INTO THE BATTLE
JUST A FEW weeks before the cameras were set to roll on Gladiator, director Ridley Scott and his leading man Russell Crowe sat down for a pre-production pow-wow with highpowered Hollywood executives. The clock was ticking and there was trouble ahead.
Released in May 2000 to a fanfare of critical acclaim, it would, later, dominate the Oscars: nominated for 12, it won five, including Best Picture and Best Actor. But before taking its place in cinematic history, there was a long, arduous road to navigate. It would involve changing everything up, from the lead character’s name (originally Narcissus) to major story beats. It would, tragically, include the demise of Oliver Reed (cast as grizzled gladiator trainer Proximo), who died from a heart attack in a pub on a day off from filming. It would see Crowe producing remarkable levels of snot while sobbing holding onto a rubber leg, grappling with an unruly barnet, and filming opposite real — and dangerously unpredictable — tigers.
The conceit is as striking now as it was then: a Roman general who becomes a slave, then becomes a gladiator, seeking vengeance for the murder of his wife and son. Starting off with an original screenplay by David Franzoni, and then input from heavyweights John Logan and William Nicholson, the rewriting process would continue throughout, and it was the director and actor who shaped, honed and rewrote many of the scenes they were about to film. This, then, is the story of Gladiator, a movie still referred to by both Scott and Crowe as the greatest bullet-dodging in the history of cinema.
“Are you not entertained?” Maximus memorably asks after one brutally vivid round of Colosseum carnage. Oh yes. We most certainly were. Twenty years on, exclusively for Empire, Crowe looks back at a masterpiece.
Let’s go back to 1999. You’ve made L.A. Confidential for Curtis Hanson and Michael Mann’s The Insider. And then Ridley offers you Gladiator. What was your reaction?
The producer Walter Parkes went to Ridley with a single image: the [Jean-léon] Gérôme painting [‘Pollice Verso’], and Rid said, “No matter what is in the script, I want to make this movie.” When the producers approached me, they said, “We don’t want you to read the script, we want you to engage on a single sentence: ‘It’s 184 AD, you’re a Roman general, you are being directed by Ridley Scott.”’ And on the basis of that sentence I met with Ridley. I had just come off The Insider so I was really super out of shape. I was also bald, because I’d needed a wig for [Jeffrey] Wigand’s hair. When I walked in he was like, “Holy shit!” But he showed me that painting and the mathematics of how he was going to create the Colosseum with a set and CGI. The budget was $103 million and though I’d worked on big films before, nothing of that scale. If you crossed the $100 million mark at the time it was a big deal — there was no room for failure. I was in on the basis of how I got along with Ridley because he is super honest, sometimes to his detriment, and he was telling me more about the problems we faced, rather than trying to do a snow job or super-sales me.
What were the problems?
It’s really hard to explain, but there’s nothing about the film that Ridley ended up creating that was on the table at the beginning. Ridley was like, “You’re giving me two acts — you are giving me ‘general’ and ‘gladiator’ and asking me to make a fully arced story.” So we needed a second act, for a start. Really, at the time all we had was a simple idea that we both loved and believed in but that was it.
So there were lots of meetings about the script?
I remember arguing with 12 executives in Rid’s office about the name of the character. I was like, “Narcissus? What are you talking about? It connects to narcissism, for a start. Nobody is going to give a fuck about a character called Narcissus.” I mean, come on. I also remember talking about Marcus Aurelius and what a goldmine he would be in terms of thematics. And everybody else in the room, apart from Rid, was like, “What the fuck is he talking about?” They didn’t know that Marcus Aurelius was a philosopher. So I bought every one of ’em a copy of Meditations. I still have a quote
from it on the wall in my office: ‘Nothing happens to anybody which he is not fitted by nature to bear.’ Every piece of shit that was thrown at me, every challenge on that set, I would refer myself to that quote [laughs].
Would you be working on the script during shooting?
[Laughs] Every day, but before we started shooting there were these meetings and Rid was getting more and more irate because he felt like everybody was wasting the time he had to solve these problems. It was like, “I can’t do this by committee. If you and I agree on it, then fuck everybody else’s opinions.” He would work with his people, and they are great people — production design, cameras, costumes, all of that — and every night I’d go to his office or his house and work on it and really, we began to throw out what we didn’t need. And after a couple of weeks we had about 21 pages left.
Ridley was like, “We have to go ahead and have faith that we will work all this shit out.” And that’s what we did.
Let’s talk about the cast. Tell us about the ‘Four Horsemen Of The Apocalypse…’ [Laughs]. That’s what Ridley called Richard [Harris], Oliver Reed, David Hemmings [the Colosseum’s master of ceremonies] and, initially, Peter O’toole [as Senator Gracchus]. But Peter wouldn’t do it. I think it was offered at a time when he’d only take a role if it fell during the school holidays because of his parental commitments. So Rid cast Derek [Jacobi], who was fantastic.
You became great friends with Richard Harris...
From 1999 when we met on Gladiator until 2002 [when Harris died] there wasn’t a week, ten days tops, that went by without us being in some kind of contact. He was a great man, a great friend and a great actor.
Let’s talk about Oliver Reed. What was that relationship like for you?
I gravitate towards company who enjoy a drink, not those who just enjoy getting drunk. There’s quite a distinct difference. [Long pause] I don’t want to speak ill of him in any way. I didn’t know him well enough to know where his demons came from, but he definitely had them and he took against me from our very first reading. He’d had quite a lot of drink before he arrived, and the script was a mess. It was just painful, like having your teeth pulled without a needle, to hear really good actors reading that script. I kept reassuring everyone that the lines would be rewritten and get stronger. We got
through it, but Oliver just had a thing from the start. He didn’t like me, which is just the way it goes sometimes.
But he was delivering on set?
In Morocco, Oliver contributed a lot — he brought a lot of ideas to Ridley. As I said, he was in a dark place when he was doing that movie. But that darkness wasn’t about laziness or lack of care: he was still charging at that character every day. And when he died, Ridley didn’t want to give up what he had, so he came up with a way of gracefully finishing and honouring his contribution.
Two other key cast members were Connie Nielsen and Joaquin Phoenix [as siblings Lucilla and Commodus]. How did it work with them?
Both were fantastic. It’s funny with me and Joaquin, we’re not in each other’s pockets, we don’t see each other very much at all, but it’s actually really dangerous when we do because the only thing we want to do is just sit together, talk and drink, and the rest of the world can fuck off. I have a deep love for Joaquin. He should have won the Oscar 20 years ago and there are probably two or three other performances he should have won for, too.
There’s a haunting, emotional scene when Maximus returns to his farm in Spain to discover that his wife and son have been murdered and strung up on a crucifix. It encapsulates the key themes — a longing
for home, vengeance, and Max longing to join them in the afterlife — that run through the rest of the film. Could you talk about that sequence?
At first Max was just going to kneel and break down in front of the crucifix. I said, “Rid, I’ve thrown away an opportunity to be the emperor of Rome, I’ve crossed Europe from the north of Italy to Spain on horses that have died underneath me, I’ve done all that to get to my wife and I’ve failed.” And he goes, “Yeah, I know, man, but I’ve only got the legs.” I’m like, “What?” He goes, “Are you not fucking hearing me? I keep telling you I’ve only got a pair of legs.” So I say, “It doesn’t matter, I’ll kiss her toes.” So there’s this piece of wood with some rubber legs nailed on to it.
How did you approach the performance there?
I said, “You know this scene has to be full snot, right?” And Ridley goes, “I don’t even know what that means.” I said, “This is beyond a tear, man, this is total collapse, that’s got to be a lot of snot.” So he calls, “Action!” and I start from about 400 metres away and he’s got a long lens on me, I’m limping, running, and I get to the first spot and I start to cry as I see her. I collapse and then I delicately kiss her toes, and the realisation that she’s dead sinks in. I’m in full-on snot mode. I’ve got to wipe my face and the snot is on my hands like a spider’s web — I’ve got it on one hand, then the other and I can see it lit up — there’s fucking snot everywhere. Then I kiss the feet and I collapse and it’s, “Cut!” And Ridley comes over and he goes, “Holy fucking shit, that was some powerful stuff, man. Wow! Can we do it one more time?” And I say, “Yeah, no problem.” And he goes, “And just a little less snot…” [laughs].
What about the scene where Maximus, as The Spaniard, has won yet another battle in the Colosseum, and Commodus orders him to reveal his true identity and he delivers the “My name is Maximus Decimus Meridius” speech?
That helmet was full of static electricity and every time I took it off the hairs on the top of my head stood up [laughs]. I tried doing it slowly, I tried doing it fast, but every time two hairs stand up like I’m a fucking Teletubby. So, Ridley solves it by going into a massive close-up, when I turn to face Commodus — it’s just forehead and chin and out of frame you can’t see the Teletubby hair wiggling in the wind. Every single moment of that film, man, was like that — it was on the day, solving problems, constantly asking questions and finding answers.
Did Maximus die in the original script?
No. That “My name is Maximus…” speech is basically a suicide note. I remember Ridley coming up to me on set saying, “Look, the way this is shaping up, I don’t see how you live. This character is about one act of pure vengeance for his wife and child, and, once he’s accomplished that, what does he do?” And my joke used to be, “Yeah, what does Maximus do? Does he end up running a fucking pizzeria by the Colosseum?” He has a singular purpose, which is to meet his wife in the afterlife and apologise for not being there for her. And that’s it.
With the story being developed so much on the fly, was the film a gamble for you?
I knew it was an extreme gamble. I remember meeting an executive from a different studio before Gladiator came out. There’d been strange stuff coming back from the front, mainly from people who weren’t actually on
the front, as usual. I told him, “Yeah, it was a really difficult shoot, mate, it was heavy hours and a lot of extra work.” And his response was really patronising. He said something like, “You still have L.A. Confidential — not every career has a great film like that.” And I didn’t say it, but I thought, “I’m pretty sure the effort we put in will add up to something special.”
Can you remember when you first saw Gladiator?
I saw it on a mixing stage in LA and it was an overwhelming experience because it’s such a powerful film. And when you’re in something like that, you’re not watching yourself and patting yourself on the back; you’re watching the work of hundreds of people unfolding in front of you. At the end, Ridley turned to me and said, “Did I fulfil my promise to you?” And I was like, “Mate, you really did.”
What impact did winning the Oscar have on your life?
How long have you got? [laughs]. That tidal wave of fame that came off the back of Gladiator, which led, in 2001, to winning the Oscar, shifted my life in such a dramatic way. It changes your day-to-day because every time you walk down the street, you know you are going to have 50 conversations that you weren’t expecting to have. But if there’s one thing that’s really wrong about the process, it’s how the fuck can you give me and the producers an award and not give Ridley one? It just misses the point of how you make a movie. He’s the guy who stood in the middle of all that. He said to me, “Kid, come and stand next to me if you want to, but I’m going to stand in this fucking field and I know it’s going to be raining arrows but I don’t give a fuck. If I’m going to do this I’m going to make it the way I want to.” And I believed in him and I went with him. And that’s what he did.
And that “extreme gamble” certainly paid off…
We were given an opportunity and we were put under an enormous amount of pressure. There were a lot of bullets heading our way but by sticking together — one of the fundamentals of Maximus’ beliefs as a general — we dodged those bullets. Every single fucking one of ’em!