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Gladiator (2000 film)

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Gladiator
File:Gladiator ver1.jpg
Directed byRidley Scott
Written byDavid Franzoni
John Logan
William Nicholson
Produced byDouglas Wick
David Franzoni
Branko Lustig
StarringRussell Crowe
Joaquin Phoenix
Connie Nielsen
Oliver Reed
Ralf Moeller
Richard Harris
CinematographyJohn Mathieson
Edited byPietro Scalia
Distributed byDreamWorks (USA)
Universal Studios (non-USA)
Release dates
5 May, 2000
Running time
154 min.
LanguageEnglish
Budget$103,000,000
Box officeDomestic: $187,705,427
Worldwide: $457,640,427

Gladiator is a 2000 historical action/drama film directed by Ridley Scott, and starring Russell Crowe and Joaquin Phoenix. It won five Academy Awards in the 73rd Academy Awards ceremony, including the Academy Award for Best Picture. While Gladiator was criticized by historians for its historical inaccuracies, its epic scope and gigantic battle scenes won praise. The film's success may have helped to revive the historical epic genre, with subsequent films such as Troy, Alexander and Kingdom of Heaven, the latter also being directed by Ridley Scott.

Plot

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A farmer-turned-soldier named Maximus Decimus Meridius (played by Russell Crowe) is one of the leading generals in the Roman army. He leads his men to many victories and gains the support from the masses and even the Roman Emperor, Marcus Aurelius (played by Richard Harris). The emperor is dying, and though he has a son, Commodus (played by Joaquin Phoenix), the emperor wishes to appoint temporary leadership to Maximus in order to return the power to the Senate. On being told this by his father, Commodus kills him to inherit the position by default.

Because he realizes the truth of what has happened (and does not pledge his loyalty to Commodus), Maximus is sentenced to death. Soldiers are also sent for his wife and son. Maximus, however, escapes his fate and races home only to find that he was too late, and his family has been killed. After burying his wife and son, Maximus is captured by slavers and taken to North Africa. There, he is forced to fight as a gladiator in arena tournaments in order to stay alive. During this time, he meets the Numidian gladiator, Juba, and a barbarian from Germania named Hagen. Juba proves to be a great comfort to him, and they often talk of the afterlife, and if they will meet their dead family and friends there.

To survive the brutal life of a gladiator, Maximus appeals to the Roman people under the name and title, "Spaniard". His power and fame grows until he ultimately reaches the historic Roman Colosseum and comes into contact again with Commodus. Upon being introduced to Commodus after a gladiatorial contest, he reveals to the emperor that he is in fact Maximus. Commodus, however, decides to let him live for the time being due to his popularity with the crowd. Maximus later survives an indirect attack on his life when he is forced into a match against "the only undefeated champion in Roman history," Tigris of Gaul. After an intense battle, in which Maximus must avoid being killed by tigers released into the arena, Tigris is defeated, though Maximus refuses to obey Commudus' wish to kill him, and is pronounced "Maximus the Merciful" by a spectator in the crowd.

Following the fight, Maximus meets with his former servant, Cicero, who informs him that his army is still loyal to him. Soon thereafter, Maximus forms a plot with Lucilla, Commodus' sister (in whom Commodus has sexual interest), and Gracchus, an influential republican senator, to rejoin with his army and topple Commodus by force. Commodus, however, learns of this plot and arrests Maximus on the eve of his coup. Now desperate to have Maximus killed, Commodus arranges a duel with him in the arena, though he stabs Maximus with a dagger in his cell before the fight begins. In the midst of the fight, Maximus causes Commodus to drop his sword. Commodus then calls to his guards to hand him another, but they refuse. Maximus succeeds in defeating Commodus but dies also soon after, though not before ordering that governance be returned to the Senate. Through this last gesture, the original wish of Marcus Aurelius is finally realized.

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Script development

Gladiator was based on an original pitch by David Franzoni who went on to write all of the early drafts.[1] Franzoni was given a three-picture deal with DreamWorks as writer and co-producer on the strength of his previous work, Steven Spielberg's Amistad, which helped establish the reputation of DreamWorks SKG. Franzoni was not a classical scholar but had been inspired by Daniel P. Mannix’s 1958 novel Those About to Die and decided to choose Commodus as his historical focus after reading the Augustan History. In Franzoni's first draft, dated April 4 1998, he named his protagonist Narcissus, after the praenomen of the wrestler who strangled Emperor Commodus to death, whose name is not contained in the biography of Commodus by Aelius Lampridius in the Augustan History. The name Narcissus is only provided by Herodian and Cassius Dio, so a variety of ancient sources were used in developing the first draft.[2]

When Ridley Scott and the producers first offered Russell Crowe a role, the script was still in an unsatisfactory early draft.[3] During production director Ridley Scott hired John Logan and William Nicholson to rewrite Franzoni's script.[1] The screenplay faced the brunt of many rewrites and revisions due to Russell Crowe's script suggestions. Crowe questioned every aspect of the evolving script and strode off the set when he did not get answers. According to a DreamWorks exec, "(Russell Crowe) tried to rewrite the entire script on the spot. You know the big line in the trailer, 'In this life or the next, I will have my vengeance'? At first he absolutely refused to say it."[4] Bill Nicholson, as the 3rd and final screenwriter, tells how he had to deal with the frustration of actors who refuse to say lines when Russell Crowe on Gladiator told him, “Your lines are garbage but I’m the greatest actor in the world, and I can make even garbage sound good.” Nicholson goes on to say that "probably my lines were garbage, so he was just talking straight."[5]

David Franzoni was later brought back to revise the rewrites of John Logan and William Nicholson, and in the process garnered a producer's credit on the box office hit. When Bill Nicholson was brought in to write on the project, he started going back to Franzoni's original scripts and putting certain scenes back in. Franzoni helped creatively-manage the rewrites and in the role of producer he defended his original script, and nagged to stay true to the original vision.[6] Franzoni later shared the Best Picture Oscar with producers Douglas Wick and Branko Lustig.[1]

Production

File:Cityrome.jpg
One of the much-praised CGI shots of Rome.

Overall, Gladiator cost $145.7 million to film and promote, with much of the production cost spent on computer special effects. However, the movie grossed over $187 million in American theaters alone and after earning more than $269 million overseas. Gladiator proved to be a huge success at the box office.[7]

The Oscar-nominated score was composed by Hans Zimmer and Lisa Gerrard, and conducted by Gavin Greenaway. In June 2006 the Holst Foundation sued Hans Zimmer for allegedly copying the late Gustav Holst's famous Planet Suite for the score.[8] The opening battle scene sounds almost identical to 'Mars, the Bringer of War.' Lisa Gerrard's vocals are similar to her own work on The Insider score.[9]

The film was shot in three major locations. The opening battle scenes in the forests of Germania were shot over three weeks in Bourne Woods, near Farnham, Surrey in England. Subsequently, the scenes of slavery, desert travel, and gladiatorial training school were shot in Ouarzazate, Morocco just south of the Atlas Mountains for a total of three weeks. Finally, the scenes of Ancient Rome were shot over a period of nineteen weeks in Malta using a multicultural workforce whose talents were stretched to the limits.[10]

A full-scale replica of about one-third of Rome's Colosseum was built in Malta to a height of 52 ft, (with the other two-thirds and remaining height added digitally) mostly from plaster and plywood. The reverse side of the complex supplied a rich assortment of Ancient Roman street furniture, colonnades, gates, statuary, and marketplaces for other filming requirements. The complex was serviced by tented 'costume villages' that had changing rooms, storage, armourers and other facilities.[10] The rest of the Colosseum was created in CG using set-design blueprints, textures referenced from live action, and rendered in three layers to provide lighting flexibility when compositing in Flame and Inferno.[11]

When actor Oliver Reed died in Malta of a heart attack during the filming of Gladiator it was a European post-production company called The Mill that managed to create a digital body double for the remaining scenes.[11] The visual effects house photographed the body double in the shadows and then mapped a 3D CGI mask of Oliver Reed's face to the remaining scenes during production at an estimated cost of $3 million. The film is dedicated to his memory.

The Mill was also responsible for post-tricks such as compositing real tigers filmed on bluescreen into the fight sequences, and adding smoke trails and extending the flight paths of the opening scene's salvo of flaming arrows to get around regulations on how far they could be fired. They also had to populate a CG crowd with 35,000 actors that looked believable and reacted to fight-scenes using only 2,000 live actors. The Mill accomplished this feat by shooting live actors at different angles giving various performances, and then mapping them onto cards, with motion-capture tools used to track their movements for 3D compositing.[11]

Cast

Influences

Historical

File:Rharris.jpg
Marcus Aurelius as played by Richard Harris.
File:Commodusj.jpg
Commodus as portrayed by Joaquin Phoenix

The Roman emperors portrayed in the movie are Marcus Aurelius (played by Richard Harris), who ruled AD 161–180, and his son, the deranged Commodus, who ruled between 180–192, and scandalized Roman society by appearing in the Colosseum as a gladiator, and spent most, if not all, of his time as Emperor in staging gladiatorial combats, seemingly obsessed with the sport. The film's characterization attempts to reflect Marcus Aurelius's reputation for wisdom but does so by placing a modern democratic slant to his actions and beliefs. The representation of Commodus is extremely watered down, as the senatorial sources such as the Augustan History present Commodus as far more insane and bloodthirsty than he appears in the film. Commodus' murder of his father in the movie is fiction, and while Commodus was the only Roman Emperor to fight as a gladiator (discounting reports of Caligula having done the same, as there is no record outside of Suetonius that he ever did so), he was killed by a gladiator, but not in the arena, as the film suggests.

Lucilla was Commodus’s sister and was married to Lucius Verus (mentioned in the film as the dead father of her son Lucius Verus, but not mentioned as co-emperor or seen), her father’s co-emperor until his death in 169. The incest, or attempted incest, between Commodus and Lucilla in the movie is not historically recorded, though Commodus is said to have committed incest with other sisters. Lucilla was in fact implicated in plots with members of the senate to kill her brother. In 182, following an assassination attempt on Commodus, Lucilla was exiled to Capri and subsequently executed on her brother’s orders.

The opening battle most likely is intended to depict the last fight of the Marcomannic wars. The film says they are fighting in "Germania," however the war was really against Germanic tribes in the area of the province of Pannonia. Of course Germania is more familiar to viewers and works better geographically with Maximus' home in Spain. Nearing the end of the battle, Maximus raises the cry 'Roma Victor,' meaning 'Rome, the Conqueror.' (Greco-Roman culture often anthropomorphized aspects of civilization and nature in order to depict them as gods/goddesses to be recognized.) The sequence of the battle's unfurling is not historically accurate, as legionaries abandon formation in favor of a more Hollywood-friendly action scene in which they combat the Germanic Marcomannii in one-on-one battles, in which the barbarians would have excelled. In reality the Romans favored close-knit formations and would not break formation unless being ordered to retreat (hastily) or if the legionaries broke under the strain in which case, unless able to reform or reach friendly lines, would almost certainly be wiped out.

Further information on Historical Imperial Roman Legionary tactics - Roman Legion

The city of Rome is seen in all of its glory, and the Colosseum (then actually called the Flavian Amphitheatre) is accurately seen as the stadium for the Roman people, though the topography, views and ground plan of ancient city-centre Rome around it are entirely fictionalised.

The character of Maximus is entirely fictional, though he is similar in some respects to the historical figures of Narcissus (the character's name in the first draft of the screenplay and the real killer of Commodus)[12], Spartacus (who led a significant slave revolt), and Cincinnatus (the saviour of Rome who wished nothing more than to return to his farm).[citation needed]

A character in the film asserts that "Rome was founded as a Republic". Rome was not founded as a republic but as a kingdom, becoming a republic after the last King of Rome, Lucius Tarquinius Superbus, was deposed in 510BC.

After his death Commodus was replaced as emperor by the general Pertinax, who is never mentioned in the film.

Artistic

The film's plot is influenced by two 1960s films of Hollywood's sword and sandal genre, The Fall of the Roman Empire and Spartacus.

The Fall of the Roman Empire (1964) tells the story of Livius, who, like Maximus in Gladiator, is Marcus Aurelius's heir. Both films tell the story of Commodus' murder of Marcus Aurelius and his seizure of power when he learns that the old emperor is planning to appoint Livius/Maximus as his successor. Livius/Maximus are exiled and seek to avenge Marcus Aurelius by killing Commodus.

Spartacus (1960) provides the film's gladiatorial motif, as well as the character of Senator Gracchus, a fictitious senator (bearing the name of a pair of revolutionary Tribunes from the 2nd century BC) who in both films is an elder statesman of ancient Rome attempting to preserve the ancient rights of the Roman senate in the face of an ambitious autocrat — Marcus Licinius Crassus in Spartacus and Commodus in Gladiator. Interestingly, both actors who played Grachus (in Spartacus and Gladiator), played Claudius in previous films — Charles Laughton of Spartacus played Claudius in the 1937 film I, Claudius and Sir Derek Jacobi of Gladiator, played Claudius in the 1975 BBC adaptation.

The story of Maximus bears similarity to Judah Ben-Hur. Both are accused of treason to the Roman Empire, becoming a slave and rising through the ranks, desiring vengeance and finding new life, be it Christian or pagan.

Additionally, Maximus, Quintus and other characters, as well as the opening sequence of the film (set in Germany), appear to be based on a work of historical fiction by Wallace Breem, Eagle in the Snow (set some 200 years later).

The film's depiction of Commodus's entry into Rome borrows imagery from Leni Riefenstahl's Nazi propaganda film Triumph of the Will (1934), although Ridley Scott has pointed out that the iconography of Nazi rallies was of course inspired by the Roman Empire.

The opening battle scene features war chants taken from the film Zulu (1964), one of director Scott's favorite films.

Critical and Public Reaction

Gladiator received very positive reviews, but it was not without its share of detractors. In particular Roger Ebert was harshly critical of the film attacking the look of the film as "muddy, fuzzy, and indistinct." He also derided the writing claiming it "employs depression as a substitute for personality, and believes that if characters are bitter and morose enough, we won't notice how dull they are."[13]

Awards

Gladiator was nominated in 36 individual ceremonies, including the 73rd Academy Awards, the BAFTA Awards and the Golden Globe Awards. Of 119 award nominations, the film won 48 prizes.[14]

The film won five Academy Awards and was nominated for an additional seven, including Best Supporting Actor for Joaquin Phoenix and Best Director for Ridley Scott. There is controversy over the film's nomination for Best Original Music Score. The award was officially nominated only to Hans Zimmer, and not to Lisa Gerrard due to Academy rules. However, the pair did win the Golden Globe Award for Best Original Score as co-composers.

File:Gladiator09.jpg
"Smile for me now, brother!" Oscar-nominee Joaquin Phoenix addresses Oscar-winner Russell Crowe.

Historical deviations

  • Stirrups can be seen used on some of the Roman cavalry, but while they were invented during the Roman Empire period (by either the Chinese or Asian barbarians), the Romans never adopted them. They are used in the movie for obvious safety reasons, a proper Roman saddle being very difficult to ride.[15]
  • In the opening battle scene of the movie, the Germanic leader says to the Romans "Ihr seid verfluchte Hunde." This is actually modern standard German (which the Marcomanni of 180 AD would not have spoken), and translates as "You [all] are cursed dogs".[citation needed]

Trivia

  • The four British and Irish veteran screen and classical stage actors (Shrapnel, Jacobi, Harris and Reed) were jokingly referred to by Crowe during filming as 'our four horsemen of the Apocalypse'[16], and their English accents are often copied in the film by the American and Australian actors in order to merge in.
  • Maximus tells Marcus Aurelius that his family live in a farm outside Trujillo. In reality Trujillo in Roman times was called Turgalium. Nevertheless in the Spanish version of the film (audio), Maximus tells that his home is outside Emerita Augusta, today named Mérida.
  • At the Colosseum, Maximus and his gladiators are introduced as Hannibal's barbarians, while in fact their uniform and equipment suggest they are Scipio's legionaries. Their mounted opponents (including a female archer) are introduced as Scipio's legionaries, while they are clearly Hannibal's barbarians.
  • The opening battle scene, set on the Rhine, was actually filmed in Bourne Wood, near Farnham, Hampshire, UK. This location, southwest of the junction between the M25 and M3 motorways, had the correct natural forested look, is near London yet, despite that, had no train, road or aircraft noise - an unusually useful combination. Since Gladiator it was used extensively in the 2006 film Children of Men (e.g. for the initial car ambush and the location of Michael Caine's secret house) . It has also been used in a video by the band Cold Play containing a car crash, in a forest, shown in reverse.

References

  1. ^ a b c Stax (2002-04-04). "The Stax Report's Five Scribes Edition". IGN. Retrieved 2006-12-29.
  2. ^ Jon Solomon (2004-04-01). "Gladiator from Screenplay to Screen". In Martin M. Winkler (ed.). Gladiator: Film and History. Blackwell Publishing. pp. p.3. {{cite book}}: |pages= has extra text (help)
  3. ^ Griffin, Joshua (2000-02-10). "Where the Gladiators Rome". Retrieved 2006-12-29. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |publication= ignored (help)
  4. ^ Corliss, Richard (2000-05-08). "The Empire Strikes Back". Retrieved 2006-12-29. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |publication= ignored (help)
  5. ^ "Bill Nicholson's Speech at the launch of the International Screenwriters' Festival". 2006-01-30. Retrieved 2006-12-29.
  6. ^ John Soriano (2001). "WGA.ORG's Exclusive Interview with David Franzoni" (PDF). Retrieved 2006-12-29.
  7. ^ "Gladiator total gross". Box Office Mojo.
  8. ^ Priscilla Rodriguez. ""Gladiator" Composer Accused of Copyright Infringment". KNX 1070 NEWSRADIO. Retrieved 2007-01-01.
  9. ^ "Zimmer and Gladiator". Reel.com. Retrieved 2007-01-01.
  10. ^ a b "Gory glory in the Colosseum". KODAK: In Camera. 2000. Retrieved 2006-12-31. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)
  11. ^ a b c Bath, Matthew (2004-10-25). "The Mill". Digit Magazine. Retrieved 2006-12-31.
  12. ^ "Gladiator: The Real Story". Retrieved 2007-01-02.
  13. ^ Ebert, Roger. "Gladiator Review". Chicago Sun-Times. Retrieved 2006-12-31.
  14. ^ "Gladiator awards tally". IMDB.
  15. ^ "Movie Nitpick: Gladiator". The Nitpickers Site. Retrieved 2006-12-31.
  16. ^ Landau, Diana. Gladiator: The Making of the Ridley Scott Epic. pp. p.50. {{cite book}}: |pages= has extra text (help)

See also

Wikiquote has quotations related to Gladiator.


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