Looking back to, well, it was about 1980 that the series was conceived,
at that time in the academic world,
there was a strong feeling that this was just a myth
and the greatest of all the scholars on Homer had written this thing
saying "The Trojan War lost again"
and really poured scorn on the idea
that there was a historical Trojan War
and really attacked everybody who wanted to believe in this tale
and believe in Achilles and Helen of Troy
as just fantasists, you know.
He had also pointed out that, for all the excavations that had taken place
over the previous 100 years at the site we call Troy in Turkey,
nothing had been found to prove
that such a war had taken place.
So the mood at that time among the experts
was that it was really far too dangerous to start meddling in these things,
and I think if you're going to do a serious TV series,
you have to take that on board.
If you start dealing in fantasy to begin with, you are really on a sticky wicket.
The journey we undertook wasn't an epic journey in the sense of trekking through jungles
and over mountains and all that kind of thing,
but it was an epic journey in terms of the complexity of the story.
We made six hour-long films in the end on this.
It's a very intricate story that involves archaeology, myth,
history, landscape, geography.
It stretches from Egypt to the Black Sea,
from Greece even to the destroyed museum in Berlin
where we went searching for the remains of the earliest excavation of Troy
that were in the cellars when the British bombed it.
There's a wonderful scene right at the beginning of the series
with the German archaeologist when we go down into the cellars in Berlin
and we find the stuff Schliemann had found at Troy
but smashed to bits in the bombing of 1945.
So the journey was an epic journey in terms of the ideas and the complexity of it,
and it was a fantastically intriguing thing to do.
I love films where you don't have an expert just telling you this is what happened
and the audience doesn't have to engage in that.
I like films where you take the audience on ajourney, on a search,
it's very, very exciting,
and that's the way history actually works in reality.
There's no final answer to most historical problems.
All you do is show the audience how you get towards some kind of solution.
I think that was what was so exciting about the series,
and I think that's what engaged the public.
It really was a mystery story and an adventure.
One of the things we were trying to do was to show how the poetic tradition,
say in Homer's "lliad" and "Odyssey",
actually survived until today.
And we searched all over Europe
for surviving bards
who told oral epics handed down orally, who were still performing.
And the best we came up with was right over by the Armenian border
in the far east of Turkey -
and in those days that was a difficult place to get to.
In fact, a difficult place even to get permission to film in.
I remember particularly the excitement of taking the trains all the way across to Erzurum
and then driving almost as far as the Iranian and Armenian borders
to this smoky, damp, dark little railway town,
and walking down a dirt street at night to this little caf^ m,
and there in all his splendour, meeting somebody
with all his badges, his felt cap and his traditional costume
who really might have been straight out of a scene from hundreds of years ago.
So those little moments were very exciting.
The other great logistical thing which still has left its mark on my imagination today
was of course in those days, the Berlin Wall was still up
and Europe was still divided
and all the great archaeological material and the cuneiform tablets
which were the diplomatic archive from this time,
from the Hittite Empire in Anatolia,
they were all stored in East Berlin.
And every time you wanted to go and film in East Berlin,
you had to go through Checkpoint Charlie.
And I'll always remember those rather bleak winter's days
in the cobbled streets of East Berlin.
It was like a Len Deighton or John Le Carr^m novel.
You took the overground railway, you crossed at Checkpoint Charlie,
and went through all these ludicrous checks,
but it still had a really edgy atmosphere,
with the armed guards and the security and
the suspicion and the atmosphere of paranoia,
in order to get through to these places
where the physical material from Troy was stored.
So that's my chief memory of the filming,
apart from those wonderful days in the Aegean Sea,
sailing on boats between the islands looking for sites in Homer,
all that was great.
The first excavator of Troy, the site of Troy, was Heinrich Schliemann.
He died more than 100 years ago
and he's often been described as the father of archaeology,
and at the same time he's been described as a liar and a charlatan,
a crook... and a thief and a vandal.
And all those feelings come in to play.
This was a man who... a self-made millionaire,
learned many languages,
he went to the California gold rush,
he made fortunes and lost fortunes,
but who later created this romance about his life
that from his childhood he'd been obsessed with the discovery of Troy.
I'm not sure that that story was ever really true.
But he did in his retirement devote his time and his vast fortune
to excavating the site.
So it's a very romantic story and he is an extraordinary character
but a very flawed character.
There's no question that he did lie and cheat his way around Europe
and probably through archaeological science as well,
and there's still a big debate about
whether he fiddled some of his evidence.
The chief thing is that he put his money where his mouth
was in terms of finding the site of Troy and excavating it,
but in the process he virtually destroyed the site.
Archaeology is a strange science.
It destroys the evidence in finding it.
Once you've pulled the evidence out of the ground, that's it.
You're left to rely entirely on the archaeologists' word for what happened
and the way the archaeologists recorded it.
And in those days, archaeology had just started as a science.
Schliemann didn't record his material properly at the beginning
and he had this idea in his head of what Troy might have looked liked
and, obviously, he was reading Homer's poems like the "lliad"
and he had this idea of some great prehistoric city
with palaces and fortresses and towers.
And when he excavated this mound, Hisarlik, near the Dardanelles,
he found nothing like that.
The whole citadel at Troy is only a couple of hundred yards across.
And he believed also that it must be deep down,
that the event must have taken place so far in the past that the upper parts of the city,
built later by classical Greeks and Romans,
must be far above the Bronze Age prehistoric city which he dreamed was Homer's.
So he smashed his way through that mound.
There was nearly 100 feet deep of human habitation debris,
and the irony is that he actually destroyed
the very thing that he was looking for.
He went right down to levels
from the second, third millennium BC
and didn't realise that he'd actually smashed away the great walls
that surrounded the real citadel, if there was a real citadel.
So I think anybody who looks at Schliemann today
must mingle admiration with a terrible frustration
that he smashed to bits the very thing that we want to know about now,
dug away thousands of tons of debris.
It would be very interesting,
for example, if somebody would finance it, if you could go through his rubbish tips,
because I bet you'd probably find the one thing everybody would love to find,
which is Bronze Age clay tablets with writing on them
from the archive of Bronze Age Troy.
I'm sure that did exist on the site
and Schliemann probably destroyed it without ever noticing.
Homer's story has really been
the most important single myth
in the literature, culture, music, drama of the Western world
from the ancient Greeks right until today.
You've only got to look at everything from
Virgil to the Greek tragedians to Chaucer
and Shakespeare's "Troilus and Cressida",
to all the great writers of the 20th century and to Hollywood.
Any number of Hollywood films on the story and there's more coming.
So it's affected our imagination in a most powerful way.
It's partly because, I think, the story of Troy
and the tragedy of this beautiful city
and its royal family who were all killed, enslaved,
the city destroyed,
wiped out...
Especially in modern times, but really all the way through European history,
it's been almost an image of civilisation.
The Roman writer Seneca has this wonderful passage where he says,
"If you ask me for an image of human civilisation,
"I'll show you the sack of a beautiful city."
It's about the fragility of human life.
It's about human hopes and dreams,
the characters are larger-than-life characters:
Achilles, Hector,
Helen of Troy, paris.
All the great characters have the power to move us:
The noble Hector who knows he's going to die,
he knows his children are going to be killed,
and they fight even though they know that
the cause... in a sense, they've been betrayed.
Helen wasn't really worth fighting for, on one level.
So it's got everything in terms of human drama,
which is why Hollywood still wants to do a new version today.
So it grips our imagination.
The second thing that has gripped our imagination
since Byron's time, in fact, since even earlier,
is, well, did it exist?
Is there a real story behind that? Was there a real Troy?
Were these real people?
And, since archaeology began as a science,
that's been one thing people have most wanted to try.
And therefore, each generation of archaeologists:
Schliemann, then Dorpfeld -
Schliemann's assistant who did another excavation -
then Carl Blegen, the Americans in the '30s,
then Manfred Korfmann in the 1990s, who's still there...
They're all going back to this site
and in a sense, they've all gone and tried to find what they hoped to find, you know.
However much you say as an archaeologist,
"I'm not interested in the myth,
"I'm just interested in this place."
But the myth is so powerful that you can't help but be ensnared by it.
And certainly the earlier generations of archaeologists,
they went looking for that myth and its historical truth
and they found what they wanted to find.
I think all great literature, no matter how old it is,
no matter how far back in time it was written,
still holds lessons for the present day.
Homer's "lliad"
is one of the greatest works of literature of the world.
It's the first great work of literature
of the Western tradition.
And its theme is war
and what happens to people in war
and it's brilliant in its detail.
It's cruel, unsparing.
It has no illusions about what human beings do under those kind of pressures.
It opens up how people suffer in war,
how non-combatants and the women and children suffer.
It shows you how brave people face death.
It's a most powerful and wonderful work.
And I think it still has great relevance today.
You've only got to look at the last few years
with the tragedies in Iraq and Bosnia and Rwanda
to see we've not escaped any of the predicaments
that Homer was depicting 2,700 years ago.
War has been the condition of human history.
The point we were trying to make really was that our own time -
and we were making this more than 20 years ago,
when Europe was still divided as a result of the Second World War -
and you felt the power of those tragedies still all around you.
East Berlin was still wrecked from those times.
And the point we were trying to make,
also looking out over Gallipoli, which you can see from the site of Troy,
is that the 20th century was the most destructive in human history
perhaps in terms of the losses of people in war and the cruelties of war.
I mean, the worst moment in the history of the Western tradition, really,
was the generation or two before us
with the genocides across Europe and the Holocaust
and the things that were done in Africa and other parts of the world.
It was a horrendous time.
And I think Homer has those fundamental things to show us
about what human beings do in times like that.
Nothing has changed in that, and I think if you were gonna choose a few works of literature,
if the world was gonna end and we had to send a spaceship off
with just a few works of art and literature to show
what the human race had achieved in its few thousand years of being "civilised",
you'd have to send the "lliad" as one of the greatest.
I think if I was shooting the series now,
and I would love to do a new version of it - you look back on these things.
I was a... I was a kind of relative newcomer in television at that time.
I'm talking about the early '80s.
And, you know, when you're that age...
...there's a sort of devil-may-care, let's get out on the road
and shoot what happens to us and have a bit of fun!
And you could never reproduce the sort of youthful fun of it.
But there are things that you'd probably do differently.
Since then, I have made quite a few series,
using landscape, the living cultures, adventure, travel,
mixing with the history,
bringing the life of the past out of the landscape.
And there are moments through the "Trojan" films where we do that.
I can remember searching for one of those sites in Homer
that sent men to Troy which was a little village
called Thisbe of the Many pigeons,
and we went to Thisbe in Boeotia today
and there was this old lady by the well
and I went up to her and said in halting Greek,
"Are there any pigeons around here?
"Homer says it was full of pigeons,"
and she directed us to a cliff
and you clap your hands and thousands of pigeons come out of the cliff.
And she directed us to the Mycenaean ancient Greek fortress as well.
In moments like that, the thing comes alive.
If I were doing it again, I would have made more of that kind of thing.
When we did the series of films on Alexander the Great,
or we followed the route of the Conquistadors,
it was astonishing how living traditions were still alive.
And sometimes in the most dramatic circumstances.
And I think I probably would've looked for more continuity still
with living rituals and traditions, especially in Anatolia.
Some of these sacred sites stay sacred for 3,000 years.
And there are references in Homer you could pick up on the ground
which are still revered,
even where Christianity is gone
and the Greek language is gone, in Turkey, for example.
But the ancient sites still have a holy aura.
I think I would've done a bit more of that.
As for other things, you know, you're kind of... you were young!
You look at yourself and think,
"God, why didn't I get my hair cut?
"Why did I wearjeans that tight?"
I mean, the jeans were so tight, they became a Trivial pursuit question!
The most exciting thing, I think,
about the Troy story has been the re-excavation of the site which started
at the end of the '80s and really worked up steam in the mid-'90s and is still on at the moment.
So, when we made the film, you could look back at Schliemann's excavations,
Dorpfeld's and then Carl Blegen's in the '30s.
And we ended with Carl Blegen's trenches
being closed up before the Second World War.
But now there's been a massive and scientific re-excavation of the site.
The discoveries have been, well, sensational, to be honest.
One of the most important things is
that they've discovered that the site
that we call Troy
is only the royal citadel
and that there was a major lower town,
probably 7-800 yards across from one side to another,
which in Bronze Age terms is quite big.
Not that much smaller than the Roman and Greek town that existed on the site.
All sorts of interesting new stuff has come out on that,
with a clear indication of where the Greek epic imagined the Greek camp to have been,
which actually was over to the west on a bay between wide headlands,
just as Homer describes it, called Besika Bay,
opposite the island of Tenedos.
So everybody had conceived of the war and the battles in the wrong direction.
And this new discovery - and they've even found mounds with Mycenaean Greek cremations
of presumably warriors close to the seashore -
means that we've really got a sense of how Homer imagined it
and indeed how the story was passed down.
The other really great thing about it, which gives me particular pleasure,
is that back when we started making this, more than 20 years ago...
...I looked at the... There's a diplomatic archive that survives from this time,
from the Hittite Empire, based in the middle of Turkey.
One of the great kingdoms of the time.
The whole of episode five in the series is taken up with this.
And they were on a par with Ancient Egypt, Ramses the Great and Babylon,
and they had diplomatic relations and
they sent ambassadors and exchanged letters.
They were one of the main kingdoms of the time.
And in the Hittite diplomatic archive, there's a whole series of letters
relating to another great king somewhere out to the west.
And this king was the king of a place called
Ahhiwa or Ahhiyawa.
And Homer calls the Greeks Achaeans.
There's still a centre of Greece called Achaea.
And in Homeric Greek, that will be Achawoi.
Now, common sense suggested that these people were indeed the Mycenaean Greeks.
Homer remembered Agamemnon, King of Mycenae,
as being overlord of the whole of Greece
at the time of the Trojan War,
the king who led all the kings of Greece in this great expedition to Troy.
And here in the diplomatic archive, in the middle of Turkey,
from just the right period, 1280s, '70s, '60s BC,
is the story of these struggles over on the shore of the Aegean
between the western kingdoms of Anatolia,
who were under the Hittite Empire,
and this great king of this mysterious kingdom to the west.
Now, at the point we started this, all the scholars were saying,
"No, it can't possibly be,
"you can't do that seriously."
I got attacked by the greatest scholar of the Homeric text, Sir Moses Finley,
saying, "Oh, it's all unbelievable."
And I am a great believer that in history, common sense takes you a long way.
And common sense said that these must be the Greeks.
The revolution in the last 20 years
is that it's now accepted,
as it surely is correct, that these WERE the Greeks.
So it means that not only have we got the archaeology of Troy
pinned down much more accurately but we've actually got a series of texts
which are letters sometimes between the king of the Greeks and the king of the Hittites
about their conflicts along the shores of the Aegean,
including the area of Troy itself.
So everything that one speculated, I say with a certain amount of diffidence
but with a certain amount of pleasure, has turned out very likely to be true.
Whether it means that the Trojan War literally happened in the way that
we imagined it is another matter, but that there is a real context for that story
I think is now clear.
That's all very exciting. And I think especially the excavations of Troy itself, you know.
The Germans under Manfred Korfmann have consolidated all the stuff
that Schliemann excavated all those years ago.
They've dismantled the walls and repaired them.
It's a much more beautiful site to look at now.
And they've given us an image now of a royal citadel
from prehistory, even with anti-chariot ditches,
like anti-tank ditches almost,
around the outside of the royal city.
It's started to come to life in the most wonderful way
that one would never quite have hoped for 20 years ago.
Hollywood's approaching Homer again, very soon, I think.
Brad pitt as Achilles is about to hit our movie screens.
And of course, there's been a lot of bad history in Hollywood recently.
But I don't think that's a relevant sort of worry,
really, with the Homeric story.
I mean, we don't know what the history really was.
It's Homer that is the model and
all those who've reworked the Homeric story since.
So I don't particularly mind what Brad pitt does with Achilles
or Angelina Jolie does with Helen of Troy.
I think what it does is open Homer up to a new generation of viewers and readers.
And that's the main thing. I think it's contact with these wonderful stories.
I remember when we made this series, all that time ago,
we did a sequence with penguin Books in their printing works in Suffolk,
showing the "lliad" running off the printing press.
I think the penguin "lliad"
had been their biggest seller of the penguin Classics
up to that time, with more than a million sold.
And I remember them phoning up
and saying that in the course of the six weeks of the series,
I think they had to do two reprints of the text
because so many people saw it on the screen and went back to the text.
And I'm sure when Brad pitt comes on the screen
and Hollywood's Troy appears,
that it will have the same effect.
You know, it's just one of the greatest stories in the history of the world.
And it's thrilling and moving
and I'm sure a whole new generation of kids, especially,
will look back at that story
and go and read it in one edition or another.
And the story will carry on being reworked and reimagined.
It will be passed on to the next generation,
which is after all what has happened
since... probably since the 13th century BC.