Snyder's first priority was to capture Miller's distinctive visuals, which don't always adhere to physics or logic. To storyboard the movie, the 40-year-old director, who attended art schools as an aspiring painter before turning to film, cut up pages from the graphic novel and expanded on key panels. Sometimes he'd draw the action he imagined coming before and after one of Miller's pictures; in other cases, he'd take a vertical panel and draw in the margins until it fit movie-frame proportions. But the goal was always, as he describes it, something "Frank-esque." He recalls how the studio was thrown by an instigating scene in which Gerard Butler, as the Spartan king, Leonidas, coldly (and improbably) kicks a Persian emissary down a gaping well. "They said, 'Um, the messenger wouldn't stand that close to the well, would he?' And I went, 'In real life, no. But in Frank's world? Yeah.' It took them a while to understand that it's just the material."

Miller's hard-rocking interpretation did leave the filmmakers with a quandary: how to lend their protagonists humanity when their demeanor is so, well, Spartan. One answer was to give the material an estrogen injection not found in the graphic novel, in the form of the love story between Leonidas and his queen, Gorgo (played by The Brothers Grimm's Lena Headey). Still, says Butler (Reign of Fire), "if you really wanted to analyze the Spartans, some people could quite easily describe them as crazy, murdering Nazis. And yet they're the only heroes of the movie. It was a challenge to be so uncompromisingly, unapologetically badass, and yet allow the audience into your soul."

Snyder, who's now in preproduction on the seminal superhero deconstructionist tale Watchmen, didn't hesitate to play rough on 300. (Chat rooms will no doubt soon be debating which scores higher on the harsh-o-meter — the zombie-baby execution in Snyder's Dawn of the Dead or the fate awaiting a Spartan child born sickly in 300.) "When anyone at the studio tried to water down the screenplay with a note about, 'Oh, they can't throw babies off cliffs, they need to be sympathetic,' I was like, 'Then let's not make it,'" he says. "Because the fun of the movie is that for two hours, you get to be a Spartan. No one's supposed to be that hard-core."