Now you don’t see it, now you do... How special effects house Mill Film added 33,000 extras to the 2,000 already there,
plus the remaining two thirds of the Colosseum - not to mention a
dramatic bit of skyscape.
“You can almost smell the arena and feel the atmosphere of the city:
watching the film, you should believe you’re experiencing a contemporary situation. You’re living in Roman times”
Ridley Scott
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Certainly Scott himself knew, when producer Douglas Wick and executive producer Walter F Parkes (the latter, also co-head of DreamWorks Pictures, was one of the team responsible for this year’s Oscar triumph, American Beauty) first got in touch with him a couple of years ago, that this was an epoch that still had a lot of big-screen life in it. The first thing they showed him was not the script, which was still to be written by David Franzoni (who had scripted Spielberg’s critically lauded but commercially disappointing Amistad); John Logan (who turned American football into a modern-day gladiatorial combat for Oliver Stone in Any Given Sunday); and British veteran William Nicholson, Oscar-nominated for the infinitely gentler Shadowlands.
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