'I thought Troy wouldn't be made'

Director Wolfgang Peterson
10 April 2012

All directors hope their filmography will read like Homer's epic list of mighty ships. Wolfgang Petersen has a special ambition for his latest, Troy, which reworks The Iliad and turns the Trojan War into a $175 million blockbuster starring Helen, Paris, 1,000 ships, a clutch of heroes, 20,000 arrows, 4,000 shields, 3,000 swords, 1,250 extras, 1,000 men o' war, a few dozen stuntmen, a 38-feet-high wooden horse, and Brad Pitt.

"No one will have seen battles like this before," Petersen says, with infectious, beady excitement. "These are the most realistic on film. This is not Lord of the Rings; there is no fantasy. It's serious human endeavour. You see the blood, the sweat, the tears. Of course we use computer images and horribly realistic prosthetics to swell the numbers - how else could we have conveyed fighting between 75,000 men? But every move has been choreographed and rehearsed over weeks and months, sometimes just for a few minutes of film."

In addition, he hand-picked 250 Bulgarians as extras from a sports school in Sofia because of their physical prowess, "and because we needed them in the front row of the fighting as they looked more Mediterranean than our 1,000 Mexicans. But there's one battle to end all battles, one for the history books, and that's just between two men."

He is referring to the emotional centrepiece of the film, when reluctant Hector (Eric Bana), Prince of Troy, confronts the brooding, god-like Achilles (Brad Pitt), said to be the greatest warrior alive.

"There are no villains here," Petersen says. "We feel for both these men, who put their lives at stake. Their courage and nobility make them heroes. That's Homer's genius, to win our double sympathy. Today, when our politicians are so grey, so bland, we need reminding of what it is to have moral truth, higher ideals. Is this, maybe, why people respond to these ancient epics? To fill a void ...?"

The question that all sceptical classicists will ask is whether this audacious film-maker ever encountered Homer's original measures, first sung by the blind poet almost 3,000 years ago. Has he earned the right to fiddle with this sacred text?

"In Germany when I was a boy we had 'humanistic' schools in which you learned Latin and Greek. When I was 14 I thought it was tough, boring. But when Hector showed up I couldn't wait for the next Greek lesson to see what happened next. I sucked it up like syrup.

"The battle scenes were thrilling, the intimate moments so beautiful and anguished. So when I heard that the scriptwriter David Benioff had pitched an idea based on The Iliad to Warner Brothers, I was intrigued. How could he translate Homer into the aesthetics of the movies, to an audience which tends to be young and ignorant of this poetry and who - unlike its first audience - may not automatically know the outcome?"

Benioff, who first heard The Iliad as a 12-year-old boy when his mother, sick in bed, insisted on reading it to him over and over again, has incorporated parts of The Odyssey and Virgil's Aeneid in order to tell the full story of the Trojan horse and the Sack of Troy.

"It has been condensed and moved around a bit," Petersen concedes. "And we left out the gods, except by reference. How could a modern audience see gods on screen without giggling?"

He is probably right, but he has thereby made Troy predominantly tragic, removing the ironies and wry asides that make Homer's poem so richly layered. But the chief elements of the story spring from the original intact.

"This is the great European story of all time. You can't call it a Hollywood blockbuster even though it's been funded by an American studio. I'm German. The crew and half the cast are British. It's a European film."


Petersen, 63, a mild, round-faced, twinkling Tailor of Gloucester, has a reputation for embroidering his films with meticulous care. He first came to wider notice with his Oscarnominated drama Das Boot (1982), deemed one of the great anti-war statements of recent times. The precision with which he recreated the claustrophobia of life aboard a Nazi U-boat was key to its impact. The director says this film, set in 1941, remains close to his heart.

HE was born that year - mid-Second World War - in the port of Hamburg. How could he not have a life-long obsession with the ocean and man's lust for war? Those fascinations surface once again in Troy, both in the spectacular armada scenes and through the private dramas of Paris (Orlando Bloom), his adulterous lover Helen (Diane Kruger), the nobly flawed King Priam (Peter O'Toole) and the greedy Agamemnon (Brian Cox).

The scale on which Troy has been so recreated - variously in Mexico, Malta and Shepperton Studios - is impressively convincing: its walls 500 feet long, its great gates 60 feet high, made of tons of plaster laid over a steel construction and plywood.

"It involved much pain and hard work. I thought this film would never be made because it was so ambitious. But Brad wanted to do it from the start, which helped convince the backers, so somehow within only two years we have completed it. Every aspect was difficult. We needed a site for Troy adjacent to the sea but the only one we could find was in Mexico - which was fine until we discovered that we were on the site of a field of rare cacti. Each one - 4,000 - had to be tagged and removed, and later replanted. It was a nightmare."

Petersen bubbles with similar tales of hardship overcome, each more riveting than the last.

"We had to develop a fighting style for Brad. We put it all on video, using stuntmen, and he learned by imitation. At the start of the film, he kills a giant - a wonderful, gentle, 6ft 10in Australian wrestler who managed, brilliantly, to fall flat on his face at each take. Brad was brilliant. He quit smoking and showed amazing discipline. Now he is like a statue, a god, don't you agree?"

If gods are measured by muscle size, then, yes, Pitt is Zeus himself. "He trained for months, and had a special diet - not very tasty - to build himself up. He was always dreaming of pizza."

All this is a far cry from Air Force One, Petersen's action fantasy - less funny now than when it was made in 1997 - in which the US President triumphs single-handedly over a planeload of Russian hijackers. "Aw, that was a popcorn movie. I did it when Bill Clinton was in office. You couldn't do it now. How could you turn George Bush into a hero?"

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