'300': The Future of Movies?

March 7, 2007 — -- The battle of Thermopylae took place 2,500 years ago, but a new film aims to place it squarely back in the public's mind.

Adapted from the graphic novel by Frank Miller, "300" is the underdog story of how 300 men held off a million (men).

The fight pitted a portion of the Spartan army against the much larger Persian Empire. The Spartans stood their ground, helping the Greeks unite and preventing the Persians from spreading into Europe.

ABC's Joel Siegel spoke with the director of the film, Zack Snyder, who calls it, "half real world, half Frank world."

"I took the battle of Thermopylae and turned it into a myth. I think my movie is the way a Greek would tell the story of Thermopylae months after it happened, not with 2,000 years of hindsight," Snyder said.

In "300," the Spartan king Leonidas faces off against the Persian tyrant Xerxes. Some media reports speculate that one or the other is supposed to represent President Bush. Snyder, who also co-wrote the screenplay, says that he began the script long before Bush was elected, and that any connection is purely speculative.

"I think it's awesome that our little movie about the crazy Frank Miller version of Thermopylae could evoke that kind of discussion, and like I said in [The New York Times] article, if people are saying, 'I think Leonidas is Bush' and the other is saying, 'I think Xerxes is Bush,' and those two people are having a debate about world politics because they saw my movie -- hey, that's pretty awesome," Snyder said.

To create the fantastical look of the movie, all the scenes were shot entirely on green screen. Snyder was worried that not being able to visualize the finished product would affect the actors, but that wasn't the hardest aspect for him.

"I was afraid that the actual fighting would be the hardest part, but it turned out that when an actor is swinging a stick at an actor and trying to hit him in the head, they tend to duck and it looks real. The harder part of the movie for me was actually the post-production side of the movie -- the year of post production it actually took to finish the movie," he said.