The Roman Empire Rises Again

Director Ridley Scott remembers groaning and rolling his eyes when he was first approached with the idea for “Gladiator,” an epic adventure that marks Hollywood’s return to the era so lavishly portrayed in classics like “Ben-Hur” and “Spartacus.”

“My first thought was basically, ‘ick,’ ” he says. “All I could see was togas and sandals and permed hair.”

Yet producers Walter Parkes and Douglas Wick needed just a simple prop to spark the interest of Scott, whose credits include “Blade Runner,” “Alien,” “Thelma & Louise” and “G.I. Jane.” Before uttering a word about story or cast for the DreamWorks movie, the producers showed Scott a reproduction of a 19th century painting by Jean-Leon Gero^me picturing a beefy Roman warrior standing before a full house at the Colosseum.

“This picture was perfect--the proportions, the architecture, the light and shadow, everything,” Scott says. “From that picture alone, I thought, ‘That’s a great world to open up. We haven’t been there in a long time.’ I was in, right there.”

Indeed, in the 40 years since Kirk Douglas made a toga look manly in “Spartacus,” the gladiator movie has gone from studio mainstay to creaky relic, with today’s moviegoers more likely to associate the genre with a punch line from “Airplane!” than one of the seminal settings of Hollywood’s golden age. Which is precisely why, Scott says, the time is right for a comeback.

“It’s so old it’s new again,” he says. “It was due for a good freshening up.”

There are few directors more suited to spiffing up a genre than Scott, an elfin Brit who at 63 has made a career of creating grand spectacles and topical adventures. Puffing a fat Monte Carlo cigar in the West Hollywood production offices he shares with his younger brother and fellow director Tony, Scott spent a recent morning discussing the making of his $100-million “postmodern Roman epic” before heading off to Italy to begin shooting his next project: “Hannibal,” the long-anticipated sequel to “The Silence of the Lambs.”

With “Gladiator,” Scott says he set out to re-imagine a classic form in distinctly modern terms. The mythic tale of a hero’s odyssey is given a psychological and political polish, with David Franzoni’s story pitting a tortured warrior against an evil emperor who is revealed to be more wounded child than cunning arch-enemy. And while its major thrills are delivered in the arena, where extravagant fight scenes are captured in teeth-rattling digital sound, “Gladiator” also deals with the savagery of public combat and the unseemly motives of those who stage escapist spectacles for the sake of “the mob.”

But perhaps the most striking thing about this swords-and-sandals update is Scott’s sweeping vision of the Roman Empire. The film opens in the muddy forests of Germania, moves to the desert provinces of North Africa and ends in the towering metropolis of Rome at its most glorious. Each of these three settings is realized with the sort of clever digital imaging that makes “Gladiator” feel more sci-fi than Classic Lit.

The generous helpings of eye candy will come as no surprise to Scott’s fans, who forgive even his least successful films--Tom Cruise as a pointy-eared forest boy in 1985’s “Legend” was not exactly a career highlight--for the sake of all the intricate, painterly surfaces. For “Gladiator,” Scott studied subjects ranging from the plumbing at the Colosseum to the construction of ancient catapults in an attempt to fill all the film’s nooks and crannies with original detail.

“What I do is create worlds,” Scott says. “Whether it’s historical or futuristic, creating a world is the most attractive thing to me about filmmaking because everything goes--it’s a matter of drawing up your rule book and sticking to it.”

The problem with summoning the particular world of “Gladiator,” says Parkes, executive producer and DreamWorks co-head of production, was the association with what he calls “toga movies.”

“We wanted to avoid connotations left over from movies with cardboard sets and men wearing skirts and sandals,” Parkes says. “Ridley has so much taste and visual sense that we knew that was something we didn’t have to be afraid of.”

Producer Wick agrees that Scott’s involvement eased any fears of kitsch. “The idea of Ridley Scott being a tour guide through 2nd century Rome was very exciting--that was a bus I wanted to get on,” Wick says.

But something far more basic than the creation of worlds sets “Gladiator” apart from its predecessors. “Filmmaking 40 years ago tended to be much more theatrical,” Scott says. “You’re always standing back looking at this beautiful tapestry. That’s nice, but to me you can’t beat a close-up of a good actor doing his thing properly. I wanted to get inside, to do something about real people who had real predicaments as you would see them in a contemporary movie.”

There are predicaments galore in “Gladiator.” Franzoni, John Logan and William Nicholson’s script mixes Roman history, classic myth and superhero action. As a general the Roman emperor ordered killed, Russell Crowe must overcome slavery and conscription in the brutal gladiator games. As the emperor Commodus, Joaquin Phoenix tries to outmaneuver a squabbling congress that seeks the restoration of democracy. And as the emperor’s sister, Connie Nielsen attempts to aid in the resistance while protecting her only son from her brother’s paranoia.

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Crowe may not have been the most obvious choice to play Maximus, especially coming off the part of the paunchy, middle-aged executive that earned him an Oscar nomination for “The Insider.” But Scott says he was more intrigued by “Romper Stomper,” in which Crowe played a murderous neo-Nazi. “I thought, ‘Wow, there’s an animal,’ ” Scott recalls. “When you meet him, he’s also smart and articulate and very well-read. He does his research and comes to the table fully prepared--and God help you if you’re not.”

Crowe also contributed suggestions for character and story, elements Scott says he has only recently come to appreciate fully. “Over the years, I’ve learned to pay attention to material to the extent that I now understand that story and characters are the most important thing in any movie,” Scott says. “The audience must identify with someone in a film and go on a journey with them. That’s called escapism. I don’t care if it’s the stupidest mainstream movie or a really smart movie--it’s got to communicate.”

This no-nonsense sense of story is what Scott thinks sets him apart from more highbrow filmmakers, particularly in his native England. “The problem with communicating means it’s also got to sell--which is very anti-British,” he says. “The British seem to admire failure rather than success, providing it’s artistic or adheres to certain intellectual criteria that are noncommunicative except to a few people. But we aren’t in the business of a few people; we’re in the business of a lot of people, just by definition of cost. If you deny that, you’re a moron and you will very soon not continue working.”

Such notions are not just idle pondering--the nature of mass entertainment is one of the central themes of “Gladiator.” With most of the action revolving around spectacles staged to distract the masses from the hardships of their everyday lives, the film could easily be seen as a commentary on the Hollywood blockbuster. When the emperor Commodus announces the commencement of the games, a political opponent wryly notes: “He’ll conjure magic for them, and they’ll be distracted.” Which raises the question: Is he talking about gladiators or “Gladiator”?

Scott admits he feels a close allegiance to Proximo, the gladiator trainer played by Derek Jacobi, who describes himself as “an entertainer.” But Scott says he sees no conflict in milking thrills from bloody battles while simultaneously condemning the combatants for their brutality.

“It’s guilty pleasure,” he says. “If we could only get the world to get their religious and political rocks off by sitting in a theater rather than killing each other, wouldn’t that be healthier?”

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Scott began his career as a painter, graduating from London’s Royal College of Art (where he was a classmate of David Hockney) before hanging up the brushes to make commercials. While he has few regrets about leaving the artist’s life behind--for one thing, he probably couldn’t afford the homes in Brentwood, London and Arles, France, if he had remained a painter--Scott says he sometimes wishes for a more solitary career. “I really think the perfect life is a writer, painter or musician,” he says. “You’re on your own. You’re not relying on anyone. You have your own brushes or canvas or note pad. I need a bloody army to do what I do.”

For “Gladiator,” that army was an international force, dispatched in battalions to London, Morocco and Malta. By fortunate accident, production followed the story’s sequence, beginning in a forest seven miles from Gatwick Airport that doubled as ancient Germania.

The film opens on a gloomy winter evening, with Maximus unleashing a barrage of 16,000 flaming arrows in a jittery, bloody battle sequence that looks worlds away from the majestic set pieces of classic Roman adventures. Scott says he was directly inspired by the gritty realism in “Saving Private Ryan.”

“Steven [Spielberg] threw down the gauntlet with ‘Ryan,’ ” he says. “To me, that movie put everyone who makes films on notice that if you’re going to see battle, you had better take people right there and have metal whizzing past their ears. They better really get how unglamorous it all is.”

But in the process of re-creating the carnage of war, the producers completely destroyed nearly everything within a few miles. Scott says the production was merely fulfilling the wishes of the local forestry commission, which wanted to remove undernourished pines in a section known as Bourne Woods. “The forest commissioner told me either we could take down the forest, or he would,” Scott says. “I told him fine--we’d rip the [expletive] out of it.”

Next, the crew moved to Morocco for a section of the story that was added relatively late in the development of the script. “If we jumped straight from Germany to Rome, we used up Rome too quickly,” Scott says. “We invented a journey through the provinces in North Africa because we wanted to save Rome for the third act.”

Rome was re-created on the island of Malta, where a 17th century Spanish fort stood in for the floor of the Colosseum, the surrounding streets and a local marketplace. Digital effects helped elongate the views, adding upper levels and top stories. “Romans had six-story tenements and tall buildings,” Scott says. “The Colosseum stood 265 feet high. Every time we’ve seen Rome in movies before, it’s been a horizontal city, but I wanted this to be a vertical city, looming over everyone.”

In fact, life in ancient Rome must have felt remarkably similar to life in any big city, Scott says. Sitting in a crowd with 36,000 at the Colosseum would have been much like attending any modern sporting event.

Scott says he may have underplayed such a comparison in his past work, but “Gladiator” is explicit, casting the gladiators as sports heroes and the crowd as clamoring fans. “In the past I often took a jump and hoped people would get it--and of course they didn’t,” he says. “It was too internalized. I’ve learned to take the jump and make sure people get it.

“It’s exactly the same as going to a football match. The only difference now is that everyone gets up at the end of the game.”