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. With a scale more epic than the first, Offscreen Central had the opportunity to chat with production designer Arthur Max about his extensive research at museums and historical sites, advanced fabrication technologies aiding in a faster production timeline, and the challenges of putting together the finale location.

Jillian Chilingerian: Hi.
Arthur Max: Hi, nice to meet you.

Jillian Chilingerian: The environment says so much about the state of Rome in this film. It’s been a short time in the timeline of the last movie in this movie, but at the same time, it’s like so much has changed like the world can change in so little time. In Rome, we see the rise of corrupt powers and the wealth gap between the people. We see affluent touches with the juxtaposition of the people in the Colosseum and the people outside. How did those aspects factor into the continuation of Gladiator II?
Arthur Max: Well, by this time you rightly described you saved me from explaining it. Ancient Rome is now at its maximum geographical extent, and it’s very multicultural. It’s very all-absorbing so you get all this cosmopolitan atmosphere, which we try to indicate visually by having all the races possible. We had black Centurions and legionaries, the opulence, the grandeur of ancient Rome, the scale of it, the richness of it, as well as the filth and the degradation of it, and the whole sweep and scope of it, and much more so than we did on the first one. We had some of the suffering and misery of the gladiators, but mostly they were pretty well looked after because they were valuable. By this time, life is cheap, and you’re only as good as your last fight. So we looked at a lot of reference material. I could go into a lot of detail, but for every museum you can think of, the British Museum, the Vatican Museums, and the Louvre, we went to Pompei and Herculaneum, where they have research and restoration workshops and labs. I think I even went up to Turin, where they have some ancient Roman stuff, but I found their Egyptian stuff was much better. It’s scorched and it’s very kind of fragmented. It doesn’t give you the whole picture so we turn once again to our old friends, Sir Lawrence, Alma Tadema, and Jean Leon Giroux, and a few others like Edmund John Poynter all of the orientalist romantic painters who portrayed this world in full color and fine detail, and who are basically the cameras of the time. We love to borrow as much as we can from them, because they bring back to life, the rituals, the processions, the street life, and the home life, in some cases we copied, but in most cases, we transformed and amalgamated. Ridley is not too bothered by historical accuracy, as you know, where there’s a gap in the available research, we make it up from what we’ve learned what we we like, and what we think they might have done. So was there a telescopic tower on a Roman warship? A lot of people thought there were, and there are little miniatures in the Maritime Museum of Rome in Fimacino, where they have recreated models of what they might have been like. So we copied those. Why not? How else would you get up on a wall of a cease fortress?

Jillian Chilingerian: As you mentioned, they’re growing and you get influences from the people that have come to this one spot. As history is passed down, most of our recollections are through painting statues, as well as just like stories that we’ve heard. So it’s like, how do you really fill in those gaps of times that might not have been as prominent within history, and, you know, filling those in of what this world looks like?
Arthur Max: I always thought, and I think Ridley agrees, that the audience gets its ideas about what ancient Rome was like, not from all those places I just mentioned so they don’t have the time or the ability to go to all those places. They get it from the movies that have been made, which I’ve looked at and we borrow from, particularly the scale so when Ridley said to me, this time, we’re going for scale I thought the first one was big enough. I looked at once again, all the movies, particularly the biggest sets I saw, the kind of filmography of ancient Rome was Cleopatra and Quo Vadis. I won’t really comment on the details of them, because there were different eras, different technologies, and of course, the mother of all Roman films, Ben Hur, but they were big in their scope, so we were competing with them. We built much more almost a complete Picasso site full of our sets, more buildings, more statues in a shorter prep time, a shorter construction time, shorter dressing time, because we had more technologies, and so we used those techniques to speed up our production. Whereas the first one, was more handcrafted and it took longer. So we didn’t get as many statues of big scale. We had big ones, but only half a dozen, whereas in our film we had a couple of dozen,
and all the boys were there. Marcus, Aurelius, Julius Caesar, Augustus Caesar, Vestal virgins, Artemisia, the goddess of agriculture,
Juniper, the goddess of wisdom. We had a room full of busts and pedestals. I mean, maybe four dozen. We didn’t make them all, but we assembled a lot of them.

There was just the whole Colosseum to do, which went higher because of the boats coming into them and the water level, and then the spout, the mask of Neptune, who was spewing water to fill the arena. That was a sculpt, some of the biggest capitals of columns we ever have done, eight feet high to top the columns that were 30 feet high. For the great entry up the staircase with the giant triumphal columns, which came from, the Palatine ruins, actually in Rome. If you walk amongst them and you see the fragments, you realize how big everything is topped by the wing guilt victory God holding the olive wreath of victory. We had eight of those. All the columns were real, but the victory was only one. The rest were digital. That’s why we could make more of it. The we had a triumphal arch on the first one, but it was half the size of the one we had on this one. That’s the rule of thumb. Then we replicated the Emperor’s box and a bunch of the seating on either side to do the wet work in the tank down the road, which was all done in the dry because our visual effects department said it was easier to do that way and put the water in later but we needed some water work for the stunts. If you fall into the water, it’s much easier for cameras in the water to be in the water than try to put all of that into every shot with 12 cameras, or 10 cameras, or even eight cameras, which was our minimum, apart from very small rooms which had four cameras in them.

Jillian Chilingerian: I like that you touch upon that because I always think about how films from years ago get sequels, and the influence of like, how technology has changed, and how that either, like you mentioned, like it makes the times shorter because you can fill in things. It is fascinating to see those advantages of when you get to return with this technology that you know, was not around, or maybe would have been helpful.
Arthur Max: From the first one, we were on the cutting on the threshold of what was cutting edge back then, and we put most of our marbles into the 360 of the Colosseum and a couple of big, wide plate shots that we had, but the technology was not nearly as advanced as it is now, not only the water software but in lots of physical ways of fabrication technologies in the industry that we could use, ie these remote controlled hydraulic platforms that could pitch and roll like ships. That’s why we could do the sea battle in the desert and simulate the sea movement mechanically, then in terms of fabricating statues and props and the chariots and all of that stuff it could be done from digital drawings going to digital cutting machines and laser cutting machines and water cutting machines and all of that, which expedited the process so you could build more and more quickly. We had big statues on the first one where we had about half a dozen made by hand on steel armatures with chicken wire and clay and plaster and quite slow this time you could do digital files scanned from a maquette in beautiful clay detail scan, cut it big sectionally in Medium Density Foam by machine with multi-armed cutters in sections ship that on a truck, assemble it on site. We ended up with 20 statues of that size, although, when you do close-ups on them, like in the portrait statue of Acacius we did his face in clay to get an absolute likeness and the hands always the hands are difficult. Generally, we could do it more quickly for relatively the same cost, including the transportation from we did prefabs in England, Italy, Malta, Croatia, and Serbia, because they all had machines, and we had such a compressed schedule, we needed to outsource and then ship them in to be assembled. It was a triumph of planning and coordination by my department, doing the drawings, farming them out, and getting the bids.

Jillian Chilingerian: Well, it looked amazing. I can imagine for the actors it was so helpful to feel they’re in those places and be able to transform and I think it speaks to what the environment does for it.
Arthur Max: I think they do. I mean, they’ve mentioned that out loud. I mean, what about the finale? That was a bit of a journey from what was supposed to be the river Tiber and in ancient times, the river Tiber wasn’t like it is today, it did have one bridge across it, but we couldn’t find a bridge, either in Morocco or Malta that had a river flowing under it of that type. They had a few drainage canals, but we weren’t allowed to work in them because they were all overgrown with protected species of trees and plants. So we came up with the city gate idea, with a stream running under the road for the battle, and that was all quite last minute, because of the great delay that we had with the writer/actors strike situation. By the time we got to that, the seasons had changed dramatically, from summer to winter, and also the road could be closed, but only for four days so we were limited in how we would do it. As big as it was with all its statuary and aging, the first arch in the history of Rome. Ridley wanted it to be very, very weathered, and straddle the road with a stream running onto the road as if and so that was probably the biggest challenge of pulling that off, getting all the permits, selling it to the authorities that we would be digging the whole place up. Although the owners of the land were private farmers, they were quite happy to do it because they would dig up the fields and flood it all the time, but not to the extent we did, but we promised we would put it all back as new, and we did. I think with Ridley’s luck with the weather because it’s chronic, the sun came out, everything dried out, and we shot the sequence, and it was beautiful. We had what we needed, but there was a lot of consternation getting there.

Jillian Chilingerian: Well thank you so much for talking with me about the aspects that I like and wanted to hear about.
Arthur Max: My pleasure. Nice meeting you.

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