Ridley Scott chats exclusively to Film Stories about Gladiator II, his career to date, plus the inside scoop on Gladiator III…
This article first appeared in Film Stories issue #52
Ridley Scott had always wanted the rhinoceros. In 1999 he had drawn out, in his typically exquisite detail, an entire sequence for his historical revenge epic, Gladiator, in which Maximus (Russell Crowe) fights an ornery white rhino in front of a baying crowd in Rome’s Colosseum.
Scott etched out images of the rhino thundering into the frame, intercut with the leering reactions of the senators and dignitaries in the stands; next to each shot, Scott jotted down little descriptions, one of which read: “A huge white rhino with a bird on his back… it prances in, agile despite its three tons…”
Alas, the scene was ultimately dropped due to budget constraints – a CGI test and Scott’s storyboards, tucked away on Gladiator’s DVD extras being all that remained of what could have been a striking moment in cinema.
Twenty-five years later, Scott finally has his rhino. In one of Gladiator II’s spectacular arena battles, out the beast rumbles, this time with a muscle-bound, armoured combatant riding on its back rather than a bird. It’s one of many obstacles Lucius (Paul Mescal) must overcome on his own revenge mission – this one against Pedro Pascal’s war-weary general Acacius, whose invading army decimated Lucius’s home town in Numidia.
Return to the arena
Given the production challenges that the original faced in 2000, it might seem surprising that Scott would want to make another Gladiator. At the vocal insistence of leading man Russell Crowe, the script was constantly being rewritten on set; the sudden death of co-star Oliver Reed during the Malta shoot forced Scott and his collaborators to resort to visual effects to fill in the actor’s unfilmed scenes.
Budget constraints saw not just the rhino sequence cut, but also an entire climactic battle involving thousands of extras dressed as soldiers; a more low-key showdown between Maximus and the object of his vengeance, Commodus (Joaquin Phoenix), was devised instead.
Despite all of this, Gladiator emerged as one of the most successful films of Scott’s career. It won five Academy Awards, and with a box-office take of over $450m, made the sword-and-sandal genre fashionable again. Consequently, a sequel was in the planning stages right from the early 2000s, with a truly bizarre screenplay by Nick Cave, subtly named Christ Killer, among the legendary abortive efforts. Nonetheless, something about the project kept Scott interested, and almost a quarter of a century on, along comes Gladiator II – a sequel that manages to find inventive ways of complicating the revenge plot of its predecessor.
Read more: Gladiator II review | Ridley Scott serves up another sumptuous tale of blood and circuses
“It seems to have grabbed the imagination,” Scott says of the original Gladiator. “There’s more to it than action and violence.”
The first film’s themes of mortality and immortality – illustrated by lyrical shots of Maximus’s hand gliding through wheat or doorways opening into the afterlife – helped endear the film to audiences, Scott suggests.
“The interesting thing that wasn’t in the script was… I wanted to see [Maximus] reach for the door and join his wife and child. That was an idea that was thought to be a bit too much, but ironically it proved to be, really, the bloodline of the film.”
Creative energy
In conversation, Scott has a restless, almost mischievous energy, his eyes glinting as he veers unexpectedly from topic to topic. It’s an energy that has led him to make, on average, roughly a film a year since 2000’s Gladiator, their subjects ranging from the intimate (comedy Matchstick Men, romantic drama A Good Year) to the resolutely epic, including 2021’s The Last Duel and the recent biopic, Napoleon, released in 2023.
Even at 86 – age is a subject that inevitably comes up in features such as this – Scott can maintain that pace in no small part thanks to his skills as an artist. With everything storyboarded out in advance – in what have been widely dubbed his ‘Ridleygrams’ – Scott essentially has the film worked out before anyone even builds a set.
“Once I’ve done the board,” the director asserts, “I can literally shoot the film on Monday because I’ve already filmed it in my head.”
Drawing has therefore formed the backbone of Ridley Scott’s filmmaking from the beginning of his career. When Scott was hired by 20th Century Fox to make 1979’s Alien, he was originally given a paltry budget of $4.2m; Scott then went away and spent countless hours drawing out the entire film in detail, scene by scene, shot by shot. In a graphic style inspired by French artist Moebius and Heavy Metal magazine, Scott imagined an entire sci-fi world – a cavernous ship, like an oil refinery in space; its seven crew, who touch down on a wind-blasted planet and discover an ancient craft crammed full of leathery eggs. These weren’t just sketches, but fully realised, shaded renderings of what the movie could look like, from the heft and bulk of an astronaut’s space suit to the particular way a ship’s corridor could be framed and lit.
Ridley Scott went into a meeting with Fox’s executives, showed them his storyboards, and walked back out with a budget of $8.5m. The director’s artistry had impressed the moneymen to such an extent that they were willing to double their investment in his sci-fi horror vision – a moment in the production that arguably changed the course of mainstream cinema history (all told, Alien would cost Fox $11m – a sum it earned back more than ten times over on its initial cinema run alone). It was thanks to Scott’s eye, and the financing required to achieve it, that what could have been a B-movie became something far more striking – even artistic.
Scott has continued to storyboard his films ever since. And whether they’re drawn at leisure long before production, or sketched out hurriedly in the back of a car on the way to set, they’re key to the director’s filmmaking. During the production of Gladiator II, for example, Scott used his boards to help his actors find their characters. Fred Hechinger, a young New York actor who plays Rome’s joint Emperor Caracalla in the finished film (Joseph Quinn plays his brother and fellow ruler, Geta), recalls looking at Scott’s boards, and the pair coming up with a look for the character based on punk rocker Sid Vicious.
“When he talks about things, you can really tell that what starts him out in every movie is his strong visual sense,” Hechinger tells us. “So his storyboards are gorgeous and so detailed. One of the first conversations we had was when he showed me the portraits he’d drawn of Geta and Caracalla. That’s what set us off on talking about punk figures and history and all these different inspirations for these guys. He has a real artistic, visual impulse.”
Paul Mescal, the 28-year-old actor who leads Gladiator II, was similarly struck by Scott’s artwork.
“When you’re in a room on your own with Ridley and he’s showing you these infamous storyboards, you feel like you’re in a museum of sorts,” the actor tells us on a video call from an expensive-looking hotel room. “You’re seeing this great director, and watching how his process is unfolding, and how this has been a cornerstone of every film he’s made.”
When production on Gladiator II wrapped, Scott gave Mescal a gift: three original storyboards, mounted and framed. “They have pride of place in my house,” Mescal says.
Fast shooting
There’s another practice of Scott’s that allows him to make his movies at such a rate: he shoots them at an extraordinary speed, with minimal takes and footage captured on multiple cameras, all running simultaneously.
“I discovered a while ago that actors don’t want 49 takes,” Scott says with a dry cackle. “If you’re doing 49 takes there’s something seriously wrong, okay? They love two takes because they’ve come in there, they’ve been cast… they turn up prepared. So I say, ‘No rehearsal. Action.’ They go, ‘Wow’.
“Normally, it’s two or three takes and we’re done. I always use eleven cameras. Four to eleven cameras. So you schedule for the day, but you’re done by 11 o’clock. And the actors say, ‘Goddamn, we did 40 set-ups this morning’. And they’re thrilled to bits with themselves.”
Mescal gives us a wry smile when we bring up the subject of his director’s style of filmmaking. Scott prefers “max three” takes, Mescal laughs.
“I knew from talking to actors who’d worked with him before that he’s infamous for not doing a huge amount of takes,” the actor says. “But he’s also infamous for getting great performances out of actors… You’re coming in and you really want to be landing it on the first take, and then anything you get after that is a bonus.”
Scott’s decisiveness extends to his casting. Mescal, having impressed Scott with his performance in the TV series Normal People, was cast after a single Zoom call.
“It was about half an hour,” Mescal said, “so I definitely wasn’t thinking that would be it. I thought there would be further stages, but Ridley makes his decisions quickly – which I later found out!”
Hechinger, who was hired when Barry Keoghan was forced to drop out, was cast with similar speed.
“One of many things that is deeply inspiring about Ridley is that he does not waste time and he trusts his gut,” Hechinger says. “He operates in a very focused and straightforward manner. And as an actor, that’s unusual, you know? Sometimes [casting] can be a long, long process. It did happen unusually fast, and I did have this call of, ‘I want to do this, do you want to do it?’ ”
Both Mescal and Hechinger seemed to find Scott’s filmmaking style exhilarating – like racing to get on board a train that’s about to leave the station.
“His process is wonderfully liberating, because you’re shooting the wide and the close-up in the same set-up,” says Mescal. “You’ve got a long lens, probably 75mm, on your face, and you can’t feel the camera. He’s also shooting the wide. The camera’s never really in your face.”
Young artist
Wherever Scott’s drive and creative urgency comes from, it has propelled him from County Durham – where he was born in 1937 – to a long and extraordinary career in Hollywood. Having struggled with his exams (“I got one GCE and that was art”), a teacher recommended that Scott go to art school; the young artist soon ended up at London’s Royal College of Art, where he was taught by (among others) the great Francis Bacon.
With a flair for drawing and composition, Scott briefly considered becoming a fashion photographer before he picked up a 16mm camera and made a short film in 1962. Boy And Bicycle starred his younger brother Tony (the only actor he could find) cycling around the cold industrial backdrops of West Hartlepool. It would serve as a calling card, leading to a brief stint at the BBC, and after that, a hugely successful career in commercials.
“I caught the wave of this new thing called commercial TV, and in a heartbeat I was directing commercials,” Scott recalls. “Because of my visual nature, what I’m good at, I was fundamentally top of the line… A lot of ads back then, honestly, looked way better than any of the programmes, and I think we influenced the way things looked and were lit.”
By the time Scott was in his 20s, he was a millionaire. He’d set up his own advertising agency, Ridley Scott Associates, in 1968, with his brother Tony as partner; and the company soon had offices in Paris and New York. Scott estimates that the number of commercials he’s directed hovers around the 2,000 mark, with clients including Pepsi and Chanel. His most famous commercials, though, are arguably his 30-second ad for Hovis in 1973, and his Orwellian spot for Apple’s Macintosh computer – appropriately made in 1984.
“I did a commercial for Steve Jobs,” Scott says, casually. “He was very pro-filmmaking after that, because he was a bit suspicious of advertising.”
While Scott’s career as a commercials director flourished, his feature debut was rather longer in the making than you may have thought.
“Really, I was ready at 26 to do it, and they just didn’t want to know because all I’d done were 30-second commercials,” says Scott. “I think they were just short-changing me because they didn’t know what I could do, which is fine.”
By the 1970s, however, Scott had the means to essentially bankroll The Duellists himself. Based on the Joseph Conrad short story The Duel, it starred Keith Carradine and Harvey Keitel as a pair of French soldiers who, with the Napoleonic Wars as a bloody backdrop, repeatedly, futilely fight one another over the course of 16 years.
“I gradually worked my way up to buying a book, paying the writer, becoming my own completion bond, and funding my first film and never getting paid,” Scott says with a chuckle. “The Duellists then won a prize at Cannes. Boom – I was off and running. But I was 40. But with no regrets, because when I entered the film business, I wasn’t a new kid, I was kind of the leader of the pack.”
A critical rather than financial success, The Duellists nevertheless caught the eye of Sandy Lieberson, 20th Century Fox’s European president, and Scott was hired to direct his first studio movie, Alien, in 1979. Since then, Scott has sought to strike a balance between artistry and commercial-mindedness. Blade Runner (1982), Scott’s first film shot in the United States, was a fraught production and the movie failed to find an audience on its initial release, but its stunning visuals influenced science fiction for decades afterwards.
Not all of Scott’s films have been hits – Legend, 1492: Conquest Of Paradise, White Squall and G.I. Jane all struggled – but every few years, the director has bounced back with a huge success. The tepid reception to his 1987 neo-noir Someone To Watch Over Me was followed by the 1989 cop thriller Black Rain, which made $134m.
The ’90s was an uneven decade for Scott at the box office, but it started on a soaring note with Thelma & Louise (1991), which was nominated for six Oscars. Again meticulously storyboarded, Thelma & Louise’s dusty, golden-hour conclusion in the Grand Canyon is one of the most iconic of the 1990s – an example of how Scott’s talent as a visual storyteller can bring so much verve to an already effective screenplay.
Some of Scott’s films have themselves been inspired by the images of other artists. When co-writer and producer Dan O’Bannon handed the director a book of artist HR Giger’s work, Scott saw one painting, entitled Necronom IV, and immediately knew he’d found his title monster for Alien. Similarly, Scott was handed an evocative painting of a victorious combatant by 19th century artist Jean-Léon Gérôme, and was so taken by it that he agreed to make Gladiator without having read the script.
Roman re-creation
For Gladiator II, Scott looked at the work of Romantic artist Lawrence Alma-Tadema, famous for his detailed oil paintings of an idealised ancient Rome.
“He would paint aristocrats in full Roman gear to hang in their own drawing rooms,” Scott says. “And so it became fashionable to be painted in a Roman bath or something like that. The quality of their paintings are like great photographs, so I’d always look at those.”
Similarly, Scott attracted Denzel Washington to the role of the scheming Macrinus by showing him another 19th century painting, The Moor, which depicts an African nobleman in all his finery.
“I thought, ‘There’s Denzel,’” Scott recalls, “and that’s how I got him involved. I thought he might say no, but he said yes.”
Washington nixed the idea of his character sharing the same facial hair as the noblemen in the painting, however.
“He had a great pointy beard,” Scott ruefully notes, “Denzel didn’t go for the beard.”
On location in Morocco and Malta, Scott approached Gladiator II like a true Old Hollywood historical epic, with vast sets teeming with thousands of extras. As he did with the first film, Scott had a replica Colosseum built, with liberal sprinklings of CGI used to extend the top of the arena and add in extra crowd members.
“It was staggering,” Hechinger said, recalling the start of the shoot. “I walked on set the first day and I felt immersed and surrounded. A mix of absolutely petrified by the scope and the scale, and totally inspired and invigorated.”
“I think the only part of the arena that didn’t physically exist was a portion in the corner so they could get the cameras in,” Mescal recalls with similar wonderment. “And I think if Ridley could have gotten his way, he’d have built 360! What you see is it – there’s very little CGI. I think they would’ve built a tiny bit up at the top end. The gates were to scale. You would walk out of the gates and go up the Via Appia. It was like this mini city, you know? It was the biggest set I’ve been on, and probably, the way that filmmaking is going, probably the biggest set I ever will be on in terms of scale.”
The combination of enormous sets and a rapid filming schedule added to the urgency of the performances.
“You have to reckon with everyone around you at all times,” Hechinger says. “So if there’s a mob of 700 people screaming at full volume, you have to figure out how to be heard. You have to fight through the noise and command them or make sense of it – or fail, publicly. Those stakes are utterly connected to the context of Gladiator.”
In one electrifying scene, Mescal’s character engages in a deadly bout of hand-to-hand combat with another gladiator, and follows it by reciting a poem by Virgil, addressed defiantly to a saucer-eyed Geta. Scott’s style of filming being as it is, the fight and the recital were shot right after each other.
“Yeah, that was two takes,” Mescal says, a hint of pride in his voice. “You run the fight, and the camera’s [rolling]… I just love it because you can’t fake the adrenaline. When I watch the film, I can see the heartbeat in my eye going duh-dum, duh-dum, duh-dum…”
Scott’s authorial control over the movie is such that he’s able to slot personal ideas into the midst of a huge production. He recalls standing in a car park in South Africa one day before work on Gladiator II began, and watching in horror and fascination as an entire troop of baboons came flooding over a wall towards a group of tourists “wandering around to get a coffee.”
“It was unbelievable, because baboons are carnivores,” Scott says now. “A baboon can be small, but can you hang by a beam for two hours from your foot? No. Will they rip your arm off? Yes. Will they take a bite out of your face? Yes. So I thought, ‘It’s got to be the baboons.’ ”
So it was that one of Gladiator II’s combat scenes involves Paul Mescal’s character fighting a pack of screaming, vicious primates.
“We cast all the smallest stuntmen I could find, who are muscular and strong,” says Scott. “We gave them short crutches to walk around on, so suddenly you have the movement of a baboon. They’re in black tights, painted faces. We shot the whole sequence with stuntmen in black tights.”
Monkey business
Gladiator II as a whole displays a surprising preoccupation with animals – even more so than the first film, in which Russell Crowe had to avoid the swiping paw of a tiger. In the sequel, Mescal contends with sharks swimming around a flooded Colosseum, while Fred Hechinger’s character owns a tiny pet monkey, clad in a custom-made dress. Echoing a legendary story about Caligula’s favourite horse, Caracalla makes the primate a member of his senate.
“I rehearsed more with that monkey than with anybody else,” Hechinger laughs. “Ridley, I think it’s clear from his movies that he loves animals. Their impulsivity, their rage, their sweetness. I think he responds to the urgency and believability of animals. Frequently, especially in the first Gladiator, he sees the way in which humans are animals. I think he’s very unafraid to depict that on screen.”
All these huge sets, animals and extraordinary gladiatorial scenes came at a cost, however, and if estimates are accurate, Gladiator II cost somewhere in the region of $250m, or perhaps even as high as $310m – by far the biggest budget Scott has ever had to work with.
“I’m always in deep respect for somebody who’s paying me to fulfil a dream on paper,” Scott says of his studio backers at Paramount. “Trust me. That’s why on Gladiator we ended up $10m under budget. Because we moved so fast and I’m respectful of my investor partner, the studio.”
Read more: Gladiator II | Is this the first post-January 6th blockbuster?
Although less arduous a production than its predecessor, Gladiator II wasn’t without its unforeseen challenges. Filming was interrupted for five long months by the Hollywood strikes, which contributed to that huge production spend; as recently as June 2024, the production was brought back into gear – with dozens of extras – in order to film some additional scenes for the ending. Not that any of this appeared to faze Scott; rather than sit and enjoy the break, he instead began storyboarding out his plans for Gladiator III.
“Listen, I had to fire Kevin Spacey,” Scott says, referring to his 2017 thriller, All The Money In The World, in which serious allegations against Spacey saw him replaced by Christopher Plummer at the eleventh hour. “I reshot [Plummer] in nine days. It’s about knowing what you’re doing and speed and decision. So with four months down, I just sat and prepared the next fuckin’ movie. I sat and drew boards for Gladiator [III]. So I’ve got the next three years laid out with three movies.”
With Gladiator III – whose existence will hinge on the performance of this year’s film – further off, Scott is next making You Should Be Dancing, a music biopic about the Bee Gees, and he’s also planned a science-fiction project he’d prefer not to talk about.
No stopping
Paul Mescal laughs when we raise the subject of Gladiator III; by coincidence, Scott had mentioned a second sequel to him over the phone only a day earlier.
“We haven’t spoken about it,” the actor clarifies when we ask whether he’ll play Lucius again. “[Ridley] was phoning me about something else. I say it just to laugh about the fact that it’s a real insight into his brain; that at 86 he just doesn’t stop. So anytime I say I’m tired while I’m shooting something, and I’m 28, I’m like: ‘This guy’s operating on a different level.’ ”
Death and mortality is a recurring theme in Scott’s work, and it’s a wonder whether it’s that awareness of timing ticking away that keeps him so relentlessly busy.
“I don’t really stop,” he admitted when I asked him about this in 2015, not long after he’d finished another big hit, The Martian. “Whatever I do, I’m on. But it’s life, isn’t it? We’re not here for that long. I don’t feel vulnerable in any way. I’m lucky that I’m in good health and the brain’s still going… My dad retired five years younger than me. Retirees are retiring at 50, 60. What the hell are you going to do? I don’t know. It’s unthinkable for me to retire.”
Still drawing, still planning, still obsessed with making movies, Ridley Scott’s a little bit like the white rhino that he finally got to realise in Gladiator II – through scene after scene, production after production, he keeps charging on, obstacles be damned.
In 2020, Gladiator producer Douglas Wick, the person who fatefully showed Scott that Gérôme painting, gave The Hollywood Reporter an anecdote which could easily sum up the director himself. Ahead of the film’s shoot in 1999, Wick asked an animal trainer whether they could bring a rhinoceros to the set for the combat scene he and Scott wanted to make.
“Yeah, we could definitely do that,” the trainer said. “There’s just one problem – when they start moving, you can’t stop them.”
Gladiator II is in cinemas now.
