Interview: Zack Snyder On 300

By Kellvin Chavez on March 5, 2007

Director Zack Snyder first feature film was Dawn of the Dead. Snyder's eclectic style ensured the film as a commercial and a critical success and fans of the original film largely received the film positively.

Snyder's most recent film is an adaptation of Frank Miller's "300," which will be released to theaters this coming Friday. Preview screenings for the film have been highly enthusiastic, with standing ovations at the premiere of the Berlin film festival and various positive reviews which laud the film with high criticial acclaim. You can read our review from our very own George Roush HERE!

Zack Snyder is directing the big screen adaptation of Alan Moore's graphic novel Watchmen for Warner Bros. Production is set to begin this summer and is slated for a 2008 release.

I sat down with Zack Snyder a few weeks ago in LA and here is what he had to say about the film and of course Watchmen.

Here is what he had to say:

So what's going on with 'Watchmen?'

Snyder: What's going on with 'Watchmen?' That's awesome [Laughs]. No, that's fine. It's alright. It's fine. It's supposed to be one question and then 'Watchmen.' No, it's fine. I get the mood of the room. 'Watchmen,' well, we're trying to get a budget together now. Look, the movie I feel like is in a pretty cool place. I think that the script is getting to be pretty cool. I've been talking to some actors, I'm not going to say who, but it's cool because in some ways you can get some real actors. You don't have to go Hollywood with it. So that's all going along. I've been drawing away, and so I think it's coming along, as they say. They have talked about maybe shooting it in the summer. So it's eminent.

What's been the delay because ten years ago it was a Joel Silver project and Terry Gilliam was going to direct?

Snyder: Yeah, look, I can only thank God that they haven't gotten it together yet. I think that the delay is always that they haven't known what it was. I've set the movie in 1985 and I have the luxury of being far enough away from 1985 so that is a viable idea. I think that what happened in the past was that when you're only five years away from 1985 it's a weird thing. It's hard to make a period piece that took place a few years ago. Studios don't get that and there has a been a push on the other scripts that exist about trying to update the movie or make it take place in present day, or things of that nature. I really think that by setting the movie in '85, by having the Cold War, having Nixon, having all of that stuff you sort of reinvigorate what the story is about and it allows all the metaphors to sort of play out. If you set the movie in modern times you're basically saying that it's the war on terror, right – that would be the thing. Then the movie is asking me, 'Oh, Zack, what do you think of the war on terror? What's your take on it?' I really am not – who gives a fuck what I think about the war on terror. That's not what the movie should be about and that's not why people go to movies. I think that what Alan [Moore] has done in his book, the comment that he's made about authority and government and all of those things, they're big themes, maybe if you make that movie right what that has to say makes people think about what's happening now or maybe in their own lives. That's my hope for what the movie could be.

How is the universal praise for '300' assisted you in making 'Watchmen' and possibly other projects?

Snyder: Well, I can't say that it hasn't helped. It's helped a lot. I think that what it is and what it does do is that, like, someone said to me, 'Dude, what's going on with "Watchmen?" You have to make sure you don't fuck that up.' I'm sorry if I'm swearing, but goes, 'What can I do to help?' I said, 'Go see "300."' The truth is that '300,' to the studio anyway, is a graphic novel movie. It is not a movie that they necessarily understood exactly when I pitched it on paper. I said, 'Listen, it's this in a movie.' They don't get that. So my point is that they feel in some ways the same way about 'Watchmen.' They don't understand why it's not 'Fantastic Four.' I always have to tell them, I have to remind them that it's much more 'Strangelove' than it is 'Fantastic Four' which they don't like hearing. But I think that they believe that I know which is a mistake [Laughs]. No. They believe that I know and so in that way it helps and when they finally saw this movie, I think, they were like, 'Wow, we didn't necessarily know that was the movie you were making, but we like this movie. So maybe that will apply to "Watchmen."'

For someone who didn't read the book, how much of the movie is the book?

Snyder: '300?' I would say that it's probably about ninety percent the book. There is maybe a ten percent bit that I added which was sort of the queen's storyline. We did that to initially remind people of the why we fight part of it. You get all the way up there in Thermopolis and suddenly Sparta becomes abstract and so I wanted to remind people, and then once we got into that we started to realize that we had to figure out what the queen was about. There is a line in the graphic novel where Gorgo says, 'Come back with your shield or on it.' That was attributed to her in history, and so in my research I found, like, 'Oh, here's another thing, this thing about only Spartan women give birth to real men.' That was another line that I found that was attributed to her, and I thought, 'Gosh, if you combine those two what kind of a character is that? Who is that woman who says those things?' That's really what we used to build her and sort of flesh her out.

Where do you start with something like this? You're on a green screen stage doing all of this. You do start building environments? Do you start with the actors? Do you start with the place?

Snyder: The way that we started was with the concept art. The first thing that we did was that we would just be like – I would do a little doodle, and Grant [Story] would say, 'Okay.' And he would do some Photoshop whacking together of images and that would sort of get us in an area where we'd be like, 'Okay, that is kind of working.' Then we would try and refine that by maybe shooting some stuff. We'd shoot a guy in a Spartan outfit, not the ones we used in the movie, but something like it – red cape for composition and sky and things like that. So that process evolved all the way then to production where we would sit at a table like this and we'd have the storyboard that we were going to shoot in front of us and I would say, 'Okay, I want the camera low. What happened the moment before is the guy walked up and they stopped on the hill and I'm imagining that it's a silhouette and that sky we would replace.' Then everyone would take turns. The visual FX guys would go, 'Okay, what we plan to do is generate this sky, get this background, maybe there is a sun flare.' And so on. Jim Bissell, the production designer, would say, 'Okay, this is what I plan to build for you to shoot on. It's a little hill silhouetted that's made out of concrete and you can use it for all these different things.' So we'd basically do that two thousand times and then you have the movie.

Miller has such a distinct style in the book. Was it difficult as a director to leave your own style in adapting it?

Snyder: I wasn't really conscious of that. I didn't really think about it that way, but I will say that I think that even when you try to get out of the way of something you're like a filter. You can't help it. It goes through you and when it comes out of the other side it's got people in it and there are all sorts of things that happen. So I wasn't really worried about that because also the thing that I talk about and the thing that I love about a movie is tone. That's like my favorite part of movies, the tone of the movie. What is it? What kind of a movie is it? When I did 'Dawn of the Dead,' my feeling with that was that I wanted to make a movie that felt like a cult movie, that you could feel it was organic and it was just simple and it wasn't going to be a lot of CGI, but just a lot of makeup. So when we went to do '300' I wanted to do a movie that felt like the graphic novel, that the characters stood and they looked and they talked like the graphic novel and that you felt the graphic novel in this. That was the most important thing to me because I felt that the story was there and the sort of heroic nature of the film was there, but the tone and where it came from, I wanted you to feel that too. So in that way I used the graphic novel as a thing that informed the tone of the movie, and that's my favorite thing about the movie. It's that I feel that.

Were primarily dealing with mythology here rather than history, right?

Snyder: Absolutely. I say that '300' is a movie that is made from the Spartan perspective and not just the Spartan's perspective, the camera is with the Spartan's, but it's also the sort of Spartan sensibility of the battle of Thermopolis. If you had a Spartan and they were sitting around a fire and they were telling you, before anything was written down, what happened at Thermopolis this is the way that they would tell it, down to the fact that they don't have armor on. Everything about it is just to make the Spartan's more heroic.

Were there any shots that you just couldn't make work and are now out of the movie?

Snyder: The only thing that's out of the movie, nothing from the graphic novel really except for that one scene with Stelios and Leonidas that's at the very beginning of the book, but there is this thing we shot that's going to be on the DVD. It was these giants with these midget archers on their backs. They just got so outrageous that when I looked at it I was like, 'This is like from another movie. This is crazy.'

Is it finished?

Snyder: Yeah. It's like ninety percent finished. It's pretty cool because the Spartans are running and these giants have no arms. They're arms have been hacked off and they have these sort of little elf looking guys in these kind of whicker baskets on their backs and they're firing arrows. Then a Spartan comes and hacks the leg off of it and it screams and falls and then they leap onto it and stab the little elf with a spear.

Even on 'Sin City' Frank said he was hesitant to let Robert Rodriguez do the film. Was he at all hesitant with you?

Snyder: I think he was hesitant. I don't think that he thought anyone would ever try to make '300' into a movie. I've been with him and we've talked about it in these kinds of scenarios, and he always seems to me to be very surprised that we picked it. It's almost like a passion project for him. If you look at it in relation to his other work it's sort of an anomaly in many ways. I think in the graphic novel world too it's an anomaly. It's this thing that sort of exists outside of the realm. I think the one thing that's consistent is Leonidas. Leonidas is like Batman. He's the same guy. Frank likes that guy and he writes him a lot. I think that his chance to have Leonidas march up to Thermopolis and fight like a madman and then die is something that he just likes.

What will your approach to the tone of 'Watchmen' be like?

Snyder: Well, I have to say that for instance, the CGI on this – listen, the thing that we really tried to do with '300' was not make the movie look like it was made by a computer. I wanted it to feel organic as much as we could because you don't want it to end up looking like 'Polar Express' which is a possibility. You get enough CGI in there and suddenly it's that movie and though that's a great looking movie and super cool I feel that it doesn't then relate back to the printed medium that it came from. You start separate yourself from it. I know that sounds contrary because you could say, 'Well, an animated film is much more like a graphic novel.' But I disagree because I feel like Frank's graphic novel is much more of an organic experience. It's a gritty book. There is a lot of still paint on that book, it feels like it anyway and that's what I wanted to do.

So then what about the colors you chose because you go from monochrome to sepia to full color?

Snyder: Well, I think that they all relate. All of the color choices have a lot to do with each sequence and why they are the color they are. Also, it's how they relate back to what the sort of overall palette of the book is and how in the book sort of the only color that's really saturated is the red. Everything else is pretty washed out and even with that, ninety percent of the cases in the book are almost like that brown red. To get back just for a second to the 'Watchmen' answer, the idea with that is not to do a CG movie, but to do it when it's necessary like when he goes to Mars. If you do that you have to figure that out. You can't go to Mars. I know that a lot of people are going to be disappointed with that, but I just don't have the money. Antarctica, also, there is no Karnak built there. I know we should probably build it, but I don't think that they're going to let us do that. So those two things right off the bat you have to think about. Then Dr. Manhattan himself, what do you do with that and how do you render him? Rorsharch's mask. There are things that have to be dealt with and figured out, but I think that the appetite for me is to make a movie that feels more like 'Taxi Driver' than 'Fantastic Four.' So it's a balance.

Is the budget for 'Watchmen' set right now or is there some plus or minus with the success of '300?'

Snyder: That's theoretical, but I believe that is probably reflecting reality. I don't know that for sure though. It is not set right now and so maybe that's a coincidence and maybe not.

With the DVD of '300,' what can fans look forward to aside from the one scene that you spoke of already?

Snyder: There are only a few deleted scenes because pretty much the movie that we made is there. That's the thing, I feel the one cool thing about the cinematic experience of '300' is that it's my cut. They haven't really messed with me that much. Although there are a few Ephialtes scenes that we took out where he's like, you know, looking down on the Persians when we first see him. It's just straight out of the graphic novel. You can look in the graphic novel and those are the two scenes that aren't in, but we shot them and also the Stelios diving off the wall of dead – that was also in the movie.

What about documentaries on there?

Snyder: You'll actually see the Frank frame. Whenever it's the same as the movie you would see that frame in the corner and you can click on it and do all of that crazy stuff.

What was your meeting with MPAA like?

Snyder: You know what, it wasn't that bad. I think that there were a few things. Look, on 'Dawn' I had five or six tries before I got my R, but we got an R right away which was pretty cool. Honestly, I don't think that the movie is that gory personally, '300.' I think that it's so bizarre. I've had fifty year old women see the movie and go, 'I thought it was cool.' And I go, 'What about all the gore?' They said, 'Well, it's cool. It's like art. It's fancy.' So I think on one hand if you want to enjoy that you can, but I think that on the other hand it is abstracted in a way that I think the MPAA looked at it and said, 'It's not "Saving Private Ryan."'

How do you see the art of animation involving more technology?

Snyder: You mean in the sense that now animators are doing everything in the computer and it's not really a drawn medium? Is it that good or bad? I think that certainly in some ways it needs reinventing. If we look at the movies now like 'Shrek' and all the Pixar movies, in some ways they were super original and now they've all become the same thing. I think that's a genre that could use a little kick in the ass.

Source:Latino Review

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