From the Herald:

Meanwhile, Yorkshireman Dave Ellis – who is in charge of the French defence – has revealed the team found strength to beat the All Blacks when they faced each other in 2007 by adopting a Spartan siege mentality.

He told the Daily Mail that the Spartans against a million soldiers theme depicted in the movie 300 was particularly helpful.

“What we did was get a poster from the film itself and we transposed Sebastien Chabal’s head on to the body of their leader (played by Gerard Butler), and on the bottom we said it was the French Federation and the 30 instead of the 300. We used some of the speeches from that, the boys took it on board and it galvanised them.”

Someone really ought to tell the French team what happened to the 300 Spartans at Thermopylae.