300

I have been meaning to write this post for sometime, but it was not until Gerard Butler’s face, fixed in battle cry as Leonidas, whizzed by me on the side of a 337 red London bus last night, did I remember that I had yet to do so:

A few weeks ago Jeremy and I had the chance to see a preview screening courtesy of Warner Bros and the film’s Soho-based PR company, Beatwax, in Regent Street. We were guests of one of Indigo’s clients, Hugh MacLeod, whose Gaping Void t-shirts we printed and sold last year.

What made the evening really memorable though was not the film (even though it is very good!) but the Q&A with director, Zack Snyder, whose passion for Frank Miller’s original graphic novel and his insights into digital blood and ‘blue-screen’ filming were excellent:

QUESTION: Before this movie, how big of a fan were you of Frank Miller’s work? And what stands out to you about his style?

ZACK SNYDER: I’ve been a huge Frank Miller fan for a long time. I came to graphic novels through a magazine called Heavy Metal Magazine, if you’ve ever read it. It’s an adult illustrated fantasy magazine, and I say that because my mother did not know it was adult and illustrated fantasy magazine. She thought it was a comic book. I read it a lot, and I tried not to let her see what was in it, because there’s a lot of sex and violence in it. And so she would try and give me comic books, in addition to Heavy Metal and I just didn’t really have a lot of taste for it. Only then – when Frank Miller was with Batman, around ’85 – did I get recharged into the comic book world. So, I followed Frank then, gobbled up anything he did. And I didn’t think I would ever get to make a movie out of one of Frank’s books. When I was in college, or after I got out of college, I wanted to make Sin City into a movie. I thought the Marv story would be a great movie. Clearly, it is. So, the idea that we could get our hands on 300 and make it into a movie, it was just, like, guys in film school talk about, ‘Wouldn’t it be cool to make a movie that’s about 300?’ It’s, like, ‘Yeah, that’d be awesome. Let’s have another coffee.’ It seems impossible.

QUESTION: Had you always conceived of this as a CG picture?

ZACK SNYDER: Early on, there were ideas that we would shoot it in just a blimp hangar and build Thermopylae with painted backgrounds. That was the really, I think, the early, early incarnation. And then the evolution to a full blue screen movie came, I think, as we realized the production restraints, in that we needed one set to be able to fulfill a multitask. For instance, there was one big set that looked like a big plop of concrete that we shot all around, and it turned into, like, 10 sets in the movie, because once you have blue screen and a horizon, you’re pretty much off the hook of reality. So, that was a big part of how we made the movie.

You can view a clip of the movie on-line thanks to the wonders of streaming video: High Res (50 secs) - Apple Quicktime | Real Player | Windows Media Player

The film is out on general release in the UK on 22nd March 2007, so film fans will have to wait a little longer to view this roller-coaster of stylised violence set to a banging sound track and slightly camp dialogue.

Being a t-shirt blog we couldn’t leave you without some cotton related news and in tribute to the 300 film, we leave you with this gold foil print offering from British based t-shirt store, bonaroo.co.uk [Via T-Shirt Watch]:

N.B. Images and film clips © Warner Bros Ent Inc 2007.