SUBMITTED BY Stephanie

April 5, 2004 — In newsstands soon, pick up the May Issue of Premiere Magazine (with Orlando Bloom as Paris on the cover) and read up on their summer movie preview. Heading the article is a preview of Troy, out May 14th. The article also introduces new pictures of the main characters and scenes.

"It isn't pretty, what they're doing to Orlando Bloom. He's flung himself onto the hard-packed Mexican dirt several times now, enacting the turning point of a complex scene in which his character, Paris, has just taken a gawdalmighty battering from Brendan Gleeson's Menelaus.
The characters' differences are quite irreconcilable. The Trojan youth Paris, in this story that has survived nearly three millennia, has stolen the Spartan king Menelaus's wife, Helen. With 50,000 of his fellow Greek warriors massed at the gates of Troy, Menelaus has chosen this moment to make it personal. "Let me," he's just said to his brother Agamemnon in the poetically tough-talking screenplay by Daved Benioff (25th Hour), "kill this little peacock."
Before the grudge can be satisfied, Paris's brother Hector, in the person of The Hulk's Eric Bana, will step in to save the lad. "For me," says Bloom, "this scene is the most intimidating part of this whole shoot, because I knew that I was going to have to run from this moment - I just hobble and crawl away to my brother's feet. It's just humiliation, the lowest possible point for a character to get to."

The shot that director Wolfgang Petersen (The Perfect Storm) is going for at the moment comes just after Hector has dispatched Menelaus, and is beseeching his younger brother to flee inside the gates even as the Greek legions come on the run. But in a rash choice, the bloodied Paris sprints for the stubby bronze sword of Troy that Menelaus had knocked from his grasp. The shot will show one man running toward the angry horde. "Just when you think he's gone mad," Petersen will explain later, "he's turned it into the quite heroic act of getting the sword of Troy."

But Petersen isn't quite seeing what he wants in Bloom's gritty ten-yard sprint and culminating dive to earth, and he calls for a cut in an assiduously patient tone.

This is day 100 on one of the most expensive movie shoots ever. One insider estimates production costs at $700,000 per day; add in other massive below-the-line costs for ocean-spanning company moves and materiel, plus the $17.5 million Brad Pitt will fetch for playing the tormented demigod Achilles, and you've got something around a $200 million price tag.

To read the entire 6-page article, plus a small article on beauty, Diane Kruger (Helen), pick up your own copy at your local newsstand, bookstore, etc soon!