Ridley Scott On Why ‘Gladiator II’ Is His Most Ambitious Film: Will It Finally Win Him The Oscar? – The Deadline Q&A
EXCLUSIVE: Every interview Ridley Scott has done with Deadline has turned into a master class on his cinematic exercises in world creation, ranging from Alien, to Blade Runner, Thelma & Louise, Blackhawk Down, Napoleon, Prometheus, The Martian and Gladiator to name just a few. He’s back 25 years after Gladiator won five Oscars including Best Picture, but not Best Director. Scott has never won that elusive prize, but maybe his time has come with Gladiator II. It picks up the storyline with the son of Maximus, as hellbent on revenge as was his father in the original film. There is connective tissue to the original which salvaged the sword-and-sandal saga from the scrap heap, and intrigue and emotional backstories brought to life by a strong cast of Paul Mescal, Denzel Washington, Connie Nielsen, Pedro Pascal, Joseph Quinn, Fred Hechinger and Derek Jacobi. There are also several action set pieces in the Colosseum that go past what Scott put together in the original. Here, Scott discusses putting together a film that stopped and started in mid-production due to the actors strike, and shares why he will immediately reteam with fast-rising star Mescal in The Dog Stars next spring.
DEADLINE: You’ve said that Gladiator II is bigger than anything you’ve done before. That is saying a lot, considering your world creation films from the first Gladiator to your Alien films, Blade Runner, Blackhawk Down, The Martian and your most recent film Napoleon. Can you describe how in your mind that is the case?
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RIDLEY SCOTT: I think I was being a bit bold; they’re all fucking huge. Blackhawk Down was like a Lego kit gone crazy. On a daily basis it was, how the hell am I going to do simultaneous action with 11 cameras. Fundamentally, Blackhawk Down, we went to war. That’s about as close I’ve ever been to actually being in battle.
DEADLINE: How did this one compare, in terms of scale and scope and ambition realized?
SCOTT: A lot of it was seen in rooms, so not too much war. Enough war and enough punches, But when you have to build Rome…Napoleon, I didn’t have to build anything except the fort in Toulon. Funny enough, that had the same size and footprint as Rome. So I went back, tore down Toulon and built Rome. Building Rome was a huge undertaking. What you see in the film when you arrived with Acacius [Pedro Pascal]. That ain’t blue screen. We built the whole damn thing. I can come to why; because I worked out that blue screen, blow by blow and shot by shot, is very expensive and sometimes surpasses the cost of actually building a set. In this instance, that was the case. You could only do this with a great production designer like Arthur Max. Sometimes it required 1500 men. Arthur and I know each other so well, since before Blackhawk.
DEADLINE: You once told me that because you had to rely on matte paintings for Blade Runner and Alien, when you watch them you can see the seams. And I wonder, are there seams in the first Gladiator that you see when you watch it back? What technological achievements in the quarter century since that film allowed you to see fewer seams in the way you made this movie?
SCOTT: Digital work in the first Gladiator was really advanced. I’ll give an example. I just as it were, invested in a digital company at that moment called The Mill. So they’re going to get the job. They’ve never done a film before. And I remember talking to the two guys saying, I’m going to pull ’em out the ground underneath an underground platform and in the background I’m going to see an actual part of the Colosseum that we built. 40% is built, but I then want to do a Steadicam so you see the whole 360 and end up back on [the gladiator]. That’s your first shot. They did it. That’s digital, then. And they got the Academy Award for special effects.
DEADLINE: Does that seem like child’s play compared to what is possible 25 years later?
SCOTT: Digital effects are tools. The best tool in the world is your brain. This is where we’ll find out what the challenges of AI are. A good brain may come up with some originality that will make AI say, damn, I hadn’t thought about that [he laughs].
DEADLINE: Your Gladiator II plays off the original in intriguing ways. The first film began with Maximus leading the Roman troops to victory in Germania when they bring to heel what we see as the barbarian horde. We see a sea battle in Numidia in North Africa when the Romans do the same thing to open Gladiator II. Only now, Paul Mescal’s Lucius is part of the so called barbarian horde. These are people who just want to live their lives free of Roman influence, and the Romans are these callous invaders. Also, Lucius gets taken under the wing of the industrialist Macrinus played by Denzel Washington. It’s similar to how Oliver Reed and Russell Crowe’s relationship unfolded in the first film. Except there is a major difference in the motives of the mentors. Talk about turning the tables in a way that opened the door to a much more cynical and cruel reality of this iteration of Rome.
SCOTT: Well, actually, it’s an iteration of what the f*ck is happening today right in front of us. Every time I switch on CNN, there it is, dude, some asshole is territory-hunting and shouldn’t be and has no right to have that. Therefore it would seem to be a good beginning to touch on, present day politics and terrible actions.
DEADLINE: You create these worlds, in ancient period on earth and in futuristic space. You weren’t able to hang on to the world you created for Alien, you told me they hired James Cameron and didn’t even really tell you. How did you get to the point where you make sure that could not happen on a film like Gladiator, where you created a world and if you want to go back and play in the sandbox you built, you can?
SCOTT: That is never unfortunately that straightforward. I guess a director in some level, shape or form and layer by layer, are part of the authorship of the movie. Some directions are more part of the authorship of the movie than others. I come into this blow by blow. I’m right into everything from everyone’s eyeballs, everyone’s suits and sets, because what I do I’ve found far more efficient to get to where I want, quickly. I storyboard everything, still. My storyboards are in an archive and have to be insured because of the value, but they’re more than valuable. They become a song sheet on a daily basis of what we’re doing. So my board can amount to a 200-page comic script, with close ups, medium shots, wide shots, vista’s, landscapes that we haven’t seen yet. I imagine where I’m going to go and frequently that drawing is used for the location scout to say, like this. I regard myself pretty well as a pretty strong author alongside the writer, in where we’re going.
DEADLINE: It sounds like all that doodling you did in art school has paid off. It used to get you a smack in the head by your professors, and now these are so valuable they need to be insured…
SCOTT: That is a true statement. I’m doodling right now as we speak.
DEADLINE: Why was it so important for you to re-inhabit the world of Gladiator, and not let someone else take it over?
SCOTT: I have to go back down the alleyway to explain. Alien was my second film. I was a new kid on the block in Hollywood, but I’m 40, and I was doing very well, enough to have been in my second Bentley. So I’m no f*cking kid and I’m not an idiot by that moment. My offices are in London, Hong Kong, New York and Los Angeles, and they’re looking at me like I’m a new kid on the block. It’s ridiculous. Okay, now. But I’ve learned to tolerate such arrogance and from that, I knew what to do. And even then, even though I’m 40 years old and brand new to movies, I frankly embraced that as good fortune. It was hard work; I paid for the first script and I spent a bundle completing The Duellists, and I got no fee. But I figured I was now over the gate and into the field, right? And so now I’m on a new universe for myself and my future, at 40. To sidetrack a moment, my sport was always tennis and I became reasonably good. But when you get that good, you’d be better play five times a day, five days a week. I watched a documentary on the retirement of Roger Federer. It’s three parts, just fantastic. Federer begins, and in his soft English said, I know I’m going to cry. He is about to have his last matches, with Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic. He talks about the game and I am paralleling that with what my game is, which is feature film. I thought, good God, if I’d had to retire at 40 from filmmaking when I’ve just began my new career, I wouldn’t know what to do. I’m sure Roger’s got it all planned out. He’s a very smart man. But there’s one thing you’ll always miss. You miss Nadal, across that net.
DEADLINE: So you were bypassed for Alien and I’m sure that stung, but is there consolation in the fact that James Cameron didn’t screw it up? His film was so different than yours, more like a rollercoaster ride…
SCOTT: Yes. Jim told me, listen, I can’t get it as frightening because you’ve just shown the beast enough that it’s no longer fresh. But it works, still. He said, I’m going to go military. That’s what Jim said. I said, gotcha. Jim’s was a very good sequel. Three and four became more and more difficult. As it unrolled, I thought, oh God, they’re f*cking it up. And then from that, honestly, I said okay, that’s done.
Years later, I saw this bloody film that they keep playing every night somewhere on the globe, on all the platforms. There’s life in the best, yet. That’s why I sat down with the great writer [Damon] Lindelof, and we reconstructed a resurrection of the era, with Prometheus, and how it evolved from Alien. But we were asleep at the wheel. My advisors, who frankly no longer are with me, were asleep at the wheel, certainly. And I partly blame myself, except I was busy making other films. And so it was let go and it shouldn’t have been. When you resurrect, you better put your nail into the wall. The same thing happened on Blade Runner, which is my third movie. They said to me, to make this firm, it’s going to cost us $21 million. At that moment, Steven [Spielberg] had already cracked a $40 million budget, and so I’m halfway to being pricey, but am at half the price of $42 million, right? And these investors came in saying, if we put in the extra three or 4 million to make the film, we will take your backend from whatever source. Which is disgusting. And I was now 45, 46, but long enough in the tooth to know, this is the playing field, this is what you’ve got to deal with. F*ck ’em, let’s make the movie. I’d spent 10 months prepping it, readjusting it, and spreading it wider with the great writer Hampton Fancher. There’s a lot of me in that screenplay, make no mistake about it, and the whole universe was fundamentally coming from me. I was a very, very good designer, so I could talk to designers. I looked at these industrial illustrations by this great guy Syd Mead. I brought him in to help the production design of Blade Runner. This is authorship, dude. And they took everything. So I’ve never had a piece of Blader at all. That’s going in the book. Isn’t that disgusting? And by the way, they know who the fuck they are.
DEADLINE: There were numerous attempts to resurrect Gladiator over a quarter century. How real was the one where Maximus is brought back by the gods to kill Jesus Christ because the prophet had stolen their thunder? What was the appeal?
SCOTT: To me? I was going along with the boys. I didn’t really believe in it. It got too rich and started to go to time warps, which frankly I thought was bloody silly. But the one thing I added to it was this great idea of how to bring someone back through a portal of time and death. It would have to come from the dying soul of a dying soldier in a battlefield. Isn’t that cool?
DEADLINE: That is cool.
SCOTT: So that’s mine. So that’s why I kept that as a little silver bullet thinking, I’ll use that again somewhere. And that’s why I then introduced Styx, where you see [Lucius] loses the love of his life. Let’s say that woman is…fundamentally right now, many women, certainly in Middle Eastern Israel, are soldiers. Right. I saw her as a then living in the little edge of city kibbutz, not Israeli exactly, but I believe the actress is Israeli by the way. And I saw her as a housewife and then she’s got a bow. Oh my God. Movies can do things like brilliantly, show change. So she’s a wife, but she’s a soldier and an archer and a Markswoman.
DEADLINE: So you salvaged something out of that exercise. You wonder how far you can stray from a movie that is beloved. Audiences roundly rejected the sequel to the billion-dollar Joker, the second one staged as a musical. If you’d gone in the Jesus Christ direction, could that have worked for audiences who loved the first Gladiator?
SCOTT: I think we ended up in the trenches in World War I. That’s when I said, okay, that’s it. Thank you. I think the gravy was too rich. But by the way, Nick Cave did a great job of invention and Russell was fully engaged. We all were, but I was the one I got dragging my heels saying, I don’t know about this. I think we’re getting too far off the mark. If you do that, that’s where you can lose it.
DEADLINE: What did you do better here than when you made the first Gladiator?
SCOTT: I’d already started using 11 cameras in the arena. But I can’t do a shot of the audience. A shot of Max is walking out, and a shot of the emperor, separately. I’d still be shooting it. So I started to position them round and in one take, get the whole entrance in one shot. It’s all about knowing where to put the cameras, incredibly specific choices you have to make in relation to the light, the visual and direction, all that stuff. But that’s easy. It’s knowing where to put it and how they will go together, as the Lego kit of editing.
DEADLINE: So you refined techniques from the original. How much more efficient did that make the shooting of a difficult film?
SCOTT: I could do it in two or three takes. Denzel Washington is not wrong when he says he felt like he was on camera the entire time he was on the set. Each scene is a play and everyone’s on. And I may be shooting that way away from you. I’ll be shooting that way. I’m shooting across you. I’m shooting the emperors. I’m shooting Paul coming in on a stadium the size of the real Colosseum. One take.
DEADLINE: We see Maximus in flashback and this was the film that launched Russell Crowe as a global star and it won him the Oscar. What, if any, was your dialogue like with him as you put together Gladiator II?
SCOTT: Well, if you’re doing James Bond and you’ve now cast Roger Moore, you don’t expect Roger Moore to want to talk to Sean Connery. You get it? I don’t think so. Everyone’s bringing their own, as it were, thoughts and creative elements to the next evolution. You get into too much conversation and it gets very convoluted. I try to avoid convolution.
DEADLINE: So in other words, Maximus is gone and you weren’t using that Jesus Christ angle he would have been part of. So there wasn’t much reason to seek the opinion of Russell, who as I recall, has a lot of opinions and is exacting about his work as you?
SCOTT: Yeah. I’ve done five films with Russell, and he is probably one of the smartest actors I’ve ever worked with. Very inventive, quite brilliant at being the hero to the bad boy. But this is a new universe. New arena. No more convolution. Got to move on. By the way, Russell and Chris Hemsworth, about Russell being the father to Lucius. Whilst it might have seemed fun, it was not good. It’s online, still. Listen, what’s the expression? It’s all fun in love and war. Except there’s a lot of blood on the side and you don’t want it to go there. They were speculating, but they didn’t happen to talk to me. This isn’t really a complaint or a whine. I mean, I’m not a person who goes on that terrible site called Twinkle or Zipper or whatever the f*ck that is…
DEADLINE: Twitter, now it’s called X…
SCOTT: Yeah, I don’t do that. I don’t even know what it is. I’m not on it. It’s deadly.
DEADLINE: A broad question. You’re at an age where most slow down. What is the appeal instead of growing more and more ambitious at 87? Maybe it’s the smell or a visceral electrical charge in the air, or the feeling of being in control on a big movie set, with so many moving parts? What keeps you come back for more and more?
SCOTT: I feel alive. I feel I’m getting into a Formula One car and driving away. And I like being in the Formula One car. I’m doing recon in Italy for my next film, which will happen April 1.
DEADLINE: The Dog Stars, which puts you right back in the arena with your Gladiator II star Paul Mescal from a script by Mark L. Smith…
SCOTT: We had a hiccup on The Bee Gees movie, which we don’t need to discuss. I’m hoping to return to that by the end of next year. I’ve prepped it and had a very good meeting recently with Barry Gibb, who honestly I haven’t seen for 50 years. That was a time warp, odd but actually wonderful. The Dog Stars is the best script I’ve read since The Martian.
DEADLINE: Last time we met, you told a great story about chasing Russell Crowe’s stand-in out of a dry wheat field where he was smoking a cigarette, then observing his hand gliding over the wheat. You told him to put out the smoke before he burned the field to the ground, and then called for a camera and the result was one of the most iconic images in the first movie. Russell Crowe discussed how, on the fly, you came up with that two-sword decapitation scene that Paul Mescal replicates in the Gladiator II trailer. The original reinforced the brutality that disgusted Maximus and led him to taunt the crowd with the ‘Are you not entertained’ line. What magic did you find in the moment with the actors on Gladiator II?
SCOTT: I think there are two phrases which are great. One is Marcus Aurelius, which is what you do in life echoes in eternity. To me, Marcus Aurelius started his philosophical ruminations, writing poetry, probably from a sense of guilt. Over the devastation and brutality he had to engage with by imposing Roman rule on territories who did not want him there. As he got older, I get a sense naturally there may have been a degree of guilt, and therefore he was ruminating on what he’d done in life. He hopes it won’t echo in eternity, but it will, it’s always there. The other is the line Strength and Honor. Two lines that are beautiful. Connie Nielsen’s Lucilla says to Paul, who is in his cell. She knows she is close to the end, and murmurs strength and honor. Paul just picks that moment up spectacularly and answers as if almost in, dare I say, surprise. She is telling him to be strong, and he replies with the deepest respect to his mother, the same line. That’s one of the most emotional moments in the film. And that was something that just sort of happened in the moment, something that two actors did beautifully. The line itself can either be nothing or something. It’s called great acting.
DEADLINE: While it seems your pace doesn’t leave a lot of room for binge-watching, you found Paul in the Irish TV series Normal People. What did you see that sparked the idea maybe you found your gladiator?
SCOTT: It sounds easy, but casting is not. And I’ve got the best casting director in Kate Rhodes James. By the time I’ve got something written, I’m already thinking probably of the two or three above the line people. Russell came from a suggestion by Michael Mann that I look at him at a time when Michael was editing The Insider. There is a lot of stuff especially now that is very expensive and kind of doesn’t really work. It’s not very good and so I can’t watch it. I find myself watching more and more very low budget indie movies, because that’s where the freshness lies. That’s where the new guys and gals are coming from. New ideas are there. So I tend to look at a lot of low-budget $2 million to $6 million movies and I came across this Irish TV show, I think in Cork or Dublin at normal housing estate. Not my kind of thing that I’m going to get engaged with, but you never know. So I did open up the door and immediately engage with the two youngsters. I binged eight hours of it. At the end of it, I thought, you know what? This guy is very strong, a powerful character, and he could easily be the grandson of Marcus Aurelius. The face is not dissimilar to Richard Harris. The nose certainly is. You’ve got a Roman nose. And I thought, this is it. So from that, I just told the studio, this is the one. There were other suggestions. I said, no. A lot of people hadn’t seen normal people. So then they watch it and go, yeah, right there. When I’m going to cast somebody, I don’t sit in a room and say, read this scene.
DEADLINE: Not helpful?
SCOTT: I gave that shit up years ago. It’s entirely artificial. What I do is look at everything they’ve done. I looked at all the bits and pieces that Paul had done and said, okay, this guy’s got something special. How do we go from here?
DEADLINE: Key to an actor playing a gladiator is to be able to handle the physicality. I’m surprised you found Russell Crowe from The Insider. I would have thought the discovery would have come from Curtin Hanson’s L.A. Confidential. His focused rage and power made you go, who the heck is this guy? Did LA Confidential make a big impression on you?
SCOTT: I’ve never seen it.
DEADLINE: It will confirm your good judgment. He played a tough police detective with a tortured past named Bud White who became this symbol of masculinity. After the film played through, for awhile every pitch in Hollywood was, “imagine Bud White, as a blank.“
SCOTT: I’ll take a look. I think that’s how Michael cast him, off that film. Michael and I are friends for years and we talk occasionally. I’ll say, where’d you get this? Where’d you get that? I loved The Insider.
DEADLINE: Me too. Paul has a different kind of energy. I mean, Russell’s was right there on the surface, and you can feel his confidence in being a general who basically won the war, brought peace to Rome and has his wife and son slain as his reward. Paul Mescal’s Lucius is much less fully formed, but he is big and strapping. What were some qualities he had that convinced you?
SCOTT: The Irish football background helped. I don’t think he was pro, but nearly pro, and all that physicality. If you come in with half the physicality, you can learn. Putting on muscle weight is a matter of good diet, lots of exercise. And having a big guy standing over you saying, where were you? You’re five minutes late. So the trainer helps you put on almost 15 pounds of muscle, and your whole demeanor changes. Russell, when I saw him after The Insider, he’d put on weight for that role, had a bit of a tummy and kept talking about how he would promise to lose weight to do Maximus. But Russell naturally is bit of a boiling kettle, or one that is on the edge of boil. Paul is a different creature coming from a different direction, but the kettle will boil over when needed. And he knows where to go, because I think his first love is theater. He’ll do A Streetcar Named Desire. I really respect that the boards are his thing. Theatrically, it gives the actor an encyclopedia of emotions to draw down on, and the knowledge of how to get there.
DEADLINE: You previously worked with Denzel on American Gangster where he played Frank Lucas. This was a guy who made his fortune importing heroin in the caskets of U.S. soldiers flown home from Vietnam. He had volatile moments of rage and violence, but a lot of depth underneath. Macrinus is quite a different guy. What made him right for this and how did you sell him on it?
SCOTT: Because I’m f*cking good at casting, dude. Have you noticed? Remember Brad Pitt in Thelma & Louise? I’m pretty good. Denzel didn’t show it at the time, but I think he really enjoyed doing American Gangster. I think the film was terrific, one of my better movies, right up there. He says, speak to me, tell me about this guy. I showed him a painting. I think by Sir Lawrence Alima-Tadema. He was this very successful 19th century painter who would do portraiture of the very wealthy and paint them in Roman and Greek circumstance in robes and architecture. They are spectacular. There was this painting which I think defines the Macrinus. This guy is standing there with these huge forearms. He is African, a very superlatively, powerful African man who is wearing beautiful silk orange and sky blue silk, with a beard that runs around his face and hits a point on his chin. He’s got a hat what looks like a Dizzy Gillespie hat on the back of his head, woven with beads. Denzel asks, what’s he do? I said, well, he’s a billionaire. Oh, okay, send me the script. Whoever said a picture is worth a thousand words, they were right.
DEADLINE: Denzel told me he didn’t try to track down people from that era, rather he relied on the history of slavery in his own family to inform where Macrinus came home and why he is so ruthless. All your stars told touching personal stories that inspired their work. What role do you play in helping your cast find reference points for their fictional characters rooted in ancient history?
SCOTT: Discussion? The more you talk the better because what comes from that is the most divine intuition. Intuition is a very powerful element, and I have recognized my intuition as being pretty strong and reliable. Years ago, it made me successful in advertising. And by the time I started in movies, I was already very intuitive and listening to that voice. And everyone has the voice. A lot of people don’t listen to it, but it’s in their imagination. And if your voice is tied to your imagination, then you are lucky. And I guess I’m born lucky. I learned to combine the two, and I try and keep my explanations quite simple. I’ll show them pictures of what I want. It’s worth a thousand words.
DEADLINE: So you help point them in a direction and let them go?
SCOTT: Point?. No, no, no, not always. Because when we were doing Gladiator with Joaquin Phoenix, he entered that in a very fragile state, afraid because of the scale of the film.
DEADLINE: Really?
SCOTT: That’s his style, that’s what he does. But he scares the shit out of you because it’s the first day. And you go, oh, sh*t. So it’s a little bit of, I wouldn’t say handholding, but you got to hug him often, find ways to make him secure, make him feel what he’s doing is good. And if they have a problem, you listen. You become really a psychologist father figure. And sometimes what you don’t say is better than saying too much.
DEADLINE: It’s interesting that Joaquin Phoenix worried he was over his skis, because that mirrored where his Commodus character started out, before he gained power and grew arrogant. He fears he doesn’t belong as the leader of a nation. Didn’t the actor’s fragility help him find the tone for that tragic figure?
SCOTT: Well, it did. Him doing Napoleon that way was unbelievable. He’s Napoleon, he looks like Napoleon. Over many meetings, I kept saying that and we hugged and he said, okay, I’ll do it.
DEADLINE: These set pieces in the Colosseum, where the gladiators face off in sailing ships floating on shark-infested waters, square off against a rhinoceros, and a bunch of pissed off baboons. Let’s take the last shot. How did you make it look so terrifying?
SCOTT: Baboons are carnivores, and would have killed them all. A big baboon could be 40, 50 pounds; try wrestling a 20-pound Jack Russell Terrier and you’d lost. A baboon, you’ll lose your arm and your head. Can you hang from a beam by one arm for two hours? No, they can. I was in South Africa doing the pilot for the TV show Raised by Wolves, a and there was a car park for visitors who park with their coffee lattes and all that sh*t. And a little gamboling troop of baboons come across the wall and sits on the wall, staring at the tourists. One idiot goes across to a big baboon and tries to pat it. This thing attacked him, and he’s a big man. The guy dropped his coffee, ran for the car, getting clawed as he struggled to get in the car. I thought that was funny, but I knew every actor had to do the physicality of the movement of defend, kill and or attack, right?
I have to have them fighting something which is formidable. So I cast 12 very small stuntmen. Some of them are not children, but tough teens, quite tiny. And I put them all in black tights and for fun, I painted whiskers on them. And we went to war with stunt men. So it becomes a stunt men brawl of savagery. So then I had all the physicality recorded of the actors. I removed the guy in black tights put in wire frames of baboons where it looks good, the movement looks real. You then put on the flesh and the hair. That’s how you do it. That is a masterwork of digital work right there. You change nothing into a furry baboon.
DEADLINE: Does everyone appreciate what you’ve shot?
SCOTT: No. Some idiot says to me, I’ve never seen a baboon like that before. I said, well, the baboon has alopecia, where you lose all your fucking hair. I copied that from the baboon I saw in the car park, which had alopecia. I thought, who is that? And it was this everything sinew tendon with no fat, like muscular steel. I said, that’s my monster. I said, Paul, you know what would be cool? Turn the tables on the baboon. If you bite the baboon, the baboon will be psychologically in shock. Bite the baboon. When he snarls, you snarl back and the baboon goes, holy sh*t. That’s meant to be funny.
DEADLINE: Did you restrict yourself to things that actually happened in the Roman gladiatorial arenas?
SCOTT: For sure. They flooded the Colosseum for naval battles. I think what the did was put in big moray eels which can bite you hard. Whether they had a shark, I don’t know. But I thought, let’s go for the sharks.
DEADLINE: These were these things you wanted to do in the first film, but technology would not allow it?
SCOTT: I did want to do the rhino on the first film. I hadn’t thought about the baboons until I saw the car park. I knew the boats existed but the first Gladiator had to be done on a budget so we withdrew.
DEADLINE: What did the escalation of savagery in the Colosseum under the rule of those two nitwit twin brother emperors say about the decay of Rome?
SCOTT: I remember somebody said, we seem to portray Rome as a cleaner place in the first Gladiator, but not really. The brutality in the arena is still the same. And the death by sword or by animal is still there. Christian families would be devoured by lions and people were enjoying it. That’s true. Historically, that is so cretinously horrifically brutal, as bad as anything you can possibly imagine today. Nothing is worse than that. Death is death, a sword is a sword. A 2000-pound bomb is even worse. So you’ve got to take all that into account. Now, we are trying to do entertainment of an empire that’s been revered for marvelous things and also criticized deeply for crazy brutality as bad as it gets in any time or space, including Adolf Hitler, and including whatever’s happening today in the world.
We are fortunately slightly veiled by the silk of movie land. So in a way we’re watching it through a veiled curtain. But when I’m doing it, I am reminding myself, this happened. They would have a fight to the death on a Saturday afternoon in the living room of some senator. People would stand there, drinks in hand, maybe slightly high on something and watch two guys fight until one decapitates the other. And they all clap and say bravo. That’s real.
DEADLINE: You say you want to make another Gladiator and when I spoke to Paul he said, I want to sit down with Ridley because whatever it is, I’m in.
SCOTT: I’ve already got … an intuitive aberration came to me about a month ago. I thought, why not? I have a really very logically positioned very good idea. And we will not go back to the arena. You want to do Gladiator IV you can go back to the arena, but you would wear it out if you did that on the next one.
DEADLINE: You were shooting Gladiator II when SAG-AFTRA struck and shooting stopped for half a year. What was the biggest challenge in losing the momentum you had built?
SCOTT: Nothing, really. I made four films through the pandemic. I made The Last Duel, Gucci, Napoleon, and then started this one and the strike stopped it. I edited what I had, prepared the next movie, and then resumed. I never sit around. I was thinking about the movie I’m going to do next. The union cannot stop me from thinking.
DEADLINE: You conveyed a very cynical view of AI in Alien, which you told me you borrowed from Kubrick’s 2001. Hollywood is now embracing AI as the next thing. Have you adjusted your cautionary tale view of AI into maybe something different, a tool that can help in the kind of epic scale storytelling that you do?
SCOTT: Well, AI is a tool, remember that. But AI can be also a terrible abuser of normal stuff, even good stuff. There’s one or two people out there like authors, musicians, actors, directors, who may be able to think a little bit beyond what the AI for the best they can come up with, the big idea. That would include Jim Cameron. And therefore, we always hope the very best will evolve and use AI as a tool. But see, probably one of the best ideas that is the trigger for all the best science fiction that followed, is 2001. You start off with a dawn of man, you see apes fighting over sustenance in a waterhole. You see anteaters, and the occasional leopard that eats the ape. The apes live on insects and pieces of wood. The one morning, the power, not God, the power of the universe has delivered a monolith because it’s seen that the apes are now getting close enough to be thinking entities. And need that boost and help forward. The ape touches the monolith and has the first massive idea in history: he picks up a thigh bone of a beast and kills an ape with it. That’s a weapon, that is a million year quantum leap forward. It’s a grand superlative idea. Idea two, you’re on a spaceship now, going to search for the power that is and was, and what was the moment? Is it what we call God? I can’t think of anything else. Or is simply a power way beyond our comprehension, and therefore has examined us for years, and examining us a bit like a canary in a cage saying, oh, interesting, they do this and they do that. They are studying the human race.
Now you get to the actual big number, which is the ship is going to the far reaches of where they’ve never been before, and they’re relying on one crew member, called Hal. Hal is a f*cking computer. And from that, an AI which won’t reveal it to them, but they’re smart enough to suspect Hal is betraying them. Because Hal knows that the expedition is more important than these human beings, and that’s Hal’s error. Hopefully, AI will always make an error. Hopefully. That’s a massive idea.
DEADLINE: You sound cautious still, but do you ever see AI that can help Ridley Scott make bigger and better movies?
SCOTT: Never say never.
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