Filmmaker brings stories of the Colosseum to life
When he was a little boy, British filmmaker Jim Greayer wanted to be a medieval knight. “Sometimes when my sisters just wanted to go to the beach or lie by the pool, we’d go off and visit a monastery on a hill, or something like that,” he says.
“I was always keen to put myself in the shoes of the people and see it through the eyes of the people back then, just imagine what it would be like to be a monk or a knight or something like that — just try to fill in the blanks of the landscape and bring those ruins back to life,” he says.
Visiting castles and monasteries and abbeys with his mom sparked a passion in him that has lasted a lifetime. “I’ve always been attracted to ancient history, Roman history, medieval history — just the parts of history that require you to recreate a world,” he says.
“I can’t be a medieval knight, but the closest I can come to it is to make a film about it.”
Well, close but no cigar. Instead Greayer has taken on the momentous task of overseeing an eight-episode docudrama about the Roman Empire. And while Colosseum, airing Sundays on the History Channel, portrays the agony and ecstasy of that most famous arena, it’s also about the lives of eight real people who lived during that tumultuous time.
Dogging the footsteps of these ancient folk took some serious detective work, says Greayer, 47. “Depending on who the character is, determines how much detective work was needed to fully round out those characters,” he says.
“Someone like Emperor Commodus is one of the most famous Romans in history — popularized in the movie, Gladiator — the Joaquin Phoenix character. An awful lot is known about him. But about some of the slave characters we know only fragments. And it’s a question of finding other fragments to piece together a bigger story. So, the detective work is finding other clues about where they might have come from, what their life might have looked like, and I think that detective work is something that takes place on the screen as well as in the research for the series.”
The filmmaker, who’s supervised series like First Ladies, Eight Days that Made Rome and World’s Greatest Mountains, says the most difficult part of Colosseum was creating two narratives simultaneously.
“It’s almost like running two productions at once,” he says, “you’re running a documentary and a drama — they both have quite different needs. One is you’re trying to create a scripted drama and pull off a drama production.
“On the other hand, you’re trying to research the history, shoot interviews [with various historians] and bring it all together. So, it’s quite a lot to juggle to keep both of those things going in a single production.”
Filmed partially in Italy, much of the series was shot in a town called Ouarzazate in Morocco. “Morocco [is] a great place; the weather’s amazing. It also has an ancient world feeling,” says Greayer.
Greayer’s first job right out of college was with the History Channel, which was just gaining a foothold in the U.K. at the time.
“I sent out a million letters to production companies and only got one response, and that was from the History Channel which was staffed with lots of film school grads and people who had long careers in TV — but not much history. So, I was brought on as a kind of ‘runner,’ my job was to know a bit of history. They would teach me filmmaking and I would teach them history.” The rest, as they say, is “history.”