Twenty Four years later the arena is welcoming audiences back for Gladiator II. The visionary himself Ridley Scott has assembled quite a team of frequent collaborators to continue his version of Ancient Rome on a more bloody and brutal scale than ever before. Apart from the legacy is the soundscape of Rome which composer Harry Gregson-Williams talked to Offscreen Central about crafting a DNA to connect Gladiator with its successor, traveling the world to find the right instruments and attuning sound to the journey of these characters.

Jillian Chilingerian: Hello, it is very nice to meet you.
Harry Gregson-Williams: Hi, nice to meet you as well.

Jillian Chilingerian: I went to the Deadline Sound and Screen event a few weeks ago, so I heard the score Live, which was just insane. I am excited to talk to you after that.
Harry Gregson-Williams: Oh, cool. Great.

Jillian Chilingerian: I was very shocked that I was so into this film. I want to start as you’re coming on to give us the sound of Ancient Rome and all of these characters and continue the lore of the first one. What are those initial conversations you’re having with Ridley and figuring out how you want this to sound, whether it’s having that honor of the original, and how do you craft your legacy for this one?
Harry Gregson-Williams: Well, the great joy about doing a score like this is that one of the first points I go to is trying to build the sonic world, the sort of tapestry of sound. So what sounds am I going to use? I know I’m going to use a big orchestra and a big choir, those are the large, sort of weighty sounds, but I’m interested in the featured musicians, the instrumentalist, the odd vocalist I can find that’s unique to the sound I can make here. To your point, Ridley is a very visual director I mean, he’s an artist, first and foremost, literally, a painter so it’s better that I after a very, very quick conversation, he’ll give me a few pointers, like, embrace this and don’t go anywhere near that, and then he’ll want me to go off and write something, and then we’ll talk about the music that we hear. So rather than start just with words, the starting point is a piece of music and in this instance, I wrote the piece you heard the other night. I wrote a piece of music that contained the spiritual essence of the first film score, which happened to be written by my old boss and friend, Hans Zimmer, so I did step proceedings once I figured out the kind of essence of the DNA, of the first movie I went ahead and started writing music away from the picture at first. Now, as a film composer, the temptation is to dive straight in and start scoring a specific film, but I started early on this project. I had enough time to be able to create music away from the picture, and then start finding my colors for the palette that I was going to use. One of the fun things I did was jump on a plane and go to visit a person I found on YouTube who was in the field in northern Spain, where he lived and in the back of this farmhouse, there was a studio, and in that studio, many of the instruments that he not only could play, but he built, so he’s a multi-instrumentalist, a guy called Abraham Cooper. It was fascinating some of the instruments that he built could have been played in Roman times. They’ve been designed, having looked at art and etchings and literature of the time and they’re fascinating. They look like they would probably be as useful as weapons as they would be as musical instruments, some of them made from various horns ripped off, goodness knows what animals and some brass instruments that looked like they could be almost like sirens like pretty scary sounding and one in particular I love had this beautiful, brassy serpent’s head on the front of it, and then masses of tubing which needed two people to sort of manhandle it into a position that could be blown down. So these sort of sounds I collected as I went down to his place and recorded him. I did this with several different instruments and instrumentalists. With the vocals, I found an Ethiopian vocalist, a Nigerian vocalist, and also with Lisa Gerard, who sang on the very first score so I contacted her and asked her if she wanted to be a part of it. Of course, she was very keen on collecting this sonic template, and then sitting at the piano trying to work out what would be a good theme for Lucius, and how could I express that in a way that’ll feel like it’s part of the DNA of the of Gladiator?

Jillian Chilingerian: I love hearing about collecting these sounds because sometimes I wonder as someone who listens to music and watches films how you know that this should be the sound that fits in here, envisioning it. It’s wild to hear that process that you went through, and even pulling in the vocalists. I love hearing what the Numidian’s vocals sound like among the music.
Harry Gregson-Williams: I mean, for me, the vocalists are good fun, I had a few vocalists come here to my studio in Santa Monica and record. Interestingly, I found a voice that I liked, and it was a Spotify acapella track, so there was no accompaniment. It was just this one girl singing, and we liked the direction of her voice, I wanted to use her particular vocal skills over the Arishat character, so that when we first meet Lucius, he’s living a very pleasant life with Arishat, having found a vocalist, I liked the sound of her, I had to find the actual human being, which proved very difficult. No one seemed to know where she was, and the recording that I’d liked had been made years ago, and it was quite possible that she disappeared to a different country. So we searched for her. In the end, I liked it so much, that I decided to sample a part of the track that I had found, and that way I could cut it up, I could reorder some of the syllables, and I could use it within the music track that I had created for Arishat character. One of my first calls was then to the Paramount Music Department saying you’re going to have to license this little six-second clip that I’ve used on my track. That’s how that was created, but it’s great fun to sample something I liked. I was able to retune it, detune it, reorder it, to make it work exactly how I wanted it to be, which I guess I could have done had I found this lady in the flesh.

Jillian Chilingerian: I want to go off of that because I think what makes this movie so compelling is the amount of different characters you have in this amazing ensemble that words can’t describe. They all have these archetypes of people who are really all just trying to survive. Macrinus, He’s so manipulative. I love him. Then Lucius who is at the center, and his mother, the emperors, and so many people so what was it like figuring out beats for those characters and how they are all leading us into their story points from sound, because watching this felt like Shakespeare, a great opera.
Harry Gregson-Williams: Ridley is all about storytelling, and as we’ve established, he’s a very visual director, but he’s completely open to ideas of how the music can support any of these characters. For instance, you mentioned Macrinus. He’s such a slippery character particularly at the beginning, when you first meet him, not quite sure of his force of good, or force for bad, or who the hell he is, or what his aims are. My friend Martin Tillman, who plays electric cello, now that’s just pretty much like a regular cello, but it’s a bit like the difference between an acoustic guitar and an electric guitar. So with this electric cell, it’s played in the same sort of rather rapturous way. However, it’s got a plug on it to make it slightly more distorted or put some cool effects on it. So it’s also just the way that the electric channel can be played seems to give me what I wanted for Macrinus’s motif, his theme, sliding intervals, quite first of all, major and then minor intervals. That one wasn’t quite sure where he was sitting, whether he was a force for good or evil, but a friend of mine, Hugh Marsh, plays a similar instrument, it’s a violin that’s been built somewhere between a violin and a cello. It has a slightly lower sound than the violin, and he was able to support the same idea. We called it Macrinus’s plan, but that track plays out very much underneath the plotting of Macrinus and what he gets up.
Jillian Chilingerian: So many times you’re like, I think I know where he’s going with this, but do I trust him? Those musical cues to kind of help you get through.
Harry Gregson-Williams: Lucius starts in a very simple way, but you need to look at the costumes, to begin peasant-like, but he ends up in Maximus’s costume with the sword. It’s very regal and iconic, but that’s his emotional journey that we track. Part of his thematic material, I think I call it the DNA theme. So it’s a plaintive, high-ethnic flute playing a very simple and sweet melody. It’s almost as if that melody, whenever we hear it, pulls Lucius towards his mother, not that he knows that it’s his mother to begin with, but that’s binding Gladiator with Gladiator II.

Jillian Chilingerian: Pulling him to his mother, because this looks like there are so many emotional beats, and I love the mother-son relationship amongst the action. What is that approach when you have a movie that’s teetering on both of these very epic, very large, but then it has these moments of just like heart and soul?
Harry Gregson-Williams: Composing happens on different days so Ridley may have sent me a couple of the emotional scenes involving Lucius and his mother. The first of those is Lucius is angry and bitter, and won’t accept what his mother’s trying to tell him, and the second time they meet in a cell, it’s very different. He understands exactly his heritage and what that means and those scenes require quite a lot of poise, and as a film composer, one doesn’t want to get in the way of what’s going on, just amplify, perhaps the emotions a little bit. Sometimes we should find ourselves as composers, often channeling what we’re seeing on screen, but also we can be channeling something that’s not on screen, so something a little subversive or much more subtle. For instance, in the first scene Lucius and Lucilla are together there’s quite a lot of anger and bitterness. My first call with that was to find some chilly, frosty, cold instrumentation to play those things out and I used a consort of vials being instruments that preceded the orchestral instruments we know of today, and they’re played without vibrato, without much warmth, and that sounds seem to suit the environment well.

Jillian Chilingerian: Creating the soundscape for Ancient Rome in such a transitional time, we see this rise of tyranny, people having a hope that maybe Rome will be the dream that they once had. As a composer, and when you’re going into this how do you figure those sounds of a period so specific?
Harry Gregson-Williams: I’ve done various other movies, for instance, a movie that I did for Ridley a few years ago, The Martian. It was a techie movie where Matt Damon’s character was into his tech, so that kind of encouraged me to use synth in a techie way. There’s always something to be gleaned from what’s on-screen as the composer, however, if I were to stick to, what anybody would perceive as an authentic instrument from the Roman times, I don’t know what the hell we’ve been listening to cow horns, you know? We’re building our world, just like the costume department, just like the sound department, that it’s almost like an animation, of which I’ve done a few animation scores. We’re building the world from the ground up. At least in Gladiator, there is some natural sound of the actors standing where they’re standing, with a big crowd, in that huge Colosseum. I had to work around those things in the knowledge that the sound effects department was going to be providing huge noise in some areas, that rhinoceros was very, very deep, and hard to write around those things so maybe not using the same Sonic spectrum as what the sound effects department would be using so often. It is quite a collaborative process knowing what the sound effects man is doing as to what the composers do. He’s painting his masterwork and he’s taking the music in this part and the sound in that part.
Jillian Chilingerian:The working relationship between the sound and the score of not one thing to be too much, and getting that organic sound. In this film, where you have so many people in that Colloseum, and you’re placed right there, and everything is supporting one another.
Harry Gregson-Williams: I hope so. That’s what we’re aiming for.

Jillian Chilingerian: I felt it well. I really appreciate the time diving into the instruments, because sometimes an audience, we don’t really tune in to what we hear the sound is, it’s always what feelings are these sounds giving me.
Harry Gregson-Williams: I’m happy it’s the sort of flavors that one’s able to throw around, musical flavors in a movie score like this is that that’s where it’s really exciting as a composer. I’m so happy you liked it.
Jillian Chilingerian: Thank you very nice to meet you.

Gladiator II is available to watch in theaters
You can read our review of the film here.