Ridley Scott On Why ‘Gladiator II’ Is His Most Ambitious Film: Will It Finally Win Him The Oscar? – The Deadline Q&A
Ridley Scott On Why 'Gladiator II' Is His Most Ambitious Film: Will It Finally Win Him The Oscar?
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DEADLINE: Why was it so important for you to re-inhabit the world of Gladiator, and not let someone else take it over?
SCOTT: I have to go back down the alleyway to explain. Alien was my second film. I was a new kid on the block in Hollywood, but I’m 40, and I was doing very well, enough to have been in my second Bentley. So I’m no f*cking kid and I’m not an idiot by that moment. My offices are in London, Hong Kong, New York and Los Angeles, and they’re looking at me like I’m a new kid on the block. It’s ridiculous. Okay, now. But I’ve learned to tolerate such arrogance and from that, I knew what to do. And even then, even though I’m 40 years old and brand new to movies, I frankly embraced that as good fortune. It was hard work; I paid for the first script and I spent a bundle completing The Duellists, and I got no fee. But I figured I was now over the gate and into the field, right? And so now I’m on a new universe for myself and my future, at 40. To sidetrack a moment, my sport was always tennis and I became reasonably good. But when you get that good, you’d be better play five times a day, five days a week. I watched a documentary on the retirement of Roger Federer. It’s three parts, just fantastic. Federer begins, and in his soft English said, I know I’m going to cry. He is about to have his last matches, with Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic. He talks about the game and I am paralleling that with what my game is, which is feature film. I thought, good God, if I’d had to retire at 40 from filmmaking when I’ve just began my new career, I wouldn’t know what to do. I’m sure Roger’s got it all planned out. He’s a very smart man. But there’s one thing you’ll always miss. You miss Nadal, across that net.
DEADLINE: So you were bypassed for Alien and I’m sure that stung, but is there consolation in the fact that James Cameron didn’t screw it up? His film was so different than yours, more like a rollercoaster ride…
SCOTT: Yes. Jim told me, listen, I can’t get it as frightening because you’ve just shown the beast enough that it’s no longer fresh. But it works, still. He said, I’m going to go military. That’s what Jim said. I said, gotcha. Jim’s was a very good sequel. Three and four became more and more difficult. As it unrolled, I thought, oh God, they’re f*cking it up. And then from that, honestly, I said okay, that’s done.
Years later, I saw this bloody film that they keep playing every night somewhere on the globe, on all the platforms. There’s life in the best, yet. That’s why I sat down with the great writer [Damon] Lindelof, and we reconstructed a resurrection of the era, with Prometheus, and how it evolved from Alien. But we were asleep at the wheel. My advisors, who frankly no longer are with me, were asleep at the wheel, certainly. And I partly blame myself, except I was busy making other films. And so it was let go and it shouldn’t have been. When you resurrect, you better put your nail into the wall. The same thing happened on Blade Runner, which is my third movie. They said to me, to make this firm, it’s going to cost us $21 million. At that moment, Steven [Spielberg] had already cracked a $40 million budget, and so I’m halfway to being pricey, but am at half the price of $42 million, right? And these investors came in saying, if we put in the extra three or 4 million to make the film, we will take your backend from whatever source. Which is disgusting. And I was now 45, 46, but long enough in the tooth to know, this is the playing field, this is what you’ve got to deal with. F*ck ’em, let’s make the movie. I’d spent 10 months prepping it, readjusting it, and spreading it wider with the great writer Hampton Fancher. There’s a lot of me in that screenplay, make no mistake about it, and the whole universe was fundamentally coming from me. I was a very, very good designer, so I could talk to designers. I looked at these industrial illustrations by this great guy Syd Mead. I brought him in to help the production design of Blade Runner. This is authorship, dude. And they took everything. So I’ve never had a piece of Blader at all. That’s going in the book. Isn’t that disgusting? And by the way, they know who the fuck they are.
DEADLINE: There were numerous attempts to resurrect Gladiator over a quarter century. How real was the one where Maximus is brought back by the gods to kill Jesus Christ because the prophet had stolen their thunder? What was the appeal?
SCOTT: To me? I was going along with the boys. I didn’t really believe in it. It got too rich and started to go to time warps, which frankly I thought was bloody silly. But the one thing I added to it was this great idea of how to bring someone back through a portal of time and death. It would have to come from the dying soul of a dying soldier in a battlefield. Isn’t that cool?
DEADLINE: That is cool.
SCOTT: So that’s mine. So that’s why I kept that as a little silver bullet thinking, I’ll use that again somewhere. And that’s why I then introduced Styx, where you see [Lucius] loses the love of his life. Let’s say that woman is…fundamentally right now, many women, certainly in Middle Eastern Israel, are soldiers. Right. I saw her as a then living in the little edge of city kibbutz, not Israeli exactly, but I believe the actress is Israeli by the way. And I saw her as a housewife and then she’s got a bow. Oh my God. Movies can do things like brilliantly, show change. So she’s a wife, but she’s a soldier and an archer and a Markswoman.
DEADLINE: So you salvaged something out of that exercise. You wonder how far you can stray from a movie that is beloved. Audiences roundly rejected the sequel to the billion-dollar Joker, the second one staged as a musical. If you’d gone in the Jesus Christ direction, could that have worked for audiences who loved the first Gladiator?
SCOTT: I think we ended up in the trenches in World War I. That’s when I said, okay, that’s it. Thank you. I think the gravy was too rich. But by the way, Nick Cave did a great job of invention and Russell was fully engaged. We all were, but I was the one I got dragging my heels saying, I don’t know about this. I think we’re getting too far off the mark. If you do that, that’s where you can lose it.
DEADLINE: Last time we met, you told a great story about chasing Russell Crowe’s stand-in out of a dry wheat field where he was smoking a cigarette, then observing his hand gliding over the wheat. You told him to put out the smoke before he burned the field to the ground, and then called for a camera and the result was one of the most iconic images in the first movie. Russell Crowe discussed how, on the fly, you came up with that two-sword decapitation scene that Paul Mescal replicates in the Gladiator II trailer. The original reinforced the brutality that disgusted Maximus and led him to taunt the crowd with the ‘Are you not entertained’ line. What magic did you find in the moment with the actors on Gladiator II?
SCOTT: I think there are two phrases which are great. One is Marcus Aurelius, which is what you do in life echoes in eternity. To me, Marcus Aurelius started his philosophical ruminations, writing poetry, probably from a sense of guilt. Over the devastation and brutality he had to engage with by imposing Roman rule on territories who did not want him there. As he got older, I get a sense naturally there may have been a degree of guilt, and therefore he was ruminating on what he’d done in life. He hopes it won’t echo in eternity, but it will, it’s always there. The other is the line Strength and Honor. Two lines that are beautiful. Connie Nielsen’s Lucilla says to Paul, who is in his cell. She knows she is close to the end, and murmurs strength and honor. Paul just picks that moment up spectacularly and answers as if almost in, dare I say, surprise. She is telling him to be strong, and he replies with the deepest respect to his mother, the same line. That’s one of the most emotional moments in the film. And that was something that just sort of happened in the moment, something that two actors did beautifully. The line itself can either be nothing or something. It’s called great acting.
DEADLINE: Key to an actor playing a gladiator is to be able to handle the physicality. I’m surprised you found Russell Crowe from The Insider. I would have thought the discovery would have come from Curtin Hanson’s L.A. Confidential. His focused rage and power made you go, who the heck is this guy? Did LA Confidential make a big impression on you?
SCOTT: I’ve never seen it.
DEADLINE: It will confirm your good judgment. He played a tough police detective with a tortured past named Bud White who became this symbol of masculinity. After the film played through, for awhile every pitch in Hollywood was, “imagine Bud White, as a blank.“
SCOTT: I’ll take a look. I think that’s how Michael cast him, off that film. Michael and I are friends for years and we talk occasionally. I’ll say, where’d you get this? Where’d you get that? I loved The Insider.
DEADLINE: You previously worked with Denzel on American Gangster where he played Frank Lucas. This was a guy who made his fortune importing heroin in the caskets of U.S. soldiers flown home from Vietnam. He had volatile moments of rage and violence, but a lot of depth underneath. Macrinus is quite a different guy. What made him right for this and how did you sell him on it?
SCOTT: Because I’m f*cking good at casting, dude. Have you noticed? Remember Brad Pitt in Thelma & Louise? I’m pretty good. Denzel didn’t show it at the time, but I think he really enjoyed doing American Gangster. I think the film was terrific, one of my better movies, right up there. He says, speak to me, tell me about this guy. I showed him a painting. I think by Sir Lawrence Alima-Tadema. He was this very successful 19th century painter who would do portraiture of the very wealthy and paint them in Roman and Greek circumstance in robes and architecture. They are spectacular. There was this painting which I think defines the Macrinus. This guy is standing there with these huge forearms. He is African, a very superlatively, powerful African man who is wearing beautiful silk orange and sky blue silk, with a beard that runs around his face and hits a point on his chin. He’s got a hat what looks like a Dizzy Gillespie hat on the back of his head, woven with beads. Denzel asks, what’s he do? I said, well, he’s a billionaire. Oh, okay, send me the script. Whoever said a picture is worth a thousand words, they were right.
DEADLINE: Denzel told me he didn’t try to track down people from that era, rather he relied on the history of slavery in his own family to inform where Macrinus came home and why he is so ruthless. All your stars told touching personal stories that inspired their work. What role do you play in helping your cast find reference points for their fictional characters rooted in ancient history?
SCOTT: Discussion? The more you talk the better because what comes from that is the most divine intuition. Intuition is a very powerful element, and I have recognized my intuition as being pretty strong and reliable. Years ago, it made me successful in advertising. And by the time I started in movies, I was already very intuitive and listening to that voice. And everyone has the voice. A lot of people don’t listen to it, but it’s in their imagination. And if your voice is tied to your imagination, then you are lucky. And I guess I’m born lucky. I learned to combine the two, and I try and keep my explanations quite simple. I’ll show them pictures of what I want. It’s worth a thousand words.
DEADLINE: So you help point them in a direction and let them go?
SCOTT: Point?. No, no, no, not always. Because when we were doing Gladiator with Joaquin Phoenix, he entered that in a very fragile state, afraid because of the scale of the film.
DEADLINE: Really?
SCOTT: That’s his style, that’s what he does. But he scares the shit out of you because it’s the first day. And you go, oh, sh*t. So it’s a little bit of, I wouldn’t say handholding, but you got to hug him often, find ways to make him secure, make him feel what he’s doing is good. And if they have a problem, you listen. You become really a psychologist father figure. And sometimes what you don’t say is better than saying too much.
DEADLINE: It’s interesting that Joaquin Phoenix worried he was over his skis, because that mirrored where his Commodus character started out, before he gained power and grew arrogant. He fears he doesn’t belong as the leader of a nation. Didn’t the actor’s fragility help him find the tone for that tragic figure?
SCOTT: Well, it did. Him doing Napoleon that way was unbelievable. He’s Napoleon, he looks like Napoleon. Over many meetings, I kept saying that and we hugged and he said, okay, I’ll do it.
DEADLINE: These set pieces in the Colosseum, where the gladiators face off in sailing ships floating on shark-infested waters, square off against a rhinoceros, and a bunch of pissed off baboons. Let’s take the last shot. How did you make it look so terrifying?
SCOTT: Baboons are carnivores, and would have killed them all. A big baboon could be 40, 50 pounds; try wrestling a 20-pound Jack Russell Terrier and you’d lost. A baboon, you’ll lose your arm and your head. Can you hang from a beam by one arm for two hours? No, they can. I was in South Africa doing the pilot for the TV show Raised by Wolves, a and there was a car park for visitors who park with their coffee lattes and all that sh*t. And a little gamboling troop of baboons come across the wall and sits on the wall, staring at the tourists. One idiot goes across to a big baboon and tries to pat it. This thing attacked him, and he’s a big man. The guy dropped his coffee, ran for the car, getting clawed as he struggled to get in the car. I thought that was funny, but I knew every actor had to do the physicality of the movement of defend, kill and or attack, right?
I have to have them fighting something which is formidable. So I cast 12 very small stuntmen. Some of them are not children, but tough teens, quite tiny. And I put them all in black tights and for fun, I painted whiskers on them. And we went to war with stunt men. So it becomes a stunt men brawl of savagery. So then I had all the physicality recorded of the actors. I removed the guy in black tights put in wire frames of baboons where it looks good, the movement looks real. You then put on the flesh and the hair. That’s how you do it. That is a masterwork of digital work right there. You change nothing into a furry baboon.
DEADLINE: Does everyone appreciate what you’ve shot?
SCOTT: No. Some idiot says to me, I’ve never seen a baboon like that before. I said, well, the baboon has alopecia, where you lose all your fucking hair. I copied that from the baboon I saw in the car park, which had alopecia. I thought, who is that? And it was this everything sinew tendon with no fat, like muscular steel. I said, that’s my monster. I said, Paul, you know what would be cool? Turn the tables on the baboon. If you bite the baboon, the baboon will be psychologically in shock. Bite the baboon. When he snarls, you snarl back and the baboon goes, holy sh*t. That’s meant to be funny.
DEADLINE: Did you restrict yourself to things that actually happened in the Roman gladiatorial arenas?
SCOTT: For sure. They flooded the Colosseum for naval battles. I think what the did was put in big moray eels which can bite you hard. Whether they had a shark, I don’t know. But I thought, let’s go for the sharks.
DEADLINE: These were these things you wanted to do in the first film, but technology would not allow it?
SCOTT: I did want to do the rhino on the first film. I hadn’t thought about the baboons until I saw the car park. I knew the boats existed but the first Gladiator had to be done on a budget so we withdrew.
DEADLINE: What did the escalation of savagery in the Colosseum under the rule of those two nitwit twin brother emperors say about the decay of Rome?
SCOTT: I remember somebody said, we seem to portray Rome as a cleaner place in the first Gladiator, but not really. The brutality in the arena is still the same. And the death by sword or by animal is still there. Christian families would be devoured by lions and people were enjoying it. That’s true. Historically, that is so cretinously horrifically brutal, as bad as anything you can possibly imagine today. Nothing is worse than that. Death is death, a sword is a sword. A 2000-pound bomb is even worse. So you’ve got to take all that into account. Now, we are trying to do entertainment of an empire that’s been revered for marvelous things and also criticized deeply for crazy brutality as bad as it gets in any time or space, including Adolf Hitler, and including whatever’s happening today in the world.
We are fortunately slightly veiled by the silk of movie land. So in a way we’re watching it through a veiled curtain. But when I’m doing it, I am reminding myself, this happened. They would have a fight to the death on a Saturday afternoon in the living room of some senator. People would stand there, drinks in hand, maybe slightly high on something and watch two guys fight until one decapitates the other. And they all clap and say bravo. That’s real.
DEADLINE: You say you want to make another Gladiator and when I spoke to Paul he said, I want to sit down with Ridley because whatever it is, I’m in.
SCOTT: I’ve already got … an intuitive aberration came to me about a month ago. I thought, why not? I have a really very logically positioned very good idea. And we will not go back to the arena. You want to do Gladiator IV you can go back to the arena, but you would wear it out if you did that on the next one.
DEADLINE: You were shooting Gladiator II when SAG-AFTRA struck and shooting stopped for half a year. What was the biggest challenge in losing the momentum you had built?
SCOTT: Nothing, really. I made four films through the pandemic. I made The Last Duel, Gucci, Napoleon, and then started this one and the strike stopped it. I edited what I had, prepared the next movie, and then resumed. I never sit around. I was thinking about the movie I’m going to do next. The union cannot stop me from thinking.
DEADLINE: You conveyed a very cynical view of AI in Alien, which you told me you borrowed from Kubrick’s 2001. Hollywood is now embracing AI as the next thing. Have you adjusted your cautionary tale view of AI into maybe something different, a tool that can help in the kind of epic scale storytelling that you do?
SCOTT: Well, AI is a tool, remember that. But AI can be also a terrible abuser of normal stuff, even good stuff. There’s one or two people out there like authors, musicians, actors, directors, who may be able to think a little bit beyond what the AI for the best they can come up with, the big idea. That would include Jim Cameron. And therefore, we always hope the very best will evolve and use AI as a tool. But see, probably one of the best ideas that is the trigger for all the best science fiction that followed, is 2001. You start off with a dawn of man, you see apes fighting over sustenance in a waterhole. You see anteaters, and the occasional leopard that eats the ape. The apes live on insects and pieces of wood. The one morning, the power, not God, the power of the universe has delivered a monolith because it’s seen that the apes are now getting close enough to be thinking entities. And need that boost and help forward. The ape touches the monolith and has the first massive idea in history: he picks up a thigh bone of a beast and kills an ape with it. That’s a weapon, that is a million year quantum leap forward. It’s a grand superlative idea. Idea two, you’re on a spaceship now, going to search for the power that is and was, and what was the moment? Is it what we call God? I can’t think of anything else. Or is simply a power way beyond our comprehension, and therefore has examined us for years, and examining us a bit like a canary in a cage saying, oh, interesting, they do this and they do that. They are studying the human race.
Now you get to the actual big number, which is the ship is going to the far reaches of where they’ve never been before, and they’re relying on one crew member, called Hal. Hal is a f*cking computer. And from that, an AI which won’t reveal it to them, but they’re smart enough to suspect Hal is betraying them. Because Hal knows that the expedition is more important than these human beings, and that’s Hal’s error. Hopefully, AI will always make an error. Hopefully. That’s a massive idea.
