Butler, Wenham on Bringing 300 to Life

Now Playing Magazine

Butler, Wenham on Bringing 300 to Life

Written by Cindy White
Wednesday, 23 August 2006

Like Sin City before it, The 300 will bring the work of graphic-novel writer and artist Frank Miller to the screen using live actors against a computer-generated background. Shot entirely on a soundstage in Montreal, the film centers on the ancient battle of Thermopylae, in which 300 Spartan soldiers attempted to hold off an invasion by a massive Persian army. For stars Gerard Butler (The Phantom of the Opera) and David Wenham (the last two Lord of the Rings films), the process was a little disorienting, but worth it in the end.

“I’m not going to lie,” Butler tells Now Playing. “It takes a little bit of the joy out of it, and it also makes it more challenging in different ways. I wasn’t used to it, so it took a bit of getting used to. But I always try to look at the positive side of things and that was, ‘What can I learn from having to act in this kind of environment?’ I think your initial reaction is to overdue things and overreact to the environment that you’re pretending to have. Whereas what I did was really try to play against that, because at the end of the day it’s about people speaking to people, and it’s about attitudes and values.”

Butler is King Leonidas, the leader of the Spartans, who makes the decision to take his men into battle despite the overwhelming odds against them. He describes his character as a natural born leader. “He’s somebody who at the start of the film has a huge dilemma set in front of him,” Butler says. “Does he accept kneeling down to another ruler and essentially abandon everything that the Spartans have ever stood for? Or going for it, taking his army that’s hugely outnumbered and essentially risking completely annihilating his own culture and his own people? So he has this choice. He’s also rejected by his own political party and therefore can only take 300 men. For him, though, it’s a vision to something far greater — inspiring the rest of Greece. And also kind of showing the rest of the world just what the Spartans were capable of. This was a chance for them to show what incredible warriors they were.”

Wenham plays Dilios, the narrator of the story and a friend of Leonidas, who inspires the Greeks to defeat the Persians once and for all. “He’s essentially he’s the storyteller,” Wenham says. “It’s through his telling of the story that we find out what happened at Thermopylae. And it’s also Dilios’ telling of the story that eventually rouses the troops to go on and eventually defeat the enemy. He’s one of the 300 soldiers, he’s a great friend and confidant of Leonidas, the king, but his great skill is in oratory.”

Having already worked on Lord of the Rings, Wenham was no stranger to special-effects epics, but he had even less to work with on this film. “I’ve got to say, for me it wasn’t a problem because it wasn’t as though we were imagining creatures that weren’t there or people that weren’t there,” Wenham says. “All the people that I had dialogue with or fight sequences with were physically there. I spoke with them, I fought with them, I killed them — they were there. It’s just the geography of the space that was dropped in afterward.”

The 300 is in the midst of a long and arduous post-production phase before opening in March of next year.


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