After taking the stage and answering questions from the crowd, writer/director Zack Snyder sat down for this interview about his second feature film.
You couldn’t have imagined this reception for 300, could you?
“You know, I got to say I didn’t exactly know. I felt like…I’m slightly geeky so for me I thought, ‘Gosh, I think this is cool.’ I felt like it would probably translate to the fans. But, you know, it’s been big and sweet and cool.”
But it doesn’t just translate to the fans of Frank Miller’s graphic novel. Women seem to love this and women don’t usually read graphic novels.
“Absolutely. Well my wife has been really pretty hard on me about making sure I keep something for the girls…”
Besides the naked men…
“And it’s not even that (laughing). It’s just that we’ve been talking about the movie from the [female perspective]. I think it’s an interesting process to make a movie with your significant other, in the sense that she’s my best friend and this person that I’m always with every second. The idea that I could just turn to her and go, ‘What about this?’ And she’d say, ‘Yeah, that’s cool,’ or ‘I don’t know.’ Or, ‘Yeah, that’s what I’m talking about.’ I’d say, ‘Okay, good.’ So I think that, and also to have someone - and this sounds a little corny - but I think to have this sort of female energy in your life that’s that strong and I think it ends up balancing me out a little bit. I tend to go a little hard.”
Whose idea was it to expand the role of Queen Gorgo?
“It was my idea, but she just monitored that I think, you know? Even just I’ve got to say like at the end of the graphic novel, [flipping through my copy of Frank Miller’s 300] Leonidas goes, ‘My queen, my wife, my love, be strong goodbye,’ right? And so I kind of felt like, ‘Gosh, you know, it’s been a while since I’ve seen her.’ It’s like I want that to resonate. I want you to remember her.”
You felt the need to teach us more about their relationship?
“Absolutely. That in the very end he’s like, ‘I want HER.’ That’s the thing and I think that’s important.”
There’s a moment when King Xerxes first speaks that’s a little disconcerting. Why did you choose to alter the actor’s voice?
“Because we saw that when we, because we scaled him as we did, when his normal voice played, it was even stranger to me. He was out of scale of his voice, not that it wasn’t commanding. In some ways it was foreign to him because now we’ve taken him and turned him into a nine-foot-tall guy and his voice is not the voice of a nine-foot-tall guy. It was weird. So we just pitched him down and that’s why we did it. It was hard to do. I talked Rodrigo [Santoro] about it and we tried to figure it out. I showed him some things.”
But it was Rodrigo’s voice?
“It is his voice. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We just pitched it down.”
I saw 300 with an audience of Ultimate Fighting Championship fans who seemed to really appreciate the fight scenes. They were so into them that I think they weren’t necessarily appreciating your visual style.
“That’s okay, that’s fine. It’s funny, I really think that, too, because I do have this weird sensibility where I do like action, I do like hard-hitting stuff, but I do want it to be beautiful. I really do. I’m obsessed with the image and I’m obsessed with it looking fantastic. But I’ve got to say one of my favorite parts of the movie is when Lena [Headey] - and from basically from when Gerry [Butler] stands up at the very end and says, ‘My wife, my love, be strong,’ or no, he just says, ‘My queen, my wife, my love,’ right? To the end of the movie I love that part of the movie. I just feel like it it’s this kind of thing where you go to a movie and the whole thing is you get to that point in the movie and all the pieces are still like, the whole thing’s like that [holding his hands together with his fingers spread out], right? And in those 10 minutes it all just closes on itself in this kind of nice way. It really does, and I feel it even though I made it (laughing). I still go like, ‘Oh, that’s cool.’”
How close is the finished film to your storyboards?
“It’s pretty close. I mean if you look at the ‘Making Of’ book, if you look at the drawings in there, I think you have a pretty good idea about what I was intending of the frames. I’m happy with the translation. I feel like it is all the things that I hoped it would be. When you flip [the graphic novel] around and you just start to look at what we actually shot, you know, you come across a lot of the same images that are in the movie. And not just visually, but emotionally as well. Like it was that experience, trying to get that, [pointing out a drawing of two men standing alone on a hilltop in the graphic novel] what that does to me emotionally, trying to get that into a movie is the trick. It’s one thing to be technical about it, right? That’s like, ‘Okay, blue screen, blah, blah, blah, whatever,’ you’re crazy look and all that. But it’s another thing to say, ‘How does it make you feel and is that in the movie?’ That’s what I hoped to do.”
