When you try to bring something like this to the screen, is it a matter of making sure the technology is there first?

SNYDER: I guess that it is a little bit, but I think that acknowledging that we used to make movies without this stuff is important. I think the real change was in the studios had kind of exhausted these sort of tales to the point where they felt like the idea of reinventing it a little bit was a thing that they could go, “You know what? Maybe that is good. Maybe that does work. Maybe people do want to see something else.”

You mean like something different than “Troy”?

SNYDER: Well, maybe that was the thing where it was like, “You know what? This is another way to do it and maybe people will like this.” So, yeah, I do think that there was a studio saying maybe it’s cool to do this. Maybe it was Frank [Miller] going, “I want to make this graphic novel for Zack.” Frank never thought anyone would want to make this. This is one of his more obscure titles, and so the idea that someone would say, “Hey, let’s make 300 the graphic novel into a movie,” I think he was surprised by it. So he said, “Look, go do it.” He then gave me his blessing.

Why did you fall in love with the subject matter?

SNYDER: I was a big fan. When I was a kid I came to graphic novels. When I was a kid my mother used to buy me a magazine called Heavy Metal, and my mother did not realize it was an adult magazine. She thought it was a cool publication that had comics in it, and I encouraged her to keep buying it. At the same time she would try to buy me Wolverine or X-Men, classic comic books as well, but no one was having sex or dying in those—not a lot, anyway—and so it didn’t hold my interest like Heavy Metal did. I was pretty devout to it. I remember trying to order some of the pornographic stuff and I would always get caught. My mother would say, “What is this?” “Oh, they just sent it…for free.”

Then when Dark Knight came out, and also Watchmen around the same time, it sort of drew me back into the graphic novel world in a way that I was satisfied. That’s the way it happened. So I wanted to make any Frank Miller work that I could. You always say, “I want to make Sin City into a movie. They already did that. I want to make this into a movie.” So “300” was basically something that we would talk about like we were film students, like, “Wouldn’t it be cool if we could do this shot? It would be awesome.” Basically we never thought that it would happen, but we would talk about it like it was fun. Then Gianni Nunnari is the one that actually got the rights and said, “I called Frank Miller, and he’s very difficult, as you know, but he’s going to give us the rights.” I was like, “What? What do you mean give us the rights?” He said, “Well, we’re going to try and make it into a movie.” So it was scary, but at the same time the idea of making it was the thing that I was passionate about.

Is the movie historically accurate?

SNYDER: It’s just upwind. I have shown the movie to historians. I showed the film to an English historian who’s a Spartan specialist, and I showed like 20 minutes of the movie to her and I said, “What do you think? Is it crazy? Am I stupid?” She said, “No, in a lot of ways it’s more Spartan than anything I could do.” As a historian, she said she can’t be emotional about the Spartans because she’s trying to give a historical reference, but then she goes, “What you made is Spartan.”

It’s like a home movie.

SNYDER: Yeah, like a home movie. It’s like the essence of how a Spartan thinks. The other thing is that people have asked me if it’s political and how I feel about the politics of the movie, and the one thing that I always try to stress is that we are not Spartans in the movie. I try to show you from the first thing that it’s fun to be with Spartans and it’s fun to go along with them, but you’re not them. You see the first image, which is the Spartans throwing their kids off of a cliff. I hope you go, “Okay, wow. These guys are a little rough.” They’re beating the kids constantly. It’s an effort to sort of remind you that you’re not them. When they meet the free Greek it’s like—well, it’d be like me asking you what you do and you’re like, “I work for a magazine. What do you do?” “Well, we kill.” I think that even when we’re looking down on the canyon and Dilios goes, “It’s awesome. We Spartans are looking for a beautiful death. That’s what we do”—all of that stuff is in there to just kind of present to you a little bit of a bridge. I want you to try and be with them, but I always feel like it’s important to remember that they are freaks in their own way.

It really seems like you captured the novel in this, and Frank’s style. Do you and Frank see yourselves collaborating on anything in the future?
 

Have you discussed it?

SNYDER: We haven’t really, but we kind of have fun when we talk and that could easily be something that we’d get around to talking about. He really stressed to me from the beginning, he said, “Look, I’ll do whatever you want me to do, but this is your movie, so go kill it.” In some ways that made it harder, because he put the responsibility on me and said basically to not f— it up.

How important was it to you that he gave you his approval?

SNYDER: It was great. It was really great. I mean, when he saw the movie he said, “Listen, I wrote this book because I saw a movie called ‘300 Spartans’ when I was a young man. And after I saw your version of my book in a movie form, I realized that I wished this was the movie that I had seen when I was a kid and not the one that I did see.”