WHAT WENT WRONG - Gladiator

Episode Date: January 12, 2021

A pissed-off Russell Crowe, a fatal drinking game, and Phoenician fainting spells. This week Chris & Lizzie dissect how Ridley Scott’s Gladiator went from 32 32-page shooting script to Oscar glory.*CORRECTIONS:Chris incorrectly states that Richard Harris is a Brit like a real dummy. Richard Harris is, of course, Irish.Go Ad-Free - Join Our Patreon!Check Out Our Merch!Follow Us on Instagram!What Movie's Next? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

And no, ha. And I'm not. All right, guys, thank you for joining us for another episode of what went wrong. I'm Chris Winterbauer here with Lizzie Bassett, who I'm watching just like munch down on just way too big a bite of spinach. And I don't know what else. Tomatoes. And you're drinking a Lerquois when you promised me you wouldn't drink fizzy drinks while we record anymore. because they make you burp.

Oh, yeah, that's the only thing I had. So many betrayals. And I don't think you rewatched the movie for this week. So Lizzie, what's going on? I know you have a full-time job. That is also accurate. I was busy and I'm tired. And I have seen this movie approximately 20 times.

I've seen this movie so many times. And here's the question to get out of the way right at the top. The movie in question is Gladiator and Lizzie, did your high school world history teacher spend three weeks screening this movie in 20 to 35 minute chunks to teach you the intricacies of Roman life? Honestly, no, and I feel ripped off about that. Instead, I watched this movie more times than I can count with my mom who loves this movie and loved Russell Crow. Oh, yes. Loved Russell Crow. As many women didn't do. Today, we are entering the ring with Ridley Scott's somewhat historical epic Gladiator,

co-produced and distributed by DreamWorks, Pictures, and Universal, the film stars, as Lizzie mentioned, Russell Crow, Joaquin Phoenix, Martin around the world. Joaquin Phoenix, Connie Nielsen,

Jamon Hounsu, Richard Harris, and, in his final film role, Oliver Reed, as Proximo. So, for those of you who don't know, can't remember, or,

have not seen the film. The film follows Russell Crow's Maximus Decimus Meridius, who is a decorated Roman general tasked by Richard Harris's Marcus Aurelius, who was a real person, with transitioning Rome from a monarchy back to a republic upon his death, something he didn't actually want in real life. Aurelius's son, Comedus, played by the scene-stealing Joaquin Phoenix. Oh, yeah.

Not loving this plan that denies him his, quote, rightful place on the throne, murders his father and orders Maximus and his family to be executed. We then follow Maximus as he embarks on a quest for vengeance through the gladiatorial rings of ancient Rome. To be clear, he does execute Maximus's family. Yes. And then Maximus manages to find out and get like sold into slavery. I guess I should have watched this.

The film was very well received critically. Currently holds 77% on Rotten Tomatoes. It's actually a little lower than I thought it would be at. It won five Academy Awards. It played especially well at the box office. However, it was far from a surefire success. As we'll learn, a disgruntled star, an incomplete script, and a death during production all threatened to derail this now action classic.

So, let's let the bloodshed begin! All right. So Gladiator's Road to the Big Screen begins with writer David Franzoni. Franzoni is a screenwriter who came up in the industry in the mid-1980s, and after some early success, he found himself attached to a bunch of projects that had a lot of great promise, but never went anywhere. So an Al Capone biopic that he co-wrote with John Millius of Apocalypse Now, a Harvey Milk biopic that was supposed to be directed by Oliver Stone. It never went and a reboot of the House of Cards BBC miniseries that Michael Mann was supposed to direct, which of course was later done by David Fincher. All of these projects fizzled out, went into

development how they never got produced. But Franzoni's work didn't go unnoticed. Stephen Spielberg impressed by a George Washington biopic script that Franzoni had written that's still unproduced and has had like 30 directors attached to it, hired the scribe to adapt what historical film of Stephen works from the 90s. Oh, Amadeus? Wait. Almost. Oh, Amistad.

Amistad. Amistad. Amistad is what I meant. Amistad I got it right. The project snagged him, a high profile, three-picture deal with DreamWorks, and he won an Academy Award for screenwriting. So, Franzoni, during his youth, had taken a motorcycle trip around the world. He was fascinated by the Roman Coliseums, and while he was staying in a yurt in Baghdad,

he met an Australian. woman who gave him the book, Those About to Die by Daniel P. Manix, which was written in the late 50s. The story followed the Roman gladiatorial games, and Franzoni was hooked. 30 years later, after the success of Amistad, he brings the idea for a film set in this gladiatorial world to DreamWorks. They love it. They decide, great, let's go make this movie. So he works with producers Douglas Wick and Walter Parks. Walter Parks was the head of DreamWorks. And they put together. a pitch. It's like a rough story, visual aids. I actually read another account that said that this pitch was included two full drafts of the script. It's unclear. The timeline is a little murky here.

But the point being, the most important part of this pitch was a painting from 1872 by Jean-Leon-Gerome, called, and I'm going to pronounce this wrong, Police Verso. It means thumbs down. And if you saw the painting, you'd think it was out of the movie Gladiator. It's basically, if you remember in the film, there's a character who has like a trident tuna fork that, like, they throw a net on one of the guys, and then they stab him with the tuna fork. And it's basically that character, like that armor, looking up at the emperor as he's holding his thumb out down, signaling you should kill your opponent. And it's really beautiful light and shadow Coliseum. It's a very cinematic painting. So the team decides they're going to take the pitch to Ridley Scott.

And it's unclear whether or not they approached any other directors before this, but they took it to Ridley Scott. And as they're kind of walking him through the pitch and he seems a little distracted, he keeps looking over at the Jerome painting that's like sitting behind some other pieces. So Walter Parks just finally says, hey, do you want to look at this? And he shows him this Jerome painting and Ridley just looks at it for a few minutes. And then before hearing the rest of the pitch or what the story is even about, he just says, I'll do it.

And Parks goes, hang on, you don't know what the story's about. Ridley just dismisses and he's like, we can figure out the script. I don't care. I'll do it. And so he was clearly just so fascinated with this world of gladiators and the visual storytelling potential that he was willing to jump onto this project without really knowing what the story was about and without reading the script. I kind of get it. Yeah. I mean, it makes sense. So briefly, let's touch on who Ridley Scott is. At this point in time, Ridley Scott was a blockbuster director who is somewhat in need of a comeback. So he was born in Northeast England in the late 1930s in a military family.

He came up during the war. They often moved. His father was an officer with the Royal Engineers. And he always had an incredible talent for the arts. So Ridley Scott is a very talented illustrator, much like James Cameron. And you can see his storyboards and visual drafts for a lot. lot of his films. If you look online, he's incredibly gifted. He went to the Royal College of of Art in London, and in the early 1960s, he started working for BBC initially as a set designer.

So it makes sense. He comes from this visual world. In 1965, he started directing television. He then, much like David Fincher, would later do, founded Ridley Scott Associates. It's a commercial production company. It's still thriving today, and he begins directing commercials in the 1960s, in 1968. And so this is, he's 31 at this point. He's older than a lot of these other directors that we've talked about who come up in their 20s. So he has this incredible run, and it culminates with helping Chanel number five revitalize its image in the 1970s and kind of regain its place as like a non-passé sort of high class. And he kind of was one of the guys that invented the more modern perfume commercial,

which now is like insane. Yeah, hate perfume commercials. They just automatically make no sense. That's the first rule. Second thing, Chanel number number. five does smell like an old lady's bathroom. It does that I want to go to. So now like I mentioned, unlike a lot of the directors we've covered, Scott didn't actually direct his first feature film until he was 40 years old. It was the duelist starring Harvey Catell and Keith Carradine.

It was a pretty small film period piece and it debuted at Cannes in 177 or 78. And it won some awards like Best debut feature. And then he, of course, followed up the duelists with what would become his most famous film, Lizzie. Alien. Alien. 1979's Alien, which changed the trajectory of science fiction. It earns over $100 million at the box office. All of a sudden, Ridley Scott, 42 years old, is a directorial force to be reckoned with. Wow. So that's his second movie? I didn't realize that. Second movie. And then do you know what his third movie is? Is it Thelma and Louise? It's Blade Runner. No.

Oh, wow. Yeah. So his 1980s path is a little bit checkered. Like, the high points are Blade Runner. And he did the Apple Macintosh commercial, the 1984 one, with the woman running through and she throws the hammer at the screen and shatters it. So he directed that as well. And then he also directed Legend with Tom Cruise, which no one has seen. And it's totally wacky.

Yeah, exactly. No one watched it. And then in 1991, he had his, like, huge commercial break. through Bonafide hit with Thelma and Luis, which is great. Great. It's a box office smash. Critical Darling, he gets an Oscar nomination for directing. The movie wins for screenwriting.

And he's got all this momentum and success, and he parlayes it into the independently financed, incredibly expensive, 1492 Conquest of Paradise, starring Girard Depardue as Christopher Columbus. What? Yes. No one has seen this movie. It was a failure critically and commercially, and he didn't release another film for four years following 1492, eventually returning to the screen with White Squall, which flopped the Jeff Bridges' like Boys on a Boat movie,

and G.I. Jane with Demi Moore, which did okay at the box office, but still lost money. Fun fact, in my kindergarten, there was a kid who allegedly had a cameo in G.I. Jane, and it was the closest to Hollywood that I had come at that time. Wow. Oh, how the turn tables. So in the 1990s, which had started off at such a high point for Scott with Alma and Louise, it turns out to be this kind of down period in his career. And so whether or not Scott feels this pressure to, you know, of gladiator needing to be a hit, he kind of does need it to be a hit. It's been now almost nine years since his last big movie. And so what we can say is that no matter how the movie would turn out, it would be an inflection point. the first film under his name to be released in the new millennium. And furthermore, he's tackling a genre that's been dead in Hollywood for 30 plus years. Roman epics are considered totally risky moves. Spartacus and Ben-Hur, like back in the 50s and 60s had lit up the box office,

but there had been no such successes in recent years. People were worried it was going to be a quote, Toga party is what they called it. Like, kind of out-of-shade actors and loincloths, women's cycling grapes. Right. That had kind of become a genre for a while there where they really cranked out a bunch of really bad ones. Yeah. So like Cleopatra in 63 was a big flop. And then ironically, the fall of the Roman Empire was the 1964 film that lost a ton of $10 million. And actually the entire plot of Gladiator is a rip off of the fall of the Roman Empire. And so literally like it's just a beat for beat. It's the same story. So they basically just took that movie and they're like, it didn't. work then, but maybe it'll work now. So all of this is going to depend on a script, as we know, in these processes. And unfortunately, it turns out the script is a bit of a disaster for gladiators. So Franzoni turned in his first draft sometime in April of 1998, and the story was almost

completely different in detail than what they ended up shooting. So it followed Narcissus, who was a real historical figure. He was a wrestler of the Galatotivus. He was a wrestler of the Galatot games who eventually strangled real-life emperor Commodus to death in his bathtub. Cool. Yeah, the broad strokes of the story are similar, but apparently, like, the dialogue was extremely dense. The story was less propulsive.

It was much more ambiguous. We never witnessed Comitist murder his father. There was, like, some ridiculous touches that actually were historically accurate, like Narcissists finds himself sponsored by the Golden Pompeii Olive Oil Company, much like a modern-day athlete. And this runner, which was a real thing, apparently, back in the gladiatorial games.

They would get sponsorships from local companies. And they actually, in the third act of the film, the slogan for golden Pompeii olive oil becomes, Narcissus would kill for a taste of golden Pompeii olive oil, which was a real part of the script. Oh, no. So then in the third act of the film of the original screenplay, Comedus burns his sister Lucilla played by Connie Nielsen, alive inside a brass bull, along with the other senators that betrayed him. He then replaces these senators with chimpanzees and purple togas.

And then in the end, Narcissus, after, it's revealed that his family is actually still alive. And so it's like that kind of classic, like, actually, they've been alive this whole time. And then after he kills Comedus, he rides off with his family into the sunset. Roll credits. Nope. Ridley Scott had a similar reaction. and he hired John Logan, who'd written any given Sunday, and Bats, if you haven't seen it, more importantly. I have three times. A good horror movie about Bats.

Logan does a rewrite, and six months later, and I think this is roughly around October of 1998, he turns in a new draft. So he has changed a number of things. The best decision that he makes is Maximus's wife and child are, killed off 100% in the first act, giving him the full revenge motivation that he needs to take into the end of the story. He added in kind of the North Africa gladiator training sequence that then happens before he gets shipped off to the Coliseum. Which is also good. And basically it seems like it's pretty close to the end product structurally until you get to the third act. And so the third act of the film was much bigger. Maximus escapes via the sewers.

He was still called Narcissus in this draft. but I'll refer to him as Maximus. He brings the army back to Rome, has a big battle with Cometus's Praetorian Guard. He then chases Cometus into the bowels of the Coliseum, kills him underneath the Coliseum, after Cominus reveals that he killed his sister, Lucilla. And then he rides that elevator up to the base of the Coliseum,

like in the end of the current film. They then ride this ancient elevator that you see in the final film, up to the center of the Coliseum, the Roman audience is waiting, the emperor's dead on the platform, they're all excited. Maximus then adopts

Lucius, who's Connie Nielsen's son, played by Spencer Treat Clark, in the film, and they go and live on a farm, end of movie, happily ever after. It's a lot closer to the final version.

So, some sort of script in hand, Ridley Scott and Company need to find their cast. I've attempted to reconstruct the timeline leading into production. Don't hold me to this exactly. But assuming that Logan turned his draft of the script in sometime around October 1998,

and assuming that production began in January 1999, which we do know, and that construction of a lot of these sets took many months and that the actors were hired many months in advance, I think we can safely assume that Scott and the producers were actually sending out John Franzoni's script, the first one I described to you had to be to the cast in trying to draw them to the film right so I wasn't able to find a completely verified list of who Scott initially wanted for maximus however

various sources claimed that Mel Gibson was first offered the role no no and uh he turned it down he has since said that he felt he was too old for the part he was 43 he was almost 10 years older than russle crow he'd also just done braveheart and he actually went on to take the role, the lead in Roland Emmericks, the Patriot, which shot almost the same time. Antonio Banderas was also strongly considered. And I don't know if you remember in the movie, the character is Spanish. She's called the Spaniard throughout the entire film. Yes, which is strange when you look Russell Crow in the face.

Well, yeah, we'll get there. So in the end, Ridley Scott, though, wanted actually a lesser-known actor. And so he reached out to Russell Crow, the ruggedly handsome, now infamously combustible New Zealand-born actor. I will say this. I forever will love Russell Crow, no matter how many phones he throws at hotel employees. So Russell Crow at this point was not the Russell Crow we know today.

Yeah. He was in his mid-30s and coming off of the critically acclaimed LA Confidential, which if you haven't seen it, like, it's so good. It's one of the best movies ever made. Go watch it. Crow grew up in New Zealand and then Australia. He'd been exposed to the film industry through his parents. They worked as set caterers.

And he'd kind of like worked consistently through the 90s for an Australian film with proof and romper stomper. And I've seen romper stomper and it's definitely worth watching. So at this point in time, Crow is working on the insider. Michael Mann's story about a tobacco industry whistleblower. The character that he plays real life, I think Wiggins, the guy's last name, was actually 20 years older than Crow. He was in his 50s.

So he was wearing a wig, and he also weighed a lot more. So Crow had put on 50 pounds for the role. And so Crow gets sent the script for Gladiator, and initially he didn't even want to read it. He was like, what am I, they play, Gladiator? Then Michael Mann was like, listen, Ridley Scott's directing this. You should read this script. And so he's like, all right.

And then he reads Gladiator, and he hated it. He really was honest. He was like, this script is not very good. The character's underwritten. I'm not going to do it. So he passes. And so then producer Walter Parks, probably thinking like, fuck, we can't have like two or three actors pass on this. You know, it's going to lose steam.

Calls him and he gives him a simple pitch. It's 184 AD. You're a Roman general. You're going to be directed by Ridley Scott. The budget's $100 million. And so off of that pitch, Crowe agrees. to talk to Ridley about the part, and after Ridley pitched him on his vision, and by this point, Ridley Scott's been working months in advance with a storyboard artist, so he has visualized a lot of

the movie, and once Crow can see it, it sounds like he's down to do the projects. And I just would love to have seen this meeting if it did happen in person, because at this point in time, Russell Crow was 5-11.5, 240 pounds, and he had a shaved head, because he'd shaved his head bald so he could get the wig on faster. So can you imagine this, like, fat, bald Russell crow coming in me like yeah I could be a gladiator as ridley scott's like oh my god do we have the right guy ridley scott rounds out his cast with a number of british heavyweights including of course richard harris as marcus ralius derrick jackaby as senator gracis and then most importantly for our story oliver reed as proximo jude law screen tested for the role of comidus oh that might have been

really good i think he could have been excellent i think wakene phoenix is great i'm glad it was him. But I think, I think Jude Law is great. And I think he would be great as a villain. Like, it could be really cool. My favorite Jude Law is wormy villainous Jewel. It's like the talented Mr. Ripley and as Dickie Greenlee is, I think one of the best performances. Which came out this same year. And so he was actually, he chose this over Gladia. I don't think he, I don't think he chose it. I think they probably would have worked it out. But Ridley Scott insisted that Joaquin Phoenix was the one an only choice for comedies. So it sounds like DreamWorks, maybe Spielberg thought that Jude Law could be good and Ridley Scott. And I'm guessing it might have been Spielberg because Spielberg then

almost immediately went to work with Jude Law on AI, artificial intelligence. So there was one actress who lobbied hard for the role of Lucilla that went to Connie Nielsen eventually, but did not win over director Ridley Scott. And I bet you with a million guesses you could never guess this actress, but just give me like, give me a clue. She's, Hispanic? American? Yes. I'm going to guess something I know it's wrong.

No, go for it. Jennifer Lopez. That's right. Yeah. Oh, what? Jennifer Lopez, who's New Yorkan, she lobbied hard for the role of Lucilla. And she was... I'm sorry, that only wouldn't work because I would expect Jennifer Lopez to just beat the

ever-living crap out of walking feet. Yes, yeah, exactly, exactly. But despite securing a meeting with Ridley Scott, she quickly realized he wasn't going to select her and the role of course went to Danish actress Connie Nielsen, who you can see in the new Wonder Woman 1984. She's great. She's great. So cast in place, the production plan for the film was surprisingly straightforward. The movie was broken up entirely by location. So act one is set in Germania, which they were going to shoot in the born woods of England. They'd then relocate to Morocco for a month to shoot all of the scenes of the desert.

North Africa. North Africa stuff. And then the rest of the film takes place in Rome where they're going to shoot in Malta. The plan is to actually shoot the script linearly, which is extremely rare. So for those of you who are unaware, when you're filming a project, you're shooting out of order. You're shooting solely to minimize the number of local. location changes and costume changes, you're always trying to minimize change because that eats up time and time costs money when you're on set. So when you watch a movie like The Departed, for example, and you have an initial meetup point between Leonardo DiCaprio and Mark Wahlberg early in the film at the police station. They're going to film that back to back with the final meetup that they do later in the film in that same location.

That's a simplistic way of looking at it. But the point being, it's rare that you get a film that you can shoot in linear order. Another example is, I believe, Alejandro and Uritu shot the revenant roughly in script order. So, production would last just over four months from January through May of 1989. That's not terrible. The other reason to shoot linearly is that all of the big set pieces take place in the back half of the film. Rome is the most extensive piece of construction, so let's shoot all the lower construction cost stuff. up front and give our production time team more time to finish these sets. And the sets were

enormous. In Morocco, that arena that they fight in initially, that fits 3,000 people, was built to scale out of mud bricks using like local techniques and processes to make it, yeah, to make it genuine. I assumed that was like digitally. Nope. Oh, wow. That was real. And they also recreated basically 50% of the Coliseum in one. one direction at 52 feet high or one-third of its actual height of 157 feet. And these replicas cost well over a million dollars each, and they took months to complete. Not only, though, was Ridley Scott trying to buy time for his production design team. He was trying to buy time for the script as well, which just was not getting there.

So two weeks out from production, they brought on a third screenwriter to the project. So John Franzoni, then John Logan, and now British screenwriter William Nicholson is brought on mostly just to rework Maximus's character because Russell Crow is really pissed off that his character has not been fixed until this point. And I think with good reason, he's basically like- Well, if he's signed on with the caveat that it would be fixed and it's not, then yeah. So Nicholson is the one who added the idea of Maximus ultimately wanting to rejoin his family in the afterlife. which gave him a softer, more sensitive side to play. They also worked in a lot of crow's background with farming into the character. And they made him this like, oh, he's a soldier in his profession, but he's a farmer at heart.

And they did this kind of like rural versus city divide. And he strengthened Maximus's friendship with Juba, Jimon Hounsu's character, which initially was pretty surface level and they wanted it to be more of a strong, emotional arc to the film. So production begins in January of 1999, as I mentioned in the Bourne Woods of England. Scott has learned that the forestry commission has planned on executing a swath of deforestation

that year in that area, so we convinced them to allow him to deforest it for the movie. So the opening, like, Germanic war scenes, Ridley Scott just blew the forest up because they were going to take all those trees down anyway. Ridley Scott... So that's why there's just like stumps everywhere There's just, yeah, that's exactly right. Yeah, he was like, we're just going to cut it down for you.

So, Ridley Scott had just seen Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan, and he had seen the staging of D-Day and was like, this is the greatest battle sequence anyone's ever made. And so a lot of what he does in the sequence is an homage to Stephen Spielberg's cinematography and staging in the D-Day scene. If you watch them back-to-back, you can see similarities. Yeah. So Scott's cinematographer was John Matheson, a British cinematographer. He and Ridley Scott used up to seven cameras at a time to capture what they need. And changing lighting was constantly a problem, but they were shooting with all these cameras. And Ridley Scott smoking a cigar was like, we're going to push through all of these.

Who cares about continuity errors? And if you go watch the movie, it's like during these... There are so many continuity errors. It's sunny. It's snowing. There are clouds. There's smoke. Like, it just doesn't matter, though.

My favorite one, there is a section where Russell Crow is covered in like the wolf pelts and he's talking to somebody and they're inside a tent and then behind them in the background, you can see the opening to the tent. If you watch, not even that closely, because once you know it's there, you can't unsee it. There is a cameraman or crew member in Blue Jeans and a Parca that just walks right through the back of the shot. Yep. And it makes the final cut.

Yeah. You don't need to worry about that because that's not where you're looking. He's not wrong. You aren't looking at that. Because you're looking at the incredible production, which was enormous. For these opening scenes, they had 1,750 extras. They had 120 horses, and they had built real siege equipment. Those catapults that you see are real.

So for these opening sequences, young Joaquin Phoenix, he's 25. Also, this was the first film, big film that he was doing after the death of his brother, River. He was so nervous to be acting across from Russell Crow, and in particular, Richard Harris, that he suffered anxiety attacks. At one point, he apparently asked Russell Crow to beat him up before their scenes to get him into character. And Russell Crow was very weirded out by this and went to Harris for advice. And Richard Harris was like, get the boy pissed, apparently. So Russell Crow got... As in drunk?

Yeah, got Joaquin Phoenix drunk before some of their initial scenes to help calm his nerves. So in some of the takes, he's actually drunk. And despite this, Phoenix actually fainted after an intense take during the scene where he killed his father. Now, unfortunately, after rapping in England, which took three to four weeks, the production had run into an unusual problem. They didn't have any more pages of scripts to shoot that were locked. So here's Russell Crow talking about the script situation. And I read the script and it was actually, it was substantially underdone. And even the character didn't, you know, wasn't existed on the pages.

I mean, we actually started shooting with about 32 pages, went through them in the first couple of weeks. here was a situation where we got to Morocco with a crew of 200 and the cast of 100 or whatever, and I didn't have anything to learn. I actually didn't know what the scenes were going to be. We had, you know, I think one American writer working on it, one English writer working on it, and of course a group of producers who are also adding their ideas, and then Ridley himself, and then on the occasion where Ridley would say,

look, this is the structure for it, what are you going to say in that? So then I'd be doing my own stuff as well. I mean, this is how things like Strength and Honor came up. this is how things like at my signal unleash hell came up you know um the name maximus decimus meridius it just flowed well where did it come from my imagination i'd had ten other thing no writer send me names which i just didn't think had that kind of groove to it you know so adding of course to the difficulty with all of this is that crow is extremely dissatisfied with all of his dialogue he famously refuses to say perhaps the most famous line from the film in this life or the next

I will have my vengeance. He said it's stupid. It sounds arch. I don't know how to play it. I'm not going to do it until finally Ridley Scott just said just fucking say it. And that take is the take that's in the movie when he finally said. He was wrong on that one. It's a great line. It's a great line because he delivers it well too though. To be fair. As he said, strength and honor. was in Latin, the saying from one of Russell Crow's high schools that he attended back in Australia. So he was like talking to Ridley Scott and he was like, my character just says goodbye to a bunch of soldiers in this scene. Could I say something different? And Ridley's like smoking a cigar and he's like, what, what are you thinking? And then Russell Crow is like, well, there was this Latin phrase for my

school and he says it in Latin and then Ridley Scott goes, what's that mean? He goes, Strengthen Honor. And he goes, say that. And so that's how Strengthen Honor went into the story. Wow. And Crow wasn't the only cast member that was given input on the script. Both Connie Nielsen and Jimon Hounsu gave feedback on their characters and their dialogue that was incorporated into the story. Lizzie just informed me to all of you listeners out there that I've been pronouncing Jiamun Su's name wrong for 15 years. And I'm a big fan of his. So apologies to Jiamen.

You're a great actor and I should have learned how to pronounce your name prior to doing this podcast. But I've learned now. his feedback was also incorporated into the script. Ridley Scott was so receptive of input from his actors that one performer, and I'm probably going to pronounce his name wrong to, comedian Omar Jalili. He's also in The Mummy and he's hilarious. He's the guy that comes up when we meet Proximo and he Oliver Reed grabs his balls

and then he sells Oliver Reed Maximus effectively. He wrote in a later piece for The Guardian that Ridley Scott actually provided no direction to them at all. Omar once asked Ridley Scott about this, and Ridley Scott responded with a cigar in his mouth. Everyone, whenever they describe him, they're like, he always has a cigar in his mouth. And he's always like, if you're in a Ridley Scott film, you doubt in any direction. But I think he was focused on finishing their days because four months to shoot this whole movie is not that much time. No, that's surprisingly short. So the production moved to Malta after a few weeks in Morocco for the Rome set scenes where the Coliseum replica had been built.

In addition to those construction costs, there were over 3,000 extras. The production made 10,000 costumes, 1,500 sets of armor. They brought in dozens of animals from hyenas to horses to monkeys. On top of this, Russell Crow did a lot of his own stunts. He suffered a lot of injuries through the process, tore an Achilles tendon, permanently damaged one of his shoulders. He broke a bone in his foot, among other ailments. The cuts on his face after the first battle scene are real. his horse unexpectedly backed into a tree and he cut his face on some branches.

You can actually see the stitches on his face during the close-ups in that scene. And there were certain production limitations that required further script changes. The famous tigers seen in the film were originally supposed to be a single rhinoceros that Maximus fights. However, Ridley Scott, the producers called and we were like, hey, can you get a white rhino to Malta? And they were like, sure, but the problem is rhinos can't move. backwards. So apparently it would just the resetting of a rhinoceros in a scene would be so, they'd have to like run the

circle around the whole Coliseum to reset every time. So they said no and they asked their production team if they could do a CGI rhino and it was going to be millions of dollars and so they said... Also it would look like trash. It would look so bad. So they're like great, we'll just use tigers. However, perhaps the biggest

Thorne in Russell Crow's side was not the script, was not the injuries on set, but in fact his co-star all of Reed, who apparently, to be expected. Apparently just fucking hated Russell Crow from the beginning.

It seems like they're just very similar. Yeah. Oliver Reed at one point, even challenged Russell Crow to a fist fight in front of the cast and crew. Don't take that because Oliver Reed will get you, even if he's old. Yes, he would. Oliver Reed also,

I should say, because I don't want him to seem like just an asshole, reportedly became incredibly close with Joaquin Phoenix, who looked up to him in a lot of ways, and he was very good friends with Richard Harris. For anybody that doesn't have sort of a reference point for Oliver Reed outside of Gladiator, he plays Bill Sykes in the movie musical Oliver,

which is great. He's truly, truly, like, deeply scary in that, which is not something you expect from a musical, but, boy, is he scary. Yes. Oliver Reed had kind of been out of the film game for basically a decade. His last movie, big movie, had really been, and The Adventures of Baron von Munchausen,

which is the Terry Gilliam film, the flop that preceded, the failed making of the man who killed Don Quixote, and we'll do a separate episode on that. So Oliver Reed had famously accepted the role because, quote, he wanted to see some shows in London, not realizing he'd be filming in Malta and Morocco the entire time.

Whoops. He also had a provision in his contract that he couldn't be made to work past 5 p.m. So that time, was Reed's time. For those of you who don't know his earlier work, as Lizzie mentioned, he actually was considered to take over the Bond franchise for Sean Connery at one point. Too scary.

Too scary. And as Lizzie mentioned, he was as known for his acting chops as he was for his alcoholism. Yeah. So with three weeks left in production, the producers and Ridley Scott get somber news. Oliver Reed, their proximo, has died. On May 2nd, 1999, Oliver Reed. Oliver Reed hunkers down in a local pub in Malta. He there crosses paths with a group of British sailors

who are taking shore leave from the HMS Cumberland. Oh, no. According to witnesses, he drank eight pints of German lager, a dozen shots of rum, a half bottle of whiskey, and a few shots of cognac. What? He then proceeded to beat five of the sailors in arm wrestling matches. By the way, he's 61 years old, they're 20.

And then he's not in good shape. He suddenly stands up and collapses. He died on the way to the hospital of a heart attack. As I mentioned, he was 61 years old. So Ridley and his team are devastated for obvious reasons, and they're also completely screwed because they still had multiple key scenes with Proximo's character left to film.

As scripted, the retired Gladiator trotted out to fight Maximus at the end of the second act was supposed to be Proximo. Oh, no. And then the end of the film was to feature him, not Jiamen Hounsu's Juba, burying Maximus's statues in the sand at the Coliseum and walking away. So Proximo was the end of the movie. And so the issue with replacing him really wasn't so much financial as it was emotional.

So the film's insurance policy actually would cover the cost of reshooting all of Proximo's scenes with a new performer. It would cost apparently somewhere around $25 to $50 million. to go back, because they'd have to go back across three continents, rebuild all their sets, and he's in scenes. Repay all the actors. Yeah. So a $100 million film becomes a $150 million film. But really, the real hurdles were the fact that Ridley Scott and the entire team were exhausted.

It was such a struggle to get through this film for all of the expected reasons and the unexpected ones of the script and Russell Crow, etc. And the idea of recreating all of these sets and scenes needed to. reshoot all of this footage was truly terrifying. And on top of that, everybody loved the dailies of Reed and Crow together. Yeah. Meanwhile, post-production house, The Mill, located in England, was hard at work figuring out how to use visual effects, which Hollywood was just starting to embrace. Remember, we had had Jurassic Park in 93, and everything, the world of visual effects opened up. But they could be great results and terrible results. As we mentioned on an earlier episode, Last Action Hero, Alien 3, roughly the same time as Jurassic Park.

Some look good, some don't. So the mill is working on how to recreate the Coliseum, composite Tigers in, recreate Rome from above. They're pioneering techniques that would be used in epics for years to come, including motion capture and crowd generation. So Ridley Scott flies in screenwriter William Nicholson, and they set out to rewrite Proximo's Ark in a way where they can repurpose existing footage of Oliver Reed onto an added scene that Nicholson would write, then rely on the mill to digitally composite Reed's face

onto a body double. This becomes the scene where Reed ignores the Praetorian guards at the gates of the Gladiator Training Section. He releases Maximus and is subsequently killed in his chambers. Wow. Wait, that's entirely reconstructed after he's dead? Yeah. And if you watch it now in high definition, you can tell. But given that it was done in the year 2000, I think the effect looks remarkably good. In total, the mill recreated two additional minutes of screen time for Reed. That's a lot. And it costs $3.2 million to do, which if you think about $50 million for redoing the character, much less. The film is dedicated in Reed's memory. So at the very, very end of production, Ridley Scott still isn't satisfied with the story. He still feels like the themes of the film

weren't strong enough. So while shooting in Tuscany and apparently location scouting for Hannibal, he found himself inspired by something he saw and here's Ridley Scott. I knew I wanted to find a metaphor for mortality. I wouldn't discover the symbol of that

until the very last two days of photography when I was in Tuscany and I've got a double standing in his Roman leather armor and tunic. He's standing waist deep in wheat and he's actually stroking the corn, the wheat or the corn like that. And I was watching that and thinking, right, there's the opening shot of the movie. It also becomes the lead-in to the idea of heaven, because that's where he will go eventually.

And then you connect when he talks early on to Marksleros, who says, tell me about your home, he's actually describing the perfection that's in his own mind, which in a funny kind of way is heaven, because that's where his family died. So the kind of connective themes of the film weren't really discovered until the second to last day of filming. And actually that scene that Ridley Scott describes of Russell Crow telling them of his farm, that's actually written by Russell Crow.

Russell Crow wrote his speech about his farm in Australia and wrote it into that scene. So Russell Crow, that's a nice speech. He does deserve it. credit for that. So the film enters a lengthy post-production process in the summer of 1999. Guys, the mill did incredible work

on this movie. Go watch it. It speaks for itself. You can also learn more about the VFX online. I'm not going to get into that here. Hans Zimmer was brought in to score the film and Lisa Girard lent her vocals to the project. It is not Enya on this score despite what it sounds like. And so

the producers, by the time they saw early cuts, realized somehow they had captured something magical with this movie. They set a May 1st 2000 release, and then they showed the film to the historical consultant they'd hired on the project. He ran out of the screaming saying,

it's a disaster, there are so many inaccuracies. He then listed the inaccuracies and asked that his name be removed from the film. And indeed, much to the chagrin of actual history teachers, not my high school one, Gladiator is about as historically accurate as most science fiction.

there are a lot of anachronisms and fictitious elements. If you want us to look at those, look at them online. We're not going to get into them here. Gladiator stormed the box office in the summer of 2000. It earned $500 million worldwide against its $100 million budget. It was the second highest grossing film of the year behind Mission Impossible 2. What? I know.

How did that outperform Gladiator? It was nominated for 12 Academy Awards, including four of the big five, best actor, best director, best original screenplay and best picture. Didn't get best actors because there's literally one female speaking part in the whole movie. Correct. Joaquin Phoenix was also nominated for Best Supporting Actor, John Matheson for Best Cinematography. It was Ridley Scott's first nomination since Thelma and Louise nearly a decade earlier. We should also note that Ridley Scott opted not to take a producer credit on the film, despite his having done so on the previous four films that he directed in a later interview, he said the movie already had a bunch of producers on it and he didn't want to glom on.

So in the end, Russell Crow wins for Best Actor. He beat out Tom Hanks, for example, in Castaway. It was a bit of a surprise win. John Matheson won for cinematography. The folks at The Mill, one for special effects, visual effects. Pietro Scalia, one for editing, Arthur Max for production design. And of course, producers, Douglas Wick, Walter Parks, along with EP and writer John Franzoni, took home a statuette for Best Picture.

Ridley Scott, as they ran up to the stage, kid, went, God damn it, I should have taken a producing credit on this project. Oh, no. And if you look at his filmography, he has never not taking a producing credit since that movie. Out of curiosity, do you know who beat Joaquin Phoenix for supporting actor? Because he's the one that, like, his performance is so insane. Oh, it was traffic. Benicio del Toro.

Eh. Russell Crow, of course, would go on to have the most illustrious and productive decade of his career, a stretch highlighted by a beautiful mind, Cinderella Man. and capped off with 310 to Yuma in 2007. He's had a dip since, but like the nice guys was pretty good a couple years ago. Scott's career has been up and down in the decades since, but he continues to work at a prolific rate

with no signs of slowing down, even though he is 83 years old now. Oh, my God. And he looks great, and he's crushing it. Go, Ridley Scott. And of course, Lizzie, to end this episode, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the speculation around a long gestating prequel or sequel to Gladiator.

Now, folks, if you don't want to hear this, you can check out now. That concludes our section on actual Gladiator, but I have to talk about Gladiator, too, because the script was written, and it's amazing. Ridley Scott's decision to kill Maximus at the end of Gladiator was controversial for a number of reasons, not the least of which because it ruled out a sequel. So if you remember in the first drafts that DreamWorks read, he lives. So Ridley Scott wanted to do a sequel after those successes. of the first film. He planned on hiring screenwriter John Logan to pen a follow-up that would be

set in Rome in the years after Maximus's death. It would feature neither Russell Crow and really not be about Gladiators and serve more as a spiritual successor to Gladiator than an actual direct sequel. Okay. Now, unhappy at the notion that a sequel would be made without him, Russell Crow reportedly hired Australian musician Nick Cave to write a sequel to Gladiator. What? Called Gladiator 2. So Nick Cave, who is great. Like, go listen to his music.

He's amazing and an amazing composer. And he had written one film before this, and I can't remember what it was called. He took the job with one question. Didn't you die in Gladiator 1? To which Russell Crow responded, yeah, you sold that out, might. So without further ado, this is the plot of Nick Cave's Gladiator 2. Moments after the events of Gladiator, our hero Maximus wakes up in the afterlife. However, to his horror. This isn't the Elysium that he imagined during Gladiator 1. No,

this is a rain-soaked netherworld at the edges of a black ocean where terrified people huddled together in purgatorial state. With the help of a ghost guide, Mordecai, Maximus heads to an old temple where he communes with Jupiter, Mars, and five other long-dead Roman gods. Jupiter explains that Hephaestus, who, by the way, is technically, that's the Greek name for the god, I guess, has betrayed them, and that if Maximus kills him, they will reunite Maximus in the golden wheat fields of Elysium with his wife and son. So it's like, okay, it's like the afterlife version of Gladiator. No. So Maximus actually quickly finds Sifestus, kills him, but is then transported back to Rome 10 years after the events of Gladiator, where he sets out to find his son Marius, who in this

world is somehow alive and wasn't like crucified and burned like in the first movie. Yeah, he's extra dead and gladiator. Well, Maximus finds him. He also teams up with some secret underground Christians and Juba Jiamun Su from the first film and they go head to head against the new villain of the story, which is Comedus's nephew Lucius, who grew up to become evil in this timeline. The action also now features a flooded coliseum filled with 100 alligators. Yeah. But then the movie keeps going. And this final battle stretches on for 20 pages or so as we watch Maximus,

now immortal, stride into battle across history, participating in the Crusades, what? World War II, the Vietnam War, and finally raiding the Pentagon. So it's the opening credits of the... X-Men Orange and Wolverine. Yes, exactly. Yes, one of my favorite really bad X-Men movies. So good.

It's amazing. Crow read the script. He called up Nick Cave and apparently all he said was, don't like it, mate. And that was the end of Gladiator 2. All right. Apparently there is still a prequel in the works. Who knows if that will ever come out. Of course, to wrap things up, we need to talk about what went right. And there's a lot to choose from for this movie. So Lizzie, spinach and mouth, tell me, in your opinion, what went right with Ridley Scott's Gladiator. I've got to go with the casting of Joaquin Phoenix. While I think that Jude Law could, could have been really good. I don't think you can beat Joaquin,

and I'm so glad that this kind of launched... I mean, I know he'd done some other stuff as an adult prior to this, but this really was his big launch pad into Hollywood, and he's just... He is so good in this movie and continues to be so good. So, yeah. Absolutely. I have to say, Russell Crow, writer slash improviser.

That is really impressive. A lot of the great lines in this movie seem to have come from him and by the admission of the writers as well uh i gotta give him credit and he also and he plays them to perfection so good on russell crow and then obviously ridley scott's non-direction of actors i guess just works uh or at least it worked in this movie that does it for gladiator guys thanks so much for listening go give the movie a watch send us your recommendations lizzie anything else no i want to eat more spinach Send us your recommendations.

Eat more spinach. Stay safe. Stay healthy. Yeah. We'll talk to you guys next week. What went wrong is a sad boom podcast presented by Lizzie Bassett and Chris Winterbauer. Editing and music by David Bowman with cover art from Yathano Yubos.