The director speaks his mind on rejected sequel ideas, Joaquin Phoenix’s plan to quit the original and working with a “fractious” Denzel Washington.
It’s been 24 years since director Ridley Scott scored one of the biggest hits of his career with Gladiator, a swords-and-sandals epic starring Russell Crowe that won the Oscar for best picture. Now 86, Scott still works at a prodigious pace, sometimes even directing two films in the same year.
His latest is Gladiator II, which picks up two decades after Crowe’s character, Maximus, died heroically in the arena. In the years since, Lucius (Paul Mescal) – Maximus’ secret son – has been shuttled to North Africa where he, too, has become a capable fighter. But war waged by Roman general Marcus Acacius (Pedro Pascal) will draw Lucius back to his birthplace, where the clever arms dealer Macrinus (Denzel Washington) will try to manipulate the young man to further his own ambitions.
In October, I met Scott at his Los Angeles office, which was decorated with posters of some of his memorable films like Alien, Blade Runner and The Martian. True to form, while gearing up for the November 22 release of Gladiator II, he was already deep into preproduction for his next movie (a Bee Gees biopic set to shoot in February) and had even begun storyboarding the one after that (a sci-fi adaptation).
“I feel alive when I’m doing something at this level,” he said. “I don’t call it stress, I call it adrenaline. And a bit of adrenaline is good for you.”
Here are edited excerpts from our conversation.
Q: A sequel to Gladiator had been in the works for over two decades, making it by far the longest film you’ve ever developed. What made you want to see it through?
A: [The first Gladiator in 2000] had a growing success: After it was released, it was pretty good, but the beloved nature of the film grew partly because of the [streaming] platforms. I love the platforms because instead of a film sitting on a shelf dying after it’s opened, it’s online, and the quality is always superb, as good as when it was released. So I kept hearing how people loved Gladiator. I thought, “You know, we better do something.”
The logic was very clear what it should be, because frequently in a sequel you’ve got no survivor, you’ve got no story, but we had a person [Lucius] who had suddenly disappeared out the picture. Where did he go? You begin with where he went to, a boy in constant flight. And that seemed a good start.
Q: After the first Gladiator was such a big hit, there were other explorations of a sequel that might still somehow involve Russell Crowe, weren’t there?
A: Russell and I got together a couple of years afterward, and Russell said, “What can we do? I’m dead.” I suddenly thought there’s a way of bringing him back from the dead: As a man dies in battle, that is the opportunity to come from the dead side into the life side, to come back in the body of a soldier. I said, “The problem is, Russell, either you’re going to be the double of Maximus or you’re going to have to be somebody else.”
Q: There was even a sequel idea that musician Nick Cave wrote, where Maximus is resurrected as an instrument of the Roman gods dispatched against Jesus Christ. That obviously didn’t happen.
A: It got too grand. Nick is very high theatre, and Steven Spielberg [who was consulted on the original film] said, “Nah.” I wasn’t confident about what we had actually put together, so I just let it go.
Q: How did you know that this new incarnation was right after all those years of false starts?
A: I became determined to not let it go because the enthusiasm wouldn’t go away. I wanted to honour that and I’d be crazy not to – also financially crazy because if you get it right, it’s a big winner. So I just thought, “I’m going to sit here until we come up with a footprint.”
Q: Once you decided to centre the movie on the son of Maximus, it became a leading role that many young men in Hollywood were pursuing. How did you settle on Paul Mescal?
A: I noticed Paul when I was watching Normal People. I thought, “My God, he looks like Richard Harris,” so immediately, ding! It’s the nose, the profile. At this point, I think I’ve spotted so many first-timers right back to Sigourney [Weaver for Alien], Brad [Pitt for Thelma & Louise]. Part of my job is I’m a good caster, and I’m also helped by very good casting directors, so I choose them carefully. To me, a casting director is as important as a good camera.
Q: Until now, Paul has never made a big studio movie. Did you feel like you had to scale his independent-film sensibility upward for this?
A: Paul is very smart, so all he’s got to do is get over the scale of what I’m going to walk him into. When I walked him on to the set of Rome in Malta, I said, “You’ll get over this in two hours. This is all for you, this is all for me. Let’s go and make this together.” That was it. Part of my job is to make light of it.
Q: Did you conceive Denzel’s character with him in mind?
A: No. But there’s one great painting by Jean-Léon Gérôme [Moorish Bath]. The guy is absolutely Black as the telephone and he’s magnificent, he’s got a beard with a point and a great jewelled, Dizzy Gillespie hat in orange and blue silk.
Q: It’s a different Denzel than we’re used to seeing. He’s light and cunning, with hints of bisexuality.
A: There’s a twinkle. Also, he’s a gangster. I think he was clearly a prisoner of war, went to the ring, earned his freedom, suddenly working in a giant bread factory and supplied bread for the Roman army. He maybe eventually took that over, then goes to munitions, so he’s an arms dealer. I thought that was his evolution. He said, “Oh, I like that. I’m a gangster.”
Q: You previously worked with Denzel on American Gangster (2007). How did you find him to be on this?
A: Always fractious, always. That’s who he is: Denzel, in a funny kind of way, is a Method actor. When he’s doing a part, he’s in the part all the time, so it isn’t Denzel daily, even off-camera.
Q: Barry Keoghan was set to play a villain in the film and dropped out. What happened?
A: Yeah. Barry got locked into Saltburn. I think that’s maybe the best film I’ve seen this year. Anyway, Barry is one of the good ones, the same level as Joaquin Phoenix and Paul. Barry is so complex and actually has it under control. I know he’s a bit of a challenge, but it’s worth it. Like deciding on Joaquin, it’s worth it.
Q: Joaquin recently dropped out of a new film by Todd Haynes just as it was going into production. I’ve heard that on the original Gladiator, he had to be convinced to stay on, too.
A: He was in his prince’s outfit saying, “I can’t do it.” I said, “What?” And Russell said, “This is terribly unprofessional.”
Q: How do you convince someone to stay?
A: I can act as a big brother or dad. But I’m quite a friend of Joaquin’s. Gladiator was a baptism of fire for both of us in the beginning.
Q: Is it true that Joaquin also wavered on doing your film Napoleon until Paul Thomas Anderson came in for uncredited rewrites?
A: Tommy was doing Licorice Pizza, advising me how to do Napoleon. It turned into a lot of fun, actually. Three of us in this room screaming with laughter.
Q: There were reports that the budget for Gladiator II ballooned to over US$300 million. Did that have to do with the strike-enforced hiatus?
A: No, I ended up US$10 million under because I did the whole thing in 51 days. What happened was we began with stop-and-go on the budget because we may have started too quickly. I am a bit of a businessman, so I said, “Wait a minute, how much are we spending? And where has it gone?” I’ve been doing this 50 years, so inevitably you become budget-conscious. You have to, because the bottom has dropped out of advertising and it’s got to now reform and reinvent itself. Now I’m trying to embrace AI.
Q: In what sense?
A: I want to do animation.
Q: Would that put people out of work? I’ve talked to people in animation who believe AI will reduce their jobs.
A: I think you might create jobs, but it means relearning. Somebody once said that in your lifetime, you may have to retrain twice, three times, and it’s rough for the average person. For me, I have to just evolve. I like to think I’m a tennis player and I’ve got to keep bouncing the ball.
Q: Sam Altman and others talk about AI creating jobs. I’m just curious how that will actually work, because it seems apparent to me it will reduce jobs.
A: I don’t think it’s going to create jobs except for very high-end specialists. You can have done in a week what would take 10 guys 10 weeks.
Q: What do you remember about the night Gladiator won best picture? The film won several Oscars, though not the directing trophy.
A: I got run over, trodden on by all the people going up for the Oscar. I always remember it was Steven [Spielberg] who said, “The film got five Academy Awards. What happened to you?”
Q: Steven Soderbergh won best director that year for Traffic. He looked surprised.
A: Yes, he was. But I didn’t care, I’ve got a knighthood. I’ve just been knighted again and I feel so over-rewarded. Actually, my reward is the fact I’m still well enough to do what I do. I touch wood every day.
Q: You received Oscar nominations for directing Gladiator, Black Hawk Down and Thelma & Louise. Do those feel like the right three to you?
A: No, I think there could have been more. I can name exactly what I could have been nominated for, because I think The Duellists was pretty good as well. I got the prize at Cannes [in 1977] for that.
Q: That’s a pretty big coup, a prize at the Cannes Film Festival for your first film.
A: I never go there. I [expletive] hate it.
When I made [The Duellists], they said, “Oh, we want to make this the British entry at Cannes.” I go, “Wow, OK.” Now I’m in Cannes and Roberto Rossellini was on the board [the jury]. I wonder if I’ll tell you this. You judge, be careful what I’m going to tell you.
Q: Sure.
Rossellini said to me, “Listen, I love the movie. I want to give you the Palme d’Or.” He said, “The committee are rejecting it because somebody in there has bribed the committee to vote for somebody else.”
Q: Wow.
A: Mm-hmm. He said, “What do you want to do?” I said, “[Expletive]. I never thought I’d come this far.” He said, “Good man.” And the Taviani brothers won for Padre Padrone. That was interesting. Money had been chucked in at the top.
Q: Do you sense that there’s any relationship between the Rome that we see in Gladiator II and our current political moment?
A: Yeah. If we don’t watch it, we’re getting worse. A bomb is just as bad as putting Christians in the arena and allowing a lion to amble in and eat them – and people will forget that they actually did that for fun. It’s all impossibly horrific. I try and keep that in the forefront, like when Paul says, “Is this how Rome treats its heroes?” Because you can’t ever correct that madness. And when the madness has the voice, the rhetoric to convince the people – because there’s always a large faction, unfortunately, 50% who are stupid and out their mind – you have a very dangerous situation.
Q: The feeling of class disparity in the film feels especially pronounced, where so many are subject to the whims of a few wealthy and powerful men.
A: But the moneymakers frequently are the engines of employment. So you can’t say every billionaire is a crook, because every billionaire probably creates a lot of jobs. And yet I can’t understand why have we got people living on the streets in California where the general productivity of California is the sixth biggest in the world?
Q: I think the wealthiest people are so insulated these days that there is no relationship between them and life as it’s normally lived.
A: But do you really think to tax the billionaire at the proper 57% would help? Would it pay for the problem or is it bad government?
Q: I would hope that it would pay for the problem, but you also have to have effective politicians in there.
A: Somebody said there are 1000 billionaires in America [there are roughly 800], so if you have 1000 billionaires, pay your 50%.
Q: It was reported recently that Apple may be withdrawing from the sort of theatrical releases the company gave Napoleon. Do things like that make you worry about the future of movies?
A: No, because I get overpaid anyway.
Q: But do you not have a vested interest in theatrical releases still?
A: No, not really. I just have fun doing what I do. But it’s a privilege to be doing what I’m doing. If this is a Formula One car, I’m a good driver.
Q: But will there still be racetracks? Do you think that the younger audience coming up today has the same relationship to film that you or I did?
A: No. You’re at least two generations behind me but you’re of a different, sophisticated mode. It’s scary how stupid we’re getting.
Q: Denzel has been saying recently in the press that he doesn’t know if he has all that many more acting roles in him.
A: He’ll start directing.
Q: Well, he has been directing.
A: Yeah. But they tend to be small.
Q: You think he’ll scale upward?
A: Yeah. Though he may not because he’s always liked theatre – he’s doing Othello on Broadway. He may prefer that because the bigger the film, more aggravation comes with it. You’ve got to be able to handle it.
Q: Denzel may work less as an actor, but you don’t strike me as somebody who’s eager to wind down his career at all.
A: No, it’s crazy.
Q: Your mother lived all the way into her mid-90s, right?
A: Yeah. She said to me, “This is ridiculous,” held my hand and died. Isn’t that great?
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Kyle Buchanan
Photographs by: Robbie Lawrence
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