Q&A with Frank Miller and Zach Snyder on 300

Q&A with Frank Miller and Zach Snyder on 300

Latino Review.com

November 10,2006

By: George 'El Guapo' Roush


'El Guapo' is back bringing you a little Q&A with Zack Snyder and Frank Miller. Select members of the press were treated to a sneak preview of 300 footage and here's what the director and comic book icon had to say afterwards.

Frank Miller & Zach Snyder Interview For '300'

By George ‘El Guapo’ Roush

Question: Mr. Miller, when you were writing this story did you have any idea that it would become a movie?

Miller: Not at all. No. I didn't think that anyone would produce this for one thing. I was just doing the book for it's own sake. It was my dream project since I was a kid and I finally just stepped up to the plate and got it done. I didn't really imagine it as a film. All that came later thanks to these lunatics.

Question: Are you guys believers that using these digital backgrounds and CG is really the only way to make a true comic adaptation?

Miller: Well, it may not be the only way, but it is a damn good one. There are a lot of things that translate very well from cartooning to film by this process. You can get more extreme and more stylized and you can feel much more like it's a living drawing, and plus you get all the other benefits.

Snyder: I think that for Frank's work, and if you're familiar with it, it's amazing and the book that he made is every – every frame is like a painting. We just felt like the only way to get at that and to try it and to respect it and to do it justice was to make sure that we learned how to do this. If you can imagine us in some dusty mountain pass like up by Mulholland or like up by Vasquez rocks trying this. It just wouldn't work.

Miller: Also, I want to comment what Zack is talking about with the panels. They looked painted because they were in fact painted by Lynn Varley. It's nice to see her water colors translated and reinterpreted to the screen. I mean, it almost feels like the same. It's amazing to see all this emotion. To say that it's a dream come true would be cliché, but completely accurate.

Question: So, you guys didn't use the comic book as the storyboard?

Snyder: Well, I mean, if you look at the movie and you look at the book it's pretty obvious that as far as storyboard in its classic sense, like, 'Here's this shot and then we're going to film this shot and that shot.' Yeah. So when we did the sequencing that was a different process, but the shots as they're rendered are straight out of the book. So, in that sense, yeah, we did use the book as a storyboard. What I tried to do was go, 'Here's Frank's book.' I was kind of going through it to find a moment in time, but it was like, 'Here's this frame. Here's this book.' It almost became like that. The drawback that I had was this sort of linear aspect of film that kind of takes you from moment to moment. So, in order to get to that next frame that he has created I have to some people talk and walk over there, and do that.

Question: How much did the visual tone of the book help or hurt the special FX process?

Snyder: Oh, it was hard. Like I was saying, it was hard on the visual FX guys because the standard for visual FX is that if I'm going to make a water bottle, a digital water bottle, the way that they know they have it right is that it looks like a water bottle, right? So, that's kind of their perimeter, but if we're saying, 'Make it look like this. Make it look like a painting.' We're now asking them to do something else. We're asking them to kind of stretch themselves into another world. So, like I was saying, Grant Freckleton who was the visual FX supervisor and works at Animal Logic we hijacked and kidnapped for three years basically. We kept him in America. He's Australian. We kept him hidden because he's illegal. I'll never be president now because I had an illegal working for me. But he had to create these style guides which were these really cool books that would say, 'This is what rock looks like. This is what a sky looks like.' And he literally, those skies, a lot of those skies in the movie would be coffee stains, and when I say that I mean he would really pour coffee on a piece of paper and that would be a layer and he would do it again and again. He would take a cup, and I'm like, 'What are you doing?'

Question: Who was composing the score, and were there any other bands that you put on the soundtrack besides Nine Inch Nails?

Snyder: Nine Inch Nails, by the way, is actually not on the soundtrack. The score has been composed by a guy named Tyler Bates. That score is Tyler's. Tyler did 'Dawn' with me and he's an amazing cat, and I'm super happy with the work that he did. Nine Inch Nails we felt sort of embodied the sort of attitude of the movie and that's why we used it for a lot of the trailers and things like that. That's where it came from. We looked at it with Nine Inch Nails and went, 'Oh, yeah. That's it.'

Question: Frank, what was it about this story that captured you as a kid, and then Zack, what was it about the book that made you have to do it?

Miller: I mainly had to do a '300' book otherwise I would've been one of these idiots talking about the best stories ever. 'I had to do one of these days.' So, I finally decided to bite the bullet and went to Greece and researched the story as much as it could be it on the battlefield and all of that, and I just put it all down. It took a lot of distillation, the genuine history and I was taking an awful lot of liberties with everything, but that's my job. You want reality. So it was a story that I always had inside me and always wanted to see it. I saw the old movie of it when I was six or seven and it formed my whole approach to what heroes were. It was pointed out that these characters were willing to fight and die on principle whether they got credit or not.

Snyder: Well, for me, first of all I was a fan of Franks. But I also like history and I like epic battles. I mean, what's not to like about that. So it's like a natural thing. Thank God we share a love for this writer named Victor Hanson who is a Greek historian and has written a bunch of books about Greek warfare and Greece itself and sort of farming culture becoming warrior culture and a free army versus a slave army – things of that nature. We showed him the movie and were doing a making of book that Victor wrote the forward for and we were a little scared when we showed him the movie because he is a historian after all, and so I was pretty sure he was going to go, 'Yeah, wrong.' But I feel like what he writes in the forward is that Spartan sort of aesthetic is realized in the movie, the essence of what a Spartan is. You can argue about whether Spartans were free people. You can argue about what level of democracy they had, probably not very much, but if you take it in an ancient context and you look at what Herodotus says, he's the one that shaped what Thermopylae is for us - democracy versus tyranny, that kind of conflict. He did that. So, you can blame him for this point of view. Anyway, that for me goes back to all of it, and then you look at the graphic novel and how can you not be a fan and want to try not to fuck it up when you make it a movie.

Miller: Also, for purposes of this kind of adaptation, it isn't to take you to school. It's at best to get you started. I mean, we're out to tell yarns and this happens to be a terrific one with enough truth in it to make up for inaccuracies.

Question: You mentioned that you went to 'Sin City' school. What are some of things that you learned so that you could do this?

Snyder: One of the things that I always say, and I think that it goes back to what Frank says about certain kinds of heroes that he likes because I always feel like Mark and Batman and Leonidas are kind of the same guy, and a guy that I like a lot. There is just a certain tone that they have that for me is exactly what I like to see in a hero. I think that in a lot of ways Leonidas - when you look at Frank's work and I tried to be a student of that as well so that I can try and find a Leonidas that had a lot of those ideas. He's a guy who didn't take himself too seriously when he didn't have to. He had fun, but he never made fun. He knew his own power, but he also knew how dark he was. It's just cool.

Question: One of the reasons that 'Dawn of the Dead' worked so well was because it wasn't ironic. What did you learn from that experience that you could use in this?

Snyder: It's funny because I feel like I can't help, but do that. That's kind of like in me. When I made 'Dawn,' and there's a sequence in the movie where they're on the rooftop of the building and they're shooting these celebrity look alike zombies and the studio said, 'Dude, we've got to cut this out of the movie. We shouldn't film it.' I said, 'What? That's gold. Are you kidding me? That's why we're making the movie. I'm spending an hour and a half so that I can get to this.' So, I didn't think about it too hard. I didn't go, 'I really need to make sure that there is a certain tone.' I hope that there is a little bit of that kind of – I don't know what you'd call it – angry irony in this movie as well. But again, I like violence and I like images and I like story. I think that once you squish all that together, if you don't drink your own Kool-Aid too much you can make something cool.

Miller: I'd like to comment that I think melodrama has been given an unfair rap. I think it's a very worthy form of drama. I think that this is a lot more interesting than hearing Leonidas talk about his personal and internal feelings for two hours, and it cuts right through to the bone. It's kind of what like Hitchcock said about one form or another, its reality, but with all the boring parts left out.

Question: One of the challenges of doing all blue screen is that your actors don't have anything to react to while shooting.

Miller: They've got people stabbing them with spears and swords.

Question: That's true, but I'm wondering if you had any techniques that you used to get your actors used to this?

Snyder: It's funny because when we first started to talk about it someone brought up this thing that what basically you could do with Thermopylae is you could put this sort of mini-GPS on the camera so if I'm handheld there is a little GPS on the camera. Over here is a 3-D model of Thermopylae, a big giant rendering of Thermopylae, and then over here is a monitor that when I point the camera anywhere – there's a huge grid on the ceiling – there is a real-time composite of where I'm pointing the camera. How cool is that? I said, 'Don't get that anywhere near me. I'll fucking kill anyone who brings that near me.' I thought that we would be constantly cheating, and we were. Everything is a cheat. We started out with this whole thing of like, 'Okay, Thermopylae is over there and the Persian camp is over there. Fuck all that. Just stand here. Here's a big chunk of blue screen. Stand right here and I'll just film it. Thermopylae is over there.' I think that at first we were very precious and then it turned into like a free for all as far as once they trusted that I knew where they were looking then they would say, 'Okay. Thermopylae is over there? Got it. Stand and fight!' So that worked.

Miller: One of the things that I learned on 'Sin City' that Robert Rodriguez taught me is that an awful lot of working in green or blue screen is doing whatever you think the camera can do backwards. For instance, the opening of 'Sin City,' there is a spin away with Josh Hartnett and Marley Shelton that looks like we're doing the most expensive camera move in the world, but we were only doing a simple pull away. We just happened to put them on a gigantic lazy Susan. So, they actually were spinning. In other words, we faked it.

Question: How involved were you during the production of this film? Did you have any influence during production?

Miller: Not really, no. I mean, I fiddled with the script a little bit. I met with Zack a few times, but this is his show. Blame him.

Snyder: You know what, you can blame him because I'll tell you something right now, and like I said before, if you look at the book and you look at the movie I think that you can see what kind of influence he had on the movie. It's pretty crazy.

Question: You mentioned 'Troy' and Brad Pitt. Did you ever get pressured to put bigger names in the film?

Snyder: Look, I'd by lying if I said that when you first start casting a movie like any movie you talk like, 'Okay, it's going to be Brad Pitt as Leonidas and then the Captain is going to be Matt Damon and then Queen Gorgo is going to be Meryl Streep.' No. I'm just kidding. 'Is going to be Kate Beckinsale.' And on and on. You know how it works. The list. It's like that on any movie, every movie. Every movie it's like that. 'Here's a thing that takes place in ancient Greece. Okay, Brad Pitt.' 'Okay, here's a thing that takes place in space. Okay. Brad Pitt.' It's the same thing. It's crazy. I think that with Gerry he really is Leonidas. I really love him in the movie. The other thing is like Gerry has a big following, but to the general world he's going to be Leonidas. You don't see him and go, 'Oh, that's Gerry Butler. Of course, right.' Like you do with Mel Gibson. I think that it helps you get into the movie because the movie already has a bombastic visual style that kind of keeps you out. Having this cast, and it's the cast I wanted – Warner Brothers was amazing. They said, 'You know what, these guys work. So lets try it.'

Look for 300 in theaters March 2007.




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