Behind the Scenes: Gladiator II

In 2000, Gladiator reaped more than U$465m worldwide, revitalised the historical epic, catapulted Russell Crowe to international stardom, and won five Oscars from 12 nominations, including Best Picture.

“Twenty-five years ago, we made [Gladiator] and I knew it was special,” director Ridley Scott said at a Bafta preview of the film alongside cast and crew. “It wouldn’t go away. I’ve been busy making 17 other movies and along the way, I kept being told by different generations, different nationalities, ‘I love Gladiator’. They’d seen it online. The great thing about the platform is they perpetuate all films all the time and they look as good as the day you made it.”

‘Are you not entertained?’ baited Russell Crowe’s Maximus Decimus Meridius to a baying crowd in Gladiator. With the sequel, Scott appears to be baiting the cinema audience with action set piece on top of set piece.

Producer Douglas Wick says of ancient Rome: “The audience has seen grand combat many times over and their thirst for more was unquenchable.”

Production Designer Arthur Max describes Gladiator II (G2) as “Gladiator on steroids.”

In Malta, they assembled the palace, a grand city entry arch adorned with Romulus and Remus motifs and whole blocks of ancient Rome in an area approximately 8km long. There was even a life-size statue of Pedro Pascal, playing a Roman general, on his horse.

“It would be hard to overstate how massive a production Gladiator II was,” says Producer Lucy Fisher. “The scope was overwhelming. In Morocco, there were over 80 huge tents dedicated just for the extras’ hair and makeup, and to house countless props and costumes.”

To film the Colosseum the production returned to Fort Ricasoli in Malta, the 17th-century building that had served as the site of the Colosseum set in the original film. The practical build was roughly one third the correct height of the real Colosseum, and somewhere between a quarter to a third of the span.

It could be argued that in a world of green screen and AI, this might be the last great set build in movies. Scott disagrees: “I want to build them bigger and bigger! We worked out it was cheaper to build a set than to use blue screen. Each time you add blue, it means money. There would be some element of blue in almost every frame of this film. So, what you see is real and none of it is blue screen.”

He shot the opening scene’s sea battle of Numidia in the middle of the Moroccan desert repurposing the old set from his 2005 film Kingdom of Heaven. “That was very economical,” he says.

“Ridley wanted two 150ft ships coming toward this wall where a huge battle is taking place,” says Special Effects Supervisor Neil Corbould. “But there was no water there.”

They deployed hydraulic building movers (capable of holding nuclear reactors or tanks) and used them as platforms to steer two full-scale ships over the desert to simulate an invasion by sea.

“I’d seen these [machines] on the internet and had wanted to use them for years,” says Corbould. “This was the perfect job for them.”

Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) added water, sails and the rigging for the boats as well as arrows and fireballs.

“We replaced the clear skies with ominous dark clouds. And then we put in a few birds because the way to Ridley’s heart is always to add some birds to the shot,” says VFX Supervisor Mark Bakowski.

Multicam theatre

Scott, who is known for using up to four cameras at a time, regularly used eight to 12 for this shoot, plus additional drones and crash cams. He proudly claims to have shot the film in 51 days as a result.

“I can capture Paul [Mescal’s] entrance into the Colosseum in two takes as opposed to it taking all day,” explains the director. “You have to know exactly where to place the cameras. I can do that because I’ve storyboarded it all in advance. For even the best camera operator it can be hell. I don’t rehearse with the actors, but I do rehearse with the camera operators, and I dress them in costume on the set because they could end up in a scene.”

Mescal, who plays the hero Lucius, explains what it was like for the actors. “When Lucius arrives in Rome in a caged cart going into the arena it was shot in a single set up. Ridley had mapped it out half a mile of coverage. All of that was shot before lunch. Which is absolutely absurd.”

He added: “It felt like theatre to me because the cameras are always on.”

Scott likens the technique to directing each scene like a play, with simultaneous action taking place all over the set. “It helps the actor because their performance is not interrupted [by stopping for many set-ups]. I’m going to run the scene and the camera never stops. Even if you’re not speaking [he told the actors] you’re on. I’ll be watching you.”

Denzel Washington, who plays scheming former gladiator Macrinus, agrees: “Everywhere you turn is Rome. It’s 360. That made our jobs easier than looking at markers for visual effects.”

Director of Photography John Mathieson, nominated for an Oscar for Gladiator, admitted: “I wanted to tear my hair out some days. Ridley works with a great deal of urgency. He has a lot to get done and this makes the process much faster.”

There was little conversation between the DP and the director while shooting, Mathieson says.

“I don’t do anything fancy. I place the lights and the cameras in the right positions. Some people claim we just mumble and grumble at each other on set but we don’t need to talk about the image. We’ve done this before. I know what he likes, I know what’s expected and I know it must look good.”

Calling the film “vivid, gaudy and a little camp” the DP’s visual cues were taken from the way Victorian painters romanticised neoclassical subjects.

“They painted idealised pictures of what Rome might have been,” Mathieson says. “There were goddesses in diaphanous gowns, beautiful marble stonework, opulent furniture, over-the-top feasts, and flowers. Rome was a bit of a mess by the 19th century, so it was primarily from the artists’ imaginations. These are not intellectual paintings but there is magic there.”

Enter the rhino

The Mill famously landed the UK’s first ever Oscar for VFX for its work on the original. This time around it is ILM in charge, including a gladiator-versus-rhino sequence which Scott had wanted to stage back in 2000, but was too expensive at the time to do with CGI. Though never filmed, the CG test for the sequence was included on the film’s DVD release while Corbould, who worked on the original, dug into his own archive.

“I found some old storyboards of the rhino fight,” Corbould explains. “When I showed them again to Ridley he said, ‘Let’s do it this time.’”

Building the creature was a joint effort between Corbould and prosthetics designer Conor O’Sullivan. A wrinkled skin made of thick plastic was draped over the frame that became the rhino.

“We made a mechanical rhinoceros that could shake its head, flick its nose up in the air, and move its eyes and ears,” says Corbould. “We could literally drive it around the Colosseum like a go-kart.”

Flooding the Colosseum

In another scene inspired by historical fact, the Colosseum is flooded with water and filled with tiger sharks. Gladiators fight for their lives in a staged naval battle.

“There were two obvious ways we could approach it,” says Corbould. “We could build the Colosseum in a tank or use VFX. The best solution was to do both.”

Many of the larger shots were filmed on dry land, with Bakowski and the ILM team adding water in post. That meant Corbould had to find a way to create the sensation of floating with real boats filled with actors.

They brought back the industrial building movers, using them as a base to manoeuvre and crash a pair of galleons in any way Scott requested.

“Ridley was sometimes shooting with as many as 12 cameras,” Corbould says. “You want to get something in front of each of the cameras, whether it was boats or explosions or smoke or crashing water.”

The colour and depth of the water provoked debate. “We did many iterations, from the canals of Venice to Ridley’s LA swimming pool,” Corbould says. “The sharks, relatively speaking, went to plan but certainly didn’t make things easier.”

Sound

More than 500 extras were brought in to play the Romans who crowded the Colosseum, with thousands added digitally.

“We wanted the actors to have as realistic an experience of the arena as possible,” says Production Sound Mixer Stèphane Bucher. “We outfitted the set with huge speakers and assembled a wide variety of crowd noises to create the ambience of the real games.”

Matthew Collinge and Danny Sheehan, founders of London-based sound studio Phaze UK, supervised sound editing and mixing.

To replicate the sound of 10,000 spectators, they recorded background players on the set, built that into layers, then added recordings of cheers and jeers from real-life bullfights, cricket matches, rugby and baseball games.

“We transformed them into a cohesive roar using a Kyma workstation,” says Sheehan. “Another device helped shape the roar of the crowd making it seem even bigger and louder.”

In the battle sequences, actors were outfitted with two mics concealed in their costumes, positioned to record dialogue no matter which way their heads were turned.

Nonetheless, “it was almost impossible to capture the dialogue audibly, but I take my hat off to Stèphane,” says Paul Massey, Re-recording Sound Mixer. “He worked miracles so that we could minimise any ADR and preserve the original performances.”

Baboons go ape

The gladiators also fight vicious baboons in the arena. It was an idea that stemmed from Scott’s viewing of a zoo documentary.

“I’d seen a documentary about a wildlife park. There was ice cream, a tea shop and into shot came some baboons and some lady went up to try and pat it. These are carnivores. It will tear your arms off.”

Envisioning a scene in which the gladiators face a troop of baboons, Scott says: “Actors have to have an opponent to get the physicality and movement of the fight. So, I cast the smallest stuntmen and women we could possibly find. They are in black tights with black masks and Nikki (Stunt Coordinator, Nikki Berwick) made them short crutches that fit under their armpit so they could move on all-fours.”

Like the first film, the hero is fighting to restore democracy and honour in opposition to tyranny. Given the proximity of the film’s 22 November release date to the US presidential election, could the story be viewed as carrying any political connotations?

“Are you kidding?” Scott responds. “A billionaire wants to be the leader of the universe! Evil is evil. A sword will kill you just like an atomic bomb will kill millions. Death is death and where we are together today [as a society] we’ve really got to reign it and sort it out.”