I am not an ancient terrorist. (Photo: WB)

[by Scott Thill]

[Previous Page: " I think that Frank has gotten a pretty good shake from Hollywood in recent years, and I also think that helps his attitude towards it, makes him more pro than con..."]

Morphizm: Plus, it's not like there's a pure tableau when it comes to comics. There is artifice behind it, usually based on film language, so to be a purist about it seems disingenuous.
ZS : Absolutely! And another thing: Because it is based on a true story, you walk out in the desert and you throw this book away. Because now you have to do research on what the Spartans wore, what Xerxes looked like, and so on. It's funny because Victor Davis Hansen, a senior professor at Stanford of classics and ancient Greek warfare specifically, wrote this really great intro for the making-of- 300 companion book which talks about how historians can be wrong about their criticisms of films like these. He argues that no one would tell a Greek vase artist painting an impression or poem with pictures that his renderings were historically inaccurate if he messed up what his subjects were wearing. Look at the actual statue of Leonidas at Thermopylae: He's naked, and wearing only a helmet, shield and spear. To me, that's what the movie is about: It's an impression of the legendary battle of Thermopylae. When you strip away all the practicalities of existence, what's left over are the ideas, the idea that you are not a slave to the particulars of the moment. It's funny, after a screening of the film, someone who is not a big fan of violence came up to me after the movie and said that the movie didn't seem violent to him. Because it's almost a poem or song about violence. It's not Saving Private Ryan . It's because we try to abstract the violence, at which point it becomes something else.

Morphizm: The authenticity argument is hard to sustain in any real philosophical sense, because you're not even in the time period under question to begin with.
ZS : Not to mention the fact that Herodotus himself wasn't there. These are all second-hand accounts. The victors write the history, we all know that. It's not about whether or not there is another movie that could be made from the Persian point of view. Sure there is! By all means, make it, and in that film the Spartans would probably be monsters, and they probably were! I accept that, I have no issue with that. And if the whole tangle makes the audience go, "I should go read some books about this," even better! The problem is that, the way we view history as academics, we tend to turn it into a black-and-white affair. But it's an impossibly liquid thing. Victor Davis Hansen writes that "If critics think that 300 reduces and simplifies the meaning of Thermopylae into freedom versus tyranny, they should carefully read the ancient accounts and blame Herodotus, who long ago boasted that Greek freedom was on trial against the Persian autocracy. Free men in superior fashion dying for their liberty with their enslaved enemies being whipped to enslave others." And that's what the movie is about, and that's fine.

Morphizm: There are even questions about whether Herodotus even got the numbers right.
ZS : Absolutely. There's a line in the movie where Leonidas is visiting the Ephurs and he's laying out the plan, and he says, "The Persians claim their forces number in the millions. For our case, I hope they exaggerate." And that's all he says! (Laughs) Because what he's really saying is, "It's all bullshit! Who knows?" (Laughs)

Morphizm: 300 Spartans had a rep for being a Cold War propaganda film, and its Leonidas (Richard Egan) was a devout Roman Catholic who was a judo instructor in WWII. His brother was a priest. So Frank watches that, it hits him, and then he creates 300 , turns Xerxes black and makes Ephialtes a Quasimodo-like ogre. Now comes your version, in the middle of a War on Terror (with Iran, or Persia, again): Did the studios ask you to color this film for the War on Terror as they asked you to do for Watchmen ?
ZS : I think the last thing Hollywood would want to do is make a film that pointed out global conflict. You know how they are. I mean, I love that the perception is that Hollywood would want to make a propaganda film, but it's impossible. Even if I wanted to make a propaganda film, that would be impossible.

Morphizm: But the layers in inescapable. Iran's autocracy forcing Western civilization into slavery, Spartan bravery and doom as represented by the most quotable battle in history, and our last stand against it all? You don't feel these?
ZS : I guess I do think about the dense strata of that well-trodden world. It's funny because the battle is talked about in the crucial scenes of films like The Last Samurai . I was in preproduction when I saw it, and thought it was awesome. The battle at Thermopylae is inside of our cultural vernacular, popular and otherwise. I saw a Chicago newspaper article written after the Alamo that used "Thermopylae Has an Equal" as its headline. And people got it and still do. It made sense to mass culture. Maybe after the movie comes out, it'll make more sense.

Morphizm: Well, I would hope it sparks not an interest in the classics per se, but in history itself. Who died, when, how many, why, things like that from a few thousand years ago can teach someone a lot about the world they live in today.
ZS : Yeah, there's a great quote from Socrates that I will paraphrase roughly as "Kids today don't respect their elders, they gulp their food, they're loud and they don't adhere to the rules of society." (Laughs)

Morphizm: Where have I heard that before?
ZS : Exactly! And that's Socrates. People always think we're so different now, but we're no different. We're the same animal. 0

Morphizm: So what's Frank story on 300 ? Did you find out what it means to him?
ZS : His story is that he was watching 300 Spartans as a kid and it dawned on him right near the end that he couldn't figure out how the good guys were going to get out of it. So he went to his brother and asked if the good guys were going to die or not. And his brother said he didn't know, so Frank asked his dad who said, as Frank always explains with a deep voice, "Yes, son, they are." And he said it changed for him what heroes meant, and it's in every one of his books ever since. If you're looking for that single moment that shaped an artist who's commented on our culture in what I think are pretty important ways, that's the moment.

Morphizm: Great point. It's almost as if Leonidas, Batman or Marv's physicality is taking them out of their worlds, rather than helping them find their places within it.
ZS : Yeah, it's funny because most say that Leonidas would have been in his 50s or 60s at Thermopylae, and while Gerry's not 40, he plays it in the movie, which was fine for me because I wanted him to represent this icon of physical prowess. Frank's 50-year-old Leonidas is a monster, you know? (Laughs) He's not some decrepit old guy; he's a beast! Nothing is going to stop him. The studio was like, "Whoa, what?"

Morphizm: How did you get into this project, by the way?
ZS : A gentleman named Gianni Nunnari, who helped produced the film, and I were talking about movies in his office on day before I did Dawn of the Dead , and he was trying to find out what kind of films I was interested in making. And I grabbed a copy of 300 , which was sitting on a desk, and turned it to the last page Frank has of all the Spartans dead after their clash with Xerxes and said, "If you can make this scene into a movie, that would be something to see." It's Kurosawa, it's everything.

Morphizm: It's the end of Throne of Blood .
ZS : It absolutely is. That's a great movie. But I thought if we could make that movie, it would be incredible. The scale alone would be something to see. Look at that shot.

Morphizm: And that's what I'm saying: You couldn't be able to get that shot without CGI.
ZS : You couldn't do it. Plus, the whole scene takes place with the sun staying right there. It would take weeks to shoot it.

Morphizm: Which bodes well for 300 and Watchmen : You may actually help comics and cinema merge in the way they are meant to.
ZS : It's going to be difficult. People ask me if CGI like this is going to change the way movies are made, and it could but not totally. This is such a particular ook, you can go see Spider-Man , which has a freakin' ton of CGI in it that no one ever mentions. No one ever mentions that pretty much the entire city of New York is texture-mapped. It's not real; in fact, they shot a lot of that movie here in Los Angeles. No one actually went and filmed Spider-Man swinging through the streets of New York. But because it is a realistic representation, it flies right past the audience.

Morphizm: Which brings up a good point: When it's non-obvious CGI, there's no problem. It's when the CGI becomes obvious, perhaps overtly, that people start to bitch about it.
ZS : CGI lets the artist film a scene anywhere he wants. If you want to film a scene on the sofa, do it. If you need something else, it's available. Here is your bag of tricks. Dig in.

Morphizm: And it's also democratic. It's not like everyone can hire a ton of extras to trek out to Greece and pretend their warring with each other in the streets.
ZS : Exactly. We shot this movie for 60 days for $60 million. There's no way we could have done it out in the desert. It's ludicrous.

Morphizm: Do you have a lot of experience with CGI?
ZS : You know, I've done a lot of commercials with digital effects, but nothing that prepared me for this. But since everything came from my drawings and Frank's book. (Gets out his sketchbook) So this is basically how I work. And this is how I would use the frames for the book: Cut the ones I want to use out and paste them into my sketchbook. Then I would just draw around them, and make them into a movie frame, you know? And the film is cut and plays exactly like this sketch book. Because I feel it's really important for people to see how I squashed all of it together, Frank's book, my sketches, the film narrative. Frank's panels don't always have a film frame, so I implement that and add it to all of my drawings.

Morphizm: That shot of young Leonidas is superb.
ZS : That's my son, actually. He did a great job too.

Morphizm: Does he want to follow dad into the biz?
ZS : He's pretty mellow about it, so whatever.

Morphizm: He's mellow, so you throw him into a Spartan war film and make him kill someone.
ZS : That's why! (Laughs) I'm like, how am I ever going to teach my kid to punch the shit out of some other kid? That's how.

Morphizm: Pasadena family values at work.
ZS : Exactly. That's how we roll out here.

Morphizm: So what did you take away from the technical challenge of mounting this film?
ZS : When it came to the technology of this film, for me it was trying to find the organic middle ground between being a slave to pre-viz and all those things and using it to serve the work. It's funny, most will tell you that pre-viz is the most important thing to the film, but I pre-viz everything when I draw it. So I have a pretty good idea of what the film is going to look like in my head before we even get to shooting it. If I have a skill, it's that I can visualize it beforehand and say, "Don't worry, that's not going to be in the shot. That is." My point is only that there is a fine line between being burdened by technology and using it well. Mostly because you have so many tools at your disposal. You can shoot the film even before you shoot the film, you know? And because I'm used to working in commercials, where you have one day to film and there's no time for bullshit or second guesses, I think I can work in a physical, immediate way that's can exist apart from technology. You just have to do it, kind of like sports, which I always use as an analogy. Shooting a film is like a two-minute drill in football -- for the entire project. No huddle! And I think that is awesome; I don't how other guys work, but that's how I work. It becomes all instinct, and if you have a solid grasp of the technology, it can serve you rather than the other way around. It can make up for things as well. I can sit with Chris, our VFX supe, look at a blank landscape, tell him what I want there, and it's no problem. There were moments where I told him that I was going to be low with the shot and there would be no bluescreen to fill the gap, and he's like, "It's fine. Go for it." I've worked with him before, and he does a fantastic job. So does Grant, the VFX art director for 300 . Grant and I, really, designed the frames of the film, which is a huge responsibility on a film like this. I mean, he'd have my drawings on one knee, and the comic on another, and I'll tell him this is what I want the skies to look like, that is what I want to water to look like, and so on. And his genius is that he has totally sick Photoshop skills. Drawings are incredibly helpful, but when you want to know what the film is really going to look like, what the physical reality of the frame is going to be, that's a whole different thing. And Grant would make these cloudy skies, literally, out of coffee. He'd throw it on paper and use the stains; it's a completely organic solution.

Morphizm: Aaronofsky used the same approach with The Fountain , with acid I think.
ZS : It's better. Well, not better, but it's when you can put both approaches together that things work best. Then it just becomes a matter of the tools you are using; you're not having to decide between CGI and coffee stains.

Morphizm: Yeah, it would seem that if you're used to running on adrenalin to make commercials, too much wanking with tech would slow your roll.
ZS : Yeah, one of the things that we talked at length with the studio about was tech. They were telling us they could get a GPS that attaches to a camera so we could build a CG Thermopylae created in real-time on a grid so I would have a composite of the site no matter where I was. And I was like, "If I see that on the set I will punch someone." At that point, you might as well go outside in the desert and film, because that's what it becomes. I mean, we did so much cheating! The GPS would have screwed me with information I didn't need.

Morphizm: Did you film this in LA?
ZS : Montreal. Because it's cheaper there. We shot on film too, so the movie is a bit grainy, which is also something I really like about it. It's not liquid. I thought Superman Returns was a cool movie, but everything in it is so liquid. Everything looked so flawless.

Morphizm: Yeah, too clean. And Frank's work is anything but clean.
ZS : Absolutely. But that's the thing: His style is so particular, and he doesn't need to say look at how clean everything looks. That whole trend of lens flares and everything? I'm not into that.

Morphizm: What are you into, so to speak?
ZS : (Pointing to Watchmen ) Right now, I'm into that monster. It's all I ever look at these days.

March 5, 2007

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