HOWZAT

While Lean is the modern godfather of the epic, it was the pioneer American director DW Griffith who really invented the genre. The Birth of a Nation might have had a dodgy white-supremacist message, but it was a thrilling re-creation of the American civil war, and the audiences of the time flocked to see it. Griffith then embarked on 1916’s Intolerance. No expense was spared as he invented the sword-and-sandals epic, and the sets were so impressive that some of them are still standing; when I lived in LA, one of my local restaurants was housed in part of what was Babylon.

Intolerance, though, was a huge flop, and Griffith’s career never really recovered. But the fledgling studios were still prepared to put up the big budgets such films required, and the 1925 version of Ben-Hur would become the landmark silent epic. Never mind the horses and stuntmen who were killed and injured shooting the iconic chariot race, it was all about the spectacle.

Making epics can still be dangerous — a Maltese stuntman died after a fall on Troy — but the time when directors were given the latitude of Griffith or even Lean, who famously waited days for the right light conditions on Lawrence of Arabia, is long gone. “It was a different time when David Lean was working,” shrugs Petersen. “Today, there’s the pressure from the enormous amount of money that’s at stake here and the nervousness of the studio. I’m not saying I’d wait for the light if I could, but it would be nice to have some room for manoeuvre.” Compare the $200m cost of Troy with the $76m (converted to today’s prices) budget for Lawrence of Arabia.

In fact, such is the financial cost of making a film like Troy that the epic would never have been revived if it hadn’t been for the recent advances in computer technology. After the successes of Quo Vadis?, The Robe and Kubrick’s heavyweight Spartacus in 1960, the sword-and-sandals epic became a joke, hijacked by a series of B-movies from Italy, often starring the bodybuilder Steve Reeves, starting with Hercules in 1957. Another muscleman, Arnold Schwarzenegger, tried to revive the corpse in the 1990s, with Crusade, but despite attracting directors such as Ridley Scott and Paul Verhoeven, Arnie couldn’t get a studio to put up the $100m-plus budget for his story of a crusader battling his way to Jerusalem. It was left to Gladiator, in 2000, to restore the genre to its former glory.

When Ridley Scott used computer-generated (CG) extras to fill Rome’s Colosseum in that film, it sent a message that you no longer needed to hire thousands of people for the background scenes. Nevertheless, one reason Troy will be different from Gladiator and The Lord of the Rings is that the use of the computer has been kept to a minimum. “I very much wanted to go with reality,” insists Petersen. “We haven’t just built a little bit and done the rest with CG.” So, when the production left Malta for Mexico, where the battles were filmed (after the initial choice, Morocco, was rejected on safety grounds), a small army of Bulgarian extras was taken along to play the Greeks.

Everyone involved in Troy seems determined to ensure that the war between the Greeks and the Trojans will be as bloody and realistic as possible. “There’s not much you can refer to,” admits Petersen. “There are some drawings, and you know what weapons they had. But this is 1215BC, and nobody knows what formations they used for fighting, so we’ve had to invent that.” Some of the battles — conducted with swords, spears and arrows — are shocking in their brutality, as blood spurts, limbs are lopped off and heads literally roll.

“Are people going to walk out because there are some bad-ass war scenes? Your own level of maturity is going to define whether you walk out,” says an unrepentant Pitt. “But if you’re going to show a war, you have to portray it properly.” He’s expecting people to draw parallels with the situation in Iraq. “I don’t see how they won’t, but the danger is that people will read too much into it. But there are certainly universal themes there. It’s fascinating and disturbing that not much has changed since Homer’s time.”

Or, indeed, how little has altered since the early days of Hollywood. Movies have always looked to myths for inspiration and striven to outdo their predecessors visually, which is perhaps why so many recent blockbusters have been adaptations of modern myths such as Spider-Man and X-Men. But Troy is inspired by the oldest tale of them all. “A story like this doesn’t come along that often,” says Pitt. “You know, there’s a reason it’s lasted all these centuries.”

Troy opens on May 21
www.troymovie.co.uk