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The Conquering Heroes

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[BOLD {WORKING BLUE}] CG effects artists turned 50 soldiers into 5,000. ''It's nothing revolutionary,'' Snyder says. ''Putting actors in front of bluescreen is the same technology every TV weatherman uses. It's the aesthetic that's different.''

Takashi Seida

It's safe to say that watching 300 won't earn you any credits in the classics program at your local university. The film is very much the 5th century B.C. by way of the 21st century A.D., playing fast and loose with the historical facts and, well, just fast and loose, period. Recounting the story of the vastly outnumbered Spartans' battle against the Persian hordes, with Leonidas (Gerard Butler) pitted against the jewel-bedecked god king Xerxes (Rodrigo Santoro), Snyder packs in a glut of testosterone-pumping action-hero bons mots, fountains of blood, and the occasional flash of Iron Age T&A. The result is 10 parts Tarantino to one part Herodotus.

Then again, scholars of antiquity are not exactly Hollywood's most coveted demographic target anyway. Gladiator's $187.3 million box office take notwithstanding, swords-and-sandals epics have had a decidedly uneven track record in recent history. Even as Snyder was honing his pitch for 300 in the summer of 2005, the disappointing examples of Alexander ($34.3 million) and Kingdom of Heaven ($47.4 million) were still fresh in executives' minds. Still, the 41-year-old Snyder, who cut his teeth on commercials, persuaded Warner Bros. that the genre was ripe for reinvention.

It didn't hurt that he promised to do it on a tight budget, using computer-generated effects to replace the usual expensive exotic locations, elaborate sets, and throngs of extras. Furthering the approach used on films like Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow and Sin City, Snyder shot his actors on bare-bones sets and CG effects artists filled in their surroundings later, turning 50 soldiers into 5,000. ''It's nothing revolutionary,'' Snyder says. ''Putting actors in front of bluescreen is the same technology every TV weatherman uses. It's the aesthetic that's different, not the tools.''

Sticking with that lean-and-mean approach, Snyder populated his movie not with A-listers like Brad Pitt or Russell Crowe but with relatively unstarry actors, casting the Scottish-born Butler (The Phantom of the Opera) in the role of Leonidas; British actress Lena Headey as his fiery wife, Queen Gorgo; and Brazilian-born Santoro as Xerxes. Butler, for one, was pleased to be the beneficiary of the studio's economizing: ''If you hire an actor who's a marquee name as an insurance policy, it adds $20 or $30 million onto the budget,'' he says. ''I always thought they were going to go the other way and get somebody who was up-and-coming.'' Butler certainly is that; in the wake of 300's opening, he has entered talks to star in a planned remake of Escape From New York. (Click here for more about the actor.)

While 300 came in at just a third of the reported cost of Troy, $60 million is still not what most people would call cheap, particularly for a film as risky as this one, and Warner Bros.' marketing team was bent on using every means at its disposal to sell the movie to the widest audience. Their campaign to win the hearts and minds of comic-book fanboys kicked off last July at San Diego's Comic-Con International, where Snyder and Miller held a Q&A and showed early footage from the movie. The footage was too explicit to meet the MPAA's standards for a theatrical trailer, nor could it be officially posted on the Internet. Not surprisingly, however, it eventually found its way onto YouTube, though the studio professes innocence in the matter. ''I have no idea how it got leaked on there,'' says Warner Bros. domestic marketing head Dawn Taubin. ''Things get leaked onto the Internet all the time, even when you don't want them to.''

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