Hollywood history is littered with foolish statements proclaiming the end of certain genres. The western is supposed to be dead, but there have been three this year — The Missing, Open Range and The Alamo — while the success of Moulin Rouge and Chicago shows that there is still life in the musical. In fact, it’s the epic, one of Hollywood’s earliest staples, that has been dormant for the longest period and has proved the most difficult to revive.
It’s more than 40 years since films like Ben-Hur, Spartacus and Lawrence of Arabia thrilled audiences with their scale and ambition while horrifying producers and studios with the size of their budgets. Now, though, the German director Wolfgang Petersen and Brad Pitt have combined to bring us Troy, a three-hour version of Homer’s epic poem The Iliad that aspires to join an exclusive club that dates back to 1915 and DW Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation. It will be followed by Alexander, Oliver Stone’s biopic of Alexander the Great. With Pitt playing Achilles, the half-god warrior hero, Eric Bana, the Australian star of The Hulk, appearing as his archenemy Hector, prince of Troy, a German newcomer, Diane Kruger, as Helen, Orlando Bloom as Paris and the likes of Peter O’Toole, Julie Christie and Brian Cox in supporting roles, Troy has the sort of heavyweight cast that is rarely assembled these days. But the stars have been overshadowed by the sheer size of the production.
“You can see the scale of it,” says Petersen, who’s sheltering from the fierce 90F heat in a vast 18th-century fort on the outskirts of Valletta, the Maltese capital. Standing in for the ancient city of Troy, it has been transformed by the presence of close on a thousand extras, dressed in robes or as Trojan soldiers, preparing to dance around the fabled Trojan horse, a 40ft-high wooden structure that sits in what is now Troy’s main square.
“I would say it’s maybe the biggest set in modern film history. Of course, in the old days, they used to do films like this, but I think this is the biggest in the past three or four decades,” says Petersen. “It’s never been done before. I mean, there was the 1950s film Helen of Troy, but that was a very specific story about Helen, and not like ours. We more or less do the whole Iliad.”
Well, sort of. Petersen and his colleagues are being extremely secretive about how much Troy will differ from Homer’s original, but Achilles will be portrayed as a traditional tortured hero rather than the (to us) more sexually ambiguous figure Homer described. Keen classical scholars will also know that the Trojan horse appears in The Odyssey rather than The Iliad.
It’s hard to blame Petersen and his scriptwriter, David Benioff, for appropriating the wooden horse for Troy, because it’s perhaps the only feature of Homer’s work that the 15- to 19-year-olds who make up the target audience in the United States might recognise. Indeed, with few schools in America, or Ireland, teaching Greek or classical studies, turning The Iliad into a film with a reported budget of more than $200m could be seen as one huge gamble. Homer’s account of how a 10-year war erupted between the Mycenaean Greeks and the Trojans after Helen, the most beautiful woman in the world, abandoned the King of Sparta, Menelaus, to run off with Paris, a prince of Troy, might be the first great story written down for posterity, but that means little in middle America, where Troy will be competing against the horror-and-effects extravaganza Van Helsing, starring Hugh Jackman. “It doesn’t worry me,” claims the 63-year-old Petersen. “Even if they haven’t heard of The Iliad, word will get around quickly, if we do it right and the film is good, that there’s a huge, great, grand film out there, an epic of a size that you don’t get any more. And I have a feeling that our story, because it is based on Homer, is very appealing to people who’ve never heard of it.”
Just in case Homer isn’t enough to get the teens into the multiplexes, Petersen and the studio are counting on the presence of Pitt as Achilles, the fighter the Greeks recruited to lead their army, to bring in the crowds. “There’s a lot of expectation out there,” says Petersen, with a knowing smile. “I think it’s the biggest and most important part he’s played in his life.” Which is an understatement, because Pitt is not known for starring in blockbusters. On the contrary, his CV is littered with interesting films — Twelve Monkeys, Seven Years in Tibet and Fight Club — that underperformed at the box office. Then there’s the fact that he hasn’t had a big role since Ocean’s Eleven in 2001. It was a hit, but whether that was down to him or the presence of George Clooney and Julia Roberts is a matter of debate.
In an LA hotel suite, after shooting on Troy has finished, Pitt seems unconcerned about what is at stake for him, and denies that he feels the pressure of headlining such a big project. “No, I really don’t,” he says. “Obviously, it’s a lot more fun when the movie works, but I look back at my favourite films and they didn’t necessarily work at the time they were released. They took some time to be accepted. It’s just more fun when people get it straight out of the gate.” Nor does he believe he’s succumbed to his destiny by playing Achilles, which is the sort of heroic role studio executives have been itching to see him in. “I don’t know. If I know what people want, then I might go the other way,” mutters Pitt. “I’m more selfish than that. I want to go and explore things, and if it’s new and interesting to me, then there’ll be others out there who’ll find it new and interesting. Maybe not the masses, but there’ll be someone. That’s the only time it’s paid off for me. The times I’ve tried to satisfy other people, or some machine, it’s been f***ing miserable.”
Pitt, though, was nervous enough while making Troy to insist on a closed set. His nonchalant attitude is also belied both by the way he’s become something of an Iliad expert and by the six months he spent honing his body to play Achilles, whose prowess as a warrior made him the most feared man of his age. For audiences used to seeing him hiding behind a weird accent, as in Snatch, or disguising his good looks, as he did in Fight Club, Troy offers the prospect of Pitt as a classic screen hero, all long blond hair and bulging muscles.
Ironically, Pitt ended up damaging his own Achilles tendon during filming. That could be seen as a sign of what happens when a man tries to be a god, but Troy plays down the immortal side of Achilles — there will be no divinities descending from the clouds, as in The Iliad — and Pitt is unwilling to discuss what his own Achilles heel might be. “I’d rather keep that to myself,” he grins. “In the film, it’s his heart, and that’s pretty much universal for everyone, so I’ll leave it at that.”
Despite Pitt’s studied ambivalence, there is no doubt that there is a new-found hunger for epics. The success of Gladiator in 2000 set the ball rolling, and the Lord of the Rings trilogy has further whetted audiences’ appetites for sweeping, character-driven stories set against memorable backdrops. “I think people are very much attracted to classical epics, but very few get made,” points out a muscle-bound Bana. “The thing I love about this film is that you can’t say we haven’t seen it before — but we haven’t seen it for 50 years or so. That’s what’s so beautiful about it.”
For Petersen, who showed with Das Boot and A Perfect Storm that he’s one of the few directors who can handle huge, logistically demanding shoots, Troy is a unique chance to film one of the world’s most famous love stories, as well as some of history’s most ferocious battles.
“I think the greatest thing you can achieve in a motion picture is the combination of a captivating world of images and scenery that’s bigger than life and, at the same time, an intimate, emotional story of characters who relate to each other. That’s what David Lean was so good at,” he notes.
