SUBMITTED BY Stephanie

April 30, 2004 — Director Wolfgang Petersen, and star Brad Pitt talk about the movie, the epic genre, and the sheer scale of the project in this in-depth article.

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."

Read the entire article by clicking on the link below. (Thanks to Rostron2 for the news bit!)