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 rumored that his mother Thetis (JULIE CHRISTIE) 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 brokenhearted 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 standoff 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 3,000 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 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 recognizable 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.”

In rendering a world more than 3,000 years removed from the current day, Petersen’s cast had to bring the film’s iconic characters to life with authenticity, while conveying the timelessness of their human drama.

“This story is very complex,” stresses the director. “There are so many different characters who are all interwoven with each other – they’re all part of an incredible human landscape. This is an ensemble piece, with important characters, and you cannot just pull two or three out, because then the whole thing will fall apart like a house of cards. So to cast these roles was fascinating, and I think the cast is what I’m the most proud of. The actors we have are just unbelievable.”

The casting of the unconquerable hero Achilles was key, and the filmmakers turned to Brad Pitt, star of such diverse films as Fight Club and Ocean’s Eleven and Golden Globe winner for his arresting performance in 12 Monkeys, to bring the legend to life. “Brad has both the talent and the magnetism to make Achilles believable as a tremendous warrior and charismatic leader without sacrificing his humanity in the process,” says Petersen.

Pitt was intrigued by his complex, multi-faceted character.

“Homer does an amazing job revealing his character very subtly, particularly since The Iliad isn’t told in a linear fashion,” says Pitt. “Little by little, Achilles’ personality unfolds. One moment you think he’s this cold-hearted killer and then Homer goes back in time to show another facet of Achilles, and you find out that in the past he’s actually operated from a place of great humanity and grace. And so it’s this conflict and these contradictions that Homer keeps exposing to the reader to form this transcendent human being.”

The film’s ensemble cast boasts both rising talent and illustrious veterans of the stage and screen. Prince Hector of Troy is played by Eric Bana, star of Ang Lee’s Hulk and the critically acclaimed Australian film Chopper. “Hector appealed to me straight away,” the actor recalls. “Hector’s very noble and very brave, qualities that are classically appealing in both a cinematic sense and in a personable sense. Hector has a wife and a child, but I really get the sense that for him, his family is the city of Troy. Even though it’s such an epic movie, I find it to be quite an intimate story in that essentially it boils down to the ramifications of very intimate relationships, and from those very small relationships spawns this huge action and drama.”

Orlando Bloom, who first received widespread acclaim for his work in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, plays Hector’s younger brother, the recklessly charming Prince Paris. “For me, the draw in terms of Paris was that he’s the anti-hero,” says the actor. “Paris is not like any character I’ve played. He’s the second son to Priam, and he’s lived a very sheltered life. He’s been nurtured and hasn’t had to think about the responsibilities of becoming a warrior or King. Although he’s in an environment that is a hugely political, dangerous world, his own world is very simple, until he basically creates a war because of his lust and his love for one woman. Two countries collide, which leads to him lose everything he knows, and he does all of this for love.”

An exhaustive international search for the actress who would play Helen, the queen whose beauty launched a thousand ships, led the director to German actress Diane Kruger, who had previously starred in Mon idole. “Helen can come across as quite vain and self absorbed in The Iliad, so her actions for her own selfish reasons can be hard to forgive,” muses Kruger. “The Troy script makes Helen more human, showing how lonely she must have been living in a golden cage and forced into a marriage with a man twice her age – her unhappiness is allowed to come through. When Paris and Helen meet, she suddenly has hope for the love she’s never experienced. The hope of freedom, even for awhile. I’d like to believe Paris must have been attracted to her not only for her beauty, but for her vulnerability and her aura of sadness.”

Versatile actor Brendan Gleeson plays Menelaus, the king she leaves behind. “Menelaus is a Spartan who has gone slightly soft,” says Gleeson, whose past credits include Gangs of New York and 28 Days Later. “The Spartans were famous for being warlike and terribly hard, but his warfaring days are coming to an end. I came to quite like Menelaus, although he’s not a particularly attractive character. He’s a middle-aged man with a beautiful younger wife, and he’s visited by such a middle aged man’s greatest fear -- which is that a younger man will come and take her away. Everything seems to disappear from him. But essentially he’s an honorable man, and the reason he goes to Troy is for his wife, and to retain his honor.”

Menelaus’ brother, the avaricious King Agamemnon, is played by distinguished actor Brian Cox, who has earned widespread critical acclaim for his performances in films such as 25th Hour and L.I.E. “I think in Agamemnon’s mind, Troy is this rather new-age hippie place,” he says, “where everybody’s living an isolated life, separate from the real world, and separate from the way the world is progressing, and he wants to make them part of the real world in quite a horrific way. Agamemnon is drunk with his own position, and there’s a suicidal aspect to his pursuit of Troy – the great power machine finally overstepping itself for that one little thing. It’s the old cliché: power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

Peter O’Toole, a seven-time Academy Award nominee and the recipient of an honorary Oscar for his contributions to cinema history, portrays the venerable King Priam of Troy. “Priam is his own undoing,” considers O’Toole, who brings to his role a wealth of experience playing legends and leaders, beginning with his eponymous role in the landmark epic Lawrence of Arabia. “It is hubris in the peacemaker. Their world is a warrior aristocracy, but Priam is an exception to this – because of his safety behind the walls of Troy, he has succeeded in holding a peace for many years. He isn’t going to attack anybody, but he’ll defend Troy against anyone who dares come near it, and the walls of Troy have never been breached.”

A poignant and painful encounter between Priam and Achilles provides the film with some of its most moving moments. In anticipation of filming the intimate dialogue, Petersen had the set moved into a hotel ballroom in Mexico to assure absolute silence so his actors could completely concentrate without distraction. His preparations paid off. “It was so still there,” Petersen reminisces. “I’ll never forget that. Brad was sitting there after the scene was done and he was almost in a state of shock. And Peter O’Toole – what can I say? That was one of those moments in filmmaking you will never ever forget in your life.”

“That is one of the greatest scenes I’ve read,” Pitt concurs. “I was very excited to do this particular scene and very excited that I was going to get the opportunity to do it with Peter O’Toole. To this day it’s certainly a highlight of why we do what we do. It was fantastic.”

Rose Byrne, star of the films I Capture the Castle and Goddess of 1967, plays Priam’s niece Briseis, a young virgin acolyte to Apollo who is captured by the Greeks and given to Achilles as a tribute. “I admire so much about Briseis,” Byrne enthuses. “She’s seventeen years old and she’s lived this sheltered life in Troy and suddenly she’s a prisoner of war, but she holds her dignity and her strength under distress. At the end of the day, she becomes a warrior.” The character ends up having a profound impact on Achilles, and therefore on history itself. “She becomes the emotional core of Achilles,” says Byrne. “Because to be sympathetic to him you’ve got to see that he does have a soul.”

Joining the cast as Achilles’ mother Thetis is cinematic luminary Julie Christie, winner of the Best Actress Oscar for her starring role in Darling. Christie’s role is pivotal in revealing the quandary that will ultimately decide the course of Achilles’ life. “Thetis is a bit of a seer,” says Pitt, “and she sets Achilles’ dilemma up for him – that if he doesn’t go to war, he will have children and they will love him. And his children’s children will love him, but after that he’ll be forgotten. The other option is, he can go to this war, and he will do great things that will be talked about for thousands and thousands of years. But he will die in this war. Thetis reveals to him that if he chooses to go to war he’s condemning himself to death.”

Knowing that Achilles will not enter into battle lightly, Agamemnon sends Odysseus, King of Ithaca and Achilles’ trusted friend, to appeal to the warrior to fight. “Odysseus is a very shrewd, clever tactician,” says internationally recognized actor Sean Bean, who plays the king. “He’s a brave man, a man of honor and a good warrior, but his role in this story is more that of an ambassador or diplomat. Odysseus understands Achilles better than anyone does, and can see why he’s reluctant to join in battle with Agamemnon, whom he distrusts. Achilles is very fond of Odysseus, and he listens to him – and there aren’t many people he will listen to. They have great admiration and respect for each other, and if anyone can persuade Achilles to join forces with Agamemnon in battle, it’s Odysseus.”

“Our story deals with what mankind is all about,” Petersen concludes. “It’s not black and white. It’s not, ‘here are the good guys, and there are the bad guys.’ That’s old-fashioned storytelling. This story is modern in a sense that it deals with the reality of human drama. Life is much more complex and interesting, and because of that it’s also more tragic.”

Rounding out Petersen’s superb cast are Saffron Burrows as Hector’s devoted wife Andromache; Vincent Regan as Eudorus, Achilles’ compatriot and captain of the Myrmidons; and Garrett Hedlund as Achilles’ beloved cousin, Patroclus.

About The Production
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 realized 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, utilizing their collection of objects excavated from archeological 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, colorless 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 soundstages at Shepperton Studios, 40 miles 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 April 22, 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 50-foot high statue of Zeus, God of Thunder, holding a golden scepter and surrounded by 15-foot 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 10 acres 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 2,000 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 U.K. 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 Ft. 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 1,200 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 fiberglass fashioned to look like wood, it stood 38 feet high and weighed eleven tons. 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 42-foot-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 labor. “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 feet 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 5,000 cubic liters of gas which could be used as either a vapor or a liquid. If used in liquid form, it expanded the flame density by 270 times the intensity of the vapor. 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 2nd 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 minimized 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 Battleground
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 July 11th in Los Cabos, Mexico at the southernmost tip of the Baja peninsula, 1,100 miles from the U.S. 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 2,800 acre compound that would serve as Troy’s new backlot. 230 laborers 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 acres of scrub and cactus stretching to the sea, approximately a square mile 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, categorize and tag each cactus. Then 4,000 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 miles 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, September 21st at around 2:00 a.m., 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 honor, 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, 1,000 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 grueling 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 1,000 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 maneuver 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, Smedly 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 1,000 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. Smedly 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,” Smedly 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 1,250 people in Mexico, 250 Bulgarians and 1,000 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, armorer Simon Atherton oversaw the design and creation of 20,000 arrows, as well as 3,000 swords and spears and 4,000 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 computerized 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 centered 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 realized in unprecedented detail and dimension.

Bloody Innovation
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 inches 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 pressurized 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 unsavory, 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.”

Horses, Ships And Costumes
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 maneuver. “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 1,000 ships launched by Helen’s flight from Sparta were crafted for the film in a variety of fashions. Two fully functional, 40-yard-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 onboard 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 1,000 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 1,200 years BC, there is very little reference information that actually survived. Homer’s descriptions in The Iliad are based on the clothing and armor 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 armor 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 3,000 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 armor 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 armor 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 armor 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 mold is created, and plastic facsimiles of the armor 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 8,000 costumes and 10,000 pairs of shoes in just four and a half months.