Terry Gilliam - only to be deemed too risky to bring off.

Both items come from the world of the graphic novel: 300 is graphic legend Frank Miller's highly personal spin on the story of the heroic defence of Sparta by Leonidas and a small band of warriors against attack from a massive Persian army; Watchmen, set in the recent past, is a Cold War thriller by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons about a group of fallible superheroes struggling to save the world from Doomsday as nuclear conflict with the Soviet Union draws closer.


The way Snyder approaches Watchmen will be conditioned, he says, by what he learned making 300 - an historical epic in which the craggy terrain of ancient Greece and the heat and blood and violence of the Battle of Thermopylae were largely re-created through special effects and innovative design techniques in a cavernous abandoned railway shed in Montreal.

Before making his feature directing debut with Dawn Of The Dead in 2004, he had built an international reputation in the area of commercials and music videos. Just as his witty commercials for Jeep and Budweiser were marking him as a unique creative talent, so does a movie like 300, which is enormously dependent on complex technology but also seeks to conceal these antecedents.

He talks enthusiastically about doodling away on paper at bits and pieces of "concept art to create a particular environment;" of augmenting his ideas by having colleagues "whack together images" in Photoshop; of reaching a point where he could conceive of a powerful visual moment showing a Spartan warrior on a hill silhouetted against a sky - provided he could place the camera so it could be angled upward.

By this time the "visual effects guys" were in the act, deciding how to make the sky dramatic enough. Then there was production designer Jim Bissell in the process of building an actual prop for a film largely dependent on CGI effects: he produced a little silhouetted hill built out of simple concrete, and he promised that Snyder would be able to use it at all sorts of important moments in the film.

Snyder wanted a new kind of realism. "I didn't want to make a film that looks like a photograph but rather to put you inside the world Frank created in the graphic novel ... to create a true experience unlike anything you've seen before."

So finding the right tone was essential.

"That's my favourite part of movies - the tone. With Dawn Of The Dead, I wanted to make a movie that felt like a cult movie ... it was organic and it was simple. When we went to do 300, I wanted to make a movie that felt like the graphic novel (with) characters who looked and talked like the graphic novel."

That meant it wasn't enough just to emulate the visual texture of the comicbook original. "The beautiful thing about any of Frank's work is the prose that goes along with his drawings. It is not just an illustration - there is this poetry. The way he structures the prose is as important as the drawings to me. I wanted to think of a way to preserve and honour his prose as well as his imagery."

Which is why, beginning with the casting of stage-trained Gerard Butler as Leonidas, Snyder looked for actors capable of handling the heightened language.

The computer was an ally in bringing 300 to the screen. But it had to be an unobtrusive ally. "The thing we really tried to do with 300 was not to make it look like it was made by a computer. I wanted it it to feel organic as much as we could because you don't want it to end up looking like Polar Express. The problem is that even though that's a great-looking movie and it's super cool, I don't feel that it relates back to the printed media it came from."




Snyder wanted to safeguard the interests of the Miller original with a film which - like the book - would constitute "an organic experience." Miller had been hesitant about a film version, and Snyder understands why. "It's sort of a passion project for him. If you look at it in relation to his other work, it's an anomaly. It sort of exists outside the realm."

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More on 300: TechnoCite blogger Roberto Rocha writes about the Montreal effects team behind the film. Read John Griffin's review of 300 and watch the trailer. Only at www.montrealgazette.com/spotlights.




© The Gazette (Montreal) 2007


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