Russell Crowe as Maximus in the opening battle against the Germanic hordes
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What Wick and Parkes showed Scott was a 19th-century narrative painting by Jean-Louis Gérôme showing a Roman Emperor apparently about to give the thumbs down to the life of a gladiator’s vanquished opponent. “That image spoke to me of the Roman Empire in all its glory and wickedness,” the director recalls. “I knew right then and there that I was hooked.”
But the story that eventually emerged was even more intriguing: that of a glorious Roman general who falls from favour when the Emperor dies, is reduced to the status of a slave and ends up fighting for his life in the Colosseum. Nor does it stop there. Maximus, the general (played by Russell Crowe in a role which could hardly be further from his middle-aged, nervous whistle-blower against the big tobacco companies in The Insider, for which he recently received an Oscar nomination), becomes so successful a gladiator, and so much a favourite with the games-mad Roman populace, that he finally finds himself in a position to challenge the new Emperor and redress the wrong that has been done to him. “Entertainment has frequently been a tool of leaders as a means to distract an abused citizenry,” explains Scott. “The most tyrannical ruler must still beguile his people even as he brutalises them. The gladiatorial games were such a distraction. Our story suggests that, should a hero arise out of the carnage of the arena, his popularity would give him tremendous power. And were he to be a genuine champion of the people, he might threaten even the most absolute tyrant.”
Richard Harris as Maximus’ mentor, Marcus Aurelius
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Scott could have been forgiven if, over the next year, he sometimes lost sight of that noble theme (which is vaguely reminiscent of Kubrick’s Roman epic, Spartacus). After all, the sheer, unremitting attention to detail required - not just to reconstruct Ancient Rome, but also to restage a spectacle which, at its height, played to audiences on an Olympic scale - must surely have taken up most of his time and attention. The process took the director and his four overlapping crews several months of work, both in the heat of the Moroccan desert and in the stormy cold of Malta, where the Gladiator company worked through the Mediterranean island’s worst winter in 30 years. But it all started in, of all places, the British home counties - to be precise, in a wood just outside the Surrey stockbroker-belt town of Farnham, where the Forestry Commission had decided to do some tree-clearing. “I said, ‘I’ll do it for you. I’ll burn it down!’” recalls Scott, who preceded to do just that in his staging of the film’s opening battle, where General Maximus (Crowe) leads his Legions against a Germanic horde. It was a sequence which combined good, old-fashioned spectacle - thousands of extras, dressed in authentic costume, using authentically recreated weapons and thoughtfully doused in mud before anyone called ‘Action!’ - with state-of-the-art technology such as Aerial Camera Systems, designed to follow the flight of some of the 10,000 arrows fired during the battle.
Even that, though, was necessarily dwarfed by the reconstruction of Rome’s Colosseum on a huge parade ground in front of the 17th-century Fort Ricasoli in Malta. Obviously, with modern CGI technology, it wasn’t necessary to build the whole thing, even as a scale model. But around a third of the lower tier had to be built full-size, to a height of 52 feet, together with the labyrinth of passages underneath the stadium, and the complex, pulley-operated lifts that carried the gladiators up into the arena. And the blending in of the computer-generated add-ons, complete with 33,000 imaginary extras to complement the 2,000 actually there, was so successful that 360º degree pans and aerial shots of the entire Colosseum were no problem. The effect is awesome.
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