Zack Snyder’s films may be divisive, but everyone who has ever worked with him seems keen to do so again, from Justice League cast members who continue to praise him long after the movie has come out, bombed, and been forgotten to cast members on Sucker Punch and Watchmen who have continued to return to his projects again and again.
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Add 300 star Gerard Butler to the long list of former collaborators singing Snyder’s praises as a person, regardless of what you think of him as a filmmaker.
“I’ll tell you what he gave me, and it was more about my humanity as an actor on set rather than necessarily performance,” Butler explained during an interview in support of his new film Hunter Killer. “A lot of what we did together in that movie was learning on the fly. None of us had ever worked with that amount of green screen. I don’t think many people had worked with that amount of green screen, and it was a quick learning process of coming up with these massive ideas and having to minimize it, internalize it, and make it all truthful. What I loved about Z is that I’d never met a guy with such passion. From the second I met him, we had a cup of coffee, we started talking about the movie, and the next minute, the two of us were up and jumping about. I’m at this coffee shop and I’m like ‘This is how the Spartans would walk,’ and he’s like ‘yeah! Like this, and carrying this!’ But more than that was his humanity as a director. He was so cool. He never lost his temper once, and that was a stressful movie. I remember this one time, there was this guy and he dropped something and it broke and smashed everywhere. It was a crew member, and they were holding up the whole set, and most other directors would have had words to say and let them know. Zack deliberately went over there and made a joke with him, just to let him know. You saw them slack, you saw their shoulders relax, and I found him like that the whole way through the movie. He was also so athletic and talented, he’s the kind of guy who would be like ‘you take that spear and you’ve got to throw it through that X,’ and I’d say ‘How am I supposed to…?’ And he’d go, ‘like this!’ Through the middle of the X, rips the curtain, out the other side, hits the wall.”
Butler’s Hunter Killer is in theaters now. 300 is available on DVD, Blu-ray, and VOD. Zack Snyder’s next film is an adaptation of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead.
