The Hollywood Reporter says Gerard Butler — the star of Dear Frankie (my review), Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Phantom of the Opera and the upcoming Beowulf & Grendel — will play Spartan King Leonidas I in 300, a new film about the Battle of Thermopylae. Those expecting a standard sword-and-sandals ancient-battle epic may be in for a bit of a shock, though.
The film is being co-written and directed by Zack Snyder, whose only other feature film to date is last year’s remake of Dawn of the Dead; and it will be based not directly on history, but on a comic by Frank Miller, whose work on the Daredevil and Batman comics inspired the recent films based on those characters, and whose pulpy, hard-boiled Sin City stories were recently made into a movie directed by Robert Rodriguez (my review).
And, just as Rodriguez went out of his way to capture the look and feel of Miller’s art, the Reporter says Snyder and the studio plan “to make the film in the style of the comic . . . Heavy use of greenscreen and virtual sets is being mapped out but with an eye toward maintaining the look of the graphic novel.”
Could be good, could be bad. I haven’t read this particular comic of Miller’s yet, so I cannot comment on his narrative treatment of the subject matter or the look that these filmmakers are trying to capture. On the one hand, I suspect I would probably prefer something more explicitly historical and authentic; but on the other hand, I enjoy the explicit theatricality of films like The Ten Commandments (1956), so what’s another form of stylization. The ancient-epic genre has been growing pretty stale of late, so who knows, this may be just the kick in the pants it needs.
Shooting begins in Montreal, of all places, in October.
AUG 18 UPDATE: Or maybe shooting begins in Vancouver. So says Lynne McNamara in yesterday’s Vancouver Sun.
AUG 21 UPDATE: Nope, looks like it will be shot in Montreal after all. McNamara admitted she got it wrong yesterday.
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