Throughout time, men have waged war. Some for power, some for glory, some for honour - and some for love.
In ancient Greece, the passion of two of history's most legendary lovers, Paris, Prince of Troy (Orlando Bloom) and Helen (Diane Kruger), Queen of Sparta, ignites a war that will devastate a civilisation. When Paris steals Helen away from her husband, King Menelaus (Brendan Gleeson), it is an insult that cannot be suffered.
Familial pride dictates that an affront to Menelaus is an affront to his brother Agamemnon (Brendan Cox), powerful King of the Myceneans, who soon unites all the massive tribes of Greece to steal Helen back from Troy in defence of his brother's honour. In truth, Agamemnon's pursuit of honour is corrupted by his overwhelming greed - he needs control of Troy to ensure the supremacy of his already vast empire. The walled city, under the leadership of King Prium (Peter O'Toole) and defended by mighty Prince Hector (Eric Bana), is a citadel that no army has been able to breach. One man alone stands as the key to victory or defeat over Troy - Achilles (Brad Pitt), believed to be the greatest warrior alive.
Arrogant, rebellious and seemingly invincible, Achilles has no allegiance to anyone or anything, save his own glory. It is his insatiable hunger for eternal renown that leads him to attack the gates of Troy under Agamemnon's banner - but it will be love that ultimately decides his fate.
Two worlds will go to war for honour and power. Thousands will fall in pursuit of glory. And for love, a nation will burn to the ground.
Based on The iliad by Homer.
Special Agent Matti
I was vaguely disappointed with Troy. It had the swords, it had the sandals, it had the raping and pillaging, it even had Brad Pitt's naked buttocks (and they are worth the price of admission all by themselves), but somewhere, somehow, Troy just didn't zing off the screen. Gladiator, now that film had zing. One man, dragged through the mud but somehow still managing to find revenge. Troy just keeps going and going (and going) until everyone is dead. There is no single character on whom we can focus our attentions. Achilles, Agamemnon, Hector, Paris, Helen, Prium, Briseis... they are all heroes - and villains - at some stage or another. That may be true to life but we prefer our heroes - and villains - to be heroes - or villains - no matter how we look at them. They were the footy stars of their day: having sex with other men's wives, throwing star tanties, getting drunk, raping virgins...
Is this entertainment or real life? Sheesh.
Even though Troy is as true to life - and to The iliad - as you're going to get (remember that no-one has any record of Troy itself, and the gods bless CGI) it's just a long story about some dudes who died thousands of years ago a zillion kilometres away. Great costumes, great battles, but ultimately it's undone by its own cleverness. This is just not the kind of story that translates into a film script. Especially one that tries to tell everything about everyone.
Not that the semi-naked, hard-muscled, sun-bronzed, running, panting, sweating young men aren't worth seeing all on their own. Heh, heh. Did I mention Brad's bum? Oh, speaking of which, in real life Patroclus is Achilles' boyfriend, which is why he goes ape-shit after Hector kills him. Makes a bit more sense than being a "cousin", doesn't it? (This is Hollywood homophobia at work.)
Anyway, Troy is a good, fun epic battle movie with lots of running around hitting people. Enjoy.
MA 15+ (Medium level violence)
163 minutes (2:43 hours)
Film: 13 May 2004
DVD rental: 20 October 2004
VHS rental: 20 October 2004
Passion is at the heart of all the momentous events driving Troy, an epic chronicle of the triumphs and tragedy of the legendary Trojan War. The seeds of war are sown when King Menelaus of Sparta hosts a banquet to make peace with King Priam of Troy, represented by his eldest son, Prince Hector, defender of Troy. While the two leaders celebrate an end to countless devastating years of war, Hector's preternaturally handsome brother Paris disappears - only to reappear in the bedchamber of Menelaus' wife Helen, known far and wide as one of the world's greatest beauties. When Paris spirits Helen away from Menelaus' palace without Hector's knowledge, their fate is sealed: the leaders of countless Greek tribes will unite to wage war against the Trojans.
Among the gathering forces is Achilles, a warrior of such skill and fame that his name alone invokes cold dread in his opponents. It is rumoured that his mother, Thetis, is a goddess, and that he shares her power of immortality. But in truth he is only a man, and so must capture eternal life the only way a mortal can: by ensuring that history will forever remember his name.
Achilles' rapidly growing legend compels Agamemnon, the arrogantly ambitious King of the Greeks and brother to Menelaus, to reluctantly summon him for battle against the Trojans. Although he knows that Agamemnon does nothing except for his own personal gain, Achilles' insatiable lust for glory and eternal renown leads the warrior far from home and into the front lines of a war waged to seize power and exact vengeance for others.
Hector and Paris arrive in Troy just ahead of the encroaching Greek armada. Their father, King Priam, must decide whether to press war with the Greeks or return Menelaus' stolen bride and consequently deliver Paris to certain execution, as the young prince would surely follow his love. The choice is soon made clear: Paris will not surrender Helen and Priam will not sacrifice his son. War is the only way.
And war is soon upon them. A thousand Greek warships land upon the Trojan shore, and with Achilles' god-like abilities driving the attack, not even the leadership of the mighty Hector can keep the Greeks from swiftly taking the beach.
By sunset, the ground is soaked with the blood of Greeks and Trojans alike. Helen is broken-hearted that the cost of her happiness is the death and destruction of so many on both sides of the conflict, but she is powerless to stop it. Paris' love sustains her, but he too is stricken at the battle he has caused - the Greeks seem destined to take the city.
Destiny, however, is less certain than the Trojans know. All is not well between Agamemnon and his prized warrior Achilles, who makes no secret of his contempt for the King. The warrior fights for no one but himself - until he finds a defiant, terrified girl in his tent, intended as his prize for laying waste to the Temple of Apollo, patron god and protector of Troy. She is Hector's cousin Briseis (Rose Byrne), a beautiful acolyte of the Temple and seemingly the only person alive who isn't awed by Achilles' power. Intrigued, he takes her under his protection instead.
He soon learns the price of such devotion. Achilles finds that he cannot protect Briseis from the whims of an angry, jealous king who longs to punish him for his scorn. When Agamemnon abducts Briseis, an enraged Achilles refuses to raise his sword again in the name of the malevolent King. Without Achilles to tip the scales of fortune towards the Greeks, the Trojans prove to be a much more formidable foe, and the bloody stand-off that ensues ultimately wreaks terrible destruction on both of their nations.
"There is an old saying that war brings out the worst and the best in human beings," muses acclaimed producer/director Wolfgang Petersen. "But war is a disaster for everyone involved. While our film shows the spectacle of battle between tens of thousands of soldiers in a way that audiences have never seen before, the focus of our story is the timeless human aspect of the victories and defeats that Homer recorded."
Troy is inspired by The iliad, the epic work attributed to the ancient poet Homer, considered to be the Western world's original literary master. The epic poems Homer is credited with appear to have been composed in the 8th century BC, 300-400 years after the supposed fall of Troy. While it isn't clear whether Homer recited existing oral chronicles or was the sole and original creator, his work has survived the centuries to become literature's most compelling glimpse into the past.
"I don't think that any writer in the last 3000 years has more graphically and accurately described the horrors of war than Homer," says Petersen. "But in his epic works, the human drama was overshadowed by the brutality. A contemporary audience needs to come into the story through the lives and passions of the real people caught up in this terrifying experience."
The film's screenplay is written by David Benioff, author of both screenplay and novel for Spike Lee's critically acclaimed film The 25th hour. "This is one of those universal stories," says producer Diana Rathbun. "Not everyone is going to be a great hero and go off and slay the dragon, but the emotions that drive them are something that we have all experienced at some point in our lives. When I read this script I fell in love with it - the insightful portrayal of the characters makes them immediately recognisable to an audience. It's very hard sometimes to relate to classic literature as it feels distant, of a different time, a different world, but there's something about this story that is so easy to connect with, it's about emotions - whether they were experienced thousands of years ago, or today."
A massive, international production, the filming of Troy was an undeniably ambitious undertaking. Director Wolfgang Petersen welcomed the challenge of staging an intimate human drama on such a grand, sweeping scale. "Our story is a tightly interwoven character piece with fascinating individuals and emotions, which is a challenge to capture by itself. On top of that, we are telling their story against a spectacularly large canvas."
Production design was a critical component of establishing the film's incredible scope. Petersen chose innovative production designer Nigel Phelps to conjure up their ancient world. "Nigel had an enormous knowledge about the time, and his first drawings were just beautiful," recalls Petersen. "He and his team dug themselves into all kinds of books and research material and I was fascinated by what they came up with."
"The initial challenge was to give the film an epic quality," says Phelps. "Wolfgang stressed that he wanted the film to be very believable and realistic. After doing a bit of research I realised that the reality of the period was that everything was actually very small scale. In 1200 BC, the cultures that were prominent were the Mycenaeans and the Egyptians. What I did was combine the art and forms of the Mycenaeans with the grand scale of the Egyptians, in order to come up with a different vocabulary that was both authentic to the period and met the criteria of an epic film."
Much of the production teams' research was accomplished through the British Museum, utilising their collection of objects excavated from archaeological digs in Turkey where the city of Troy is widely considered to have stood. There remains much speculation as to what Troy actually looked like during the period in which the events of The iliad take place. Several different ancient cities have been discovered at the site, each built directly on top of the next. Troy VI is the level that represents the period that Phelps and his team were charged with recreating.
"The reality is, Troy was quite a bit smaller than what we eventually designed - it's really quite contained," says the designer. "But you did have an outer wall and you did have an inner palace within the confines of the town. For the most part, all of the houses were single story and flat-roofed and made of mud. So we had to expand on that a little to make it more visually interesting."
Most of the film takes place in and around Troy, the main elements being the beach on which the Greeks land, the battlefield outside the city walls, the city itself and the palace within it. Other locations featured in Troy include the Thessalonian Valley in mainland Greece and the kingdoms of Sparta and Mycenae. "We were really trying to create a mood that would establish the different cultures," says Phelps. "Agamemnon's Mycenaean world is all about gold and wealth and property, as opposed to the Spartans, who lead such a barren, colourless existence. And then when we get to Troy, there's a lot of greenery and it's very pleasant."
The filmmakers had to decide which of their three locations - London, Malta or Mexico - was best suited to each setting. Most of the film's interiors were built on sound stages at Shepperton Studios, 65 kilometres outside London, but the sprawling city of Troy couldn't be contained on a stage. "Malta is a lovely island with wonderful cliff and rock formations; the area where we built Troy was amazing," relates producer Diana Rathbun. "However, there was no expanse of beach big enough for our computer graphic experts to put in a thousand ships, or enough undeveloped land to stage a battle involving 75,000 troops. Our final location was Mexico, which met all our requirements."
The filming of Troy began at Shepperton on 22 April 2003. Sets constructed there included the Palace of Troy, which encompasses Priam's meeting hall and the royal family's living quarters. All the interiors have open roofs, a reality of the time as the only sources of light and heat were the sun and the fires that were burned in the center of each room. When it came to designing Priam's meeting hall, Phelps distinguished it from the other sets by introducing a large reflection pool in its center. The set also included another distinct design element: a 15-metre high statue of Zeus, God of Thunder, holding a golden sceptre and surrounded by 5-metre tall statues of the other Olympians, each ornamented with a golden symbol of his or her own unique power.
"Religious motifs are very key elements of the film," says Phelps. "When designing the statues, we looked at the earliest and oldest sculptures that were relevant, then with our costume designer, Bob Ringwood, we modified their hair and dress so that they were more in keeping with the overall look that we had established for the film."
From London, production next moved to the Mediterranean island of Malta, where exteriors of the city of Troy were erected on 4 hectares inside a 17th century military compound called Fort Ricasoli. Malta is a country that is rich in artifacts and archaeological ruins - some pre-dating the events of Troy by over 2000 years. The production team decided that none of the existing structures looked as if they would have existed in 1200 BC. As a result, the entire city had to be built from the ground up. More than 500 Maltese workers were hired and nearly 200 UK craftsmen were brought to the island to begin the construction of Troy at the beginning of the year.
While the island's strong winds, extreme heat and humidity played havoc with the filming schedule, putting Petersen in a daily state of uncertainty about what he'd be filming until he'd heard the morning weather reports, construction continued inside the Fort Ricasoli compound. Finally, the finishing touches were put on the Palace and the streets of Troy were dressed by two-time Oscar-winning set decorator Peter Young for the filming of two grand entrances.
A crowd of 1200 extras were costumed, made up and coifed for a scene in which a cavalcade of mounted Apollonian guardsmen escort Hector and Paris through the city as they present Helen to the people of Troy for the first time. "It is when Helen is introduced to the city that the audience first sees this world," comments Phelps, "and as a viewer, they should have the same reaction as Helen does when she sees it for first time. They should be in awe."
Young wanted the street that the procession winds down to provide the audience with a multi-dimensional first glimpse of the city's character. "To bring the buildings to life we had to include all those details that make a city look lived in," he notes. "It wouldn't do to merely have some pottery on display and costumed people walking around. We had to give them things that would involve them in daily commerce; working in a smithy's shop, carrying baskets, pushing carts and such. All that activity in the background becomes the barely perceptible nuance that adds a bit of reality to everything that's going on in center stage."
That ethos extended through the entire expansive city, which is gradually revealed throughout the film. "In the city square and with the streets I tried to show a couple of different sides to life there," says Phelps. "We had the big main thoroughfare and then on the side streets there are more ordinary slices of life. The square is much more of a ceremonial place, so we wanted the design to be more formal and austere. Ultimately, it's the Trojan Horse's final resting place, so essentially we worked backwards - knowing that there's going to be a forty-foot horse in the middle of this square, what's going to look good around it?"
"The Horse was a very pivotal design challenge in the film," Phelps relates. "If you apply logic to it, the only building material the Greeks could have had would be wood from burnt ships, and I felt it should look like it was clearly thrown together in desperation in the twelve days that the Greeks had to build it. I felt that it should be a very pagan-feeling object that would really play on the Trojans' religious beliefs. The Greeks needed something to compel the Trojans to bring this horse back into their religious center, which is the square inside the walls."
Designing such an iconic figure meant that Phelps had to develop a look that evoked a feeling of recognition in the viewer while remaining true to the film's philosophy of categorical realism. "I didn't want to have a horse with wheels on it," Phelps explains. "It's sort of cliché and it didn't really make sense. It seemed to me that seeing it on the beach for the first time with big wheels, it should also have a bow and a note saying 'Take me home.'"
Working off of several reference materials (which included photos of a burnt, charred ship and a giant gorilla constructed entirely out of tires), three concept artists worked to come up with the perfect design. Once the right look was established, a sculptor took the sketch and interpreted it three-dimensionally, producing a twelve-inch maquette. Ultimately, a much larger scale, fully dressed-out model was made, which was then followed exactly by twelve polystyrene sculptors who carved the Horse on its final, grand scale.
The Horse was constructed at Shepperton Studios in London, but had to be built in two halves because there was no space available large enough to accommodate the enormous equine. "It was quite nerve wracking," admits Phelps, "because the bottom half with the legs and the base was sculpted, and then the top half, with the head and shoulders. But it wasn't going to be until two or three months later in Malta that we'd see the entire thing put together."
The Horse was transported in pieces to Malta after the company made its move there at the beginning of May. Constructed mostly of steel and fibreglass fashioned to look like wood, it stood 12 metres high and weighed 11 tonnes. Once the sections had been forged it took workers weeks to assemble. It then had to be moved into position for its entrance through the 13-metre-high Trojan gates - an entrance that called for some not-so-modern ingenuity.
"I'd seen a documentary about the Egyptians building the Pyramids that showed these massive stone blocks being pulled along on logs," recalls Phelps. "This seemed a much more logical, subtle way of designing a means of moving the Horse." A path made up of dozens of large logs was laid through the gate and a system of cable pulleys - later removed from the film by computer graphics - was set up to take most of the burden off the men towing the ropes.
After all the scenes taking place in the picturesque City of Troy were shot, the production faced the final stage of their shooting in Malta - burning their creation to the ground. Filming the sacking of Troy demanded an enormous amount of meticulous planning, coordination, and labour. "It was one of the biggest outdoor fire jobs that's been done since Gone with the wind," relates special effects supervisor Joss Williams. "Ours was slightly different from that one because it was controlled and we could turn it off - whereas with them, they just lit it and off it went."
Thousands of metres of gas piping laid by Williams' crew were connected to five liquid propane tanks set up behind the buildings along the Trojan streets and controlled by a system of 350 individually operated valves. Each tank had a capacity of 5000 cubic litres of gas which could be used as either a vapour or a liquid. If used in liquid form, it expanded the flame density by 270 times the intensity of the vapour. Into this volatile mix were thrown Simon Crane's stunt team - along with actors Brad Pitt, Brian Cox and Sean Bean.
Making sure no one was injured during the choreographed mayhem was of great importance to second unit director Crane and the filmmakers.
"Safety is obviously a very, very big concern," the veteran stunt coordinator explains. "That's why we rely so heavily on rehearsal. The more you rehearse, the more you've minimised the risk. We rehearsed the sacking for weeks before we shot the scene. Even with that precaution, something can always go wrong, so we had a reliable group of paramedics and vehicles standing by, as well as several evacuation plans."
Due to the extensive preparation and vigilance on the part of everyone involved in the planning and execution, no-one was hurt during the filming of the spectacular sequence.
The first and second units wrapped their work in Malta and set off for the final and potentially most arduous portion of the filming, which began on 11 July in Los Cabos, Mexico at the southernmost tip of the Baja peninsula, 1800 kilometres from the USA border.
Hundreds of crewmembers were hired from all over Mexico, many from Mexico City and beyond. An immense amount of preparation was still needed to get the location ready for filming once the core crew of 350 people arrived.
Much had already been accomplished before the cast and crew arrived on the 1100 hectare compound that would serve as Troy's new backlot. 230 labourers had been hired, the vast majority brought in from Mexico City, to build the Greek ships, the magnificent Temple of Apollo and the imposing Wall of Troy.
One of the most complex projects facing the production was clearing the way for the Wall. Surrounding the Mexico beach location were thousands of hectares of scrub and cactus stretching to the sea, approximately a square kilometre of which would have to cleared for the battlefield.
An environmental study was required before permits could be issued, and among the requirements was the preservation of certain varieties of cactus. Production had to arrange for botanists to count, categorise and tag each cactus. Then 4000 cacti had to be removed by hand, transplanted to a nursery and maintained until filming was completed, at which point they were replanted in the same spot from which they were removed.
Similar care had to be taken with wildlife along the beach encampment. The entire coast of Mexico is an endangered turtle habitat, so to allow production to occupy such a long stretch of sand, they were required to implement a turtle protection program. Two specialists were hired to live on the property and patrol the beach 24 hours a day, seven days a week for the six months of filming. When turtles were spotted laying eggs, the team would collect the eggs and put them in a fenced incubation area. Then when they hatched 45 days later, they would bring them down to the shore and release them.
Once the area was environmentally secured and cleared, 80 craftsmen under the supervision of construction manager Tony Graysmark began to build the exterior wall and gates of Troy. It took four months and 200 tons of plaster to erect the structure. The crew built 500 feet of wall, which was on average 40 feet tall and reached as high as 60 feet in the central area where the gates stood. It was later digitally extended for kilometres in both directions.
Unfortunately, when filming was almost completed, the filmmakers discovered that their Wall was not unbreachable after all. With the first unit wrapped and the second unit with just two weeks of shooting left in Mexico, on Sunday 21 September at around 2:00 am, Hurricane Marty hit the southern tip of Baja. The film sets suffered major damage - including the collapse of the middle two thirds of the Wall of Troy.
Simon Crane's second unit crew were able to shoot a week's worth of work on the beach - despite the absence of half the Greek fleet and part of Apollo's Temple. But it would take a month to rebuild the Trojan Wall. Petersen returned with Crane and a crew of about a hundred to complete the last portion of filming in late December.
"Making this movie was a bit like being one of the characters in it," notes producer Diana Rathbun. "At times it took superhuman effort on everybody's part to get it done, and logistically, it's been a challenge to say the least. But I've never worked on a film for which so many people had so much passion."
Along with its themes of love and honour, Troy is about the brutal reality of war, and the many battle sequences in the film needed to not only be visually compelling and technically precise, they also had to piercingly illustrate the horror and devastation of combat.
"Our approach to the battle sequences was blood, sweat and tears," says Petersen. "We want the audience to feel what it is like to be in the midst of everything. Our battles are not glorious - I wanted everything to be as realistic as possible. I give a lot of credit to Simon Crane, our stunt coordinator and second unit director, who led an entire army of experts in weaponry and fight choreography. He and his crew were instrumental in bringing together what I think are amazingly choreographed battles."
Crane's core team of eight was joined by 50 stunt people from all around the world. The team rehearsed for six weeks prior to the start of filming. Additionally, 1000 extras were broken down into groups based on aptitude, the best of whom could be placed in the background of any stunt or fighting action.
Developing a strategy for Achilles' magnificent fighting scenes proved to be an exhaustive process. "When you read the script, it says very early on, 'Achilles fights in a god-like manner,'" says Crane. "Well, that's very easy to write, but it's very, very hard to do, and that one sentence created a lot of work for a lot of people. In the end it took three months and about thirty people to come up with the way Achilles fights. He has a boxing style, but with the velocity of a speed skater and the agility of a panther. Also, he doesn't look directly at his opponent. He looks slightly to the side and only looks when he's coming in for the kill - so if he looks at you, you know you're dead."
Pitt worked for six months prior to filming to develop Achilles' formidable physique. "Beyond the physical training," says Pitt, "I had to put on a lot of weight. The layers of physicality that the role demands made it a gruelling process, but every bit of it adds up to the finished product, so I wouldn't have it any other way. Fortunately for me I had a lot of time coming into the film to really submerge myself in it. I started six months in advance, and then Simon and his team came along and started developing the extraordinary fighting style."
If cultivating the fighting technique of one man was an intricate, time consuming process, the experience of training 1000 men to fight as one was a comparable feat. The mechanics of coordinating the movements of hundreds of inexperienced "troops" was a daunting task that the filmmakers put in the hands of a seasoned professional. "People don't move naturally as a group," says military technical advisor and former British Army officer Richard Smedley. "So before we could even begin filming, we had to teach the extras - most of whom had never had military training - to work together in a coordinated manner. Once we got them trained to move as a group and manoeuvre at the snap of a finger, we could then teach them to do the things that we actually needed them to do for the film."
In Malta, Smedley and his team trained 200 extras for four weeks, teaching them skills such as marching in sync, holding weapons correctly and taking commands in preparation for the few fighting sequences shot on the island. Once production moved to Mexico, where the major battles would be filmed, the scope widened. In addition to the military training that had to be provided for the 1000 extras who were found locally, an elite group was needed that not only possessed the physical prowess necessary to convincingly stage the battle scenes, but also had a believably Mediterranean look. Smedley recruited the perfect soldiers from the Sports Academy in Sophia, the capital of Bulgaria.
"A member of my military team who lives in South Africa was flown to Bulgaria and went through the interviewing process to put that package together," Smedley recounts. "We found about 250 athletes - large, muscled, Greek-looking guys who we flew to Mexico a month before filming began. We put them through a three week training program, which began with the men turning left and right and led up to big charges and battling. We trained about 1250 people in Mexico, 250 Bulgarians and 1000 Mexicans."
There were two major battles to be shot, known as the Battle of the Barricades and the Battle of the Arrows. "The Battle of the Arrows was our big showcase battle, with 50,000 Greeks against 25,000 Trojans," says Crane. "The Trojans fight from behind the walls of Troy, and rely heavily on archers. When they can't, the theory is that if they have to fight outside their walls, they take their walls with them by way of their shield drills, so we worked that into our choreography. From beginning to end, the battle is maybe ten minutes long, but it took two units four weeks to film it."
Although the majority of the arrows shot in the film were computer generated for safety reasons, armourer Simon Atherton oversaw the design and creation of 20,000 arrows, as well as 3000 swords and spears and 4000 shields.
The second battle was on a smaller scale, but no less ambitious. "In the Battle of the Barricades," Crane describes, "we decided to have fireballs thrown down the hill by the Trojans into the Greek encampment. It came to us as a good visual idea to set it apart from the other battles. The balls were made of papier mache, and they had small charges inside them so that as they hit something, the special effects team could detonate them, throwing debris all over the stunt men."
Another important skirmish filmed in Mexico was the storming of the beach and ransacking of the Temple of Apollo by Achilles and his Myrmidons.
Key hand-to-hand clashes included Paris' fight with Menelaus, Achilles against the giant Boagrius and the fight on which the fate of two nations would rest, Hector versus Achilles. It took a team of thirty people three months to design the awesome battle between the two titans, and Pitt and Bana rehearsed it four hours a day for eight weeks.
"The armies have clashed, and so we now see what happens when the two greatest warriors of them all go up against each other man to man," Petersen reflects. "The trick of it all, what Homer did so very cleverly, is that the anticipation for this fight is built up so much that we can't help but feel the weight of how monumental this contest is. Even though we've seen 50,000 soldiers clash against 25,000, the battle between these two men is the most spectacular and the most fascinating and frightening fight of them all."
No stuntmen performed in the fight - every move is made by Pitt and Bana themselves. "When you see the fight you just can't believe that these are actors who are doing it," raves Petersen. "You talk about blood, sweat and tears, about the reality of a fight, everything that went into Eric and Brad's fight exemplified that."
"Brad Pitt just has so much dedication," Crane enthuses. "He's so focused on the character. I video the fights, and then I show Brad the choreography that I'm proposing. And you can see his eyes light up and you can see he's there - he's in that battle. We have stunt men rehearse it first, but when he actually starts to learn it, it becomes a totally different fight. He just brings the character to life. Basically he's saying, 'Bring it on,' which is fantastic."
"Every now and then you get on a film where everyone seems to be at the top of their game," Pitt compliments, "and I would say that was true of Troy, from the director on down. Simon Crane and his boys are as good as I've ever seen."
"I think the work they've done in those battle scenes is just unbelievable," agrees Bana, who trained with weapons for six months in his native Australia prior to filming. "Simon Crane and his crew are just absolutely phenomenal. The stuntmen that I got to beat up on had amazing endurance. They kept popping up."
"Eric was great," says Crane. "He told us very early on that he hasn't really done many fights in films before. We initiated a training scheme for all the actors and he really got it. He moves how Hector would move - he is Hector, it's as simple as that."
Tens of thousands of men clash on the battlefields of Troy. Even the legions of extras, stuntmen and actors assembled and trained for the film weren't enough to convey the enormity of the collision of the two fabled armies. For that, the filmmakers relied upon the visionary magic of a new breed of revolutionary visual effects.
Troy features the debut of "virtual stuntmen," provided by leading visual effects houses The Moving Picture Company and Framestore CFC, employing technology pioneered by NaturalMotion. The software, called "endorphin," was developed from research into the neurobiology of human motion conducted by Oxford University's Department of Zoology. The ingenious program creates virtual characters whose bodies react exactly like real humans to whatever forces are applied to them - unlike most computerised characters, which depend on fixed databases containing animated clips, endorphin's virtual actors move independently, sensing and reacting to their environment in the same way humans do.
The process behind the artificial stuntmen's ability to move and think, called "active character technology," is centred around an artificial intelligence simulation of the human brain, body and nervous system. The virtual stuntmen learn how to move and react using artificial evolution, building up their store of knowledge over time. Muscle models within each character are identical to properties in actual human muscles, and information programmed into the AI nervous system sends impulses to the body's muscles to achieve a given movement, such as maintaining balance or jumping.
Once programmed, the characters react on their own, providing an infinite variety of realistic reactions to action within a scene. For instance, neural networks responsible for self-preservation compel the soldiers in Troy to react to blows from their opponent with movements such as shielding themselves, attempting to maintain their balance, or breaking their fall. The ground-breaking technology allowed the vision of colossal armies engaged in furious combat to be realised in unprecedented detail and dimension.
Depicting the harsh realities of Bronze Age warfare, which relied heavily on blunt instruments, spears, arrows, and to a lesser extent swords, demanded ingenuity from the special effects team. "The fighting in The iliad is brutal," Crane stresses. "It's written in a very descriptive nature. We're not trying to glorify it, but if someone hits you hard with a hammer, it's going to hurt and it's going to do a lot of damage to your face, and that's what we're trying to show, to put an audience right there in the middle of it and show what it was actually like."
Special effects supervisor Joss Williams and his team created a series of prosthetics that allowed the director to capture graphic mid-ground action while not requiring the same level of detail as the makeup prosthetics used in close-ups. "We engineered pneumatically-controlled animated dummies with prosthetic limbs, torsos, heads and chests," Williams describes. "They could be used to show action such as a chariot running over somebody's legs or a sword going straight through somebody's chest."
The strikingly realistic prosthetics are constructed in several layers. Bones, made of resin and foam, and muscles created in wax are laid over an inner armature. The limbs are prepped with stage blood and then a silicone skin is laid on to cover the entire apparatus. The prosthetic limbs are then attached to a pneumatic skeleton, which can be locked into any position. The effect is incredibly life-like. In addition to the animated dummies, Prosthetics made 30 naked bodies, 30 burned bodies and 30 each in Greek and Trojan clothing to portray slain soldiers on the battlefield.
Other special effects innovations included a device that made it possible to safely capture shots of spearheads puncturing a shield held mere centimetres away from Brad Pitt's head. A version of Achilles' shield was engineered to give the effect of the warrior stopping two spears thrown with tremendous force. "Brad held the shield in his hand," Williams explains, "and the actor in the background mimed throwing a spear at him, which would later be added in by our visual effects team. Then Brad fired a trigger that shot a spear tip from a pressurised cylinder mounted on the other side of his shield, which punched through the shield with great force, giving the impression that he has caught a spear with it."
Crane was responsible for another unique invention that provided the battlefield with an authentic, if unsavoury, atmosphere. "We had these great big jets put into the ground filled with watermelon and ketchup, and every now and then they'd fire off and spray chunks of watermelon through a great big red mist so as people are getting hit, there's always blood and gore flying through the air."
To remain true to the period, the actors in Troy who ride horses had to learn to ride bareback, an accomplishment that challenges even the most experienced of equestrians due to the difficulty of remaining balanced on a horse without a saddle. As the leader of Troy's elite Apollonian Guard, Bana in particular had to master the skill; with up to 80 riders behind him, it was imperative that he be able to safely manoeuvre. "Hector is a breaker of horses," Petersen stresses. "He's a horseman, and Eric had no idea how to ride a horse, so he had to learn from scratch. Now he feels like he was born on a horse."
"I started training back home in Australia months before we started the production," says Bana, "and then kept up that training all the way through. I had six or eight people attack me and try and push me off my horse, to train me not to panic if I get in a situation on the set where horses and people go crazy, and you could potentially get pushed off your horse. But I had some wonderful days during filming - Orlando and I had many moments galloping along the beach on our stallions off company hours. And you just turn around to each other and say, 'How good is this?'"
Horse master Jordi Casares trained the actors and designed all the stunts involving horses. It took six weeks prior to filming to train the horses to perform their stunts. Crowd control was an obstacle in training the sensitive animals.
"The most difficult issue for me to deal with on this film was when we had actors on the chariots, being pulled by the horses," Casares remembers. "During battle, there might be 500 extras with the spears and lances surrounding the horses, and it's natural for them to be scared of spears and sticks or any fast movements. A horse could take off on a chariot with an actor on it, and they will run over anything. They'll take down extras, cameras, anything in their path."
The 1000 ships launched by Helen's flight from Sparta were crafted for the film in a variety of fashions. Two fully functional, 37-metre-long engine-driven ships were built in Malta out of steel and clad in wood, on which the scenes at sea were filmed.
"The practical ships were an amazing technological feat," Phelps reveals. "If you're going to have cast and crew on board the ship it has to meet all sorts of regulations - they have to be certified and life jackets and lifeboats must be concealed on board, so we had to build in all of these hidden compartments. And we had a professional rigger, which gives us that element of reality and extra dressing and detail and which makes the ships look believable. So these were proper, legitimate vessels that we built."
Since the two seaworthy practical ships had to stand in for several different vessels, Phelps and company had to find a way to give them a new identity with just a couple of hours notice. Their solution was to change the eyes on the front of the ships, and design a distinct graphic for each of the kings' sails. Achilles' Myrmidons are easy to pick out, as theirs is the only black sail in the fleet.
For scenes of the Greek encampment shot on the beach in Mexico, four ships were built - three full ships and two half ships. Since they would remain beached throughout shooting, these crafts were able to be built entirely of wood, which contributed to their visual authenticity.
With the exception of two ships that are real, the magnificent shots of the 1000 ships of the Greek Armada sailing for Troy were digitally rendered by Framestore CFC, the largest visual effects and computer animation company in Europe.
As with all other aspects of the production, authenticity was vital to the design of the thousands of costumes needed to outfit the massive cast, stuntmen and extras of Troy. However, as the story takes place 1200 years BC, there is very little reference information that actually survived. Homer's descriptions in The iliad are based on the clothing and armour of his time, three or four hundred years after the events in the film take place. Acclaimed costume director Bob Ringwood had to make as much of the available resources as possible.
"I got catalogues from every museum around the world that had anything," says Ringwood, "and then spent several days in the British Museum really studying everything and seeing how the clothes and armour were made and what they were made of. I looked a lot at the bas-relief sculptures, which are thousands of tiny figures - I kept setting off the alarms in the museum by getting too close - but if you make the effort to study them, there're actually quite accurate depictions. I was able to base the court clothes on them, which are the most historically accurate costumes in the film."
Much of that accuracy came about as a result of Ringwood's production methods. "I think one of the most important things about making an ethnic historical film is that you use ethnic fabrics and ethnic peoples to make it," says Ringwood. "If you try and make them with modern fabrics in modern factories they just look modern, and so we bought all the fabrics from all over the world and they were often fabrics that have been made the same way for 3000 years. I had about a hundred and fifty people working for me and then we outsourced all over the world, to Iraq, Turkey, India, Sri Lanka, China."
Ringwood had to find a creative solution to a critical issue. In designing the armour for the film, he needed to visually unify the Greek army, although it is made up of many smaller armies from different regions that would each have to have a distinct look. "They have to appear as one because when the film is cut together you really want the Trojans and the Greeks to appear to be two distinct armies. So basically I designed all the Trojan armour in blue, gold and metal, and outfitted the Greek armies in earth tones, leather and coarse fabrics, so even though all the factions in the Greek army are somewhat different, they read as a group."
To outfit Troy's legions of soldiers, Ringwood's team produced armour prototypes using methods and materials authentic to the period, including woven linens, metal, leather and grass. The full size wearable costumes were then cast in plastic, using a recently developed, highly effective new method. High-pressure spray guns cover the object with miniscule droplets of plastic that pick up every detail of the original, down to an errant pinhole. A mould is created, and plastic facsimiles of the armour are made, then dressed with details such as metal plating and leather dyes. The end result is a lightweight perfect facsimile of the original that can be mass produced at a rate of several hundred in a week.
"Bob Ringwood is a genius," Petersen raves. "An absolute genius. He is a true artist. I was in awe of Bob - he got his materials from all over the world, and put it all together in an amazing way." In total, Ringwood and company designed and manufactured about 8000 costumes and 10,000 pairs of shoes in just four and a half months.
Greek mythology tells the story of a golden apple that Eris, the goddess of discord, tossed into the middle of an Olympian wedding party to which she had not been invited. The apple came into the hands of Paris who was told to give it to the fairest of the goddesses. Hera, Zeus's own wife, promised him power if he chose her; Athena promised him wealth. But Aphrodite promised him the most beautiful woman in the world - and she was the one to whom he gave the apple. She rewarded him with Helen.
While Troy is inspired by The iliad, it also includes other elements not found in Homer's work. The Trojan Horse is not a part of The iliad, and only Virgil wrote quite extensively about the sacking of Troy in The aeneid. "Our film is a collection of motifs and story elements, drawing mainly from The iliad," says Petersen. "One respect in which we diverged from Homer's telling is that our story does not include the presence of the gods. The gods in The iliad are directly involved in the story - they fight, they help out, they manipulate. Not in our story. The religion is there, the belief is there, but the gods are only mentioned - they are not made a part of it. It wouldn't have been in line with the level of realism that we wanted to achieve in the film."
The actual existence of Paris and Helen or any of the other characters that populate Homer's poems may never be known. Some archaeological evidence for the supposed palaces of Kings Agamemnon and Nestor exists and there are other kings, including Odysseus and Priam, whom some scholars accept as historical. Ancient vases and carvings tell the story of the war, but whether they are retelling myth or history remains unknown.
The Trojan War was thought for a time to be completely a creation of the ancient poet Homer. With no supporting written evidence of the civilisation he described, archaeology - a relatively recent science with origins in Egyptology - became the key to unlocking the truth of this ancient past.
The ruins of what is now widely believed to be the real city of Troy were not unearthed until 1871. Those who had pursued it over the centuries had generally agreed the great walled city overlooked the Aegean Sea from a part of modern-day Turkey still called the Troad, preserving the ancient name of Troy. But no surface evidence of its specific location seemed to exist.
Credit for the discovery of Troy went to German entrepreneur and novice archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann. Largely uncredited was British archaeologist Frank Calvert, who suggested that Schliemann should dig at a place called Hisarlik - the site now recognised as ancient Troy.
The remains of seven cities were found on the site, each on top of the other, showing that Troy had been rebuilt many times. The city that Schliemann initially proclaimed to be Homer's Troy was on the second level. Later research proved this could not be the case, and now most scholars believe that the sixth city provides the most likely background for the story of the Trojan War. Traditional dates for the fall of Troy range from about 1250 to 1183 BC, fitting well with the dates of destructions of these cities. Excavations were resumed as recently as 1988, with the belief there was much yet to be discovered.
There is still a debate over whether a single war caused Troy's collapse: some evidence indicates an earthquake, rather than armed assault, as a force of destruction. Many historians believe there could have been a series of wars between Greeks and Trojans, with perhaps one grand finale. In any scenario, the resulting disappearance of one of the Aegean's great city-states is beyond dispute.
Though Schliemann may have solved one of the great puzzles of history, he couldn't validate the accuracy of Homer's account of the events. In fact, his findings diminished the hopes of those who believed that proving the existence of Troy would give greater credence to Homer's reportage of its downfall.
The epic poems attributed to Homer, The iliad and The odyssey, were apparently composed some 400 years after the fall of Troy. They were part of an oral tradition, in which stories were recited and listened to, as opposed to written down and read. Like other bards, Homer used mythical tales handed down over generations and told them anew, re-shaping them for a contemporary audience, adding new details and leaving others out. We know very little about Homer, and there have even been arguments about whether a single poet created the poems. Yet while the work of other bards has been lost, the poems of Homer were recognised as vastly superior to the work of his imitators and were preserved. They are the earliest master-works of Greek literature, and many scholars believe they are the work of one man.
The most likely cause for the war, or series of wars, was control over the Dardanelles, a narrow waterway leading to the Black Sea. But the theft of one king's wife might have been as good an excuse as any to start the bloody conflict that Homeric legend claims lasted for 10 years. The iliad only describes events that took place over a period of 50 days. However, if literature is to be believed and longevity is the measure, they were the most memorable 50 days in mankind's history.