ComingSoon Senior Editor Brandon Schreur spoke to Gladiator II production designer Arthur Max about the Ridley Scott-directed sequel starring Paul Mescal. Max spoke about his experiences building the Roman sets and the Colosseum, how technology aided the production design process, and more.
“From legendary director Ridley Scott, Gladiator II continues the epic saga of power, intrigue, and vengeance set in Ancient Rome. Years after witnessing the death of the revered hero Maximus at the hands of his uncle, Lucius (Paul Mescal) is forced to enter the Colosseum after his home is conquered by the tyrannical Emperors who now lead Rome with an iron fist. With rage in his heart and the future of the Empire at stake, Lucius must look to his past to find strength and honor to return the glory of Rome to its people.”
Gladiator II will be available to purchase on digital on December 24, 2024, from Paramount Home Entertainment.
Brandon Schreur: You’ve obviously worked with Ridley Scott many times over the years, including doing production design for the first Gladiator movie. Gladiator II is something that’s been talked about for a long time — I remember hearing Russell Crowe might come back, and then it ended up being Paul Mescal. When you actually got the call, Ridley said, ‘We’re finally going to do this movie,’ what was your reaction? Was that a challenge you were excited to tackle or is the scale and the scope of recreating Ancient Rome again nerve-wracking for you to do?
Arthur Max: It was very daunting. The first one is so iconic and you don’t want to mess it up, you don’t want to paint a mustache on the Mona Lisa. Also, Ridley wanted to go larger scale. A bigger canvas, if you will. The challenges were amplified by all the scenes with water, which is always a difficult way of working. Ridley’s done several films that feature the sea. There’s White Squall and there’s 1492. He loves it. I hadn’t done any major water work before. So that was a challenge.
I’m sure it was. But I love how it turned out. I was going to ask you about that, too — there’s the one, big water sequence in the Colosseum. I’m curious how you went about tackling that whole project. It’s so huge, so epic to look at. Where do you even begin when Ridley says, ‘We’re doing sharks in the Colosseum with water and boats,’ how do you tackle that?
We have round-table discussions with all the heads of department, with Ridley at the helm. It worked out that, from the practical point of view, it was easier to do everything in the dry, as much as possible, and put the water in digitally than it would be to work in water and then put all the sets in digitally. That’s the approach we took. Really, in the main Colosseum set — and we had two Colosseum sets — the full Colosseum set we built on the first one had to be raised higher to accommodate the water depth. And, also, to allow the boats to come in through the main arch. So everything went up vertically. That was challenge number one.
Then, to get the illusion of the water filling up, we added the face of Neptune as a kind of a relief sculpture spewing water. The water was just recycled, if you will, into a dumpster, whatever you call it. It was recycled with a pump so that it seemed like it constantly filling. Then the main water was put in digitally afterwards.
We then went down the road from where we built the Colosseum in Malta to the studio, which has a football field-sized horizon tank. We built a piece of the Colosseum in there and actually did the practical water for the stunt work and the close-ups of the battle, the mock naval battle, that way.
Then the Numidian assault that opens the movie, that was done in the desert. We had a small area of beach that we built, which was just for one scene where Lucius finds Arishat floating with an arrow in her chest. The rest was all done in the dry and the water was put in digitally afterwards. The technology came to the rescue on this. We were very much guided by the input we got from the special effects department, the physical effects and how they’d be moving the ships around, and the visual effects, which as we said earlier, we prefer to do things in the dry. That made life easier for everyone.
We went from the first one, which was largely a hand-made film, to the second film, which was more reliant — not totally, but more reliant on digital techniques.
Interesting. That leads right into what I was going to ask you. It’s been 25 years since that first movie. And Gladiator, itself, looks impressive as hell, I mean it’s great. And then this one is even bigger and more epic, I was just wondering if there was any kind of carry-over between the first movie and this one? Did you reuse anything or did you basically have to start from scratch when you were doing Gladiator II?
We had to start from scratch. Since we made the first one, the whole world has become much more interested in the ancient world, generally, and there’s been a host of films and TV films devoted to the ancient world, particularly Rome. Not only feature films and TV films, but also documentaries. A lot more has been produced in terms of physical accessories of that time. When we did Gladiator, there was nothing. Just a handful of pieces that we could use in terms of props, set dressing, furniture, and weapons. There hadn’t been an ancient Roman epic for about 40 years prior to the making of that film.
This sequel, there was a wealth of material that we could rent. Some of which we built on the first movie and had been bought by prop houses, both in Italy and in England, that we could rent back from ourselves all those years later. On one level, we had that advantage. There’s an awful lot of fabrication that we had to do. Just to populate the larger sets, there wasn’t enough to go around. All the thrones, the chariots, the imperial wagons, much of the weapons, and the war machine — we maybe had one or two, but we needed a dozen of each this time. So we were doing a lot of fabrication. Which, with digital technology, became more practical and efficient than it had on the hand-made film that was the first version. We had much less time. Not only the shooting schedule, but the prep schedule was very much compressed compared to the first one.
Sure, totally. I had read about that, that it was a quicker shoot but there was also the strikes in the middle that changed some things up. From start to finish, how long did it take you to make all of this? Because it looks huge and I’ve seen interviews where Denzel Washington is talking about how it’s like a whole city being built. How long did it take?
Yeah, it was like a fairly, medium-sized town. We had 12 weeks to design and about 14 weeks to build it all. On the first one, we had about 20 weeks to design and I believe it was 26 weeks to build it. So it was an enormous compression. But we had more tools and we had more people, actually. The scale of the construction was immense.
Thanks to Arthur Max for discussing Gladiator II.
