Ridley Scott never had a problem with the idea of making a sequel to Gladiator. “I’d be crazy not to – also financially crazy, because if you get it right, it’s a big winner.” Scott has always been clear that films are for making money. “Franchise always sounds like a vaguely not-very-nice word, because it means making money. But there’s nothing wrong with making money in the film industry – in fact, it’s what it’s all about”, he has said, never one to be hampered by over-refinement.
Scott stands tenth in the list (headed by Steven Spielberg) of film directors with the highest career box office gross, a lifetime’s revenue of $4,579,664,884. His single most lucrative film so far, though, was not Alien, Blade Runner, Black Hawk Down or Gladiator but the cheery Matt Damon vs the Red Planet adventure The Martian. Its take of $654m was less than half that of the single biggest films produced by Scott’s rivals: all those avatars, hobbits, wizards, avengers, transformers and the like. But Scott has directed an awful lot of films – Gladiator II is his 29th feature – and they have been remarkably consistent successes.
Development of a follow-up to Gladiator (budget $103m, box office $465m) began soon after its release in 2000. There was a problem, as its star Russell Crowe pointed out in his punchy way: “What can we do? I’m dead.” Maximus’s final battle hadn’t left much doubt about that. Thought was given to having the gladiator resurrected, nonetheless, so that Crowe too could return. The musician Nick Cave completed a script called “Christ Killer” in which, in the afterlife, Maximus is made an immortal warrior by the Roman gods and sent back to Earth to kill Jesus and his disciples and then participate vigorously in the Crusades, Second World War and Vietnam before ending up in the Pentagon. Spielberg, on behalf of DreamWorks, demurred. Another time, perhaps.
Here at last, though, is Gladiator II, with a third instalment not far behind if all goes well. (Ridley Scott is 87 later this month and has never been a dawdler.) There’s no Crowe, but in every other way it follows the template remarkably closely. Short report: it’s a triumph, therefore. Loyalists rejoice: it is chock-full of fighting once again.
Russell Crowe gave a great plot summary of Gladiator in an interview for the DVD extras. “We have that massive fight sequence at the beginning of the film and that’s followed by a series of massive fight sequences, building up to a massive fight sequence, so that we can end in a fight sequence which is what even I’d describe as massive.” It couldn’t have been better put and it serves equally aptly for Gladiator II.
The setting is some 20 years after the events of Gladiator and the two survivors from that carnage – Lucilla, the daughter of Emperor Marcus Aurelius (Connie Nielsen again), and her son Lucius (Spencer Treat Clark as a boy; Paul Mescal as the man) – carry the story forward. It is not much of a spoiler to reveal that Lucius is also Maximus’s son, since it is the whole premise of the new movie, disclosed in the trailer; it might as well have been called Maximus 2.
Lucilla smuggled young Lucius out of Rome to save his life, and he has grown into a man incognito, living quietly in remote Numidia, married to Arishat (Yuval Gonen) and tending his smallholding. Then the Romans attack this last outpost of freedom, in a fleet of ships commanded by the formidable General Acacius (Pedro Pascal). A battle just as massive as the first scene in the original Gladiator ensues, all fireballs and arrow showers, stabbings and spearing, tremendously exciting, powered along by a thudding score from Harry Gregson-Williams, from the school of Hans Zimmer.
Gladiator II was largely filmed in Morocco and Malta, supplemented by some scenes at Shepperton Studios in Surrey. The production designer was Scott’s long-term collaborator Arthur Max, who worked on the first Gladiator, The Martian and Napoleon. Enormous sets were built, including a one-third size Colosseum, as well as CGI being employed. “In a world of green screen and AI, this might be the last great build in movies,” says co-producer Lucy Fisher. The combined effects work well. In all the tumult and blood, you’d hardly suspect the ships were actually being moved around on dry land by vast industrial platforms, the water added only in post-production.
Arishat is killed, Lucius captured and enslaved. He proves his gladiatorial prowess in the provinces by out-savaging some baboons-slash-werewolves and he is promptly bought by gangster boss Macrinus (Denzel Washington, fab, with a shameless American accent), who fulfils the manager role taken by Oliver Reed last time. Lucius is transported to Rome to fight in the arena. The corrupt capital is ruled over by the effete but psychotic twin emperors Geta (Joseph Quinn) and Caracalla (Fred Hechinger), historical figures never before depicted quite like this: they are crazed punks with bleached skins, lots of eyeshadow and Rod Stewart-esque hairstyles. There, Lucius discovers that his sworn enemy General Acacius is married to his mother and not such a bad man, while Macrinus has an evil plan of his own…
Scott selected Paul Mescal personally for this immense action hero debut after seeing a bit of Normal People, having always had a practical attitude to recruiting actors: “I’m always looking for someone, something new and fresh. I mean, fresh is terribly important,” he has said. Mescal, 28, spends much of the film with his torso bared. He has bulked up and learned to fight convincingly, but he lacks Crowe’s natural intransigence and aggression. He’s too nice.
No matter. Scott’s films are all about how things look, and not about actors, dialogue, or even story. “I’ve gradually realised that what I do best is universes. And I shouldn’t be afraid of that”, he told an interviewer in 2010. He creates worlds in much the same lavish way, whether they are historic, futuristic or contemporary. One of the words he favours is “proscenium”. “The proscenium is so staggeringly powerful that the actor in there had better be able to compete,” he says. “I’d never be able to say that to an actor, but that’s what it is.”
In almost every interview, Scott prides himself on his eye. “I’m blessed with a good eye – that’s my secret.” He tells the story of deciding to make Gladiator without reading the script or knowing the story, but simply being shown a copy of a painting by Jean-Léon Gérôme, Hail Caesar! We Who Are about to Die Salute You. “I looked at it and said, ‘I’ll do it.’” He’s never been much of a reader, he owns. “I kind of speed-read… voom voom.”
Born in 1937, Ridley Scott was educated at Nelson Terrace Secondary Modern School in Stockton-on-Tees, which he loathed and where he came 31st out of a class of 31, followed by West Hartlepool College of Art and the RCA, where he was a contemporary of David Hockney’s. Later he got a job as a production designer at the BBC, working on programmes like Z-Cars and Softly, Softly, and then began moonlighting making commercials, realising he could make more in a day that way than in a month at the BBC. After setting up a production company, Ridley Scott Associates, with his brother Tony, he made altogether some 2,000 – sometimes he says 2,500 – commercials, always operating the camera himself. “My film school was commercials,” he says.
He didn’t make his first feature, The Duellists, until he was 40, winning a debut prize at Cannes but making little impact at the box office. Then he was offered Alien, the studio’s fifth choice of director, and his career has not paused since.
Scott storyboards all his films himself before going into production. He can “pre-viz” the whole thing, he says. “Boarding, for me, is filming on paper. As I’m reading, I’m seeing the scene, the geometry, the physical movement. I’ll imagine the room, the location.” He draws the picture properly, not just matchstick men. “I’ve shot it on paper before I’ve got there.” Throughout Gladiator II, the framing is so iconic that you can almost see the sketch behind the image, an extraordinary effect, even if it sometimes seems to do little to progress the story.
Always proud of coming in early and under budget, Scott avoids rehearsals and makes his films as quickly as possible, since he knows what he wants so clearly in advance. He has developed a technique of using multiple cameras, eight at a time in Gladiator II, so he can get everything he wants in just a couple of takes. Everything is fast – voom voom. He gets remarkable speed and energy into even his biggest scenes, unlike all those period epics in which the crowd scenes resemble protracted, ill-organised public meetings. “One of the biggest challenges of doing a period film is not to let it feel like a period film,” he has said.
He certainly doesn’t deny himself what he wants to see for reasons of petty historical accuracy. Notoriously, he responded to criticism of Napoleon by saying: “When I have issues with historians, I ask: ‘Excuse me, mate, were you there? No? Well, shut the f*** up then.’”
In Gladiator II, there’s an amazing contest between our hero and a killer astride a giant rhino, a combat Scott had wanted in the first instalment but lacked the technology then to pull off. A Roman anachronistically reads a newspaper (“The Roma”) in a café and Caracalla has syphilis, also unknown in the ancient world. A gladiatorial naval battle in the flooded Colosseum is enlivened by whopping sharks in the water. As it happened, I ended my review of Napoleon by saying that all the terrific Battle of Austerlitz scene of men plunging into a frozen lake lacked was a great big shark; I can’t complain now.
Scott, perhaps, not only makes films that are always in one way or another about duels and fights, but he also sees his own film-making as much the same the same sort of endeavour. It’s a tough business, he observed in 2003. “You have to build up the hide of a rhinoceros and be prepared to charge around and do some damage. Otherwise Hollywood will eat you for dinner, spit you out and forget you by morning.” Art? “Art’s like a shark, dude. If it stops swimming, it drowns.”
Sir Ridley Scott has not stopped. Currently he’s making a Bee Gees biopic and planning a new sci-fi film and his first western, as well as Gladdie 3. “You will have to shoot me in the head to stop me now. I will never retire,” he promised 20 years ago. Better, I think, to give him now the Oscar he has, absurdly, never won as a director; if not for Gladiator II, then for a lifetime’s achievement.
“Gladiator II” is in cinemas now
[See also: In Heretic, Hugh Grant is a bashful, disarming serial killer]
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This article appears in the 13 Nov 2024 issue of the New Statesman, Trump World