Zack Snyder’s schedule for the next few years seems pretty locked down. He’s got Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice opening this month, and once he finishes doing press for that film, he’ll be moving into directing Justice League: Part One and Part Two. Does he have any plans to make a film that isn’t related to superheroes or comics books? It just so happens, he had an idea that seems pretty far afield of his other work, but he thinks he can make it right in his wheelhouse.

Speaking to Bloomberg Business, Snyder was asked about what other films he would like to make, and he said he wants to make a movie about George Washington in the style of 300.


He has a picture in his office of the Revolutionary War hero crossing the icy Delaware on his way to decimate the British in the Battle of Trenton. “We were talking about it,” Snyder says. “The first thing we asked was, well, how are we going to make it look? I pointed at this painting. It looks like 300. It’s not that hard."

And that’s Snyder in a nutshell: take the artistry of someone else and find a way to translate it to motion pictures. I sometimes honestly wonder if Sndyer would still have become a phenomenon and credited as a visual wunderkind if he wasn’t standing on the shoulders of Frank Miller or Dave Gibbons. What’s the line between inspiration for Snyder and wholesale using someone else’s framing, color palette, etc. and then translating it from a 2D to a 3D medium?  Does it matter?

With this Washington project, I'm curious if he would make an entire film using the visual palette conjured by Emanuel Leutze’s painting, or would he do it with the speed-ramping, debris-filled style of 300? It will be a while until we find out since Justice League: Part Two isn’t slated to open until 2019.

washington-crossing-the-delaware
Image via Google Art Project