| 首頁 Home | 電影 Films | 評論 Opinions | 戲院 Cinemas | 資訊 Information | 網站地圖 Site Map

首頁 -> 電影 -> 香港每年上映電影 ->
Home -> Films -> Films Released in Hong Kong by Year ->

華納影片公司 榮譽貢獻
2004暑期掀起史上最傳奇一戰

一段驚世愛情 觸發一場最轟烈浩瀚戰��
捍衛榮譽 熱血出擊
締造不朽英雄傳奇
<驚濤駭浪> <空軍一號>大導演 胡根彼得遜Wolfgang Petersen曠世力作

木馬屠城

<盜海豪情>畢彼特 (Brad Pitt)
<魔戒3部曲>奧蘭度布倫 (Orlando Bloom)
<變形俠醫>艾力賓拿 (Eric Bana)
<變種特攻2>拜仁確斯 (Brian Cox)
<魔戒3部曲>辛般 (Sean Bean)
<沙漠梟雄>彼得奧圖 (Peter O'Toole)
領銜主演

戴安古嘉 (Diane Kruger) 班頓基臣 (Brendan Gleeson)
莎芬寶露絲 (Saffron Burrows) 茱莉姬絲蒂(Julie Christie)
聯合主演

監製：胡根彼得遜 (Wolfgang Petersen)、 戴安拉賓 (Diana Rathbun驚濤駭浪)、
哥連韋遜(Colin Wilson未來戰士第3集)
剪接：彼得漢寧斯(Peter Honess ACE哈利波特消失的密室)
攝影：羅渣柏列特(Roger Pratt BSC哈利波特消失的密室)
美術：尼格爾菲納斯(Nigel Phelps珍珠港)

6月17日浩瀚決戰

www.troymovie.com

故事
《木馬屠城》 (Troy) 是根據希臘詩人荷瑪的曠世史詩<艾利略特>(Iliad)改編的電影鉅獻。

寫於公元前八世紀的<艾利略特>描寫被喻為史上最傳奇轟烈的「特洛伊戰爭」的曲折震撼過程。

故事描述在公元前十一世紀古希臘所發生的一場史詩戰役，特洛伊王子巴里斯(奧蘭度布倫 飾)愛上了斯巴達王后凱倫(戴安古嘉 飾)，把她從米倫拿斯王(班頓基臣 飾)手上搶去，掀起了一場無法化解的戰爭。

米倫拿斯王及其弟艾格米倫(拜仁確斯 飾)號召希臘部族向特洛伊發動戰爭。 特洛伊城地勢獨特無人可破。在戰事膠�茪丰u有一人能扭轉勝負，他就是傳說中世上最偉大的戰士阿基尼斯(畢彼特 飾)。傲慢不羈的阿基尼斯並不聽命於任何將領，他答應攻打特洛伊城，全因要滿足戰無不勝的虛榮心。

一代驕雄踏上征途，最後竟因愛情改變了一生命運，而一個文明，亦因一個女人邁向被殲滅的邊緣。

《木馬屠城》的故事曾多次被搬上銀幕，今趟2004的版本備受矚目，是因為製作投資耗大，幕前幕後組合強勁，令人拭目以待。

曾執導《驚濤駭浪》(Perfect Strom)及《空軍一號》(Air Force One)的導演胡根彼得遜，認為戰爭電影能帶出人性的美善與醜惡，追求勝利與榮耀是人性永恆的主題。

《木馬屠城》場面耗大，將古代戰爭的浩瀚與轟烈重現觀�撞換e.影片拍攝場景橫跨墨西哥、地中海及英國。動員千萬臨時演員重塑戰爭場面。演員星光熠熠，包括有萬人迷畢彼特及以《魔戒三部曲》走紅的�苃鶣蚰洎�，其他一線演員還有彼得�芧�、戴安古嘉、及茱莉姬絲蒂等，演員陣容，令人密切期待。

選角
導演胡根彼得遜說：「《木馬屠城》是個很複雜的故事。眾多不同的角色都其實相連著，每一個都是出色的人物。《木馬屠城》是個完整的組合，不能隨便抽調任何一角，否則故事會隨著鬆散，所以在選角的時候是吸引的，是刺激的，而選出來的演員，是我在《木馬屠城》當中最感驕傲的一環。」

阿基尼斯是《木馬屠城》的關鍵人物。所有製作人都被畢彼特在《搏擊會》(Fight Club)、《七宗罪》(Seven)及《12候子》(Twelve Monkeys)的演技所吸引。所有人都確認為只有他才能演繹出阿基尼斯這個偉大戰士那種傲慢不羈，那種戰無不勝的虛榮心。畢彼特自已被阿基尼斯這個角色所吸引著。他說：「荷馬這部〈艾利略特〉實在很令人託異。尤其《艾利略特》放棄了故事平舖直�讀熄Е峞A亦因此，阿基尼斯的性格，逐漸呈現，一時大家會把他看成一個冷面戰士，但慢慢大家便會發現他其實是個充滿人性及修養的傳奇人物。荷馬一步一步的將阿基尼斯的矛盾及極端暴露出來，讓觀眾自己去摸索及想像這個卓越戰士。」

由艾力賓拿演繹特洛伊特的希達王，艾力說：「希達王這個角色直入我心。」希達王這個角色無論在電影上或容貌上都給予一種既高貴又勇敢的印象。希達王雖擁有一妻一兒，但在他心中的至愛就只有特洛伊城。縱然《木馬屠城》是一部史詩式的電影，但內裡卻足以使人產生融洽和親暱感覺得一部浪漫鉅獻。」

希達王的弟弟巴里斯揀選了在《魔戒三部曲》中受到眾人喝采的奧蘭度布倫來演繹。奧蘭度說：「對我來說，巴里斯是個給人反對的英雄人物。巴里斯不像我以前演過的角色。他從少受到所有人的保護及培育，雖然他在危險的環境中成長，但他的內心世界是簡單的，直至那一天他為了凱倫王后而掀起了「特洛伊戰爭」，他才懂得成長。」

製作人員用盡了一切方法在世界各地找出一個適合演繹凱倫王后的人選，最終揀選了曾在《Men Idole》的德國女星戴安古嘉。凱倫是一個充滿私心的人，但相反來看，她從小要居住在一個金籠內，長大後還要被迫嫁給一個她既不愛又比她年長兩倍的人，她的內心實在非常空虛及不愉快。她期待著自由的一天，即使是一天的自由，她也是渴望的。直至遇上了巴里斯，對她來說，是一個從來未有過的震撼。戴安古嘉說：「我直覺上覺得巴里斯除了傾慕凱倫的美貌，還深深的憐憫著她散發出來的那種不如意及空虛的寂寞。」

史詩式的製作
國際級龐大製作，無疑是拍攝《木馬屠城》最大抱負的工作。導演胡根彼得遜非常高興接受這項挑戰，拍攝一部令人感動而製作龐大的電影。胡根彼得遜說：「故事裡面，每一個角色都很迷人，他們都有自己的感情，而每一角色亦互相緊扣，這是一項挑戰去捕捉他們。而且，我要根據這個富有歷史背景的故事去拍攝。」

拍攝一部驚人的史詩式的龐大製作，美術設計是極重要的一環。導演胡根彼得遜邀請極富創意的尼格爾菲納斯施展他的魔法去重建遠古時代的世界。胡根彼得遜說：「尼格爾對於歷史的知識很豐富，而且他的繪畫很美麗。他的美術隊伍和他都掘進所有的歷史書和研究資料中，我被他們所造的佈置迷住了。」

尼格爾說：「導演要求拍攝一部既真實又可信的史詩式電影。但當我完成很多資料搜查後，我發現當時的規模是很少的。在1200BC，當時的文化比較著名的是邁錫尼人和埃及人。我所做的是將邁錫尼人的美術及結構溶入埃及人富麗堂皇的規模裡面。」

大部份的製作資料搜集在英國博物館中從土耳其特洛伊城所發掘出來的文物所完成。設計師說：「但真實的特洛伊城比我們所設計的規模為細，這對於我們來說是一個限制。當然，在這個城中仍然會找到城牆、皇宮，還有多用泥而建成的單層獨立式平頂房子。我們需要將所有的設計擴大，令到視覺上引起別人的注意。」

大部拍攝都在特洛伊城裡面或附近拍攝，主要場景包括希臘的沙灘、城牆外的戰場、以及皇宮內外，另外還有在希臘城市的帖撒羅尼迦山谷、斯巴達王國及邁錫尼王國。尼格爾說：「我嘗試創造一種格調，有著不同的文化。像邁錫尼人的世界是以金色為主，很富有、很多財富的，相反，斯巴達人的世界比較荒蕪、平實，沒有色彩。所以當踏入的特洛伊城，會比較綠，感情很舒服。」

《木馬屠城》全片在三個地方拍攝，包括倫敦、地中海的馬爾他和墨西哥。大部份的室內場景都是在倫敦以外40里的Shepperton Studios影棚搭建。而監製戴安拉賓選擇在馬爾他的影棚作為特洛伊城的主景，因為馬爾他是一個很美的島，這裡有令人驚嘆的懸崖壁及石壁。她說：「在馬爾他建造特洛伊城令人嘆為觀止。」戴安拉賓亦曾為找尋一個一沙灘而煩惱，因為拍攝完成後，需要用電腦特技將過千艘船艦，以及七萬五千軍隊的畫面放入這個場景中。最後，戴安拉賓在墨西哥找到她理想中的拍攝地方。

《木馬屠城》在2003年9月在倫敦開始拍攝，在這裡建造了特洛伊城的皇宮，包括Priam的會議廳以及其他皇族成員的寢室。所有房間都是開放式屋頂，因為古時是以陽光及火為主要光線來源。另外還有一個場景，這裡有一個五十呎高的宙斯神像被十五呎高的奧林匹亞人的雕塑像圍繞。尼格爾說：「宗教思想是這部電影一個重要原素。每當我設計一些雕塑的時候，我會參考一些古時和遠古年化的有關雕塑作參考，然後會詢問服裝指導卜寧活的意見，將頭髮和衣飾略為修改。」

特洛伊城
完成倫敦的拍攝後，大隊移師到馬爾他拍攝特洛伊城的室外場景。在這裡，創建了十英畝的地方。由於故事的背景是發生在1200 BC，美術組相信現在的雕刻塑像不能像古時一樣，所以他們決定由零做起。所有在2003年初，美術組在英國聘請二百名工匠師到馬爾他，並在當地聘請超過五百名馬耳他人工作，從新建立一個遠古時代的特洛伊城。

面對在馬爾他島上的頑劣的天氣：強風、酷熱、時濕時乾的天氣，令拍攝過程更加不穩。導演胡根彼得遜每天早上必要收聽天氣報告才能決定當天的拍攝工作表。

在拍攝一場騎者隊列護送希達王、巴里斯和凱倫王后入特洛伊城時，攝製隊動用一千二百名臨時演員，並由兩屆奧斯卡最佳服裝指導金像得主Peter Young為他們設計造型包括服飾和化妝。Peter Young希望列隊的景象能給觀眾有一個特別的感覺 說：「為了令城市活化，這不單單安排演員穿上戲服在街上穿梭或是放置一些陶器在路邊，我們要安排一些日常工作給演員在鏡頭前做，例如推木頭車、在簡單的店舖工作等等。」

特洛伊木馬
「特洛伊木馬絕對是整套電影的關鍵。」尼格爾說：「當年希臘人從燒焦了的船的木頭，用了十二日拼命地建築了這隻木馬。這隻木馬象徽特洛伊人的宗教信念。

美術組花了很多時間作資料搜查，例如一些燒焦了的木的相片、古代的船隻和沒有車輛的巨大建築物。雕刻家首先草圖，然後根據草圖設計立體圖，跟著他便會按草圖製作一隻高十二吋的模型。最後，一隻巨型木馬便由十二位雕刻師雕刻而成。

木馬是在倫敦的Shepperton Studios製造，但因為木馬的體積太大，影棚不能容納，所以要分成兩部份製作。第一部份是木馬腳及其基礎、另一部份是木馬的上身、頭和肩膊。當兩部份送往馬爾他後，美術組還要花三個月才能將兩部份合併在一起。整隻木馬共重十一噸，高四十二呎，主要用鋼和玻璃纖維製造，然後粉飾成木般。工人每部都要花數星期裝嶔。

火燒特洛伊城
當完成在如畫般美麗的特洛伊城的拍攝後，下一步便是將馬爾他影棚所建造的場景燒掉。拍攝這場洗劫特洛伊城的戲需要非常仔細，有計劃，有合作性和大量的人手。特別視覺效果指導Joss Williams說：「這次是繼《亂世佳人》(Gone With The Wind)後，最大規模的戶外火景。」

為了拍攝這場巨大場面，工作人員用了數千呎氣管連接五個液體氣缸用作爆破之用。這些氣管隱藏在特洛伊城的街道上及建築物內，並由三百五十個真空管控制。而每一個氣缸容納五千立方呎蒸氣和液體。為了安全及拍攝順利，攝製隊花了數星期綵排。而且每次綵排和現場拍攝時，醫療輔助隊及救護車都會駐守現場，另外事前會計劃多個疏散計劃。

最後戰場
完成在馬爾他的拍攝，大隊在七月十一日移師最後一站往墨西哥的一個半島。他們在墨西哥聘請了二百三十名工人建造在電影中出現希臘大船、莊麗的阿波羅神殿以及特洛伊城圍牆。

但最大規模和複雜的項目是要清除過千畝仙人掌和灌木。事前，他們先作環保評估，植物學家先將仙人掌分類，然後四千顆仙人掌由人手拔出，並移植入苗圃，當拍攝完畢後，再由人手移植回原處。

另外，他們在墨西哥的沙灘陣地面對同樣的問題。因為墨西哥沿岸住了很多瀕臨絕種的淡水龜，因此製作組需要執行海龜保護計劃。兩名專家獲聘並在拍攝期間的六個月內，每日二十四小時在沙灘旁邊巡邏，當發現海龜產蛋後，便會將蛋安放在圍欄孵蛋區，經過四十五日的照顧，海龜蛋便會孵化庶小海龜，專家亦會將小海龜放回大海中。

之後，八十名匠工便由建築總監Tony Graysmark統領下開始建造特洛伊城圍牆和城門口。製作組共花了四個月的時間，二百噸灰泥建造五百呎橫，平均高四十呎的圍牆，最高的城門口更高達六十呎。

不幸地，拍攝工作剩餘兩個星期的情況下，墨西哥遇上風暴，工作人員築下的圍牆被暴風擊中，三分之二的圍牆倒塌。最後，工作人員花了一個月的時間重建特洛伊城圍牆，而整個拍攝工作亦延至十二月才能完成。

進入戰役
《木馬屠城》的主旨是愛情和忠心，這是一部有關一場嚴酷而真實的戰役，電影中出現的戰役不單拍得非常仔細準確，視覺上令人愛慕，而且感受到戰爭的破壞性和恐怖。導演胡根彼得遜說：「我希望觀眾感受到戰爭中所流出的血、汗和淚。電影中的戰爭場面不是什麼了不起，不過我們拍得非常真實，這全歸功於武術指導Simon Crane和副導演。他們帶領在武器設計製造學的專家和武術指導，拍攝出令人難以置信的戰役場面。」

Simon Crane的武術指導組共有五十名來自世界各地的精英，他們在拍攝前共花了六星期作綵排。另外，一千名特技員按他們的的技能分成小隊，安排在鏡頭前參與不同的武術特技和打鬥動作。

在劇本中一句對動作簡單的形容，往往花掉了所有的心機去拍攝。例如在劇本中形容由畢彼特飾演的阿基尼斯的格鬥像神一般，但Simon Crane的武術指導組中三十人共花了三個月的時間為阿基尼斯創造一套像神般的格鬥。Simon Crane說：「他的格鬥像打拳，但迅度很快，像滑水一般，而且身手像豹一般敏捷。」

畢彼特在拍攝前六個月開始接受訓練，目的是鍛鍊出阿基尼斯的一副令人敬畏的體格。畢彼特說：「除了體能訓練外，我需要增磅，整個體訓過程確實令人受不了。」

軍事技術顧問和前英國軍事官員Richard Smedley和他的隊員花了四星期訓練二百名臨時演員，教授他們行軍的步伐、手執武器的姿勢及接受命令的準備。至大隊遷移到墨西哥拍攝的時候，規模更加大，約有一千名優秀的人才接受軍事和體能訓練。Richard更從保加利亞皇家體育學院招募完美的軍人。

Richard說：「有一名軍人是專程由南非飛往保加利亞參加面試。另外，我們挑選了二百五十名運動員，他們的體格很大，肌肉強健，外型很像希臘人。在開拍前一個月，他們飛抵墨西哥進行三星期的密集式訓練。總括來說，我們在墨西哥訓練過一千二百五十人，其中一千人是墨西哥人，另外二百五十人是保加利亞人。」

電影中出現多場場面浩大的戰役場面，包括五萬名希臘軍人與二萬五千名特洛伊人的一仗，用電腦特技造了二萬支箭、三千把劍和四千個盾牌。另一場戲是特洛伊人從山上滾下一個火球落希臘人的陣地。還有一場講述阿基尼斯和他的跟隨者密耳彌多涅人洗劫阿波羅神殿。

在電影中，三十位武術指導花了三個月的時間設計一場阿基尼斯與希達王對打的非凡的場面，而畢彼特與艾力賓拿每天花四小時，連續八星期練習及排練這場武打場面。而事實中，電影中很多打鬥場面都沒有由特技員作替身，而是由畢彼特及艾力賓拿親自彼甲上陣。導演胡根彼得遜說：「當你看見這些打鬥鏡頭，很難想像是兩位演員所做的，但這是事實。從他的表現中，你可以體現戰事中的血、汗和淚，還有戰爭的現實。」

Crane說：「畢彼特奉獻了一切。他很集中演繹阿基尼斯這個角色。每次播放我們建議打鬥場面的影帶給他作參考的時候，他的眼睛便會亮著。他就像置身於戰事之中。每一招數，我們都會安排武術指導示範給他看，當他學習這些招數並在戲中表演的時候，完全是另一回事，因為他已經完全代入角色，將這個角色生命化。」

至於另一位主角艾力賓拿亦在開拍前六個月於澳洲接受體能及武術訓練。艾力賓拿說：「Crane和他的武術組絕對是非凡的。每一位武術指導的耐力不可思議，完全不感到疲憊。」

增強的戰役
在《木馬屠城》中可以看到十萬名士兵在戰場中打仗。即使製作組安排過千名特技員、臨時演員接受訓練和拍攝，仍然很難將歷史中兩支軍隊衝突的艱巨而偉大的場面拍出來。在這方面，製作組將重任交給革命性的視覺特技效果組。

《木馬屠城》的視覺特技由行內數一數二的The Moving Picture Company和Framestore CFC負責，並利用「虛擬特技人」方法完成。電腦特技員引用牛津大學動物學最新研究的軟件「腦內啡」，這是由人類的神經生物學研究發展而成。這個電腦軟件創造虛擬角色，這個角色像真人一樣，有別於以往用電腦數輸入的一些數據所創造的角色。它特別之處是虛擬人的「腦內啡」令每個角色有自己的反應、動作和知覺。所以利用這套軟件，每個角色就可以做出無盡不同的打鬥招式。

戰場中馬
忠於歷史的記載，演員需要在戲中學習在沒有馬鞍的馬上騎行。事實上，即使是經驗豐富的騎馬士，要在沒有馬鞍上的馬取得平衡也是很困難。電影中，艾力賓拿是飾演特洛伊軍隊中的阿波羅戰士，他需要精通騎術，帶領八十名騎士在戰場中奔馳。導演胡根彼得遜說：「希達王是馬的破壞者。艾力賓拿不懂得馬術，所以他由基礎開始學習，但現在他已經像在馬上出生一樣，能夠駕馭馬匹。」

艾力賓拿說：「電影開拍前數月，我在澳洲的老家已經開始學習馬術。我要學習在馬上同時被六至八人攻擊及推落。不過最頭痛的不是被別人攻擊，而是被自已所騎的馬擊落地。但我仍然很享受在拍攝期間與奧蘭度布倫在沙灘邊上騎馬奔馳的日子。」

騎術指導Jordi Casares負責訓練演員騎術和設計所有的騎馬場面。同時，他在拍攝前用六星期去訓練馬匹在電影中的花式演出。不過，最大的障礙是控制一群敏感性極高的動物。Jordi Casares說：「最困難的是當馬匹拉著載著演員在雙輪戰車上奔走的場面。在戰場上，那些馬匹被五百名持矛士兵圍繞，它們都被這些人和兵器嚇怕了。它們會不顧一切將馬車上的人擊落，還有其他人和攝影機，只要是阻擋著它們的去路，它們都會把這些一一擊落。」

船
電影中凱倫皇后的船由一千艘船由斯巴達駛往特洛伊城，這場浩大的場面由歐洲最大的視覺特技公司Framestore CFC所負責，當中有兩艘船是四十碼長的蒸氣船是真實的。這兩艘船內裡用木製造，外穀則用金屬和鋼製造。美術指導尼格爾菲納斯說：「這兩艘船確實是一項不可思議的功績。因為所有演員和工作人員都會在船上工作，所以這艘船需要附合很多規例，如船上設有合格的救生衣和救生艇。」另一場在墨西哥沙灘拍攝希臘軍地的場面，美術組建造了四艘美輪美奐的船作拍攝之用。

服裝
整個服裝組共有一百五十人，由服裝指導卜寧活為首。他們要設計及製造過千套戲服給各主要演員、特技員及臨時演員。由於特洛伊戰事發生在1200 BC，卜寧活在世界各地的博物館取得有限的資料作參考。他說：「我在英國博物館做研究了好幾天，很仔細看清楚每一件衣服和盔甲的用料和款式。」為了令服飾更像當年的模樣，卜寧活認為衣服的質地是很重要的一環。卜寧活說：「我用了有民族風格的布料和民族人做戲中的服飾。因為如果我找工廠用現代的物料做，一定不能做出有歷史味道的服飾。我從世界各地買了很多用三千年前的人所用的方法做的布料，包括在伊拉克、土耳其、印度、斯里蘭卡和中國。」

而卜寧活利用了亞麻織品、金屬、皮和草做成原始盔甲。首先會以塑膠倒模，然後再在模型上用金屬和染色皮製品加以粉飾。

導演胡根彼得遜形容卜寧活是一位天才。他說：「他絕對是一位天才。一位真正的設計師。我很敬畏他。他竟然從世界各地搜尋適用的材料，花了四個半月的時間，用極妙的方法做成八千套戲服和一萬對鞋。」

演員簡介
畢彼特Brad Pitt（飾 阿基尼斯）
畢彼特以《博擊會》(Fight Club)，《七宗罪》(Seven)及金球獎得獎作品《十二猴子》(Twelve Monkeys)中的演技，獲得了製作人的垂青，認為只有畢彼特才有那種才華及吸引力，讓觀眾能徹底的感受得到阿基尼斯在《木馬屠城》這部電影中，是個擁有超凡魅力的偉大戰士。阿基尼斯予人他只是個冷血殺手的感覺，實際上，他是個充滿修養的卓越戰士。

艾力賓拿Eric Bana（飾 特洛伊王子希達）
曾在李安的《變形俠醫》(The Hulk)及《黑鷹15小時》(Black Hawks Down)露光芒的艾力，今次在《木馬屠城》中飾演希達王子，一個既高貴又勇敢，視特洛伊城為唯一親人的一個熱血王子。

奧蘭度布倫Orlando Bloom（飾 特洛伊王子巴里斯）
在《魔戒三部曲》已光芒四射的奧蘭度，今次飾演的王子巴里斯，是個從溫室中成長的王子，思想簡單的他，未從肩負過任何責任，直至戰爭的爆發，他才知道他的任性已成為了木馬屠城戰爭的導火線。

戴安古嘉Diane Kruger（飾 斯巴達王后凱倫）
在《木馬屠城》中，戴安古嘉飾演斯巴達王后凱倫。她被迫嫁給比自己年長兩倍的米倫拿斯王。自小在金籠中居住的她，空虛心靈一直渴望自由，就算只有一天。巴里斯除被她的美貌所吸引之外，更對她的身世起了憐憫之心，一場歷史性戰爭亦由此起。戴安古嘉在德國出生，自少在皇家芭蕾舞學院學習，後來因受傷而放棄舞蹈生涯。其後，她在巴黎當上模特兒，並在Ecole Florent學習演戲而且獲得Classe Libre Award 最佳演員一獎。去年，她在康城影展中獲得Chopard Trophy of Revelation最佳新晉演員。

拜仁確斯Brian Cox（飾 艾格米倫）
曾以"Nuremberg"獲金球獎提名及奪得2001Emmy獎最佳男配角的拜仁，在《木馬屠城》中飾演貪得無厭的艾格米倫，他選用了可怕的途徑將特洛伊城變成一個更繁榮，真實的城市，以實踐個人對特洛伊城的慾望，最後因凱倫的出現令到他的極權倒下。

彼得奧圖Peter O'Toole（飾 比安國王）
七屆奧斯卡提名及曾奪得奧斯卡榮譽大獎的他，這次飾演受萬人尊敬的特洛伊城皇帝比安。縱然在那個時代，每個國家或城市都充滿著戰爭，比安國王從沒想過要爭奪攻龐大的勢力而去攻打其他國家，因此他可保存特洛伊城多年來的和平。

辛般Sean Bean（飾 奧�Y西斯）
辛般飾演的奧�Y西斯是個勇敢，聰明的大使。他是阿基尼斯唯一信任的朋友。受到艾格米倫委任，極力游說阿基尼斯去成為《木馬屠城》一仗的統將，因只有他才有說服阿基尼斯出戰的本領。

班頓基臣Brendan Gleeson（飾 米倫拿斯王）
《紐約風雲》(Gangs of New York)及《28日後》(28 Days Later)響譽盛名的班頓，飾演的米倫拿斯王，因要保存他的榮譽，保護他的妻子凱倫，而出征「特洛伊戰爭」。

莎芬寶露絲 Saffron Burrows (飾 Andromache)
莎芬寶露絲自少在戲院學院學戲，她第一部重要的作品為Jim Sheridan執導的《因父之名》(In the Name of Father) 。其後，她在"Circle of Friends"中飾演被一名英格蘭人引誘的愛爾蘭少女被人賞識。她亦演出不少藝術性的話劇。近作有《筆姬別戀》(Frida)。

幕後製作
導演及監製：胡根彼得遜Wolfgang Petersen
以《驚濤駭浪》(Perfect Storm) 及《空軍一號》(Air Force One)譽滿國際的大導演胡根彼得遜，曾在1981年以一部全德語的外語片《Das Boot》獲提名奧斯卡最佳導演，及最佳編劇。而《Das Boot》更在當年成為票房收入最高的外語片。及後在不同年份以《極度驚慌》(Outbreak)，《空軍一號》及《火線狙擊》(In The Lines of Fire)再次獲得奧斯卡提名。

監製：戴安拉賓Diana Rathbun
監製過《Maverick》，《連鎖陰謀》(Conspiracy Theory)，《天使多情》(City of Angles)及《驚濤駭浪》(Perfect Storm)的戴安，她離開電影業後重回的第一炮，胡根彼得遜成為合作伙伴，製作萬人期待的《木馬屠城》。

監製：哥連韋遜 (Colin Wilson)
最近監製力作《未來戰士第3集》(The Terminator 3)。剪接出身的哥連，初次在《侏羅紀公園》(Jurassic Park)中嘗試擔任副監製一職，多年累積經驗後正式擔大旗作品包括《鬼馬小靈精》(Casper)、《侏羅紀公園：迷失世界》(Jurassic Park: The Lost World)及史提芬史匹堡的《斷鎖怒潮》(Amistad)。

攝影：羅渣柏列特Roger Pratt, B.S.C.
曾以《End of The Affairs》獲奧斯卡及BAFTA提名的羅渣，最新力作《哈利波特消失的密室》(Harry Potter And The Chamber of Secrets)。曾參與攝影工作的作品包括《12候子》(Twelve Monkeys)、《蝙蝠俠》(Batman)及《102斑點狗》(102 Dalmatians)等。

剪接：彼得漢寧斯Peter Honess, A.C.E.
以《幕後縑疑犯》(LA Confidential)獲奧斯卡提名及勇奪BAFTA最佳剪接的彼得，最新力作為《哈利波特消失的密室》(Harry Potter And The Chamber of Secrets)。曾參與剪接工作的作品包括《以眼還眼》(Eye for An Eye)、《童心救未來》(The Kid)及《借借你的愛》(the Next Best Thing)。

Final Production Information

Throughout time, men have waged war. Some for power, some for glory, some for honor - and some for love.

In ancient Greece, the passion of two of literature's most notorious lovers, Paris, Prince of Troy (ORLANDO BLOOM) and Helen (DIANE KRUGER), Queen of Sparta, ignites a war that will devastate a civilization. When Paris spirits Helen away from her husband, King Menelaus (BRENDAN GLEESON), it is an insult that cannot be suffered. Familial pride dictates that an affront to Menelaus is an affront to his brother Agamemnon (BRIAN COX), powerful King of the Mycenaeans, who soon unites all the massive tribes of Greece to steal Helen back from Troy in defense of his brother's honor.

In truth, Agamemnon's pursuit of honor is corrupted by his overwhelming greed - he needs to conquer Troy to seize control of the Aegean, thus ensuring the supremacy of his already vast empire. The walled city, under the leadership of King Priam (PETER O'TOOLE) and defended by mighty Prince Hector (ERIC BANA), is a citadel that no army has ever been able to breach. One man alone stands as the key to victory or defeat over Troy - Achilles (BRAD PITT), believed to be the greatest warrior alive.

Arrogant, rebellious and seemingly invincible, Achilles has allegiance to nothing and no one, save his own glory. It is his insatiable hunger for eternal renown that leads him to attack the gates of Troy under Agamemnon's banner - but it will be love that ultimately decides his fate.

Two worlds will go to war for honor and power. Thousands will fall in pursuit of glory. And for love, a nation will burn to the ground.

Warner Bros. Pictures presents a Radiant production, in association with PLAN B, a Wolfgang Petersen film, Troy, starring BRAD PITT and ERIC BANA. The film also stars ORLANDO BLOOM, DIANE KRUGER, BRIAN COX, SEAN BEAN, BRENDAN GLEESON and PETER O'TOOLE. A UK/MALTA Co-Production, Troy is directed by WOLFGANG PETERSEN, produced by WOLFGANG PETERSEN, DIANA RATHBUN and COLIN WILSON; the screenplay is by DAVID BENIOFF; the cinematographer is ROGER PRATT BSC; the production designer is NIGEL PHELPS; and PETER HONESS A.C.E. is the editor. Music by JAMES HORNER.

Troy will be distributed worldwide by Warner Bros. Pictures, a Warner Bros. Entertainment Company, and in select territories by Village Roadshow Pictures.

* * *

About the Story

Passion is at the heart of all the momentous events driving Troy, an epic chronicle of the triumphs and tragedy of the legendary Trojan War. The seeds of war are sown when King Menelaus of Sparta hosts a banquet to make peace with King Priam of Troy, represented by his eldest son, Prince Hector, defender of Troy. While the two leaders celebrate an end to countless devastating years of war, Hector's preternaturally handsome brother Paris disappears - only to reappear in the bedchamber of Menelaus' wife Helen, known far and wide as one of the world's greatest beauties. 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."

Casting

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 clich�m: 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.

An Epic 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."

Raising Troy

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 Trojan Horse

"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 clich�m 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.

The Burning of Troy

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 Final 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."

Marching Into Battle

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."

Enhanced Battles

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

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."

Ships

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.

Costumes

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.

The Historical Troy and The Iliad

Greek mythology tells the story of a golden apple that Eris, the goddess of discord tossed into the middle of an Olympian wedding party to which she had not been invited. The apple came into the hands of Paris who was told to give it to the fairest of the goddesses. Hera, Zeus's own wife, promised him power if he chose her; Athena promised him wealth. But Aphrodite promised him the most beautiful woman in the world - and she was the one to whom he gave the apple. She rewarded him with Helen.

While Troy is inspired by The Iliad, it also includes other elements not found in Homer's work. The Trojan Horse is not a part of The Iliad, and only Virgil wrote quite extensively about the sacking of Troy in The Aeneid. "Our film is a collection of motifs and story elements, drawing mainly from The Iliad," says Petersen. "One respect in which we diverged from Homer's telling is that our story does not include the presence of the gods. The gods in The Iliad are directly involved in the story - they fight, they help out, they manipulate. Not in our story. The religion is there, the belief is there, but the gods are only mentioned - they are not made a part of it. It wouldn't have been in line with the level of realism that we wanted to achieve in the film."

The actual existence of Paris and Helen or any of the other characters that populate Homer's poems may never be known. Some archaeological evidence for the supposed palaces of Kings Agamemnon and Nestor exists and there are other kings, including Odysseus and Priam, whom some scholars accept as historical. Ancient vases and carvings tell the story of the war, but whether they are retelling myth or history remains unknown.

The Trojan War was thought for a time to be completely a creation of the ancient poet Homer. With no supporting written evidence of the civilization he described, archaeology - a relatively recent science with origins in Egyptology - became the key to unlocking the truth of this ancient past.

The ruins of what is now widely believed to be the real city of Troy were not unearthed until 1871. Those who had pursued it over the centuries had generally agreed the great walled city overlooked the Aegean Sea from a part of modern-day Turkey still called the Troad, preserving the ancient name of Troy. But no surface evidence of its specific location seemed to exist.

Credit for the discovery of Troy went to German entrepreneur and novice archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann. Largely uncredited was British archaeologist Frank Calvert, who suggested that Schliemann should dig at a place called Hisarlik - the site now recognized as ancient Troy.

The remains of seven cities were found on the site, each on top of the other, showing that Troy had been rebuilt many times. The city that Schliemann initially proclaimed to be Homer's Troy was on the second level. Later research proved this could not be the case, and now most scholars believe that the sixth city provides the most likely background for the story of the Trojan War. Traditional dates for the fall of Troy range from about 1250 to 1183 BC, fitting well with the dates of destructions of these cities. Excavations were resumed as recently as 1988, with the belief there was much yet to be discovered.

There is still a debate over whether a single war caused Troy's collapse: some evidence indicates an earthquake, rather than armed assault, as a force of destruction. Many historians believe there could have been a series of wars between Greeks and Trojans, with perhaps one grand finale. In any scenario, the resulting disappearance of one of the Aegean's great city-states is beyond dispute.

Though Schliemann may have solved one of the great puzzles of history, he couldn't validate the accuracy of Homer's account of the events. In fact, his findings diminished the hopes of those who believed that proving the existence of Troy would give greater credence to Homer's reportage of its downfall.

The epic poems attributed to Homer, The Iliad and The Odyssey, were apparently composed some 400 years after the fall of Troy. They were part of an oral tradition, in which stories were recited and listened to, as opposed to written down and read. Like other bards, Homer used mythical tales handed down over generations and told them anew, re-shaping them for a contemporary audience, adding new details and leaving others out. We know very little about Homer, and there have even been arguments about whether a single poet created the poems. Yet while the work of other bards has been lost, the poems of Homer were recognized as vastly superior to the work of his imitators and were preserved. They are the earliest master-works of Greek literature, and many scholars believe they are the work of one man.

The most likely cause for the war, or series of wars, was control over the Dardanelles, a narrow waterway leading to the Black Sea. But the theft of one king's wife might have been as good an excuse as any to start the bloody conflict that Homeric legend claims lasted for 10 years. The Iliad only describes events that took place over a period of 50 days. However, if literature is to be believed and longevity is the measure, they were the most memorable 50 days in mankind's history.

* * *

ABOUT THE CAST

BRAD PITT (Achilles) is one of the most prominent actors of his generation, having given diverse performances in films such as Fight Club, Legends of the Fall, Seven and Twelve Monkeys.

Currently, Pitt is shooting Mr. & Mrs. Smith starring alongside Angelina Jolie for director Doug Liman. Immediately following, he will re-join the all-star ensemble for Warner Bros. Pictures' Oceans 12, the sequel to Soderbergh's box office hit.

Pitt's role as the seductive hitchhiker in Ridley Scott's controversial Thelma & Louise first brought him national attention. He then went on to star as the psychopathic serial killer in Kalifornia, the charismatic-but-doomed Paul Maclean in Robert Redford's A River Runs Through It, and the bloodsucking Louis in Neil Jordan's Interview With The Vampire.

Pitt has been nominated twice for a Golden Globe Award for his work as Tristan, the passionate, untamable brother in Legends of the Fall and for his co-starring role in Terry Gilliam's Twelve Monkeys. Pitt won the award for his performance in the latter.

Pitt's recent starring roles include Warner Bros. Pictures' Oceans 11, with an ensemble cast that included George Clooney, Julia Roberts and Matt Damon and directed by Steven Soderbergh and Spy Game, in which he starred opposite Robert Redford and directed by Tony Scott. He also co-starred in The Mexican with Julia Roberts and James Gandolfini for director Gore Verbinski and Guy Ritchie's Snatch. He also appeared in cameo roles in Soderbergh's Full Frontal and Clooney's Confessions of a Dangerous Mind.

Pitt also lent his voice as Sinbad in the animated motion picture Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas.

Born in Shawnee, Oklahoma and growing up in Springfield, Missouri, Pitt attended the University of Missouri at Columbia where he majored in Journalism with a focus on advertising. Right before graduation, he moved to Los Angeles to study advertising and graphic design, but instead began to pursue an acting career, studying with Roy London. Soon thereafter, he began securing roles in various television projects, including the Fox series Glory Days, HBO's The Image and the critically acclaimed movie of the week, Too Young To Die.

On film, Pitt has also starred in Johnny Suede, which won the 1992 Golden Leopard Award for Best Picture at the Locarno Film Festival, Ralph Bakshi's Cool World, Tony Scott's True Romance, Sleepers, The Devil's Own, Jean Jacques Annaud's Seven Years In Tibet, Marty Brest's Meet Joe Black, and Fight Club, reuniting him with director David Fincher.

ERIC BANA (Hector) was born in Melbourne Australia, where he currently resides, and was first introduced to international audiences in the title role of Mark 'Chopper' Read in the Australian feature film Chopper, which premiered at the 2001 Sundance Film Festival and was then released to critical acclaim in the US after its Australian success.

Bana most recently starred in the title role of The Hulk for director Ang Lee. He was seen co-starring in Ridley Scott's Black Hawk Down as one of a group of elite US soldiers opposite Josh Hartnett, Ewan McGregor and Tom Sizemore.

Bana lives in Melbourne with his wife, Rebecca, and two children.

ORLANDO BLOOM (Paris), who made his feature film debut starring as 'Legolas' in Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, has captivated audiences and filmmakers alike. He continues to do so in the second and third installments of the Lord of the Rings trilogy - The Two Towers and Return of the King. Last summer he starred opposite Johnny Depp in Jerry Bruckheimer's hugely successful blockbuster, Pirates of the Caribbean, directed by Gore Verbinski.

Bloom will next be seen in Gregor Jordan's Ned Kelly with Heath Ledger and in The Calcium Kid. He recently wrapped Frank E. Flower's independent Haven; and is currently in production on Ridley Scott's Kingdom of Heaven. Notably, he appeared in Ridley Scott's award-winning film Black Hawk Down a few years earlier.

Bloom was born in Canterbury, England and at age 16 moved to London where he joined the National Youth Theatre for two seasons and then gained a scholarship to train with the British American Drama Academy. On completion of his scholarship, Bloom played the lead in A Walk in the Vienna Woods and made his screen debut in the feature film Wilde, based on the life of Oscar Wilde.

He was then accepted to Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London and chose to put his screen career on hold for the opportunity to further his education. During his time at Guildhall, Bloom performed in several productions including Little Me, A Month in the City, Peer Gynt, Mephisto and Twelfth Night. After graduating from Guildhall, Bloom appeared in the BBC television series Midsomer Murders.

Born in Germany, DIANE KRUGER (Helen) studied with the Royal ballet from an early age before an injury ended her dance career.

She became one of the best known photographic models in Paris where she trained at the Ecole Florent, winning the Classe Libre award for best actor in her year.

Kruger made her film debut starring alongside Dennis Hopper and Christopher Lambert in the independent feature The Piano Player, released last year. She received a Caesar nomination last year for her role in the award-winning French film Mon Idol and starred in another French feature, Michel Vaillant, released last fall.

Kruger recently completed her American film debut opposite Josh Hartnett and Rose Byrne in the romantic thriller Wicker Park and National Treasure with Nicolas Cage, both set for a 2004 release.

Kruger was honored at last year's 2003 Cannes Film Festival with the Chopard Trophy of the Revelation for Best Newcomer.

Considered "the most prolific Scottish actor of his generation," BRIAN COX (Agamemnon) won the 2001 Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Miniseries or Motion Picture Made for Television for his portrayal of Nazi war criminal Hermann Goering in the TNT original film Nuremberg, for which he also received SAG and Golden Globe Award nominations. His hilarious guest-starring role as Harry Moon on NBC's hit television series Frasier earned his second Emmy nomination in 2002.

He recently wrapped filming the comedy The Ringer, produced by the Farrelly Brothers.

At the beginning of 2003, Her Royal Highness Queen Elizabeth honored Cox with a CBE (Commander of the British Empire). He also received a 2003 SAG Award nomination (his second) as part of the ensemble cast of Spike Jonze's Adaptation, in which he has a scene-stealing cameo as Hollywood's screenwriting guru Robert McKee. He also received rave reviews for his portrayal of non-mutant villain General William Stryker in the summer blockbuster X-Men 2.

In 2002, Cox was featured in seven films, which grossed an impressive $347 million at the box office. His memorable performances include 25th Hour, The Ring, Adaptation, The Bourne Identity and The Rookie.

Cox's masterful portrayal of "Big John" in the critically lauded independent film L.I.E. (official selection of the 2001 Sundance Film Festival) earned an AFI Award Nomination, an Independent Spirit Award Nomination, a Golden Satellite Award and a Boston Film Critics Award for Best Actor.

An accomplished veteran of the London stage, Cox has two Olivier Awards for Best Actor to his credit for his performances in Titus Andronicus at the Royal Shakespeare Company's Swan Theatre and Rat in the Skull for the Royal Court in London. Recent New York theatre credits include Art on Broadway and St. Nicholas at Off Broadway's Primary Stages (Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Actor; Drama Desk and Outer Critic's Circle nominations). Other theatre credits include Conor McPherson's Dublin Carol at the Royal Court; St. Nicholas at the Bush Theatre in London and the Matrix Theatre in Los Angeles; King Lear and Richard III at the National Theatre in London and Skylight at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles.

Other film work includes The Affair of the Necklace, The Minus Man, For the Love of the Game, Rushmore; The Corrupter; The Boxer; The Long Kiss Goodnight; the Academy Award-winning Braveheart; Academy Award nominee Rob Roy; Hidden Agenda (Special Jury Prize, Cannes Film Festival); as well as originating the celluloid Hannibal Lecter in Michael Mann's cult classic Manhunter, based on Thomas Harris' novel Red Dragon.

Cox made his television directorial debut for the hit HBO prison drama Oz. He is the author of two books, Salem to Moscow: An Actor's Odyssey and The Lear Diaries.

SEAN BEAN (Odysseus) gained international recognition opposite Harrison Ford in Patriot Games. He starred as Boromir in the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Other recent projects include Ronin starring opposite Robert De Niro and Jean Reno and Don't Say A Word with Michael Douglas, Brittany Murphy and director Gary Fleder.

Bean just completed production on National Treasure for director Jon Turteltaub and producer Jerry Bruckheimer. The story centers around an expedition to uncover a treasure buried in the 1700's. Bean plays Ian Howe, the financier of the expedition, alongside Nicolas Cage. The film shoots in Washington D.C., Philadelphia and Los Angeles.

Bean, in the fall of 2002, starred in Macbeth opposite Samantha Bond in London. He has received critical acclaim for his work as Macbeth, making the show the fastest non-musical to sell out in the West End. In 2003, Bean was seen in the indie feature The Big Empty with Jon Favreau, Kelsey Grammer, Daryl Hannah, Rachel Leigh Cook, and Joey Lauren Adams, which premiered at AFI. Bean also shot a cameo role in Henry VIII opposite Ray Winston and Helena Bonham Carter.

On television, Bean has starred in numerous productions, including Carlton Production's The Sharp Series. His other television movies include Bravo Two Zero, Lady Chatterley, Clarissa, Prince, Tell Me You Love Me, and many more.

Bean has appeared in numerous stage productions for The Royal Court Theatre, Glasgow Citizen Theatre, and The Royal Shakespeare Company, including Romeo and Juliet Fair Maid of the West, and A Midsummer Night's Dream.

Bean's additional screen credits include Tom and Thomas, Essex Boys, Anna Karennina, Goldeneye, When Saturday Comes, Black Beauty, Caravaggio, Lorna Doone, The Field, Stormy Monday and Windprints, among others.

Dublin born actor BRENDAN GLEESON (Menelaus) had a desire to act from early childhood and began his career by appearing in local plays and concerts.

At the age of 18, he auditioned for the famed Abbey Theatre. It was a disastrous audition that led him to abandon acting for a career as a high school teacher. After ten years in the classroom, Gleeson decided to return to his dream and pursue acting fulltime.

Following small parts in films such as The Field, Far and Away, Michael Collins and The Butcher Boy, Gleeson came to the public's attention as Hamish, the hulking ally of William Wallace (Mel Gibson) in Braveheart.

Gleeson most recently co-starred in Anthony Minghella's Cold Mountain, Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later and Martin Scorsese's Gangs of New York. The talented actor's numerous other film credits include Ron Shelton's Dark Blue, John Boorman's Tailor of Panama, Artificial Intelligence: A.I., directed by Steven Spielberg, John Woo's Mission: Impossible II and I Went Down, directed by Paddy Breachnach. On television, Gleeson appeared in The Treaty, The Snapper and Kidnapped.

In 1998 he starred in The General for John Boorman, winning international acclaim for his performance as the Irish mafia figure Martin Cahill. This performance earned him Best Actor awards from the Boston Society of Film Critics, the London Film Critics, and the Irish Film and Television Association.

Gleeson will soon be seen in M. Night Shyamalan's thriller The Village, followed by Ridley Scott's Kingdom of Heaven, as well as his third film with John Boorman, Country of My Skulls.

One of the most honored actors of his generation, PETER O'TOOLE (Priam) was recently given an Honorary Oscar for a movie career that spans four-and-a-half decades and has included seven Academy Award nominations.

Born in Ireland and raised in Yorkshire, England, O'Toole began his professional life as a journalist but soon discovered a love for the theatre, which led to his stage debut at age 17. Following a two-year stint as a radioman in the Royal Navy, he attended the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, where among his fellow classmates were future acting stars Albert Finney, Alan Bates, and Tom Courtenay.

O'Toole spent two years onstage at the Bristol Old Vic. Following, he made his London West End stage debut in The Long and The Short and The Tall for which he won the Evening Standard Best Actor Award. Peter then joined the Royal Shakespeare Company where he made his acclaimed performance as "Shylock" in The Merchant of Venice.

O'Toole made his film debut in Nicholas Ray's The Savage Innocents, released in 1959. In 1962, O'Toole was chosen to play T.E. Lawrence in the David Lean epic Lawrence of Arabia. The part made O'Toole an international superstar. He followed this triumph with Beckett (1964) and Lord Jim (1965). O'Toole received Oscar nominations for his work in Lawrence and Beckett. He was also nominated for The Lion in Winter, Goodbye Mr. Chips, The Ruling Class, The Stunt Man and My Favorite Year. Other career highlights include Bernardo Bertolucci's The Last Emperor, Murphy's War, Man of La Mancha and the mini-series Masada, which earned him his first Emmy nomination. He won the Emmy for Best Supporting Actor in the made for TV movie Joan of Arc.

The actor recently appeared in Stephen Fry's Bright Young Things and received an Emmy nomination for his role as Hindenberg in the Emmy-winning mini-series Hitler: The Rise of Evil.

O'Toole's next project will be Romeo and Me co-starring Janet McTeer, which he will begin shooting in early July.

ROSE BYRNE (Briseis), a Sydney native, has the chameleon-like ability to take on drastically different characters from film to film. With her ethereal beauty, screen presence, and natural talent, she is well on her way to a long and prosperous Hollywood career. Paul McGuigan, who directs Byrne in Wicker Park, describes her as "incredible" and "the best actress [he's] worked with."

Byrne will next star in the intense psychological drama Wicker Park alongside Josh Hartnett, Matthew Lillard, and Diane Kruger. The story centers on a man (Hartnett) caught in an obsessive search for a women he fell in love with (Kruger) while being manipulated by a woman (Byrne) who tries to keep them apart. The film will be released later this year.

Byrne gained international recognition when she was cast as Amidala's (Natalie Portman) loyal handmaiden, Dorm�m, in George Lucas' Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones. Dorm�m has gone on to cult status, with a Dorm�m Forever web forum devoted to her, as well as an online petition to toy makers Hasbro for a Dorm�m action figure to be released. Byrne followed Star Wars with a starring role in I Capture the Castle, a 1930's English romance based on the book by Dodie Smith.

Over the next few years, Byrne starred in several Australian television shows while earning her degree from the Australian Theatre for Young People. She has since commenced an Arts degree at Sydney University. In 1999, Byrne rocketed to fame in Australia with her role as Alex in Gregor Jordan's gritty crime comedy Two Hands, which also starred the then relatively unknown Heath Ledger. The film was a hit and won both public and critical acclaim.

Byrne's next film was her first lead role in Clara Law's surreal The Goddess Of 1967, for which she was awarded the Copa Volpi for Best Actress at the 1999 Venice International Film Festival. Next up for Byrne was the critically acclaimed My Mother Frank, which also starred Sinead Cusack, Sam Neill and Matthew Newton.

Byrne travels back and forth between Los Angeles and Sydney. When she has a break from filming, she enjoys spending her time reading, hiking, and relaxing at home.

SAFFRON BURROWS (Andromache) began studying acting as a child in youth theatre, before making her major film debut in Jim Sheridan's In the Name of the Father, starring Daniel Day-Lewis. She came to the attention of international audiences with her second role, as an Irish girl seduced by a morally suspect Englishman (Colin Firth) in Circle of Friends, starring Minnie Driver and Chris O'Donnell.

Burrows' film work ranges from art-house dramas such as Miss Julie and Timecode, to Deep Blue Sea and the mob drama Gangster #1 starring Malcolm McDowell, Paul Bettany and David Thewlis. Most recently, she starred in Michael Apted's box office hit Enigma, and appeared in the critically praised Frida.

Burrows will start production in New Zealand this spring in Perfect Creature with Dougray Scott.

Academy Award winner JULIE CHRISTIE (Thetis) recently completed roles in J.M. Barrie's Neverland with Johnny Depp and Kate Winslett, and the third installment of the beloved Harry Potter series in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.

The daughter of an India-based British tea planter, Christie was born in Chukua, Assam, India and grew up on her father's tea plantation. Educated in England and on the Continent, Christie studied at the Central School of Music and Drama before getting her big break in the science fiction series A for Andromeda on the BBC, sealing her professional fate for the next four and a half decades.

Christie made her film debut with a small part in Crooks Anonymous. After her performance in The Fast Lady, director John Schlesinger gave her a supporting role in Billy Liar, which won attention from the critics and a subsequent supporting part in his 1965 feature Young Cassidy. Later that same year, Schlesinger made her a star by casting her in the title role of the drama Darling, which earned her an Oscar for Best Actress, a BAFTA Award and a New York Film Critics Circle Award for her performance.

Christie's star continued to rise when David Lean picked her as Lara in his classic Doctor Zhivago, for which she won the David di Donatello Prize for Best Actress. She followed this with a dual role in Francois Truffaut's Fahrenheit 451, then teamed again with Schlesinger to star in Far From the Madding Crowd and played the title role in Richard Lester's Petulia. She reigned as one of the film world's premiere leading ladies throughout the 1970s in such films as The Go-Between, Nashville and Don't Look Now. During this period, she also starred with Warren Beatty in three seminal films of the decade: McCabe and Mrs. Miller, which earned her another Academy Award nomination, Shampoo and Heaven Can Wait.

Christie's subsequent film credits include Dragonheart, Kenneth Branagh's Hamlet and Afterglow, for which she received her third Oscar nomination.

Christie also continued to work in theatre over the years in such productions as Comedy of Errors, Uncle Vanya, Old Times and Susanna Andler.

ABOUT THE FILMMAKERS

WOLFGANG PETERSEN (Director/Producer) was named 2001 ShoWest Director of the Year after his epic sea drama, The Perfect Storm (2000), starring George Clooney and Mark Wahlberg, grossed over $327 million and earned two Academy Award nominations.

Petersen shot to international attention in 1981 as the director of the extraordinary underwater thriller Das Boot. For his work on the film, the Motion Picture Academy recognized Petersen with two Academy Award nominations, Best Director and Best Screenwriter, making him the first Best Director nominee ever to have been so honored for a German-language film. Das Boot earned six Academy Award nominations and became the highest-grossing foreign language film ever released in the U.S. at that time.

Noted for his remarkable string of commercially and artistically successful films, Petersen directed and produced the multiple-Academy Award nominated box office smash Air Force One (1997), starring Harrison Ford, Gary Oldman and Glenn Close. That same year, he supervised the director's cut of Das Boot which was re-released theatrically to enormous critical and audience acclaim.

In 1995, Petersen directed and produced the Warner Bros. Pictures hit Outbreak, starring Dustin Hoffman, Rene Russo and Morgan Freeman. His classic suspense thriller In The Line of Fire (1993), starring Clint Eastwood, John Malkovich and Rene Russo, received three Academy Award nominations.

After Das Boot, Petersen wrote and directed the lavish fantasy The Neverending Story (1984) and directed the futuristic Enemy Mine (1985) starring Louis Gossett, Jr. and Dennis Quaid. Upon taking up permanent residence in the United States, Petersen wrote and directed the stylish thriller Shattered (1991), starring Tom Berenger, Bob Hoskins and Greta Scacchi.

Petersen began his feature film career as the winner of the German National Film Prize for best new director for One of Us in 1973. He first gained international notice with the controversial 1977 drama The Consequence. The following year he won the award for Best Director at the Paris Film Festival for Black and White Like Day and Night.

Through his company, Radiant Productions, Petersen also produced the feature film Bicentennial Man starring Robin Williams, and executive produced Instinct, starring Anthony Hopkins and Cuba Gooding, Jr., as well as the suspense thriller Red Corner with Richard Gere. Radiant also developed the television series The Agency.

Petersen's upcoming directing projects include the epic survival story Endurance; Shutter Island by best-selling author Dennis Lehane; and the sci-fi thriller Ender's Game based on the classic novel.

He is also set to produce Whiteout starring Reese Witherspoon; the action/adventure Cold Shelter with Alexander Witt directing; and the remake of The Poseidon Adventure.

DIANA RATHBUN (Producer) began her film career as a literary agent with International Creative Management, following her early professional life as a teacher in Morocco and the Ivory Coast, then a job in communications at the Quebec Government House in New York.

She joined Warner Bros. Pictures as a production executive in 1991 and rose to the rank of senior vice president before leaving in 1999. Among the projects green lit under her supervision were Maverick, Conspiracy Theory, Fearless, City of Angels and Wolfgang Petersen's The Perfect Storm, on which she later served as consultant.

Taking time off to travel following her tenure at WB, she returned to the film business as Petersen's producing partner. Troy is the initial venture under that partnership.

COLIN WILSON (Producer) most recently produced Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines starring Arnold Schwarzenegger and Claire Danes and the box office hit Lara Croft: Tomb Raider.

Wilson began his film career as an editor, then became an associate producer on Steven Spielberg's Jurassic Park in 1993. He served as co-producer on the live-action adaptation of the animated television favorite The Flintstones before moving up to producer on the live-action animation hit Casper.

He revisited The Lost World: Jurassic Park as a producer in 1997 and produced Spielberg's prestigious Amistad that same year. Wilson's subsequent credits as a producer include Small Soldiers and The Haunting.

DAVID BENIOFF (Screenwriter) adapted his first screenplay from his own novel, The 25th Hour, which director Spike Lee turned into a critically praised film starring Ed Norton and Brian Cox. His third produced screenplay, Stay, directed by Marc Forster and starring Ewan McGregor and Naomi Watts, recently finished shooting.

The native New Yorker worked at a variety of jobs, including nightclub bouncer, high school English teacher and radio deejay, before selling his novel in 2000. Viking will publish his collection of stories, When The Nines Roll Over, in October 2004.

Benioff is currently writing an adaptation titled Right As Rain for director Curtis Hanson, after which he begins scripting For Whom The Bell Tolls.

ROGER PRATT, BSC (Cinematographer) earned an Academy Award nomination for his work on Neil Jordan's End of the Affair, which also brought the first of his two BAFTA nominations. He earned his second BAFTA nod for Chocolat for which he received the third of his three British Society of Cinematographers nominations. He most recently directed photography on Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets.

Pratt grew up in the British Midlands, the son of a minister. He became interested in movies as a child and earned a degree from the London Film School. He began working on television commercials and documentaries, then got his first movie job as assistant cameraman on My Childhood in 1972. He worked as lighting designer and camera operator before serving as cinematographer on The Dollar Bottom in 1981, which won an Oscar for Best Short Subject.

In the mid 1970s, Pratt began a long association with director Terry Gilliam, which led to his serving as cinematographer on The Crimson Permanent Assurance segment of Monty Python's The Meaning of Life in 1983 and director of photography on Gilliam's Brazil in 1985. Among Pratt's other credits as cinematographer are The Fisher King, 12 Monkeys, Shadowlands, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Mona Lisa, Batman and 102 Dalmatians.

Pratt is a member of the British Society of Cinematographers (BSC).

NIGEL PHELPS (Production Designer) began his career by working with Academy Award winning production designer Anton Furst. He started as an illustrator on Neil Jordan's Company of Wolves and then served as the assistant art director on Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket. Phelps followed that by moving up to art director for Mr. Furst on Tim Burton's Batman.

Shortly thereafter, Phelps moved to Los Angeles and began designing cutting edge music videos and commercials for a variety of influential directors including Mark Romanek, Alex Proyas and Michael Bay. This work garnered Phelps multiple nominations for MTV Video Awards. His first feature credit as a production designer came on the futuristic science fiction film Judge Dredd. Subsequent film credits include Alien Resurrection with acclaimed French filmmaker Jean Pierre Jeunet and The Bone Collector with Phillip Noyce. He renewed his collaboration with Neil Jordan on In Dreams and later designed Michael Bay's military epic Pearl Harbor for producer Jerry Bruckheimer.

PETER HONESS, A.C.E. (Editor) received an Academy Award nomination for his work on L.A. Confidential, which earned him the BAFTA Award for Best Editing. He most recently edited Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, the second installment of the Warner Bros. Pictures hit fantasy franchise.

Honess began his motion picture career editing on low budget films and documentaries, earning an ACE nomination for his editing of the documentary Following the Tundra Wolf in 1974. As an assistant editor he worked on many films including The Dirty Dozen, Half A Sixpence and Dogs Of War.

Among Honess' early credits as an editor were It's Alive, Plenty, Highlander, Madame Sousatzka, The Russia House, Ricochet, Mr. Baseball, Six Degrees of Separation, The Shadow, Rob Roy and Eye for an Eye. More recently, he edited Domestic Disturbance, The Fast and the Furious, The Kid and The Next Best Thing.

In 2003, JAMES HORNER (Composer) added four films to his illustrious filmography, which already includes more than 130 film and television projects. He collaborated for the seventh time with director Ron Howard on his Western drama The Missing, while beginning a new creative partnership with first-time director Vadim Perelman on the dramatic thriller House of Sand and Fog (for which Horner received his ninth Academy Award nomination). He also scored the inspirational Radio, and the romantic adventure Beyond Borders.

In film music circles, rarely has there been a more meteoric success story than that of James Horner. Having composed the music for dozens of the most memorable and successful films of the past two decades, Horner is among the world's most prolific and celebrated film composers. He has earned two Academy Awards and two Golden Globe Awards for his music from James Cameron's Titanic (one for Best Original Score and one for the Best Original Song "My Heart Will Go On"), seven additional Academy Award nominations, five additional Golden Globe nominations, and has won six Grammy awards, including Song of the Year in both 1987 (for "Somewhere Out There") and 1998 (for "My Heart Will Go On"). In April of 1998, Horner's Titanic soundtrack album on Sony Classical completed an unprecedented run of 16 weeks at number 1 on the Billboard Top 200 Album Chart, setting a new record for the most consecutive weeks at number 1 for a score album. It remains the largest selling instrumental score album in history, having sold nearly 10 million copies in the US and more than 27 million copies worldwide. Sony Classical's multi-platinum sequel soundtrack album Back to Titanic featured additional music from the film as well as several new compositions by Horner based upon themes from his original score.

Known for his stylistic diversity, his other film credits include Stroke of Genius, House of Sand and Fog, The Missing, Windtalkers, A Beautiful Mind, Iris, Enemy at the Gates, Dr. Seuss' How The Grinch Stole Christmas, The Perfect Storm, Freedom Song, Bicentennial Man, Mighty Joe Young, The Mask Of Zorro, Deep Impact, The Devil's Own, Ransom, Courage Under Fire, To Gillian On Her 37th Birthday, The Spitfire Grill, Braveheart, Apollo 13, Casper, Legends of the Fall, Clear and Present Danger, The Pagemaster, Bopha, The Pelican Brief, The Man Without a Face, Patriot Games, Thunderheart, Sneakers, The Rocketeer, Glory, In Country, Field of Dreams, Honey I Shrunk the Kids, The Land Before Time, Willow, An American Tail, The Name Of The Rose, Gorky Park, Cocoon and Cocoon: The Return, 48 Hours and Another 48 Hours, and Star Treks II and III.

Born in Los Angeles in 1953, Horner spent his formative years living in London where he attended the prestigious Royal Academy of Music. His initial interest was to become a composer of serious, avant-garde classical music. Returning to his native California, Horner continued his music education at the University of Southern California where he received a Bachelor of Music in Composition. He then transferred to the Masters program at UCLA where he earned his Doctorate in Music Composition and Theory. In 1980, Horner was approached by the American Film Institute and asked to score a short film entitled The Drought. It was then that he discovered his passion for composing music for film.

After scoring a number of films for the AFI, Horner left the academic world and began working for Roger Corman at New World Pictures. It was in this milieu of low-budget horror films (Brainstorm, Battle Beyond the Stars) that Horner developed his craft. It was also where he became acquainted with a number of young directors including Ron Howard, for whom he would later score such films as Willow, Cocoon, and the hit Apollo 13. Also during his time at New World, Horner met a young cameraman named James Cameron, with whom he would later collaborate on the hit sequel Aliens and, of course, Titanic. In the ensuing years, Horner has gone on to collaborate with many of Hollywood's most noted and successful filmmakers, including Ed Zwick, Joe Johnston, Phil Alden Robinson, Steven Spielberg, William Friedkin, Mel Gibson, Oliver Stone, Philip Noyce, Michael Apted, Lasse Hallstrom, Norman Jewison and Francis Ford Coppola.

Equally comfortable with lush orchestral scoring and contemporary electronic techniques, Horner has likened his approach to composing to that of a painter, where the film serves as the canvas and where musical color is used to describe and support the film's emotional dynamics. He is also noted for his integration of unusual ethnic James instruments into the traditional orchestral palette in order to achieve exotic colors and textures. An accomplished conductor, Horner prefers to conduct his orchestral film scores directly to picture and without the use of click tracks or other mechanical timing devices. He has also composed several concert works, including a work entitled "Spectral Shimmers" which was performed by the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra. Horner's most recent concert work is "A Forest Passage," commissioned by the Cleveland Orchestra in celebration of the 25th anniversary of the Cuyahoga Valley National Recreational Area in Ohio.

BOB RINGWOOD (Costume Designer) received an Academy Award nomination for his work on Steven Spielberg's Empire of the Sun, for which he also earned a BAFTA nomination. He has also earned BAFTA nominations for his designs on the films Excalibur and Batman.

Ringwood won the Academy of Science Fiction Saturn Award for costumes on Excalibur and Dune and was recently nominated for a third Saturn Award for Star Trek: Nemesis.

Ringwood's other major movie credits as costume designer include Solarbabies, Prick Up Your Ears, Chicago Joe and the Showgirl, Alien 3, Batman Returns, Demolition Man, The Shadow, Batman Forever, A.I. and the 2002 remake of The Time Machine.

* * *

註：以上資訊由片主或其推廣代表提供。本網並不保證此等資訊是否正確。
Note: The information above is provided by the owners of the film or their agents who are responsible for the promotion of the film. We do not guarantee the accuracy of such information.

相關連結 Related Links

• 最近公影電影 Recent, Current, and Upcoming Films