‘Gladiator II’ Producers on Returning to Ancient Rome: “We Didn’t Want to Be a Pale Imitation”
[This story contains spoilers from Gladiator II.]
In March 2001, Gladiator producer Douglas Wick accepted the Oscar for best picture from Michael Douglas, thus setting the highest possible bar for the, at that point, already discussed sequel to Ridley Scott’s historical epic. At the end of his speech, Wick paid tribute to his family by lovingly saying that “all roads lead to” them, and the metaphor proved to be true in more ways than one. His partner in life, Lucy Fisher, left her decorated career as a studio executive to become producing partners with Wick at Red Wagon Entertainment, and together they’d shepherd over a dozen more films, including Oscar winners Memoirs of a Geisha (2005) and The Great Gatsby (2013), as well as the under-appreciated gem known as Lawless (2012).
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In between it all, they never lost sight of Gladiator II as various scripts were commissioned, such as Nick Cave’s wild take that resurrected Russell Crowe’s Maximus Decimus Meridius as an immortal warrior who fought on behalf of the Roman gods. But the convoluted attempts to bring back their Oscar-winning leading man never truly took flight.
“There were funny ideas for a sequel, but obviously, Russell’s character was dead. The idea of him making his way back through the afterlife was always a little bit doomed,” Wick tells The Hollywood Reporter. “So the fact that we killed two of our leads [Crowe’s Maximus and Joaquin Phoenix’s Commodus] created a particularly challenging circumstance.”
The turning point came when the Gladiator II creative team refocused on Lucilla’s (Connie Nielsen) son, Lucius, who was originally portrayed by Spencer Treat Clark. Fans have always theorized that Lucius was Maximus’ illegitimate son, but the brain trust didn’t finalize that choice until much later. After all, the revelation about Lucius would’ve undercut Maximus’ quest to avenge his murdered nuclear family. “Maximus was always his spiritual father, but we never determined at the time that Maximus was actually his biological father,” Wick says.
Once rising star Paul Mescal joined the fold to play adult Lucius, another key to the long-gestating sequel came when he was conceived to be the lost prince who resented the city of Rome for ripping his family apart and forcing him to live in exile under another identity. According to Wick, it was also important that the second century story reflect our present to some degree.
“All period movies have to be a mirror to our times or they don’t deserve to live,” Wick stresses. “The idea of billionaires on both the left and the right who are more and more buying their way into government is a very modern story.”
If the lengthy development process wasn’t enough of a challenge, the enterprise then faced generationally rare obstacles mid-production due to the writers and actors’ strikes throughout 2023. The former required them to prematurely begin production, and the latter caused them to shut down with at least a couple months of remaining work to fulfill. While the stoppage allowed everyone to assemble a cut and make improvements once filming resumed, the size of the film was so robust that costs mounted despite cameras no longer rolling.
“The scale of making this movie was so massive that we might not ever see it again. So starting production was a military operation, and so was shutting it down,” Fisher explains. “We had 450 hotel rooms to close down, and we still had to keep renting everything, like all the scaffolding to hold up the Colosseum. We didn’t know when we were going to come back.”
The dilemmas also extended to post-production, as Scott’s initial cut was nearly four hours long. As a result, the editorial team, in conjunction with Scott and the producing team, had to kill their figurative darlings, including a scene where Nielsen’s Lucilla bids adieu to her deceased husband, Acacius (Pedro Pascal). In addition, Wick confirms that May Calamawy’s entire role hit the cutting room floor due to the overlong runtime.
“Even as we are, we’re a long movie. So you have to see what works and what’s essential,” Wick admits. “Connie had a wonderful [deleted] scene where she basically said goodbye to [Pedro’s character’s] corpse, so you just always have to make choices about what’s essential.”
Below, during a recent conversation with THR, Wick and Fisher discuss all this and more, including the potential of a Gladiator trilogy.
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Did the two of you always have faith that this day would come, or did you both waver at times?
DOUGLAS WICK We definitely wavered. It was a strange journey. At one point, we were in Tokyo, creating 1930s Kyoto [??for Memoirs of a Geisha]. Another time we were in Sydney doing 1920s Long Island for The Great Gatsby. There were all these other adventures, but our hearts were always in ancient Rome. We had gotten so lucky on the first movie. If you do this for a while, you know it’s always a minor miracle for a movie to turn out that good, and we were determined that we weren’t going to do a sequel unless we really felt it deserved to be made.
LUCY FISHER Like Doug said, there was so much pressure to live up to the first one, and if we were going to do it, we certainly didn’t want to be a pale imitation. We wanted to figure out a story and a character that would be deserving, and while we always knew it was going to be the surviving character of Lucius, we didn’t quite know what the story was. We eventually found the idea of the reluctant prince, and that’s when it all began to click. It makes our careers seem paltry, but Ridley has made 17 movies in between Gladiator movies, which is more than most other people. So we were all busy at different times, and then a number of years ago, we really started to work on the development of the story, which did take a few years.
Lucy, you were vice chairman at Sony during Gladiator, but through your partner in life, I presume you still had a front-row seat to the entire experience. You then joined Doug at Red Wagon Entertainment shortly thereafter, so did you need very little orientation?
FISHER Well, I knew Ridley from Alien. I worked at Fox as the vice president when he was making Alien, so I’ve actually known him for a long time. And, being the lucky “plus one,” I knew most of the Gladiator crew already. Interestingly enough, we threw a birthday party for Ridley while we were on location in Malta, and other than a different editor [Claire Simpson] who’s been with him steadily for almost 10 years, I looked around the table and saw literally the same heads of department. They were always ready to come back.
I’m old enough to remember when the Maximus resurrection story was hot off the presses. Did any of those previous concepts or scripts ever truly stick?
WICK No, but we later did Lawless with Nick Cave, who we love. [Note: In the mid-to-late 2000s, Cave penned a sequel draft that resurrected Maximus as an immortal warrior.] On a joking level, right after the first movie opened, Russell Crowe’s agent called me and said, “I have an idea: they carry Maximus’ body out of the corner of the arena. They put the stretcher down, he gets up and they all high five and say, ‘It worked. They believe he’s dead.’ That would be the beginning of the sequel.” So there were funny ideas for a sequel, but obviously, Russell’s character was dead. The idea of him making his way back through the afterlife was always a little bit doomed, so the fact that we killed two of our leads [Crowe’s Maximus and Joaquin Phoenix’s Commodus] created a particularly challenging circumstance. You could say Ridley Scott was the real star a little bit, and Ridley being your tour guide to Ancient Rome is always going to be an event. But it’s a fight movie, so you’re trying to move story and character forward through a series of fights, and that’s particularly challenging. So that’s why getting a story that stood on its own was so elusive for that long period of time.
FISHER And it wasn’t like we were working on it every day for two-plus decades.
WICK I did Spy Game with Tony Scott in the middle of that, so I was still around the Scotts. And because Gladiator had worked so well, we talked a lot about it.
FISHER We like to say that we had to wait for Paul Mescal to be born.
To go from decades of development into production, what were the other breakthrough moments besides the reluctant prince? What got Gladiator II over the hump finally?
WICK Besides the idea of Lucius as the lost prince, it was someone who hated everything about Rome, making the movie a homecoming. We know enough about movies to know that the more they’re about family, the more solid you are. We then talked for a long time about what the ending of Lucius’s journey would be. He’d return, he’d possibly reunite with his mother, but would he burn down the Colosseum and leave? And many of our breakthroughs were visual because Ridley thinks visually. As we would talk about all these thematics, he’d always look a little bored, and then he’d come in with a visual solution. And his visual solution to the end involved Lucius being pulled like a magnet towards his destiny as a Roman and his destiny with his family. All of his attempts to cut away his past, to cauterize himself and separate himself from it, would fail.
As much as Lucius hated Rome and wanted to be no part of Rome, the events have swept him along to where he is very much a Roman. So Ridley’s idea for the very last image is that it then dawns on him that it’s happened. We suddenly had a beginning and an end, and that’s when we knew we had the movie. There were a lot of other challenges including the antagonist, because we didn’t want the antagonist to be another depraved emperor. So there was a long journey to Macrinus [Denzel Washington]. Also, all period movies have to be a mirror to our times or they don’t deserve to live. And the idea of billionaires on both the left and the right who are more and more buying their way into government is a very modern story. So there were a lot of pieces of the puzzle.
Lucius being Maximus’ son wasn’t spelled out in the first film, but there’s at least an implication. Did you all know back then that they were father and son?
WICK No, we weren’t sure of it. It wasn’t ingrained the whole time. Maximus was always his spiritual father, but we never determined at the time that Maximus was actually his biological father.
You probably didn’t have to buy Ridley another painting to sway him to direct this time, but is his approach still mostly the same 20-plus years later?
WICK Yes, at heart, he’s always a painter. He still thinks visually as he did then. The thing with Ridley is that the longer you keep him in the room, he’s like the golden goose. If you pretended the door to the development room was locked in order to keep him in there a little bit longer, he would just have so many great solutions. In the first movie, Maximus was a combat general, so, of course, he was going to be formidable in the arena. But here we have an angry young man, a lost prince, so we talked a lot about how and why he is going to win in the arena. Ridley then had to suffer through a lot of thematic conversations about rage and fury. But one day, Ridley said, “In the scene with the baboons, the alpha baboon is going to kill Lucius’s mentor. Lucius will then be so enraged that he will bite the arm of the alpha baboon, spit out his flesh, and the baboon will realize there’s a new alpha in town.” So Ridley is a remarkable talent in that he can absorb all of these story challenges and then have them catalyze into a scene or a moment.
FISHER He has a very unusual style of shooting. He hardly ever shot with less than eight cameras. Sometimes, there were 12 or more. So most directors wouldn’t know how to do that and wouldn’t want to either, because it’s a whole other brain set that he acquired from his early days as an operator. He came in way under schedule on this movie. He’s a machine in terms of being prepared. He storyboards everything. That’s always been part of his process, but you’ll wake up in the morning to a whole new scene with every angle storyboarded so that everyone is on the same page. So he always leaves room for improvement or serendipity or whatever you want to call it. He shoots films almost like a playlet because all the characters are sitting in the same scene; they’re not being shot on different days. So your closeup is happening when your wide shot is happening, and he never does an over-the-shoulder shot. The camera is always moving. So we were always watching eight monitors simultaneously. You can’t even watch the dailies because there’s 14 hours of dailies. He just has a different way of working than anyone that we have worked with, and luckily for us, we have worked with many of the greats: Mike Nichols, Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Spielberg, George Miller.
WICK With all those cameras, we’d shoot both the emperor’s box and the floor of the arena at the same time. So the reactions of Denzel and Connie are being shot while they’re looking down at Paul with a mechanical rhinoceros. And after the first few days, I said to Denzel, “How’s it going for you?” And he said, “It’s been such a long time since I worked as an extra.” (Laughs) With all the reliance on computers, there may not be another build this big. We built not only the arena, but blocks of ancient Rome. And all the actors will tell you how the physical setting helped immerse them in the world, especially one that has a life-size statue of Pedro Pascal’s general on a horse.
Making movies on this scale is never easy, but overall, is it relatively easier to make a Gladiator movie in 2023 versus 1999?
FISHER The VFX that are available now make the impossible possible. They wanted a rhino for the first movie, but it was too expensive.
WICK On the first one, I actually spoke to some animal trainers about getting a rhino because it was too expensive to do it all by computer. But rhinos don’t see well, and once they start running, they’re almost impossible to stop. So that was a complete disaster waiting to happen. But Ridley really wanted his rhino [in the sequel], and his team is so great that they also created a mechanical rhino so that the actors could still interact with something tangible. When we did Stuart Little, Geena Davis was always talking to her empty hand. Also, to shoot ships in the arena, all of the ships were wheeled onto the dry arena floor. The visual effects people then put in the water later. It’s much harder to control boats on water, so that made that scene doable in a way that would have been almost impossible 25 years ago.
FISHER We shot the opening battle with all the Roman ships on the sand in Morocco. The boats were being dragged across sand.
That sequence also repurposed Ridley’s Kingdom of Heaven set that was built 20 years earlier.
FISHER He was not happy to have to pay for his own set.
Production was interrupted by the strikes, and while you never want to shut down for any reason, did any silver linings emerge as a result of the delay?
WICK Part of the producer’s job is to keep your eye on the ball in the middle of all this chaos. There’s so many problems to solve, and that’s where movies forget what their priorities are or what they’re about. So you’re always looking for the silver lining. Because of the writers’ strike, we started a little bit before we were ready. We then had to stop for the actors’ strike, and that pause allowed us to do a quick assembly of the movie. So we had the incredible luxury of seeing an assembly in the middle of shooting. David Scarpa, the writer, also got to see it, and then we all had conversations about what was and wasn’t working. We talked about what adjustments might be needed and what opportunities we might want to pick up in the first half of the movie based on what we were learning. So that was really invaluable.
FISHER On the minus side, the scale of making this movie was so massive that we might not ever see it again. So starting production was a military operation, and so was shutting it down. We often had more than a thousand extras on set and a crew of 450 in Morocco. We had 80 tents just to store the props and for the extras’ hair and makeup. There was no infrastructure that was big enough for us, so there were literally 80 tents. The day before we had to stop shooting, we had 2,000 extras on set. Our last day before shutting down was a sunset in Malta, and the next day it was dark. So we had 450 hotel rooms to close down, and we still had to keep renting everything, like all the scaffolding to hold up the Colosseum. We didn’t know when we were going to come back. Paul Mescal also had to continue working out because you can’t get in that kind of shape in ten minutes. You have to keep it. And the Colosseum became weathered, so we had to refurbish it with paint and age it all over again. It was all an enormous undertaking. Luckily, we had brilliant line producers in Aidan Elliott and Raymond Kirk. And when we finally got to go back, we then had to stop again for Christmas. So there was a massive transportation bill to ship all those people back and forth, but everybody was so eager to work on this movie no matter what came our way.
I attended a press screening on Nov. 7, and afterwards, we discussed how the ending felt hopeful in a very timely and much-needed way. Have the two of you been able to sense how the ending is being received amid current events?
FISHER Interestingly enough, we haven’t read much that’s focused on that. I don’t know whether it’s because people are still in shock in real life, but we were stunned at how prescient it turned out to be.
WICK Anecdotally, we’ve had several people write to us and talk to us about how good it felt to have our higher angels celebrated in terms of the swamp of politics. So that has come across from a few people, but we don’t yet know the larger public reaction. We’ve gotten responses about the celebration of a dream and higher ideals, where everything isn’t just the low road. So I hope it resonates that way with the public.
FISHER Having seen the movie somewhere between 50 and 100 times, I get choked up every time the armies yell “aye” after Lucius asks, “Dare we rebuild that dream together?” We so want to feel hope. Of the reactions that we have gotten, people have told us that they’re still thinking about it the next day. Sometimes, you see a movie that was really good, but then you can’t remember anything the next day. So, hopefully, this one will have some sticking power for a lot of people.
There’s been some chatter over May Calamawy’s character who seemed to be cut out. Was this omission just a classic example of a movie needing to abridge itself? (Scott told THR that his earliest cut was three hours and forty minutes.)
WICK Yeah, very clearly. Even as we are, we’re a long movie. So, yeah, very simply, it can’t be longer, and you have to see what works and what’s essential. Connie had a wonderful [deleted] scene where she basically said goodbye to [Pedro’s character’s] corpse, so you just always have to make choices about what’s essential.
There’s already talk of a third film. Ridley previously told THR that there’s an idea. Are the two of you eager to turn this into a trilogy?
WICK Nothing would be more fun, but I would say that we’re going to hold the same standard for making a third movie. There’s too many bad sequels and quick money grabs. So we’ll hold to our standards, but we hope to, and would love to, return to ancient Rome.
FISHER To be able to do it again under the right circumstances, there’s nothing we’d like to do more.
You’ve both mentioned that Gladiator II could be one of the final massive “builds.” Does that suggest that your long-term outlook on the industry is rather gloomy?
WICK No, what this movie and others have proven is that the big theatrical event movie is the one sure thing in this business. So that point was more about technology. Things are now more likely to be computer generated than practically built.
FISHER Doug is more the optimist, and I’m more the pessimist or the realist. We’re at a crossroads. People have always yearned for stories and entertainment, and whether it was VHS or DVD, each time it was like, “Oh, it’s over.” And then it wasn’t, because the eagerness for people to be together in a room and watch a story that resonates with them is a real instinct that human beings have. But our business is a little screwed up right now. I won’t opine upon the reasons, but it certainly wasn’t helped by COVID and the whole studio system turning to streaming. There’s been a lot of things. So we are in a confused state, but the instinct for people to want to gather and watch a story is still there. The attention span is shorter now with subsequent generations, although not as short as Quibi thought it was. (Laughs) So these reasons are why we all root for everyone’s movies. We need people to think, “It’s Friday night, and we’re going to go to the movies.” We want that habit to come back. So we’re rooting for all good filmmakers to be able to have a chance to make good movies and for distributors to have a chance at people seeing them in the theater. A movie like Gladiator II is so much more appreciated on a big screen.
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Gladiator II is now playing in movie theaters. Follow along with all of THR‘s coverage.
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