Blazing saddles

the Trojans were convinced that the horse was a peace offering from the Greeks

5 April 2012

THE STORY The Greeks have beseiged Troy for nine years, but have failed to enter the city. So they construct a horse large enough to hide soldiers inside. A Greek spy within the city convinces the sceptical Trojans that the horse is a peace offering from the Greeks, who have simply sailed away and abandoned the siege. The Trojans begin celebrating their victory, and most of the inhabitants are comatose from alcohol when a hatch in the belly of the horse opens...

Inside the horse lurk the bravest Greek warriors, led by Odysseus, played by Sean Bean. The film deals with all the events of Homer's The Iliad, detailing the fall of Troy, but also spills over into the sequel, The Odyssey, in which Odysseus attempts to return home after the destruction of the city.

SIZE MATTERS The horse that appears in the film seems vast - big enough to house the small army that pours out of its interior under cover of darkness. The model was, in fact, only 37ft high and 12ft wide. This small-scale version was used for filming, and the image was 'enlarged' using special effects similar to those used to create the 5ft hobbits and 9ft orcs in The Lord of the Rings.
PLASTER CAST The horse in the film isn't actually made of wood. Set designers on Troy employed hi-tech construction methods to replicate the effect of carpentry, with painted plaster laid over moulded sections of fibreglass. The structure is held together with a rigid frame of steel struts.
GRAND DESIGNThe horse took eight weeks to build. Twenty Maltese plasterers, welders and painters worked on the beast, overseen by six English construction experts. The horse is welltravelled, too - the moulds that were used to make its fibreglass 'planks' were made in England before being shipped to Malta for the shoot.
TWIN SET The film's Trojan Horse actually bursts through the gates of Troy on two continents - first on the huge set in Malta, and a second time on another set in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico. The horse was dismantled once filming wrapped in Malta, then transported by plane to the new set, where it formed the centrepiece of some of the later battle sequences during the fall of Troy.
DID IT EXIST? Scholars doubt whether the Trojan Horse ever existed. Although it is the turning point in Homer's The Iliad, in the 130 years archaeologists have been investigating the site of Troy, in modern-day Turkey, there has never been any evidence uncovered to support the idea that a wooden horse was instrumental in the city's downfall.

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