Did the films period dictate a particular photographic style?
Scott: If anything, I shot it in a rather modern way. A lot of the battle scenes, of course, were done with handheld cameras. We employed a lot of techniques we learned from videos to enhance the speed and violence of certain sequences. When you’re dealing with a bunch of guys wearing muddy skirts and carrying swords and spears and they’re not on horseback and everything is flat it requires a lot of energy to get the footage you need; you have to use a lot of cuts to keep the action moving forward. We worked out a proper strategic battle plan in order to illustrate the formidable might of the Roman military machine. The infantry were engaged in the front, and there were war machines like catapults and arrow launchers to the rear. The arrows were really thick and would impale whoever got in their way; if you got off a really lucky shot, you could nail four blokes together, like a kabob. The Romans would also catapult Greek oil, which is basically a kind of kerosene, in these large, eart
