300 - Trivia, Questions and Fun Facts

[discussimdb]

Fan of 300 or just want to share your movie knowledge? This topic is dedicated to all trivia and questions related to 300

[ken]

(at around 1h 15 mins) The goat-headed minstrel was designed by Adam Forman, Zack Snyder's personal tattoo artist.

[riley]

Ten visual effects vendors contributed to the film, spread over three continents.

[edgar]

Gerard Butler had 17 helmets made for him.

[brent]

Leonidas had an older half-brother Cleomenes, and an older full brother, Dorieus. Because Leonidas was third in line to the throne, he was sent to agoge, the traditional school and warrior training for Spartan youth. However, when Cleomenes ascended to the throne, Dorieus left Greece in a jealous rage. Later, following the Persian attack at Marathon, Cleomenes, suspected of insanity, fled into exile, leaving Leonidas as the remaining heir. Leonidas was thus one of the few Spartan kings to have ever undergone the notoriously harsh training of Spartan youth.

[christina]

In a deleted scene, Ephialtes jumped off a rock to try to kill himself.

[marc]

Lena Headey and Dominic West were friends before this movie. Headey jokes, "He's insane, so that helps."

[tammy]

There are 1,523 cuts in the film, with over 1300 visual effect shots comprising 8631 visual effect elements.

[toni]

The entire Senate subplot, including the rape of Queen Gorgo, was invented for the film and does not appear in Frank Miller's original comic books. Miller's comic book miniseries also has a lesser emphasis on monsters, with Ephialtes the hunchback, the immortals, all the animals, and the Ephors being the only "creatures" in the original story.

[mathew]

The real Spartans all had plumes. In the movie, only Leonidas has a plume to distinguish him to audience in battles scenes.

[chad]

In the third battle with the immortals, 3 Spartans are shown killed making the tally 297 out of 300 Spartans.

[melinda]

Over 600 costumes were made for the film.

[christina]

Filmed mostly with a super-imposition chroma key technique to help replicate the imagery of the original comic book.

[ivan]

Post-production took almost a year. The film was edited on Avid, with an HD cut also maintained in Final Cut Pro. The 3D was made using Maya, XSI and Lightwave. The 2D composites were made with Shake, Inferno, Fusion and Combustion. The filmmakers prefer Macintosh, but large portions of the movie were made under Linux. Asset management was handled by custom software written in the Panorama development environment, made by Provue. Color management was handled by Truelight software. The film was scanned on a Northlight scanner and was recorded on the Arrilaser. Most of the film was shot at high speed, between 50 and 150fps (normally, film is shot at 24fps). The film was transferred to HD SR tape and quicktime, and HD quicktimes were the basis for the HD preview cuts. The working resolution for the film was 2K, at a working aspect ratio of 2.11:1 and a projected aspect ratio of 2.39:1.

[chris]

The character of Dilios (David Wenham) seems to be, in part, based on the actual, historical figure of Aristodemus - according to historian Herodotus, he was the sole Spartan survivor of the battle of Thermopylae, having been dismissed from the force by Leonidas on account of an eye infection (not a wounded eye). Rather than returning to lead any Spartan force, however, Aristodemus was considered a coward until he redeemed himself by fighting, partially blind, and dying in the battle of Plataea a year later (the battlefield on which Dilios is seen delivering his rousing speech that is the narrative of the movie), where the Persian invasion was finally crushed.

[wallace]

British Iranian martial arts actor Darren Shahlavi makes a cameo as one of the Persians.

[jim]

Rodrigo Santoro modeled his performance on Yul Brynner in The King and I (1956).

[sophie]

It took five hours to apply Andrew Tiernan's hunchback makeup every day.

[jessie]

(at around 9 mins) In real life, Queen Gorgo said the line, "Because only Spartan women give birth to real men," but not to the Persian messenger. According to the Greek historian Plutarch, in book III of his Moralia, called "Sayings of the Spartans", she said it to an Athenian woman who asked her, "Why can Spartan women speak amongst men?"

[sandra]

Rodrigo Santoro had 33 fake piercings as Xerxes.