Word: snyders
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Snyder it was simply the only way to get the look of Miller's 300 off the page and onto the big screen. "One of the early versions of the movie I wanted to do was a Lemony Snicket kind of method," he says, "where you build a giant environment in a giant hangar, and it's an actual 3-D world, but it's just done with painted backgrounds. But it's incredibly expensive, and you need the space. When I saw Sin City I said, 'You know what? I could do that.'" He could and did. Snyder shot...
...immense burden on the director. "Zack would go, 'Come and see this stage!'" says Lena Headey, who plays Leonidas' wife. "And we'd go, and there'd be, like, a rock. And we'd be like, 'Has he taken acid this morning? Or what's he looking at?'" Snyder had to make his actors see what he saw, and he saw things that weren't there yet. "Every now and then I'd stop and go, 'This is crazy!'" he says. "'What are we doing?' And then we'd shake that off and get back to work...
...tall. In one scene a nubile oracle dances in a trance, her hair and her flowy, filmy wrap swirling surreally around her otherwise nude body (300 earns every inch of its R rating). There's something odd about the image that you can't put your finger on, until Snyder explains that the dancer was actually performing in a tank of water and was then digitally placed in the scene: "She looks like she's in pain, but she's really just holding her breath. Which works for the scene...
...heard Francis Ford Coppola say: "My movie is not about Vietnam. My movie is Vietnam." Coppola's protracted, Pyrrhic struggle against the jungle stokes the movie's crazy energy. In 300 there's not really much of a struggle. If 300 is the Battle of Thermopylae, then Snyder is the digital god-king Xerxes, and not the Spartans...
...Snyder's defense, 300 isn't really a movie about a battle at all. It's a movie about a graphic novel about a movie about a battle. "It's not trying to be reality," Snyder says. "The blood is treated like paint, like paint on a canvas. It's not Saving Private Ryan. It's something else." Maybe that's the only way to make a war movie right now, or at least, the only way to make a war movie that's not an antiwar movie. 300 turns the ugliest human spectacle imaginable into something beautiful...