Zack Snyder & Frank Miller – Interview

Staci Layne Wilson reporting

Q: This question is for Frank Miller: When you did the graphic novel, did you have in your mind at all that some day it would become a movie?

Miller: Not at all. No, no. I didn't think anyone could produce it, for one thing. But it was my dream project ever since I was a kid, and then I finally decided that I better settle on a way to get it done. But I really didn't imagine it as a picture at all. All that came later thanks to these lunatics [indicating Zack Snyder].

Q: Are you believers now that using CG technology and digital backgrounds is the only way to make a true comic book adaptation?

Miller: Well, it may not be the only way, but it's a damn good one. It's a way that I want to continue with because there's a lot of pictures that translate very well from cartoon to film by this process. You can get more extreme and more stylized, and it can feel much more like a living drawing. Plus, you get all the other... My characters can't make any noise, and they've got these white gutters that tell you they went from there to there, but you've got to figure that out. It's got all the advantages.

Snyder: For Frank's work, it's amazing and the book that he made - every frame is like a painting. So we just felt that the only way to get at that and to respect that and to do it justice was to make sure that we weren't… You can imagine us in some dusty mountain pass up in Mulholland or up by Vasquez Rocks. But I feel this way is more like the drawings, especially in terms of what he does.

Miller: Also, I want to comment about what Zack was talking about - the panels. They look painted because they were in fact painted by Lynn Varley and it's fascinating for me to see her watercolors translated and reinterpreted for the screen in a way that almost feels like there's a hand behind every turn. It's amazing for me to see all of this in motion. To say that it's a dream come true would be cliché, but completely accurate.

Q: You didn't use the comic book as the storyboard? You actually had a storyboard artist?

Snyder: If you look at the movie and you look at the book, it's pretty obvious that… the storyboard in the classic sense of, "Here's this shot. And then we're going to film this shot. And then we're going to film that shot." Yeah. But 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. It was those guys getting pushed off the cliff, the rain of arrows, and on and on - you can just flip through it. So in that sense what I tried to do is go, "Here's Frank's book." I was kind of snaking through it to try and find a moment in time. "Here it is! There's that frame. Here's this moment." The drawback I had is this linear aspect of film that takes you from moment to moment. In order to get to that next frame that he created, I've got to have some people talk and walk over there. That's the boring part.

Miller: There's a lot of white spaces between the images. He had to fill them all in.

Snyder: Yeah, exactly. It's kind of bullshit, but that's OK. [laughs]

Q: Zack, how did the visual tone you've chosen for this film help or hinder the special effects process?

Snyder: It was hard on the visual effects guys because the standard for visual effects is if I'm going to make a standard water bottle, the way they know they got it right is it looks like a water bottle. So that's their parameter. But if we're saying, "Make it look like a painting," we're asking them to do something else. We're asking them to stretch themselves into another world. So like I was saying, we had Grant Freckelton who was the visual effects art director, who works at Animal Logic but we kidnapped him for three years and kept him in American - he's Australian, but we kept him hidden. So 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 a rock looks like. This is what a sky looks like. And a lot of the skies in the movie would be coffee stains. He would pour coffee on a piece of paper and that would be a layer. And he would do it again and again. I'm like, "What are you doing?"

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

Miller: I mainly had to do 300 as a book because otherwise I really would be one of those idiots who keeps talking about how it's the best story he's ever encountered and how he's going to do it one of these days. So I finally decided I was going to bite the bullet. So I went to Greece and researched the story as much as I could - walked the battlefield and all of that - and just put it all down. It took a lot of distillation of the genuine history and I'm taking an awful lot of liberties with everything, but that's my job. If you want reality, catch a documentary. So it's a story that I've always had inside of me and always wanted to see. I saw the old movie of it when I was six or seven and it formed my whole approach to what heroes were. It gave me sort of a distaste for heroes who got medals at the end, or that damn Harry Potter getting applauded every single time. It pointed out more that heroes were willing to fight and die on principle whether they got credit or not.

Snyder: For me, first of all, I was a fan of Frank's. But I like history and I like epic battles. What's not to like about that. So it's like a natural thing. Frank and I share this love for a writer named Victor Davis Hanson who's a Greek historian who's written a bunch of books about Greek warfare and Greece itself - sort of a farming culture becoming a warrior culture and a free army versus a slave army, things of that nature. And we showed him the movie… we're doing a "making of" book that Victor wrote the foreword for.

We were a little scared when we showed him the movie. He is a historian, after all, so I was pretty sure that he was going to go, "Yeah, wrong." I feel that what he writes in the foreword is that the Spartan aesthetic is realized in the movie. The essence of what a Spartan is. You can argue whether Spartans were free people. You could argue what level of democracy they had - probably not very high. But if you take it in ancient context and look at what Herodotus says. Herodotus is the one that shaped what Thermopylae is for us - democracy versus tyranny kind of conflict. He did that. You can blame him for this point of you. Victor says, "Would you say the heroic nude as rendered on Greek vases is historically inaccurate?" He wouldn't. I do, but he won't. That for me goes back to… and then you look at the graphic novel, how can you not be a fan and make it into a movie.

Miller: And the purpose of this adaptation is not take you to back to school. It's at its best to get you started. We're out to tell yarns and this happens to be a terrific one with enough truths in it to make up for inaccuracies.

Q: Other than how beautiful the movie looks, what did you learn from the production of Sin City for 300?

Snyder: Well one of the things that I always say, and I don't know if this is true, Frank… and I think it goes back to what Frank said about the certain kind of heroes that he likes because I've always felt that Marv and Batman and Leonidas are kind of the same guy, and a guy that I like a lot. There's just a certain tone that they have that for me is exactly what I like to see in a hero.

I think in a lot of ways, Leonidas is… when you look at Frank's work, and I try to be a student of that as well so that I can try and find a Leonidas that had a lot of those ideas. That didn't take himself to seriously when he didn't have to. He had fun, but he didn't make fun. He knew his own power, but also knew how dark he was. It's just cool.

Q: One of the things about Dawn of the Dead is that it was approached from a non-ironic point of view. What did you learn from that project to make sure that this film wouldn't be interpreted as ironic, or maybe melodramatic?

Snyder: It's funny because I can't help but do that. That's sort of in me. When we made Dawn, there's a sequence in the movie where they're on the rooftop of this building and they're shooting these celebrity look-a-likes and the studio said to me, "Dude, we've got to cut this out of the movie. We shouldn't film it; it's crazy." And I was like, "That's gold. Are you kidding me? This is why we're making the movie. I'm spending an hour and a half so I can get to this." So I didn't think about it too hard. I didn't go, "I'm going to make sure that there's a certain tone." And I hope that there's a little bit of that angry irony in this movie as well. It's like I said, I like violence and I like images and I like story. Once you squish all of 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 bad name. I think it's a very worthy form of drama. I think that this is a lot more interesting then hearing Leonidas talk about his personal internal feelings for two hours. It cuts right through the bone and its kind of what Hitchcock said about one form or another. It's a reality with all the boring parts left out.

Q: Were there any techniques you used to help your actors visualize what they were doing, seeing how they were working against blue screens.

Snyder: Well, it's funny because when we first started to talk about this someone brought up the fact that basically what you could do with Thermopylae is you could put this mini-GPS on the camera. Over here is a 3-D model of Thermopylae - a big giant CAD rendering of Thermopylae. And then over here is a monitor that when I point the camera anywhere, it does a real-time composite of where you're pointing the camera. How cool is that? And I said, "Don't get that anywhere near me. I'll fucking kill anyone who brings that in here. We're going to be constantly cheating." And we were - everything's a cheat. We started out with this whole thing, "OK. Thermopylae is over there. The Persian encampment is over there." And then it was like, "OK. Fuck all that. Just stand here. Oh, here's a big chunk of blue screen. Stand right here and I'll film it. Thermopylae is over there." And I think at first we were very precious, but then it turned into a free for all. Once they trusted that I knew where they were looking, then they would say, "OK. Thermopylae's over there? Got it." So that worked.

Miller: Also one of the things that I learned on Sin City that Robert Rodriguez taught me is an awful lot of work in green or blue screen is doing whatever you think a camera would do, backwards. For instance, in the opening of Sin City there's a spin away from Josh Hartnett and Marley Shelton that looks like we're doing one of the most expensive camera moves in the world. But we were doing a simple pull away we just happen to put the camera on a gigantic Lazy Susan. So it was actually spinning, but in other words we faked it.

Q: Frank, how involved were you during the production of this film?

Miller: I went over the script a bit and met with Zack a few times, but this is his show. Blame him.

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

Q: Did you get any pressure from the studio to put bigger names in the film?

Snyder: I'd be lying if I said when you first start casting the movie - like any movie - you talk about, "OK. Brad Pitt is going to be Leonidas. And Captain is going to be Matt Damon. Gorgo is going to be Kate Beckinsale." And on and on. You know how it works. You get a list, and its "the" list. Any movie, by the way; they all go on the same list. So it's like, "OK. Here's a thing that takes place in ancient Greece. Brad Pitt, blah, blah, blah. Here's a movie that takes place in space. Brad Pitt, blah, blah, blah..." The same exact actors.

It's weird; if you're not on the list it's like, "Who's that?" But with Gerry, he's really… I really love him in the movie because he's so… Gerry has a big following, but I think to the general world he's going to be Leonidas when you see him. You don't see this movie and go, "Oh, that's Gerry Butler. Of course." I think it helps you get into the movie because the movie already has a bombastic visual style that kind of keeps you out. Having that cast, and it's the cast I wanted… Warner Bros. again was amazing because they said, "You know what? These guys work, so let's try it."

Q: They really look fit. Was there makeup used, or anything like that to enhance the muscle definition?

Snyder: When I showed some of the footage in England, I said I cast English actors because they are notoriously health-conscious people who love fitness above most other pursuits. [pauses, then laughs.] They love fish 'n' chips and beer. They don't love turkey breasts and weights. I will be perfectly honest with you; there is a little bit of makeup and airbrushing to help with the abs, but 99 percent is just sweat and an awful lot of work.

Q: Who is composing the score, and are there any other bands featured 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 and Tyler did Dawn with me and Tyler's an amazing cat and I'm super happy with the work that he did. Nine Inch Nails we felt embodied the attitude of the movie and that's why we used it for the trailer and things like that. That's where it came from. We looked at it with Nine Inch Nails and went, "Oh, that's it!"

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