BANDING TOGETHER ONCE AGAIN FOR GLADIATOR II

By TREVOR HOGG

All images courtesy of Paramount Pictures.

Not often does a film crew get to reunite two decades later to make a sequel that makes swords and sandals cool again, but that is exactly the case with Gladiator II where Ridley Scott collaborates once again with Production Designer Arthur Max and Special Effects Supervisor Neil Corbould, VES. Russell Crowe as Maximus is not returning to the Colosseum to wreak havoc on the Roman Empire; instead, the task has been given to his equally determined son Lucius Verus (Paul Mescal).

“It was an amazing experience to see the Colosseum back up again,” states Corbould. “It was like stepping back in time 20-odd years because it was an exact replica of what we did before. I felt that the first one was damn good. To revisit this period again and take it a step further was quite an incredible and daunting task.” The scope has been expanded. “We were using the same old tools, like physical builds and handmade craftsmanship, that we always did,” remarks Max. “Only this time around, the digital technologies have come into that world as well, and that enlarged and increased the scope of what we could do in the time and on budget. It has been a gigantic shift from the first one to the sequel.”

Visual ties still exist between the original and the sequel. “We wanted people to be able to recognize the [different] world from the first to the second,” Max notes. “It was also opportunistic of us to try to use some of the earlier footage to blend in. We did that in flashbacks and in the live-action, where we produced some of the Gladiator’s original crowd footage. We tried to match the sets in actual detail, particularly in the arenas, both provincial and in the capital – like the Colosseum set – as closely as possible to the first one. There were changes, but they were subtle. That was a nod to economical filmmaking. Why waste the time shooting crowds cheering when you have it in the can already? We did a few of those kinds of things.”

“Ridley said, ‘I want to have a rhino there.’ I spoke to Mark Bakowski [Visual Effects Supervisor] about it. I said, ‘We can create a remote-drive gimbal rig underneath, which is completely wireless, with a little six-axis motion base, and a muscle suit that we put a textured skin on with the head and body.’ Then Ridley said, ‘I want it to do 40 miles per hour and turn on a dime.’ That was like, ‘Oh, Christ. Another thing!’ But we did it. It was powered by flow-cell batteries and used electric car motors. This thing was lethal.”

—Neil Corbould, Special Effects Supervisor

Also coming in handy was the Jerusalem set from Kingdom of Heaven, which was repurposed as a Numidian coastal fort attacked by the Roman fleet. “The technology of water software – thank you, James Cameron and Avatar and other productions – had evolved to such a degree of sophistication that it made sense. Also, a credit to Neil Corbould, who found an incredible all-wheel-drive remote-control platform that was used for transporting enormous pieces of industrial technology great distances, like cooling chambers of nuclear power stations. We had a couple of those to put our ships on. This is where we were innovative,” Max states.

Corbould was inadvertently responsible for a cut sequence appearing in the sequel. He recalls, “I was going through some of my old archive stuff of the original Gladiator and found the storyboards of the rhino. After the meeting finished, I said, ‘By the way, Ridley, I found these.’ I put them on the desk and he went, ‘Wow! This is amazing. We’ve got to do this.’ And that’s how the rhino came about. It was like, ‘Oh, Christ, I didn’t think he would do that!’ Then Ridley said, ‘I want to have a rhino there.’ I spoke to Mark Bakowski [Visual Effects Supervisor] about it. I said, ‘We can create a remote-drive gimbal rig underneath, which is completely wireless, with a little six-axis motion base, and a muscle suit that we put a textured skin on with the head and body.’ Ridley said, ‘I want it to do 40 miles per hour and turn on a dime.’ That was like, ‘Oh, Christ. Another thing!’ But we did it. It was powered by flow-cell batteries and used electric car motors. This thing was lethal. It was good and could move around. We didn’t do it like a conventional buggy. We did it like the two-drive wheels were on the side, and we had the front and back wheels in the middle, which were stabilizing wheels. We were driving it like a JCB excavator around the arena; that, in conjunction with the movement of the muscle suit and the six axes underneath, gave some good riding shots of the guy standing on top of it.”

Not everything went according to plan, in particular the naval battle in the Colosseum. “Life got in the way because of the strikes,” remarks Visual Effects Supervisor Mark Bakowski, who was a newcomer to the project. “The Colosseum was originally to be more wet-for-wet and less dry-for-wet. But it works well in the end. There is a speed of working that suits Ridley Scott; he shoots quickly and likes to move quickly. That worked, shooting it dry-for-wet because Ridley could get his cameras where he wanted, reset quickly and get the shots; whereas, there are more restrictions being in the proper wet kind of thing. When it comes to integration, I was wary of having too much of a 50/50 split where you have to constantly match one to the other. We had a certain style of shot that was wet-for-wet, as in someone falling into the water, or Neil did some amazing impacts of the boats where the camera is skimming along the surface. Those made sense to do wet-for-wet because there are lots of interactions close to the camera.” The water went through a major design evolution. Bakowski adds, “We started off looking at the canals of Venice as our reference for the Colosseum, and then we started to drift. Ridley was showing pictures of his swimming pool in Los Angeles and saying, ‘Can you move it that way?’ It took us a while to find the look of the Colosseum water, but we got there in the end.”

“We tried to match the sets in actual detail, particularly in the arenas, both provincial and in the capital – like the Colosseum set – as closely as possible to the first [Gladiator]. There were changes, but they were subtle. That was a nod to economical filmmaking. Why waste the time shooting crowds cheering when you have it in the can already?”

—Arthur Max, Production Designer

“We built the boats in the U.K., shipped them out and then assembled them there, which was the right thing to do because it was almost impossible to get that material in Morocco or the sheer quantity of of steel and timber we needed. We put them in 30 40-foot trucks going across the Atlas Mountains, and as they were arriving, we were assembling them. It was like clockwork. On the day when we were shooting, we were still painting bits. It was that close.”

—Neil Corbould, Special Effects Supervisor

Technological advances allowed for the expansion of Rome. “We built much more than we did on the first one in terms of the amount of site we covered,” Max explains. “We went from one end to the other. CNC sculptures and casting techniques were expedited greatly on the sequel because we had the technology. The timeframe was compressed from getting a finished drawing or working drawing to the workshop floor and also being able to farm out digital files, not only to one workshop but to multiple workshops simultaneously, which increased the speed of production. To a large extent, we met the demands of Ridley’s storyboards, but there was still a large amount of [digital] set extensions.” The accomplishment was impressive. “It was an amazing set to wander around,” Bakowski states. “We had like a kit of parts that we could dress in the background. Technically, a certain hill should be in a particular place. We established it in this shot, or a certain building should be at a specific angle. But if it didn’t look good, of course, it moved because Ridley is a visual director; his work is like a moving painting every time, and we responded to that by trying to make everything beautiful, which was the main thing.”

Visual effects took over some tasks previously looked after by special effects. “In Gladiator, we did a lot of launching arrows, but in this one, we didn’t do any of that,” Corbould reveals. “It was all Mark [Bakowski]. That allowed Ridley to shoot at the speed he did, which was good. I concentrated on the fires, dust and explosions in the city. But we only shot that once, with 11 cameras.” A major contribution was the practical black smoke. Corbould describes, “We were burning vegetable oil, and when you atomize it at high pressure, it vaporizes, ignites and gives you this amazing black smoke. Everyone smells like a chip shop! We had six of these massive burners that were dotted around the set, and then we had to chase the wind. We would have some wind socks up or look at the flags. You had to try to anticipate it because of the speed at which Ridley works. We must have had 16 people just doing black smoke. We built a beach as well. Ridley said, ‘It’s supposed to be on the coast, and I want an 80-meter stretch of beach with waves washing the bodies onto the shore.’ We constructed an 80 x 80-meter set of beach. I made this wave wall, which was basically one section of the wall, but the whole 80 meters of it pushed in. It’s a bit like a wave tank. We put a big liner in it and sprayed sand over the liner; that gave it a nice, majestic wash-up against the beach.”

ILM led the charge in creating the 1,154 visual effects shots, followed by Framestore, Ombrium VFX, Screen Scene, Exceptional Minds and Cheap Shot VFX. “The baboons were a fun ride and tough,” Bakowski remarks. “The speed that Ridley likes to shoot is fantastic, but someone interacting and fighting with a troop of baboons does take some planning and thought to go into it. It’s complicated business. Bakowski adds, “He was generous in terms of letting us shoot the passes we wanted to shoot. In general, we kept to the logic that there were a couple of hero guys in the middle and a bunch of supporting baboons on the edge. We do one pass where we put all of the baboon stunt performers in there. Everyone would run around acting like baboons. After that, we pulled out the baboons that weren’t interacting with people because it was a nightmare with the amount of dust being kicked up. We did a pass with only the contact points and then a clean pass afterwards. It was a challenge to have it all come together.”

Nothing was achieved easily on Gladiator II. “This is the most challenging project that I’ve ever done given the scale and scope of it and the conditions under which we worked,” Max states. “We had the sandstorms in Morocco, and the idea of doing a naval battle in the desert had its problems. We had to keep the dust down, and the physical effects team was always out there with water hoses, and they were clever. They had water cannons to replicate physical waves coming over the bow of the ships. It was a lot of technology on an enormous scale.” The boat scenes were the most complicated. Explains Corbould, “I was probably one of the first people on the show with Arthur, and our prep period was quite short. We built the boats in the U.K., shipped them out and then assembled them out there, which was the right thing to do because it was almost impossible to get that material in Morocco or the sheer quantity of steel and timber we needed. We put them in 30 40-foot trucks going across the Atlas Mountains, and as they were arriving, we were assembling them. It was like clockwork. On the day when we were shooting, we were still painting bits. It was that close.”

The visual effects work was as vast as the imagination of Scott. “We’re doing extensions in Rome, crowds in the Colosseum, creatures and water,” Bakowski notes. “For the final battle. We were adding vast CG armies in the backgrounds of virtually every shot. We did some little pickups as well, so it’s integrating these pickups that came back to the U.K. with the stuff that was shot in Malta. It’s not groundbreaking stuff, but the volume of it is quite high because it’s one of those things that adjusts and adapts as the edit develops. The Colosseum naval battle encapsulated both what I’m looking forward to people seeing and also a big challenge. The baboons were a fun challenge, and the rhino just worked, which was fantastic. By the end, we knew how we were doing in the Colosseum, and our crowds look beautiful. I can’t wait for you to see all of it.”