COMMENTARY: My name is Zack Snyder, I'm the director of this movie.
- Kurt Johnstad, one of the writers. - Larry Fong, director of photography.
If you listen to that song...
...it's a mock of "As Time Goes By," so listen to it again...
...when you get a chance. I said to Tyler, like, it should go:
[COMMENTATOR HUMMING]
And then he made that into a song.
That lightning is the lightning from the book.
You'll see it right here at the end.
It's also in some of the Frank Miller Dark Knight lightning too, if you look at it.
That skull shot was the first shot we shot, right, Larry?
That was the first shot on the first day.
We shot it in the first 10 minutes. It's cool that it's the first shot in the movie.
We did that shot so quickly everyone thought:
"We're ahead of schedule on the first day."
Exactly. And they thought it was all gonna go that smoothly.
Boy, were they mistaken.
DILIOS: - he would have been discarded.
From the time he could stand, he was baptized in the fire of combat.
COMMENTARY: Eli Snyder appears briefly as the young Leonidas, my son.
Does an awesome job. I like that he gets beaten by a giant man immediately.
But, look, this is his Bruce Lee.
See that? I taught him that.
He had a hard time with the ADR.
He had to do this breathing separately. If you've never been in a movie...
...and you have to get in a sound room and replace your dialogue or your sound...
...it's an abstract experience.
He did a good job in the end, but it was tough for him.
- Was that a real sound there? - No.
That's a plastic shield so that sound is all completely fake.
I mean, that was a big thing, was getting those plastic props to look...
They'd put a finish on all that stuff that when we did this...
Effected the film the way it is, with the contrast...
...that those highlights, it would stand up.
If the shields were too shiny, it would have...
It would have burned out into a big white thing.
And this punch, look at the skin wrinkle.
- Yeah. On the eye. - Yeah.
And then Grant put that blood in, the blood on his knuckles.
Did that in the final hour.
DILIOS: - and if necessary, to kill.
COMMENTARY: We wanted to show the sort of quick journey of the agoge...
...and that they got beat and they beat each other up...
...and then tossed into the wild, of course.
DILIOS: Constantly tested, tossed into the wild.
Left to pit his wits and will against nature's fury.
It was his initiation...
...his time in the wild...
...for he would return to his people a Spartan...
...or not at all.
[WOLF GROWLING]
COMMENTARY: This is the wolf that was inspired very much by...
If you look in the graphic novel, you could see Frank's wolf, and it's larger than life.
It's hungry, so we made it kind of skinny in the stomach area.
DILIOS: The wolf begins to circle the boy.
Claws of black steel...
...fur as dark night.
Eyes glowing red...
...jewels from the pit of hell itself.
COMMENTARY: These are all pretty much right out of the graphic novel, these shots.
But of course we didn't have a wolf on the day we were shooting...
...so we had the stuffed wolf.
DILIOS: The giant wolf sniffing...
COMMENTARY: And we ended up shooting all these close-ups of the wolf...
Like this, we shot with the mechanical wolf and then just...
We ended up replacing him with the CG wolf. You see there?
Because he's a little bit more wolf-like.
[WOLF WHIMPERS]
[WOLF HOWLING]
COMMENTARY: So that was the background plate.
It did have the mechanical wolf when we shot it...
...but then we ended up covering it with a CG wolf there.
DILIOS: It's not fear that grips him...
...only a heightened sense of things.
The cold air in his lungs.
COMMENTARY: This is a shot that we never did. This is all CG.
[WOLF HOWLING]
COMMENTARY: Moon, again, CG, all CG.
Grant did a lot of those look frames, though, to establish what those skies...
...and moons would look like.
This shot right there, that's, like, one of the few all-set shots in the movie.
That's the same set, we made it snow, made it hot...
...you know, we used that set a lot, that courtyard.
[SPARTANS CHANTING]
COMMENTARY: And then that's David Wenham, being Dilios.
DILIOS: It's been more than 30 years since the wolf and the winter cold.
And now, as then, a beast approaches.
Patient and confident, savoring the meal to come.
All the... What do you call those things? - cinders were added later.
DILIOS: An army of slaves, vast beyond imagining...
And that third layer...
...like, you see the guys way in the back, they weren't there either.
The kind of silhouette-y guys, they were a separate pass or separate element.
- Which is why they're not moving much. - Yes, exactly.
But this was real, this little heat vapory thing.
See, that's real fire in the foreground.
- Exterior shot. - The only exterior shot in the movie.
Well, the only handful, there's the three right here.
This horse sequence we did shoot outside.
That wasn't the sky of the day.
This is the photosonic shot too. Our only photosonic shot in the movie.
So that ground is real, the dirt flying up is not real.
This was an element we shot in front of that blue screen...
...that was attached to a big trailer...
...and then this is Grant's shot that he did himself...
...basically in his living room with his Mac.
More outside and then that's it. There's no more shots done outside.
Although all the elements, they were all completely roto'd off that.
[HORSE NEIGHING]
COMMENTARY: And then there's Peter Mensah looking scary with contacts...
...and his... What do you call that? - Persian calling card?
Persian calling card, yeah. That's the crowns of conquered kings right there.
So there's the courtyard again from the snow sequence.
And if you look, the one little detail we did was, if you look at the fountain...
...that's on the back wall, you can see it at the top of the frame there...
...it's a wolf head now. After Leonidas has conquered the wolf...
...he sort of adopted the wolf as his... See it right there behind him?
- What was it before? - It was just a little sort of spigot...
...that stuck out of the wall. If you look in the... I think it's in the wide shot...
...where he's becoming a king. I'm not totally positive.
LEONIDAS: First...
...you fight with your head. - Then you fight with your heart.
COMMENTARY: Then Lena Headey and Gerry Butler, both awesome.
LEONIDAS: Do not forget today's lesson.
- Respect and honor. LEONIDAS: Respect and honor.
COMMENTARY: And then here comes Dominic West and Peter again.
And this shot was done... And if you look, there's Chad right there...
The only time you see him in his little Spartan bikini. It's a rare sight in Sparta.
LEONIDAS: I'm sure.
Before you speak, Persian...
...know that in Sparta everyone, even a king's messenger...
...is held accountable for the words of his voice.
Now, what message do...?
COMMENTARY: That was all real and this is all real, shot in camera, these shots here.
But anytime you're looking that would be to the right of Lena...
...that's all digitally sort of extended.
GORGO: Do not be coy or stupid, Persian. You can afford neither in Sparta.
COMMENTARY: This was a line we shot two ways...
...because everyone wasn't sure whether...
..."coy or stupid" was good, but I thought it was cool.
- I'm sure Kurt wrote that. - I did.
- Coy or stupid? - I'm both. Coy and stupid.
MESSENGER: If you value your lives over your complete annihilation...
...listen carefully, Leonidas.
Xerxes conquers and controls everything...
COMMENTARY: And here comes a shot that's...
...right out of the graphic novel we tried to reproduce.
This was a shot also, coming up, which was this overhead that we tested.
A lot of the looks of Sparta came from that overhead. Remember, we shot the tiles.
And this shot right here, the cat.
MESSENGER: a token of Sparta's submission to the will of Xerxes.
COMMENTARY: That's pretty much set, except for the sky.
There's a little bit of blue screen.
It goes all the way back and all the way...
The doors are open and you can see almost into the courtyard.
Back where Leonidas was wrestling Pleistarchos' son.
LEONIDAS: See, rumor has it...
...the Athenians have already turned you down.
And if those philosophers and boy-lovers...
COMMENTARY: "Philosophers and boy-lovers," that's right out of the book.
We filled that stage. Like, in this shot our backs are against the back wall.
Yeah, exactly, the camera basically is bumping against one side of the set.
Larry had a hard time lighting that because you're so close...
...to the side of the stage.
If you know about photography, it's hard to film something...
...when you can't get away from it. - Your back's against the wall.
- Literally. - Literally.
That's a CG shot, of course.
Grant worked on that shot to try and make it look good.
And then we have this shot which is when he pulls the sword out...
...and we pull back, which is, again, right out of the graphic novel.
It was the idea of kind of trying to take that shot...
...and the relationship between getting the graphic-novel shot...
...to the reality, and that's all just... Half of the well was real and half is CG.
The front half of the well is real, the back half is fake.
And it's basically a flat piece of green circle laid on the ground.
LEONIDAS: You bring the crowns and heads of conquered kings to my city steps.
You insult my queen.
You threaten my people with slavery and death.
Oh, I've chosen my words carefully, Persian.
Perhaps you should have done the same.
This is blasphemy. This is madness!
Madness?
This is Sparta!
[MESSENGER SCREAMING]
[PEOPLE SCREAMING]
COMMENTARY: And then this shot, there's a little CG link...
...they had to do between these two shots to get us from one to the other.
And then the other Spartans that were falling, they sort of become a little bit CG.
And then, now this takes us back to the early days of photography.
[LEONIDAS GRUNTING]
COMMENTARY: Yeah, a little wire assist there.
And set extension and the rocks are added later.
That shot's right out of the graphic novel too, or very similar to it.
I like that idea of the cape blowing. We actually built a separate cape...
...for those shots, because his cape is leather...
...so we had to build a sort of one that was made out of fabric...
...so it could blow. Leather, as you know, you can put a lot of wind on it...
...and it doesn't move around too good.
These makeups were pretty cool. I like these.
DILIOS: The ephors, priests to the old gods.
COMMENTARY: This is the helicopter shot. - Yes, it's the Spartan helicopter...
...which is really hard to get. They had to pedal really hard...
...to keep the blades rotating.
Again, this is a shot that's right out of the graphic novel.
We talked a lot about the size of the moon...
...and I felt like it should be pretty ridiculous, which it clearly is.
LEONIDAS: - forces number in the millions.
I hope, for our sake, they exaggerate.
COMMENTARY: That's out of the graphic novel too.
In the graphic novel he rolls out a scroll...
...but we thought it would be cool to rip off Hero and do a kind of a dirt box.
- Homage. Yes, not rip off. - Homage, yeah, sorry.
And then there's the gold. As you can see, the ephors, they like gold.
LEONIDAS: and the terrain of Greece herself to destroy them.
We will march north to the coast, where I will make sure...
It is August, Leonidas. The full moon approaches.
EPHOR 2: The sacred and ancient festival.
Sparta wages no war at the time of the Carneia.
COMMENTARY: Here's a little history. The Carneia is real.
The Spartans, that was the thing that happened to them at Marathon...
...they couldn't go to Marathon because of the Carneia.
And it's what got in the way of them here 10 years later.
They fought a lot of battles in the summer, apparently.
There's the Hot Gates. The Spartans are gonna come down...
...and they're gonna not be able to go down the coast...
...because the Phocian Wall will be built, so they'll end up going into the Hot Gates.
LEONIDAS: And wave after wave of Persian attack...
...will smash against Spartan shields.
Xerxes' losses will be so great, his men...
COMMENTARY: That moon, of course, is fake...
...and if you look, the cloud is moving ever so slightly, which is nice.
EPHOR 1: Trust the gods, Leonidas.
I'd prefer you trusted your reason.
COMMENTARY: This is another frame I liked out of the graphic novel...
...with the finger pointing in the foreground.
EPHOR 1: Don't compound them.
COMMENTARY: But again, all the torch, the embers, were all done later.
Even this shot here.
- There was a torch there. - There was a torch for the embers.
It had no embers coming off of it, which is weird anyway.
DILIOS: Worthless remnants of a time before Sparta's ascent from darkness.
Remnants of a senseless tradition.
Tradition even Leonidas cannot defy...
...for he must respect the word of the ephors.
That is the law.
And no Spartan, subject or citizen, man or woman...
...slave or king...
COMMENTARY: This bit we shot dry here, and then this we shot in a tank.
A teeny tank, by the way, underwater, to give her that...
So her outfit could move as it does.
DILIOS: The ephors choose only the most beautiful Spartan girls...
...to live among them as oracles.
Their beauty is their curse...
...for the old wretches have the needs of men...
COMMENTARY: That was a little thing I added...
...with the licking of the salty skin of the oracle.
I thought that was good.
EPHOR: "...Sparta will fall.
COMMENTARY: We should talk about Kelly making up her language.
All this, what she's saying, we never talked about it at all.
It's one of those things that... She just did this.
All this made up gibberish, she just did it.
And then she threw in "Carneia," which was awesome.
I thought that was really cool.
EPHOR: Honor the Carneia."
DILIOS: The king's climb down is harder.
Pompous, inbred swine.
COMMENTARY: CG coins, of course, which are right out of...
The idea is right out of the graphic novel, down to the pile of gold.
THERON: Truly, you're in the god-king's favor now...
And we did... We added Theron to this little...
But he's actually a made-up character too.
PERSIAN: Fresh oracles shall be delivered to you...
...daily...
...from every corner of the empire.
[CHUCKLING]
GORGO: Your lips can finish what your fingers have started.
Or has the oracle robbed you of your desire as well?
It would take more than the words of a drunken adolescent girl...
...to rob me of my desire for you.
Then why so distant?
Because it seems...
...though a slave and captive of lecherous old men...
...the oracle's words could set fire to all that I love.
So that is why my king loses sleep and is forced from the warmth of his bed?
There's only one woman's words that should affect the mood of my husband.
Those are mine.
[CHUCKLES]
COMMENTARY: It's a beautifully shot sequence, Mr. Larry Fong. Thank you.
It wasn't easy, because you had to kick them out because...
Kick the crew out, because these guys were basically naked.
Remember me, like, relighting everything because...?
Oh, yeah. Larry's running around by himself...
...like, with a glove trying to, like, grab the hot lights.
Zack's hand-held. "Get the shot. Shoot this. Do that."
It was pretty fun.
GORGO: - what should a free man do?
COMMENTARY: And we had tried to choreograph the love scene...
...like a wrestling match, so it wasn't too embarrassing for them.
I don't know how other directors do it, I'd love to talk to somebody...
...because it's embarrassing, horrible, because you're like:
"Could you move your stuff that way a little?"
So that gets a little awkward. But in the end, I think it's pretty sexy.
The other thing that I wanted to... Also, the idea is to...
...have their last sort of night together.
That was sort of the moment that you wanted too.
- Here's Vincent again. - Yep.
These were the same wheat fields that they rode through on their way into Sparta.
Kurt and I had talked about setting this scene...
...in, I think, originally it was called the Spartan barracks.
That's how it's listed on the script, but it turned basically into a wheat field.
STELIOS: We are with you, sire.
For Sparta. For freedom.
To the death.
COMMENTARY: Yeah, here's Astinos here, named after Aston Martin.
- Zack's car. - Yeah, the Greek historian was like:
"Astinos? Yeah, no, you made that up."
He doesn't know everything.
- Are you serious? - Yeah. We needed a name.
LEONIDAS: You are a good friend...
...but a better captain, there is none.
COMMENTARY: We shot this on the set that we called the wheat-field hump...
...which is basically pretty close to the stage on this side, the back of the stage...
...and then, you know, the stage was deeper looking up towards the Spartans.
COUNCILMAN: The ephors have spoken. There must be no march.
COMMENTARY: All those motes or those little bits of dust...
...floating in the air were all added later.
LEONIDAS: I've issued no such orders.
I'm here just taking a stroll, stretching my legs.
These 300 men are my personal bodyguard.
Our army will stay in Sparta.
Where will you go?
I hadn't really thought about it...
...but now that you ask...
...I suppose I'll head north.
COMMENTARY: We had to ADR this whole sequence...
...because the fans made it impossible to use the actual sound.
We had fans blowing throughout this entire sequence to blow the wheat.
There was a small amount of wheat around the actors...
...and that gives you the sort of reality that they're in contact with...
Maybe 15 feet around the actors is real wheat, and then the rest is CG wheat.
But that went back like 200 feet, right? Or a hundred feet?
Up the stage. This side was right there. That was the edge of the stage.
Like, kind of where that wheat's moving, past that.
This was maybe a hundred feet up the stage.
The edges of the wheat there on both sides were real.
What they would do is, the Spartans would go over a hill...
...and then duck down behind the stage and hide.
Then when you see them going further down the stage...
...they were CG guys or an element.
So, like, in this shot which is coming up right after...
...Leonidas gives this most subtle of head gestures to his son, which is awesome.
- This is historical too, this thing. - "Come back with your shield or on it."
So right there, like at the left edges, they're hiding...
...and then the guys in the distance are actually a second element.
So they'd go down and then they'd duck.
LEONIDAS: Yes, milady?
COMMENTARY: This is where the queen gives the wolf tooth...
...from when he was a child...
- To Leonidas, yeah. ...back to her king.
GORGO: Come back with your shield...
...or on it.
Yes, milady.
DILIOS: "Goodbye, my love."
COMMENTARY: Tyler with the beautiful little score. I love this part.
DILIOS: There's no room for softness...
COMMENTARY: And there's those little dusty motes floating in the air.
They look like strings.
DILIOS: Only the hard and strong may call themselves Spartans.
Only the hard. Only the strong.
COMMENTARY: And here comes the cloud.
And this was a thing we struggled with for quite a while...
...because it didn't quite work, but in the last comped version it came together.
And then this is our introduction of Ephialtes.
DILIOS: We march...
...for our lands, for our families, for our freedoms.
We march.
LEONIDAS: Daxos.
- What a pleasant surprise. - This morning's full of surprises, Leonidas.
- We've been tricked. - Can't be more than a hundred.
BAKER: This is a surprise. DAXOS: Silence.
ARCADIAN: This isn't their army.
We heard Sparta was on the warpath and we were eager to join forces.
If it is blood you seek...
COMMENTARY: This sequence is right out of the graphic novel. One of my favorites.
That shot. It was one of our early comps that we had to look at to say:
"Yeah, that looks cool."
I moved that mountain though. It used to be on the other side.
It's easy when it's just made out of ones and zeros.
LEONIDAS: You, there.
What is your profession?
I'm a potter, sir.
And you, Arcadian. What is your profession?
- Sculptor, sir. - Sculptor.
- And you? - Blacksmith.
COMMENTARY: Kurt came up with this idea for basically the Spartan...
I think it's an homage to the Marine Corps, if I'm correct.
Yeah. Any tough guys. It's their war cry.
Yeah, they "ha-woo" a lot. You'll see. Which is cool. I have no problem with that.
- Does that mean something in Greek? - Yeah.
It means "war cry." It means "soldier."
It's funny. If you look at the wide shot, the shot right before this...
...the couplings of spears in there, they kind of take their spears...
...and they put them in little pyramids, like you see them there.
These spears are probably... They're huge. I mean, thick. They're giant.
They're like telephone poles. It's pretty funny.
Otherwise you don't read them. So we had to make them huge.
DILIOS: His only regret...
...is that he has so few to sacrifice.
COMMENTARY: Now, this is one of my favorite shots. That's Ephialtes' spear.
And if you look, in order for Props to understand whose spear was whose...
...they would write "Ephi." If you look, it says "Ephi"...
...right above his spear, written in silver marker.
And the Visual Effects Department kept saying:
"We'll take that out for you." And I said, "No, it's fine. I like it."
LEONIDAS: It has followed us since Sparta.
STELIOS: My king! Look!
COMMENTARY: We had this... Original idea for this scene...
...was to make the burned Greek village...
There was a 360-degree dolly, where we went all around in a circle...
...and saw the big village and they were in the middle of it...
...but that proved expensive, so we pushed it a little bit into the distance.
But the embers are cool.
LEONIDAS: A scouting party.
But these footprints...
COMMENTARY: Those are lmmortal footprints. See, there are claws. They're evil.
[CLATTERING]
COMMENTARY: That's our big scare. Some pots.
- That was budgetary. - That was also budgetary, exactly.
That was supposed to be a building that fell down. Turned into some pots.
That is an lmmortal shadow.
And then this is the little girl. She's a girl, by the way. People wonder.
- She is. - It's our homage to Newt.
Yes, it is. It's Newt. "They come at night mostly."
Here she is. And she's pretty... She did a great job. I thought she was pretty cool.
This whole sequence we did in the same place, on the wheat-field hump again.
We pulled all the wheat off of it and we put that mud and dirt...
...and turned it into the burned Greek village in a matter of...
I think it was only one day, they turned it over.
- We actually shot this first, or did we? - Yeah. We did.
We shot this and then they brought the wheat it.
The genius of James Bissell, production designer.
Yes, Mr. Jim Bissell. Not only a genius of design...
...but also a genius of Rubik's-cubing our movie into making...
Trying to get all our sets turned over and switched around as quickly as possible.
DILIOS: The villagers.
I found them.
COMMENTARY: This was another Kurt invention, the tree of the dead...
...which you're going to see revealed in a moment.
This is actually a real story, coming out of one of the Balkan Wars...
...that somebody retold me about a village they came across...
...with the entire village in the Balkans...
...they found all the villagers strung up in a tree.
So of course I took that and put it in this movie because it's such a horrific idea.
The studio had asked us at this point...
...if we could have some sort of symbol of the Persian advance into Greece.
Kurt said, "What do you think of this?" And I was like,"Oh, that sounds horrific."
DAXOS: Not this darkness. Not these lmmortals.
Immortals?
We'll put their name to the test.
COMMENTARY: And I did a little doodle of it, and it basically looked like this.
And there's a bird up there on the top of the tree too.
This is the stolen shot from when the Persian emissary was approaching.
We had to actually roto him off and chop to make the Hot Gates go back...
...because our stage was so... Our set was pretty teeny.
That's where the cheat is right there. See how it goes around the corner?
But that's really just a bent piece of rock.
DILIOS: - we march.
COMMENTARY: Is this where the Spartans came down...
...and they had to run around the back then go again like clowns?
They came down, they would go upstairs and then come around again.
And then this shot was done by a German visual-effects team that do...
They're known for doing water, Scanline.
If you look closely, if you see the IMAX version, which is pretty fun...
...you can see the little... On that one ship all the Persian sailors are trying to, like...
One guy's swinging on a rope because he can't control it. It's pretty crazy.
A lot of care in... Done by those guys.
LEONIDAS: True.
It does look like rain.
COMMENTARY: These shots, if you look carefully at them...
...there's guys hanging from the sails and falling in the water.
It's pretty hilarious.
We tried to get that, the essence of what's in the graphic novel here.
[SHOUTING]
DILIOS: Only one among us keeps his Spartan reserve.
Only he.
Only our king.
COMMENTARY: Back in Sparta. Again, there's your courtyard again.
The wolf head in the background.
I do a little thing later where that woman who's got the torch... It's out of focus...
...l'll bring it up when we get to it, but Theron pays her off.
Sort of maybe that's where he got his info from.
Steve McHattie, amazing cat. He's in pretty good shape too...
...with no Spartan training at all.
LO YALIST: Is such secrecy needed?
How am I to trust beyond the walls of my own home?
Even here, Theron has eyes and ears which fuel Sparta with doubt and fear.
You speak as if all Sparta conspires against you.
I wish it were only against me.
LO YALIST: Many on our council would vote to give all we have...
...and follow Leonidas...
...but you must show them favor.
And you can arrange for me to speak to the council?
COMMENTARY: Originally when I wrote this sequence, in the storyboards...
...it was gonna be all in silhouette, like, all in the shadows...
...and then I decided that we hadn't really seen her enough...
...and that we wanted to see a little more Gorgo.
That's all that's left over of the entire silhouette sequence
Was that one little shot of them on the ground there.
GORGO: I'm in your debt. - No.
Leonidas is my king as well as yours.
COMMENTARY: Also, there was a huge sequence that was taken out of the script...
...where they actually travel here.
They run up to this position, and didn't you have it...?
You wrote it where they're hunting?
They actually ran into, like, a Persian scouting party...
...and there was a battle between the Persians and the Spartans...
...and Daxos almost gets killed and then he gets saved...
...at the last second by the Spartans.
STELIOS: fraction of the monster that is Xerxes' army.
DAXOS: There can be no victory here.
Why do you smile?
Arcadian...
...I have fought countless times...
...yet I've never met an adversary who could offer me...
...what we Spartans call "a beautiful death."
COMMENTARY: Of course, they were just sitting on a rock, looking down at nothing...
...and all the background is a...
Is a CG matte painting that we stuck behind them.
It's a rock that we've seen before and we'll see.
Yes. That's the rock that Leonidas is sitting on when he talks to Ephialtes.
PERSIAN EMISSARY: Move!
[WHIP CRACKING]
Keep going, you dogs!
COMMENTARY: This shot was changed also at the last second.
It had, if you look in the deleted scenes...
...you'll see the way it was rejigged...
...to make the coastline kind of go away from you.
- Spartan welcome. - Yeah, Spartan welcome.
Those signposts of the dead, we would call them.
- Dave Leech on the left. - Yeah.
Monster.
PERSIAN EMISSARY: Who commands here?
COMMENTARY: We redid the sky a couple times...
...because we wanted it to be more dramatic.
So you see sometimes it doesn't match.
But I didn't care, because I wanted that low angle to look cool.
The way it works is, at some point they tell you:
"You've done enough work on that shot. Sorry."
They take it away and put it in the movie.
That's not fun, but it happens.
PERSIAN EMISSARY: Listen. Do you think the paltry dozen you slew...?
COMMENTARY: That's a real metal sword. One of the few in the movie.
I don't know why it's real and metal, but it happened to be a close-up...
...so we thought we'd get a real metal one for that shot...
...and the Props Department made only a few metal ones.
PERSIAN EMISSARY: except fall like a heap of dry leaves in the face of?
COMMENTARY: That's a real guy, who we just had holes cut in the wall...
...and they would just insert the guys into it.
That's a Shaun Smith one, which was a rubber head.
STELIOS: using ancient stones from the bosom of Greece herself.
COMMENTARY: Larry had to light that big wide shot...
...but the light's about two feet away from the guys.
PERSIAN EMISSARY: You will pay for your barbarism!
COMMENTARY: This is a wire shot we did.
As you can tell, he basically flies through the air there...
...and then...
...there's this crazy hand-held shot coming here as we make that transition.
Larry and I were talking about it. Was I wiggling the camera too much?
When you were shooting that, I go, "Why is he doing that?
There must be a reason, I'm sure."
- There's always a reason. - Not really.
That wide shot also is straight out of the graphic novel.
If you look at one of the guys, I think it's...
I forgot who was doing it, but they had the spear behind their neck...
...which is really cool because it's in the graphic novel.
Frank drew them like that and I thought it was cool to try and get one guy to do that.
Kind of this casual Spartan, half-aggressive but half-casual...
...like they care but they don't care.
PERSIAN EMISSARY: By noon this day you will be dead men.
A thousand nations of the Persian Empire descend upon you.
Our arrows will blot out the sun.
Then we will fight in the shade.
COMMENTARY: Awesome one-liner. - Yes, which they say also is...
- Historical. ...historical.
CAPTAIN: lt'll do the job of funneling the Persians into the Hot Gates.
Have the men found any route through the hills to our back?
CAPTAIN: None, sire.
There is such a route, good king.
Just pass that western ridge.
It's an old goat path.
The Persians could use it to outflank us.
COMMENTARY: This is the introduction of Ephialtes as an actual character.
It was a little bit difficult, because we chopped a scene out...
...where we introduced Ephialtes. We used this scene instead...
...and we had to kind of make up that little introduction...
...to show that Ephialtes was...
The audience hadn't seen him yet, and so it was a bit of a trick to try...
...and make that look dramatic.
LEONIDAS: Forgive the captain.
He is a good soldier...
...but a bit short on manners.
There is nothing to forgive...
COMMENTARY: Ephialtes, Andrew played Ephialtes...
...and he's basically in this insane makeup that took them...
How long did it take them to get him in the makeup?
- It was like hours. - Three or four hours, I think.
Longer than that, I think.
And the thing is that his right eye...
...is completely CGI, which is funny.
- CG eye. - CGI eye.
It's a CGI eye, it's actually... That's funny.
And we ADR'd all his dialogue, because if you look at his teeth...
...his teeth are completely fake too, so we had to redo his dialogue...
...because it sounded like he had a mouth full of...
- Fake teeth. - Exactly.
EPHIALTES: - to make spear and shield and sword...
...as much a part of me as my own beating heart.
I will earn my father's armor, noble king...
...by serving you in the battle.
[GRUNTING]
COMMENTARY: He moved pretty well considering he was completely...
Every inch of his body is covered with rubber.
LEONIDAS: Raise your shield.
- Sire? - Raise your shield as high as you can.
COMMENTARY: And that's the same rock that the guys climbed up on...
...to look down on the Persian encampment.
That's the rabbit. Jim Bissell designed that rock to be used as a...
On the other side of this, to the left of it, is where he met the free Greeks.
It's used for a variety of different things within the movie.
LEONIDAS: - from thigh to neck with his shield.
A single weak spot and the phalanx shatters.
From thigh to neck, Ephialtes.
I am sorry, my friend.
But not all of us were made to be soldiers.
COMMENTARY: Another shot that's right out of the graphic novel.
The silhouette, the wide shot, where Ephialtes walks off.
This is the line where he was gonna... I was gonna have him swear.
"Mother effer, you are wrong."
But we thought it was inappropriate.
This shot right here is right out of the graphic novel, where he walks away.
Was it in complete silhouette?
It was more of a complete silhouette, it was black...
...but, as you know, we just thought it would be cooler.
EPHIALTES: Mother! Father! You were wrong!
You are wrong!
Leonidas! You are wrong!
COMMENTARY: So this is that same set...
...but we just added some CG rocks to the left...
...and then kind of blue out the sky, and then put them on this vibrating thing...
...to make the ground shake.
Dumped some rocks on them. It was very low-tech, this whole sequence.
Shake the camera and call it good.
LEONIDAS: Battle formations.
This is a Animal Logic... The first Animal Logic shot.
It's a lot of extras.
It's zero extras, except for here they come.
These are our actual guys coming over the hill here.
And those birds look like the size of pterodactyls...
...if you look at them in perspective.
That was shot on stage. There was a running horse on-stage, which was fun.
[HORSE NEIGHING]
LEONIDAS: This is where we hold them.
This is where we fight!
COMMENTARY: This is Johnstad's. - Yeah.
Give them a little dialogue, pump up the men.
That's half CG guys, half real guys.
LEONIDAS Remember this day, men...
COMMENTARY: So that's all fake back there behind him.
HORSEMAN: Spartans!
Lay down your weapons!
COMMENTARY: This is historical too, this whole "Spartans, lay down your weapons."
Oh, "Come and get... Persians."
That's where the expression molon labe comes from, from which is this, right here.
[HORSE NEIGHS]
LEONIDAS: Persians!
Come and get them!
COMMENTARY: Those are big horns that signal the charge, as you can clearly see.
CG shot.
That was sharpened in post. It was a big rubber spear.
LEONIDAS: Give them nothing...
COMMENTARY: Those are CG guys. Look at how wiggly they are.
And now here they are real.
So you can sort of see the slight difference between...
...the massive guys and the actual guys.
They way we did that one shot where they impact is we did a football sled...
...and the camera was mounted on the sled, and when the stuntmen hit the sled...
...they pushed the whole sled backward...
...and the camera was on it with the guys, so it all went back as a single unit.
STELIOS: Is that the best you can do?
Push! Push!
COMMENTARY: CG wound. Here's a Spartan getting a little bit mad.
LEONIDAS: Now!
COMMENTARY: I like this first kill after they push, the shield gets chopped...
...and then he gets... Right here. Bam, and then this. Kind of nice.
CAPTAIN: Push!
COMMENTARY: A lot of this first fighting we did on the wheat-field hump as well.
This is all stuff that's choreographed by Damon and Chad...
...all the transitions. - All of it.
Every sword hit, every spear jab, every fall, for that matter...
...it's all Damon and Chad. And the guys, of course, doing an amazing job...
...selling every hit like nobody's business.
And the actors in the fray too, though, trying to get it done.
CAPTAIN: No prisoners!
COMMENTARY: Coming up, we would call Leonidas' freelance...
...or the crazy-horse shot...
...it starts now, and it's basically the three cameras running at the same time...
...as close as possible to each other...
...and then basically in post we ramped the speed...
...and we zoomed in and out between the three cameras.
That's how you get this single take...
...but that renders this concept of all the three different sizes.
You're able to go in and out without cutting, because it actually...
...physically is the same take. All the action matches.
So that's one size. That's another one.
And then that's another one. So those are the three basic sizes...
...sort of wide, medium, tight. The leg is CG, getting hacked off there.
- And the hoards just keep coming. - And the hoards keep coming.
A lot of the way background guys are CG. Of course, these guys are all real.
And Gerry looks like he's in pretty good shape in that shot.
I always say that that's his best-looking physique shot in the movie...
...when he's walking up to stab that guy.
CAPTAIN: They look thirsty.
Well, let's give them something to drink.
COMMENTARY: And then this shot is done on the wheat-field hump...
...going up the hump...
...the same place we did the wheat sequence where they leave Sparta.
The actual hump is the sort of the hill that they go up.
Here they are coming down the wheat-field hump, this side.
We kept switching around and around in circles.
Poster shot and graphic novel.
And this, of course, we did on a little cliff that we built...
...that was made specially for the shot.
All the Animal Logic guys... Most, I'd say about...
...from about six guys back it's CG guys.
[SPARTANS CHANTING]
COMMENTARY: And this is the arrow launch. This was a big bone of contention...
...because if you look at the size of the characters on the peninsula...
...they're quite large. They would be quite large, the Persians.
And then you have these arrows blotting out the sun.
The Spartans didn't like arrows because they couldn't figure out...
...why you would want to shoot an arrow at someone...
...when you could walk over and lop their arms or legs off.
It seemed like a lot more fun than shooting them with an arrow from far away.
So they didn't like that. It made them mad.
STELIOS: What? - "Fight in the shade."
[LAUGHING]
LEONIDAS: Recover.
COMMENTARY: This shot also where Leonidas cleans the arrows off his shield...
...is sort of an iconographic shot.
I drew it and I thought it looked cool. I wondered how it would look in real life.
It looks cool and iconographic.
And, look. If you look at that shot, none of the Spartans have arrows in their shields.
But that's fine.
LEONIDAS: Today no Spartan dies.
COMMENTARY: And now this horse battle we shot all entirely on-stage.
Our stage wasn't very long so the horses could only run, like, you know...
What was it, like a hundred feet? Two hundred feet or something like that?
We'd stop them before they ran into the green screen...
...which they almost did every time.
CAPTAIN: Easy, son.
COMMENTARY: And we shot this sort of next to the big stage...
...where the main battle arena was...
...because we had to put down a surface the horses could run on.
[GRUNTING]
DILIOS: We do what we were trained to do...
COMMENTARY: That's a shot right out of the graphic novel...
...the profile where he's stabbing.
You know, we just wanted to also just...
...sort of turn the horse battle into a montage...
...because the whole concept of a horse battle was a little bit too crazy to try...
...and do as a single, linear battle.
And then a little match cut there back into Sparta.
- How great everyone looks in Sparta. - That's what a free society is.
Just everyone looking great?
Yeah, everyone looking great. Working, having fun.
- Rich and the poor intermingle. - Exactly.
Reverence for the queen.
This was all, like, a real set, which was weird for us to shoot on.
And done early in the production, because we...
...pretty much shot all of Lena's stuff out at the beginning of the movie.
It was the first stuff we did, then we marched our way out...
...up to the Hot Gates, and the rest of the battles we tried to do in order...
...but this stuff we did all at the beginning of the schedule.
LO YALIST: Your son starts the agoge next year.
That is always a difficult time for a Spartan mother.
Yes, it will be hard. But also necessary.
You will speak before the council in two days' time.
My husband does not have two days.
Think of the two days as a gift.
It's no secret...
...Theron wants what you control.
It's his voice you must silence.
Make him your ally...
...and you will have your victory.
Thank you.
You are wise as you are kind.
COMMENTARY: This is a Dawn of the Dead homage shot.
- Of course. - Sarah Polley looking in the fountain.
THERON: Ah, there's your mother.
COMMENTARY: And there's Dominic West being really...
- Creepy. - Yeah, and great.
We did one where he was rubbing his head. It was a little too scary.
THERON: keep a better eye on him if he's to be king one day.
Be unfortunate if anything were to happen to him.
Or to his beautiful mother.
COMMENTARY: This is basically my favorite scene in the movie.
Spartans cleaning the battlefield of the dead. The apple-eating scene, we call it.
PERSIAN: No! Ahh!
[FLIES BUZZING]
Our Greek comrades are begging for a crack at the Persians, sire.
Good.
I've got something I think they can handle.
Tell Daxos that I want him...
...and 20 of his best eager, sober and ready for the next charge.
King Leonidas.
- Stelios, catch your breath, boy. - Yes, milord.
The Persians are approaching.
A small contingent. Too small for an attack.
LEONIDAS: Captain, I leave you in charge. CAPTAIN: But, sire...
LEONIDAS: Relax, old friend.
If they assassinate me, all of Sparta goes to war.
Pray they're that stupid.
Pray...
COMMENTARY: The technology of the collapsible spears...
...was a thing that we worked on for a while.
The way you could take a spear, it was like a pogo stick...
...and you could jab it into somebody and it would collapse.
There was a rubber band, so the harder you pushed the more resistance there was.
[PERSIAN GRUNTS IN PAIN]
CAPTAIN: None, sire.
COMMENTARY: So here's Rodrigo as Xerxes...
...and the thing I always say about this sequence is that Rodrigo...
...if you had been telling the story of the Persian god-king...
...and then Xerxes showed up and he was just a guy, it wouldn't be that fun.
Instead he's like a giant.
We lowered his voice because of the scale of him.
I wanted his voice to be a little lower.
But it's his voice. It's Rodrigo's voice, we just pitched it down a little bit.
XERXES: it would be nothing short of madness were you, brave king...
...and your valiant troops to perish...
...all because of a simple misunderstanding.
COMMENTARY: We talked about Yul Brynner a lot before we did it.
I feel like he nailed that.
XERXES: Yours is a fascinating tribe.
Even now you are defiant...
...in the face of annihilation...
COMMENTARY: If you look in the background...
...you can see guys working on the wall of the dead.
Way around the corner. It's pretty cool.
XERXES: when I would gladly kill any of my own men for victory.
And I would die for any one of mine.
You Greeks take pride in your logic. I suggest you employ it.
Consider the beautiful land you so vigorously defend.
Picture it reduced to ash at my whim.
Consider the fate of your women.
Clearly you don't know our women.
I might as well have marched them up here, judging by what I've seen.
You have many slaves, Xerxes...
...but few warriors.
It won't be long before they fear my spears...
...more than your whips.
COMMENTARY: So that was a little blue Gerry that he was putting his hands on...
...to scale him down. We shot these pieces separately.
The hands, and Gerry and the body are all separate elements.
XERXES: But I am a generous god. I can make you rich beyond all measure.
I will make you warlord of all Greece.
You will carry my battle standard to the heart of Europa.
Your Athenian rivals...
...will kneel at your feet...
...if you will but kneel at mine.
COMMENTARY: But again, I remember Rodrigo asking me:
"What am I gonna wear in the movie?
I've looked at the graphic novel. I'm not gonna wear that, am I?"
And I was like, "Yeah. No."
- Some earrings and a gold chain. - "I would never make you wear that."
LEONIDAS: But the...
The idea of kneeling, it's...
COMMENTARY: I think once he got in the costume he was digging it.
He would kind of do some posing and walk around and be king-like.
If he was actually that huge too, that really would have been awesome.
He's about the same size as Gerry, the same height in real life.
XERXES: I will erase even the memory of Sparta from the histories.
COMMENTARY: And we gave him those big eye contacts.
See how his pupils are, like, gigantic? Basically black.
XERXES: every scribe shall have their eyes put out...
...and their tongues cut from their mouths.
COMMENTARY: The throne, of course, or Xerxes' litter, we called it, is real.
- Well, made of foam. - Well, you're right, exactly.
- It's sculpted out of foam. - It's not real gold.
Yes, it's made of real gold. No, it actually is on wheels...
...and so it was rolling. I mean, it's pretty huge. It's as big as it is.
LEONIDAS: - stood against many.
And before this battle was over...
...that even a god-king can bleed.
[FLIES BUZZING]
COMMENTARY: And so some of these were dummies and some...
That guy right there at the bottom was an actual extra, or stuntman.
I think it was an extra. The stunt guys were doing something else.
That guy that these two are about to pick up...
...it's a guy and we did like 80 takes.
They threw him on a soft foam guy so it wasn't that bad.
STELIOS: Jealousy...
...does not become you, my friend.
Move it, men!
Pile those Persians high.
COMMENTARY: This is also a shot I like. It's pretty outrageous.
LEONIDAS: - we're in for one wild night.
COMMENTARY: The lmmortal battle.
This shot right here was done on the wheat-field hump...
...but the majority of the battle was done actually in the battle arena...
...which we had built really for battle one...
...but didn't really get to shoot much of battle one there.
DILIOS: served the dark will of Persian kings for 500 years.
COMMENTARY: This sequence we did mostly in the battle arena, we called it.
And it was just a giant stage that we shot pretty much the rest of the fighting in...
...and it had an actual wall of the dead...
...that was on hydraulics that could be lowered...
...and raised to be the vertical wall of the dead...
...or the 45-degree-angle wall of the dead.
That's a CG shot, of course.
DILIOS: The Immortals.
COMMENTARY: This is the vertical wall...
...and when we did this shot I had the lmmortal kneel on his knees...
...and then when we did the tilt up it made the wall look taller.
DILIOS: Hubris.
Easy to taunt, easy to trick.
Before wounds and weariness have taken their toll...
...the mad king throws the best he has at us.
Xerxes has taken the bait.
Spartans, push!
[GRUNTING]
COMMENTARY: Most of the bodies are comped in, but they took one body...
...and they threw it on him from the top and knocked him down...
...and that made that element. But it really hit him hard.
[LEONIDAS GRUNTING]
COMMENTARY: Then these are just the guys doing an awesome job selling this fighting.
And that's all our stuntmen.
Some little... Couple Spartan deaths here.
The lmmortal swords were also a rubber bungee cord...
...and the blade actually had a rubber tip on it...
...and when you put it in them, the back of the sword would come out...
...and you painted that part out so you could actually...
And those were on resistance rubber bands too, so when you stuck it in them...
...the deeper it went the harder it was to push in.
ASTINOS: Father!
COMMENTARY: Father and son. - Astinos saving his dad.
[ÜBER IMMORTAL GROWLING]
COMMENTARY: And then the Über lmmortal.
He was, like, a pipe fitter or something in real life.
Yeah, I think he works on a metal lathe.
Great guy. Awesome. Did a great job on this character.
He had to wear a lot of makeup. One night when we finished working...
...he couldn't take his makeup off, so they just sent him to the hotel...
...in his Über lmmortal makeup...
...and when he got out of his taxi at the hotel...
...he, you know, was looking scary.
He looked like that at the hotel, maybe with a shirt on.
And he's a huge guy. He's 7'2"or 3". I forget how tall he is. He's really super tall.
Then this is Matty doubling Gerry for this sequence here.
- And Matty's one of our stuntmen, who's... - Not as tall as Gerry.
No, not as tall as Gerry. Matty's like 5'6" or something like that...
...so you had to kind of get the scale up, but Matty's in great shape.
And he would get his Gerry looks down so it looked awesome.
I like this throw, camera shake, boom. Post.
This was also a lighting... Sort of a different look for us...
...because it's a day-for-night look... Not day-for-night look. It's a night look...
...but we could have shot it outside in the daytime, but we decided not to.
This is our only night sort of exterior battle scene in the movie.
[GRUNTING]
COMMENTARY: And then here's the beheading. Nice.
I like that little stretchy bit.
- This is... - Yeah, the free Greeks.
- They've been hiding in the trees. - Yes.
They have their Battlestar Galactica helmets on.
- Yeah, that's cool. Cylon Centurions. - Yes, exactly.
DILIOS: They shout and curse...
...stabbing wildly...
COMMENTARY: Ouch.
Didn't you originally not wanna have a lot of those wide...?
I didn't. In post we actually added a lot of those shots...
...because it was a geography thing.
People wanted to know where everybody was, and so we added those shots...
...to kind of help out with the geography and a little bit of scope and scale.
Frank doesn't do it. I kind of was against it for that reason.
But, you know, I think it helps. It helps to give a little bit of continuity.
And this is the tilt up to Xerxes.
Xerxes we shot separately on a rock, and this is shot on the battle arena.
We have this tilt up that sort of reveals Xerxes up on this cliff.
DILIOS: Immortals.
They fail our king's test.
And a man who fancies himself a god...
COMMENTARY: So that tilt up in the geography of the Hot Gates...
...would be closer to the coastal road, we called it...
...which was on the far right side of the battle arena.
And this is the same set where the guys were marching through a little while before.
CAPTAIN: And our honored dead.
COMMENTARY: That's the hill they came down.
ASTINOS: There's nothing that can stop us now!
COMMENTARY: And there's a lot of that.
The firelight has been done with a flicker, right, Larry?
- I mean, some of it was real fire. - Some real fire, some flickering lights.
DILIOS: "Against Asia's endless hordes, against all odds, we can do it.
We can hold the Hot Gates.
We can win."
COMMENTARY: This is going into day three. - Yeah, or battle three.
Circus of death, as we called it.
DILIOS: Dawn.
[WHIPS CRACKING]
Whips crack. Barbarians howl.
Those behind cry, "Forward!"
COMMENTARY: There's Jesse Youngblood, Jesse James Youngblood right there.
A friend of mine who works out with me at the gym...
...and is an actor extraordinaire.
Did that little sequence for us. Super cool.
COMMENTARY: Our eyes bear witness to the grotesque spectacle...
...coughed forth from the darkest corner...
- This is our... - Rhino.
- Our Scotty Reeves Rhino. - Yeah, Scotty Reeves Rhino.
Kurt told me this story that was told to him by Scotty Reeves.
He saw somebody hunting a cape buffalo in Africa...
...and the guy took a shot and the cape buffalo slid right to the guy's feet...
...after he shot it, but he didn't move out of the way, so Zack just lifted that.
Yeah. I thought it would be cool.
And then Clay Staub, the second-unit director did...
...a lot of this stuff in battle three. He did this little sequence.
I did the throwing shot and I think I did this shot, and he did the rest of them.
[RHINO GRUNTS]
DILIOS: When muscle failed...
...they turned to their magic.
COMMENTARY: Kurt had written in the script that these guys had bat guano...
- Like, sulfur and charcoal. ...and sulfur.
Zack at one point just said, "Just write more weirdness into the movie."
And I'm like, "Okay." So this is what you get.
It's kind of fun. I like it a lot. I think it's fun.
And then it was this little bit that I added in the storyboards...
...which was kind of a Raiders of the Lost Ark moment...
...where one fireball rolls over and lands in a pile of them...
...which I thought was pretty funny.
DILIOS: They fall by the hundreds.
We send the severed bodies and the fragile hearts back to Xerxes' feet.
COMMENTARY: Those two there to the left were supposed to be my daughters.
To the left of Xerxes with the little metal hats on...
...but they didn't make it up for that shot...
...so Willow and Autumn, they didn't get to be in those shots.
They were mad about it, because Eli, of course, gets to be the young king...
...their brother, so they were mad about that.
And Olivia, my other daughter was supposed to be the...
Just one of the Spartan village girls, but she didn't get to do that either...
...so they were all mad.
[METAL BLADE WHOOSHING]
[ELEPHANT TRUMPETING]
DILIOS: Xerxes dispatches his monsters from half the world away.
They're clumsy beasts...
...and the piled Persian dead...
COMMENTARY: And that's Barbar having a hard day.
[GRUNTING]
COMMENTARY: This was a thing that Damon and Chad put together.
We wanted to do a long... This was a lot like the test shot...
...that we had done for the studio that was a 360-degree fight scene.
Now that we had all the manpower...
...we wanted to do it the real way with the actors.
Awesome sequence of carnage, which is what it's all about anyway.
It's why we're here.
ASTINOS: You still here? - Somebody's gotta watch your back.
Not now, I'm a little busy.
COMMENTARY: I like this one guy. We called him Amedes...
...that guy in the crazy outfit there.
Wanna talk about the shield size?
Yeah, these are smaller shields. These shields were actually physically smaller.
It's a cheat, because we knew when they were fighting...
...they wouldn't be able to wield their giant shields around.
LEONIDAS: Regroup!
COMMENTARY: So that's where they have their smaller shields, when they're fighting.
You'll see in this sequence, these are the normal-sized shields again.
Like, that's back to normal-sized shield.
CAPTAIN: Astinos!
No!
COMMENTARY: And then we just did this by having him...
He just fell to his knees and we just erased his head in post.
- He wore a blue hood? - I don't think so.
They just drew a line on his neck, didn't they?
- I saw a blue hood for some of the shots. - The blue hood was...
- It's when he was... - Nacho Libre.
He was Nacho Libre when he was laying on the ground.
- Vincent's awesome here. - Yeah, he is. He's just crazy.
Those are CG guys way in the background.
If you see, they barely move around. See them way back there?
[CRYING]
[SCREAMING]
DILIOS: The captain's cries of pain at the loss of his son...
...are more frightening to the enemy than the deepest battle drums.
It takes three men to restrain him and bring him back to our own.
The day is ours.
No songs are sung.
COMMENTARY: Goat-headed minstrel.
The goat-headed minstrel was another drawing Adam did...
...that I thought was cool and thought would be neat to have in the movie.
I just wanted Xerxes' harem...
...or his tent, to be a place of exotic wonders.
And most of these guys were just cast locals in Montreal.
Yeah, and by the way, we shot this all in one day and did a fantastic job.
Larry made a really nice moody... Cool, look at this. This is an awesome shot.
I forgot how to light a real place.
XERXES: But I am kind.
Everything you could ever desire...
...every happiness you can imagine...
...every pleasure your fellow Greeks and your false gods have denied you...
...I will grant you.
For I am kind.
COMMENTARY: These girls had to make up their dance kind of on the day.
We didn't have time to choreograph it...
...so they had to do a quick choreography...
...and I think they did a pretty great job. It was very sort of spontaneous.
If you look at Frank's book, he has dancing girls kind of dressed like that...
...and I wanted it to sort of have the same dark exotic quality...
...that he had in the graphic novel.
XERXES: to the hidden path that enters behind the cursed Spartans...
...and your joys will be endless.
COMMENTARY: Again, in this sequence we tried not to put too many shots of Rodrigo...
...and everybody in the same shot. It was that whole thing...
...we would have had to create that concept that he was gigantic still.
There's a lot of math involved.
When I was in school I told my teachers I wouldn't need math...
...because I was gonna be a movie director. Turned out I needed it...
...and I didn't have any. So I had to ask other people.
- Hired people with math skills. - Exactly.
XERXES: Done.
You will find...
...I am kind.
COMMENTARY: Those are huge tusks that actually hold the tent up.
Jim Bissell had done this design, and I was like, "That's cool."
And he used actual giant tusks to make the tent.
- More foam, not actual tusks. - Not actual tusks, yeah. No ivory.
Yeah, those two things right there.
That's Dominic back there.
And if you look at him out of focus, he'll pay off the...
There he is paying the girl right there.
THERON: Beautiful night.
Yes, but I did not ask you here for small talk, Theron.
THERON: You can be sure of that.
You never spared words with me.
GORGO: Can I offer you something? A drink, perhaps?
THERON: Is it poison?
I'm sorry to disappoint you, it's only water.
COMMENTARY: These two are fantastic.
Again, look, here's Larry lighting a real scene with real people in it...
...and no blue screen, and doing a fantastic job.
- And a real fire. - That's real fire, no embers.
GORGO: Yes.
I need your help in winning votes to send the army north to our king.
Yes.
I can see it, the two of us standing together.
Me, politician. You, warrior. Our voices as one.
But why would I want to do that?
It proves you care for a king who right now fights for the very water we drink.
True.
But this is politics, not war.
Leonidas is an idealist.
I know your kind too well. You send men to slaughter for your own gain.
Your husband, our king, has taken 300 of our finest to slaughter.
He's broken our laws and left without...
COMMENTARY: This was some cool props that the Art Department had come up with.
GORGO: You're an opportunist.
You're as foolish as Leonidas if you think men don't have a price in this world.
All men are not created equal. That's the Spartan code, my little queen.
COMMENTARY: Right before that I had Lena slap me.
I asked her, "How hard are you gonna slap Dominic?"
She goes, "I don't know." I go, "Show me." She whacked me.
And I was like, "That's great. Okay, do that."
- But harder. - No I didn't tell her harder.
I actually did not tell her harder. I thought he might quit.
THERON: I own that chamber...
...as if it were built with these hands.
I could crush the life out of you right now.
You will go before the council, but your words will fall on deaf ears.
Leonidas will receive no reinforcements...
COMMENTARY: It's a trick, you know. The actors have to choke each other...
...but not really put the pressure on.
But you want to squeeze the face, you know...
...to make it look like you're really squeezing it, but he's being real careful.
THERON: Do you love your Sparta?
Yes.
- And your king? - I do.
Your husband fights for his land and his love.
What do you have to offer...
...in return for my word that I'll help you send our army north?
What does a realist want with his queen?
I think you know.
This will not be over quickly.
You will not enjoy this.
I'm not your king.
[THERON GRUNTING]
[SPARTANS GRUNTING]
[INDISTINCT CHATTERING]
Dilios.
I trust that scratch hasn't made you useless?
Mm. Hardly, my lord. It's just an eye.
The gods saw fit to grace me with a spare.
My captain?
Curses the gods and mourns alone.
[HORSE WHINNYING AND GALLOPING]
DAXOS: Leonidas!
COMMENTARY: Andrew had to learn to ride a horse bareback...
...on the weekends right before we did this, and he kept falling off it, he said.
But he was able to stay on it for that sequence.
He does a great job in this sequence, and in the movie in general...
...but I really like him here.
If you look at the graphic novel, this sequence especially...
...Gerry's really starting to look a lot like the drawings.
LEONIDAS: Spartans! Prepare for glory!
COMMENTARY: It's a combination also of the way Larry lit him too...
...and his overall vibe, like right there.
LEONIDAS: Well, that's an easy choice for us, Arcadian.
Spartans never retreat. Spartans never surrender.
Go spread the word.
Let every Greek assembled know the truth of this.
Let each among them search his own soul.
And while you're at it...
COMMENTARY: And he still has his leftover scratch from the Über lmmortal...
...which isn't in the graphic novel, but he does have that scratch.
DAXOS: My men will leave with me.
COMMENTARY: There was a part where he threw his sword down...
...but we took that out to speed him up a little bit, tighten it up.
He threw his sword down and then he said, "My men will leave with me."
LEONIDAS: Children!
Children.
Gather round.
COMMENTARY: And what we did is, here we started to bring...
If you look at the background, we started to have the dawn rising a little bit...
...so that as we go into this next day...
...you get the sense that the sun's coming up...
...because basically at the end of this sequence, he takes Dilios over to this cliff...
...and then it's pretty much sunrise...
...so we wanted to just sort of suggest it a little bit.
LEONIDAS: An age of freedom.
And all will know that 300 Spartans...
...gave their last breath to defend it.
[ALL CHANTING]
My friend.
COMMENTARY: We had this idea that he was eating ashes in his mourning.
The Joseph Campbell thing where Norsemen would lie...
...in their longhouses along their fire...
...when their family would die, to lie in the ashes.
CAPTAIN: - gave up his life for his country.
It's just that I never told him that I loved him the most.
That he stood by me with honor.
That he was all that was best in me.
My heart is broken for your loss.
Heart?
[SCOFFS]
I have filled my heart...
...with hate.
Good.
COMMENTARY: It's funny, because if you look at this...
This is that same set again, just from another angle.
It's basically a Land of the Lost cave...
...that we just shot in a circle.
Again, Jim Bissell knew what we were doing...
...and he was able to build a set that we could work in all those different angles.
LEONIDAS: That you are, one of the finest.
But you have another talent unlike any other Spartan.
You will deliver my final orders to the council...
...with force and verve.
Tell them our story.
Make every Greek know what happened here.
You'll have a grand tale to tell.
A tale of victory.
Victory.
COMMENTARY: It was odd when we would shoot something...
...that took place in the same area...
...because it just didn't matter, because so much of it was changed...
...but I think it helped the actors, and it helped me. I know that.
LEONIDAS: For the queen?
COMMENTARY: Dilios has his signature eye missing from the night before.
And then here's the wolf tooth. We wanted to bring the wolf tooth back.
We just created that wolf tooth as, like, the amulet...
...that is the thread that goes through the whole script.
But it's a cool connection too, what he does.
LEONIDAS: None that need be spoken.
COMMENTARY: Big CG shot with everybody leaving.
What do you think, Larry? The first 25 feet is real?
- Yeah. Then you run into a wall. - You run into a wall, right?
And then this is from the graphic novel too.
- That's not a comp, that's all real. - Yeah, that's not a comp. Just the sky.
It's a real distance relationship.
And he basically walked two steps into the back of the stage.
LEONIDAS: Spartans!
Ready your breakfast and eat hearty...
...for tonight we dine in hell!
COMMENTARY: Then that's a big CG shot, of course.
If you look in the IMAX version, you can see inside.
All the counselmen are sitting around waiting for him and everything.
LO YALIST: May I give the floor now...
...to the wife of Leonidas and queen of Sparta.
[COUNCIL MEMBERS MURMURING]
COMMENTARY: We shot this... This was the second or third day.
It was Lena's first day. She had to do this giant speech...
...that Kurt wrote that I thought was really awesome...
...but it was hard for her because your first day and you have to...
- Day one, get to work. ...get to work...
...and stand in front of all these crusty councilmen.
GORGO: I come to you as a Spartan woman.
I come to you with great humility.
I am not here to represent Leonidas.
His actions speak louder than my words ever could.
I am here for all those voices which cannot be heard.
Mothers, daughters, fathers...
COMMENTARY: The first columns were there, the second row of columns were not there.
It's a pretty small little set, actually.
Trying to keep the graphic-novel nature of the marble...
...and all of it sort of very painterly, because that was the overall vibe.
GORGO: Send the army for the preservation of liberty.
Send it for justice.
Send it for law and order.
Send it for reason.
But most importantly, send our army for hope.
Hope that a king and his men have not been wasted to the pages of history.
That their courage bonds us together.
That we are made stronger by their actions...
COMMENTARY: Tyler's just building it up.
Yeah, you know, it's funny because we decided to put a little bit of music in here...
...just to give it a teeny bit. But I always loved this angle.
Those high angles, I think, are really cool.
[THERON CLAPPING]
COMMENTARY: But all the dust, the shafts of light are all added in post.
Those shafts weren't there and none of it was there.
It was the idea of sort of that translation.
Larry had put a hard light... He had a light on the floor. That's a real shadow.
Then it was the actual shaftiness that we added.
Because again, the set wall ended about five feet behind that column.
Yeah, there was no, like, distance to get back. Yeah, exactly.
GORGO: Then what is the lesson you would like to leave?
Shall I begin to enumerate all of them?
Honor. Duty. Glory.
You speak of honor...?
COMMENTARY: Those are like the chapter headings off the book, just repeating those.
THERON: But what of adultery?
- How dare you. THERON: How dare I?
Watch her carefully.
She is a trickster in true form.
Do not play with the members of this sacred chamber, my queen.
Just hours ago, you offered yourself to me.
Were I a weaker man, I would have her scent on me still.
- This is outrage. - Oh, the hypocrite speaks!
Did you not receive a similar payment, which you took...
...in exchange for her having an audience with these noble men?
- That is a lie. - Is it?
Was he not, by your invitation, asked to come to the king's bedchamber?
The very bed where you attempted to negotiate with me so vigorously?
[COUNCIL MEMBERS MURMURING]
You look shocked. A bribe of the flesh, gentlemen...
...while her husband promotes anarchy and war.
COUNCILMAN 4: He speaks truth.
Words escape even the most cunning tongue...
...my little whore queen.
[SCOFFS]
What queen-like behavior.
Remove her from this chamber before she infects us further...
...with her inglorious and shabby...
COMMENTARY: Dominic loved that line, by the way. "Inglorious and shabby self."
He would say... Like in some takes, he would go:
"Inglorious and unkept," and he would just make up all these crazy versions of it.
But he did love "shabby."
Persian gold.
This was also a shot we talked about doing as a fly-out-the-window shot...
...but we decided it was too much.
COUNCILMAN 5: Traitor.
ALL: Traitor! Traitor! Traitor!
COMMENTARY: This is cool. This is another shot in IMAX...
...that's crazy, because the clouds...
...you can really sense the movement in them. It's pretty awesome.
This sequence with Leonidas in the end here...
...I always say that this...
It's funny, because in theory Dilios wasn't here for this part, he's telling the story.
This was a part of the movie that he had to make up completely.
I think that's a little bit more outrageous than some of the other...
But then again, the whole thing's outrageous.
But I do like that idea that he sort of imagined this part.
GENERAL: Leonidas, my compliments and congratulations.
You surely have turned calamity into victory.
COMMENTARY: The spears coming out of the turtle behind him are all...
Half of them were CG and half of them were real.
GENERAL: You will make a mighty ally.
Yield, Leonidas.
Use your reason. Think of your men.
COMMENTARY: Ephialtes here trying to get Leonidas to not die.
He still cares. He wants a unicorn, but he still cares.
GENERAL: Despite your several insults, despite your horrid blasphemies...
...the lord of hosts is prepared to forgive all...
COMMENTARY: This is a ripped-off shot...
...when actually that was a shot, where instead of a dolly in...
...the actual litter is moving forward...
...which was when he was supposed to be arriving...
...and so we stole it for that little push in.
GENERAL: You fight for your kingship.
You will be proclaimed warlord of all Greece...
...answerable only to the one true master of the world.
Leonidas, your victory will be complete...
...if you but lay down your arms...
...and kneel to holy Xerxes.
COMMENTARY: This is quite a pull here.
- Is that Bill? - No.
Bill Dagleish was with me on my camera.
You'll see him in the credits. He was my camera assistant...
...on my camera, and he just had to follow me around...
...and help me film my ridiculous shots.
[SNARLING]
DILIOS: It's been more than 30 years since the wolf in the winter cold.
And now, as then, it's not fear that grips him...
...only restlessness. A heightened sense of things.
COMMENTARY: That's what I was referring to...
...when I talked about the shininess of the helmets.
The helmet, if you'd see it in real life, had a really dull finish on it...
...because we put such a severe contrast-y crush on the film...
...because they were kind of dull...
...once we really cranked up the highlights in the end...
...the helmet had this metallic look to it like it does right there.
Larry's got some sort of a white thing to make it really take the kick there.
It's a light or something. I don't know what it is, but it's working great.
DILIOS: His helmet is stifling.
His shield is heavy.
Your spear.
You there...
...Ephialtes.
COMMENTARY: We had this concept of doing a...
Really dressing Ephialtes' body up for this shot...
...but it wasn't consistent with the rest of them.
Put some veins in him and stuff, but we decided not to.
GENERAL: Leonidas, your spear.
COMMENTARY: That was supposed to be him looking at the...
Checking the wind right before he kneels down...
...because he's about to take a shot at Xerxes.
It looks like he's just looking at him in defiance or in resignation...
...depending on what you know is about to happen.
We had shot also another shot for this flashback sequence with him and his son.
But we decided to take it out only because when he stands at the end and he says:
"My queen, my wife, my love, be strong."
I kind of wanted to keep it honed into this simple idea of love...
...you know, him away from his love and his queen and his wife...
...and him balancing the idea of never seeing her again and all that...
...and choosing the Spartan way.
LEONIDAS: Stelios!
[STELIOS SHOUTS]
XERXES: Slaughter them!
DILIOS: His helmet was stifling.
It narrowed his vision...
COMMENTARY: All the arrows were CG.
"Battle grit," I think, is what the name of all that kind of flying debris.
This is right out of the graphic novel.
[GRUNTING]
COMMENTARY: Gerry just taking it.
This is the Excalibur rip-off shot, or homage.
It's one of my favorite movies and I like that sequence...
...where they stick the spear through his son and they...
"Come, Father, let's embrace."
And a couple of last CG arrows coming in.
DILIOS: Bold Leonidas gives testament to our...
COMMENTARY: When you see it in IMAX, it's a little crazy...
...but it's forgivable, I think, because it's such a huge movie.
[INAUDIBLE]
COMMENTARY: Then Gerry with some CG arrows stuck in him.
Is Regan dying?
This is probably the best dripping-blood shot in the movie, I think.
If you look carefully at the blood that's running down Michael's chest there...
...coming out of the wound, it's all CG, it's all added later.
Pretty awesome, the way it moves with his body and everything.
It's a really great job.
STELIOS: It's an honor to die at your side.
It's an honor to have lived at yours.
COMMENTARY: The dolly shot's real. I turned it around actually.
We turned it around in post. When we shot it originally, he was facing Xerxes.
But I thought after we looked at the cut...
...that it was cooler if he was facing the Hot Gates and not Xerxes...
...which I think is just more fitting that he looks back toward Greece.
- Towards Sparta. - Yeah. Towards Sparta, exactly.
This shot, in the reveal, is him looking at the Hot Gates rather than at Xerxes.
And those are all CG arrows.
Awesome little musical thing that Tyler's doing here, which is just fantastic.
His nails aren't dirty enough, though. I'll tell you that.
I remember David complained about it afterward...
...and I thought, "Gosh, he's right."
Although Spartans were fastidiously clean.
Yeah. A Spartan manicurist followed them on the battlefield.
That was quite a little prop. We had rubber ones for Leonidas, we had hard ones.
We had rubber ones for fighting, otherwise it would poke people in the eye.
So we had, like, a sort of foam rubber one.
It's cool because in this shot, in the real shot that we did...
...we shot this with two cameras.
The second camera is actually in the shot and they just painted it out.
DILIOS: "Remember us."
As simple an order as a king can give.
"Remember why we died."
COMMENTARY: This was David Wenham's first day. It was his first scene.
So it's funny. This was David's first scene on maybe the third day of the movie.
DILIOS: His wish was simple.
"Remember us"...
...he said to me.
DILIOS: That was his hope.
COMMENTARY: And then this was the last shot we did on the last day.
We shot this shot at about 5:00 in the morning...
...and then we all went and had breakfast.
We'd been up all night shooting, then everybody just showed up.
We had a snowball fight outside...
...where Michael Fassbender smashed me in the face with a snowball...
...and I remember it to this day...
...and I'm still plotting my revenge on him. That's him just to the right of Leonidas.
- He will get a snowball in the mail. - Or something else.
Exactly.
DILIOS: And so my king died...
...and my brothers died...
...barely a year ago.
Long I pondered my king's cryptic talk of victory.
Time has proven him wise.
For from free Greek to free Greek...
...the word was spread that bold Leonidas and his 300...
...so far from home...
...laid down their lives not just for Sparta...
...but for all Greece and the promise this country holds.
COMMENTARY: This is cool because the sun is slowly coming up...
...and each shot is slowly brighter and brighter.
You couldn't do that any other way, by the way.
Yeah, exactly.
DILIOS: Just there the barbarians huddle...
...sheer terror gripping tight their hearts...
...with icy fingers...
...knowing full well what merciless horrors they suffered...
...at the swords and spears of 300.
COMMENTARY: There's Logan putting on his helmet.
- Yeah. Awesome job. - Getting ready.
DILIOS: - at 10,000 Spartans...
...commanding 30,000 free Greeks!
[ALL CHANTING]
COMMENTARY: This looks awesome in IMAX too, it's crazy.
DILIOS: Good odds for any Greek.
This day, we rescue a world from mysticism and tyranny...
...and usher in a future brighter than anything we can imagine.
Give thanks, men...
COMMENTARY: Then we used the crazy-horse rig for this last shot as well.
This is three cameras next to each other...
...all filming 150 frames and a zoom in...
...between the different sizes.
This title sequence was done by yU + co., and I had done some drawings...
...and I had ideas and I talked to them about how I wanted it to look.
- You know, kind of like shadow puppets. - A little Southeast Asia?
- Indonesian. - Indonesian, exactly.
[ENGLISH SDH]