Rated Yet to be classified Opens Thursday

Could Brad Pitt have been cast as Achilles, the fearsome Greek "killing machine" in the new $US200 million ($274 million) retelling of the Trojan wars story, without John Woo, Jackie Chan and other choreographic luminaries of the Hong King film business? Even buff, studly and ripped to the max, Pitt's rangy Achilles concedes quite a few kilos to most of his opponents, including his movie-long nemesis Hector, prince of Troy, played by Eric Bana. What to do? Give Brad one or two Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon moves that would deck the bigger guys.

Early on in Troy, Achilles has to kill a warrior giant named Boagrius - played by Nathan Jones, a 208cm-tall Australian body building champ from Surfers Paradise - and manages what might be the first kung-fu leap of the BC calendar. The gods, it seems, were not pleased by this fleet-footed choreography. Brad came down hard and - bitter irony, this - injured his Achilles tendon. "Look at his face when he lands," says director Wolfgang Petersen. "There's a second you can see something's wrong. Great for the scene, terrible for the movie. Brad was hobbling around for months and we had to come back later to finish the last scene - which, ironically, was another big one-on-one combat scene, the one between Brad and Eric. We shot the first few frames, when they size each other up, in September. But it wasn't 'til December we shot the rest."

It was the pits. Not surprisingly, Brad used a slightly less showy leap to score his second showcase victory, against that other Australian, Bana. After that it was Achilles 2, Australians 0, and it was all over for the once-mighty Trojans. Asian martial arts wasn't the only current film infatuation Petersen used to connect his 3000-year-old, often-told story about Greeks bearing gifts with an audience large enough to make it profitable. The film is so in tune with modern sensibilities that it even has a beach landing scene as gruesome as Saving Private Ryan's big opener - think wooden barges hitting the coast under a shower of arrows instead of amphibious vehicles under gunfire.

A severed limb is a severed limb whichever way you cut it. Petersen also rather deftly rifles through the casts of eminent director David Lean's trove of 1960s epics. King Priam, the ageing patriarch of Troy, is played by Peter O'Toole, Lean's Lawrence of Arabia in 1962. And Julie Christie, Lara from Lean's Dr Zhivago, plays Brad Pitt's goddess of a mother, Thetis, who sees in the stars that Troy will be her son's Falujah.

Doing Troy was a second chance for Petersen - the man behind Air Force One, A Perfect Storm and Das Boot - to get on the everything-old-is-new-again bandwagon. Petersen says he was offered Gladiator - the Russell Crowe film that prompted the studios to take another look at chariots, sandals and guys in skirts - before Ridley Scott took it. Petersen passed on it as it seemed too "retro". "It seems to come in waves," he says. "It was very big in the 1950s and 1960s with all these religious big epics, Ben Hur and Spartacus, Quo Vadis? And I loved what Ridley Scott did with Gladiator. When I heard about The Iliad, I was excited. I learned Ancient Greek at school, and we read it in Greek." To make it a gritty enough narrative for modern audiences, Petersen had his writer, David Benioff, jettison a lot of Homer's material about the interaction of the gods with the mortals. In their hands, it's a decidedly more secular "a man's gotta do" narrative.

In Troy, Paris (Orlando Bloom) knows Helen (Diane Kruger) is married to the Spartan king Menelaus when they get it on. In The Iliad, he's none the wiser as the goddesses forget to mention it. And the Trojan Horse bit doesn't come from Homer at all, but from Virgil. "I definitely had to cut back on the role of the gods," Benioff says. "It makes for a more compelling and modern story as a battle of wills to be between Achilles and Hector."

In Troy, Achilles's major motivation is what Benioff and Petersen present as the chance to make himself a star of Greek mythology. Who better than a modern icon such as Brad Pitt to make the quest for celebrity status credible? Which brings us back to the point of looking the part. "It is very much about physicality, and Achilles had to be a half-god," he says. "I remember our discussions early on, when I said, 'Brad, we all know that you do really like to hide that you are such a good-looking guy. Not here. The hair has to be nice and long and blond, and your body has to be pretty awesome.'"

In Petersen's quest for a more perfect Brad, Pitt says the director wasn't above playing off the results of his workout regimen against those of Bana. "The emphasis of physicality made perfect sense to me because, you know, those ancient Greeks loved to get out of their clothes," Pitt says. "What I didn't realise, until I saw the film, was that I was the only one taking off as much and doing these raunchy love scenes."

At least, when he started work on Troy, he didn't have to worry about a rival Achilles. Colin Farrell and Leonardo DiCaprio, both cast as Alexander the Great in duelling Hollywood epics, must be wondering how stripped down they'll have to get to win an empire.