“300: Rise of an Empire” is taking on one of the most iconic movies in the past decade. Director Zack Snyder created the perfect backdrop for the Frank Miller graphic novel adaptation.

Now, Snyder has moved on to bigger projects. He is tasked with helming the flagship movie of Warner Bros, ‘Batman Vs Superman.’ The highly anticipated sequel, ‘300: Rise of An Empire” was directed by Noam Murro, an Israeli native whose previous directing job was “Smart People.” However. He built a reputation with his “Impossible” ad campaign for Adidas. This was his work that gave him the nod for the 300 sequel.

From an interview with dga.com, Murro talks about that tagline and how it applied to him with regards to this opportunity: “I often think, ‘Is that a good thing or a bad thing?’ If you want to look at it philosophically, it’s very interesting that everything is possible. You want me to show you New York City underwater? Sure, let me show it to you. You can do that in a reasonably convincing way, and within means. But it’s not necessarily a great thing that anything can be done visually. Maybe in the past you’d have to think a little harder about what you were doing.”

“The first one was incredibly successful at defining a genre that we hadn’t really seen before. The challenge here was how you go into it again. I think taking something like 300 and finding a new way to operatically say it, while keeping a tie to the old one, was very interesting. CGI wasn’t an issue for me—it was more the question of how you aesthetically and thematically come into this world and offer something new. How do you give it an operatic scale, so that it feels like there is an evolution and we aren’t just milking the cow again?”

Murro’s clear vision can be seen in the trailer. Snyder’s influence is still unmistakably present, but he wants to place more emphasis on the storytelling since the impact of the groundbreaking genre has lapsed.

“300: Rise of An Empire” depicts how Themistokles unites the Greeks in order to battle the Persians in a different battle arena: the sea. It opens on March 7, 2014.