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There's a movie in there, but it's buried beneath 24 books of dactylic hexameter and some unfathomably dull speechifying by the gods. David Benioff, the novelist cum screenwriter who sold Warner Bros. on the idea for $150,000, decided early on that the god stuff had to go. "I had this terror of some actor in a toga hurling CGI [computer-generated imagery] thunderbolts from the top of Mount Olympus," Benioff says, in reference to the 1981 Laurence Olivier--as--Zeus camp classic, Clash of the Titans. After dropping the deities and adding the Trojan horse from The Aeneid, Benioff focused his taut 140page script on Hector and the now mortal Achilles. "They're the two great heroes on opposite sides, but it's not a good guy--bad guy story. It's humans vs. humans, and that's what makes it great tragedy."
Petersen saw a Troy draft in early 2002 and signed on immediately. "I was offered Gladiator--before Ridley Scott," he says ruefully. "And I turned it down ... What a fool was I. This time, again I responded to similar material. Great lovers. Great fights. I did not hesitate." Pitt received an early draft too, and over dinner at Petersen's favorite German restaurant ("They brought me out a giant ham hock, extra gristle," Pitt recalls), he committed to doing months of dialect and sword work and putting on the additional 7 lbs. to 10 lbs. of muscle required to play Achilles. "I hadn't worked for two years, so I figured, f___ it," says Pitt. "I got no excuses. Plus, once you've done a few movies, you want to up the ante. I don't know how much was fueled by the story or approaching 40 or what. But I wanted to see--if I wasn't lazy about it, if I really went at the physical and emotional work--where it might end up."
With Pitt on board, Petersen cast the other dozen or so leading roles according to the gospel of David Lean. "I looked at Lawrence of Arabia," says Petersen, "at Peter O'Toole and Omar Sharif. Oh, my God! What attractive guys they were. I think these epic stories need attractive people. So I decided I will go for a high standard of beauty." Eric Bana (last summer's Hulk) was chosen to play Hector; O'Toole snapped up the role of Priam, the Trojan king; Julie Christie took a cameo as Achilles' mother Thetis; and despite rumored interest from Nicole Kidman and Julia Roberts, a worldwide casting call went out for a really pretty Helen of Troy, with German newcomer Diane Kruger landing the role. Finally, Orlando Bloom was cast as Paris. "It was a ferociously good-looking set," says Benioff. "A good way to crush your ego is to walk into a restaurant with Orlando Bloom."
With Troy's pretty people in place, the first hint of the trials to come arrived when production designer Nigel Phelps, who had been researching the architecture of ancient Troy at the British Museum, informed Petersen that the city was kind of a dump. "Going through all these sketches, there was a moment of realization," says Phelps. "Troy just didn't have the size or the spectacle the movie demanded. There was a wall and a gate, but most of the buildings were maybe 10-ft. high and made of mud." To make Troy look like a city worth defending, Phelps had to scramble to put together "an architectural vocabulary from a bunch of ancient cultures that was, you know, made up."