Russell
Crowe lives in a caravan in New South Wale, Australia. He's midway
through renovating the main farmhouse and being on the other side
of the Pacific from Hollywood suits him just fine. Just about far
away enough for him to dish the cow dung on Tinseltown, even on his
visits back to California. "This is a freakshow," he says, as we sit
watching a parade of facelifts and toupees pass through the heart
of Beverly Hills. "The art of sanity? Stay as far away from this place
as possible, mate."
But
the sheer madness of Movieland has paid off. What other show on earth
would think of cladding rugged New Zealander Crowe in armour, give
him a short sword and risk $103 million on recreating the Roman Empire,
circa 180AD, around him?
First
seen by a wider audience in Aussie skinhead pic Romper Stomper, Crowe's
US headlining debut was The Quick and The Dead, when he attracted
media attention for being hand-picked by the film's star and executive
producer, Sharon Stone.
If
some in Hollywood have labelled him as too opinionated on set, then
it's because they have mistaken his antipodean directness for rudeness.
"It's only when the captain of the ship doesn't know where it is going
that I explode," he admits. "Ridley Scott is the kind of strong director
I like, as was Michael Mann on The Insider. These are men who are
confident and have done their work long before they get to the set."
With
all the hand-to-hand combat and battle scenes, Gladiator proved to
be the most physically arduous shoot of Crowe's life. But there was
one bit of activity Crowe wasn't prepared to give up, despite a directive
straight from the studio. "They sent me a memo asking me not to play
football because I might get hurt. So I sent this memo back saying:
"I can wrestle with four tigers, but I'm not allowed to play football?
Get over it. Love, Russell."
The
final result, which has snatched success from the jaws of a problematic
shoot, will make Crowe a huge star-but he's the only one doubting
this, despite giving the movie a thumbs-up. "I sat there like a little
kid. It just blew me away," he recalls of the cast and crew screening.
Yet still, Crowe checks his enthusiasm. "The film world is full of
disappointments, " he says, warily. "And I do hate bullshit." Ê
Rome, 180AD: The gladiators have just
paraded into the Colosseum and addressed the imperial box with those
chilling words. Soon they'll fall on each other in a ferocious fight
to the death.
Above
them, you sit rapt in your stall, the blazing Italian sun and dust
thrown up by earlier combat coating you and your toga in grime. The
stench of sweat and sweet wine is everywhere. But amid a week-long
orgy of gladiatorial carnage, staged by the Emperor to curry favour
with the Roman rabble, you don't care.
Right?
Wrong. According to historians, it's mostly bogus-they can't find
any ancient records of anyone addressing the Emperor with these words.
Similarly, although accounts talk of crowds "voting with their thumbs"
for who should live or die, which way they pointed is also a matter
of speculation. And that "to the death" business? Well, would you
spend years training a gladiator up through the ranks-only to see
him frittered away in a few seconds of spectacular slaughter?
Common
knowledge of Roman life has been influenced by one too many sword
and sandal epics from the 50s and 60s, that overlong, colour-saturated
staple of wet Sunday afternoons everyone was tiring of way before
the cripplingly expensive Burton/Taylor fiasco Cleopatra. But if you
stare at Hollywood long enough, the same ideas keep coming around.
And the fact that no one had made a blockbusting Roman epic for nigh
on three decades was reason enough for someone to give it a go.
The
notion of bringing the glory that was Rome back to the big screen
came from screenwriter David H. Franzoni (Amistad). He'd approached
producer Douglas Wick three years ago, suggesting that the historical
epic was long due for a comeback. Everyone recalled 1962's Cleopatra
as a disaster-but what about Ben-Hur's 11 Oscars on 1959? Or Spartacus,
which launched the career of Stanley Kubrick? Surely he reasoned,
computer technology could create ancient Rome without the cost of
building it, and a modern director would instill some of that Saving
Private Ryan dynamism into the battle scenes. Wick agreed, and contacted
Walter Parkes, co-head of Dreamworks Pictures. Parkes was on a roll
after Saving Private Ryan and The Mask of Zorro( and now also American
Beauty), and supplied the missing part of the winning formula.
Says
Parkes: "We had to find a filmmaker who could deal with the sheer
size of the film and the characters, without being overpowered." Enter
Ridley Scott.
At
their first meeting, Scott was shown a print of the painting Pollice
Verso (translation: Thumbs Down) by the 19th-century painter Jean-Leon
Gerome. " I stared at this reproduction and thought: "What a great
idea," says Scott. "This was prior to reading the script, which needed
some serious work. But you have to find the centre-the passion of
why you should do something. That picture fired me up, because I thought
that I haven't done this before, but I could."
As
the epic $103-million production rumbled into life, the one thing
that would cause the most problems-the script was largely ignored.
It was a problem that would later return to haunt them. For the moment,
Scott hired Australian actor Russell Crowe for the main character
of Maximus, the disgraced general trained as a gladiator after being
forced into slavery. Says Scott: " Can you think of a major American
star who could have played it as well? I still can't. I needed an
actor with the ferocity of a warrior-but with dignity and character."
The
pair met in November 1998 to discuss what would drive Maximus and
what would, in time, become the centre of the whole movie. "We had
the idea," says Scott, "that he could have been a farmer, and that
he'd finger the battleground which he must die on. So each time he
is about to do battle, he feels the soil."
Crowe
puts it more simply: "This was his signal to fight. So if we watched
him, in the course of events, it was like: "Max is back, folks. He's
going to kick some ass."
While
sets were being designed and locations scouted, fight master Nicholas
Powell was despatched late in 1998 to work with Crowe on his Australian
farm. Crowe had stacked on a blubbery 48 pounds to play middle-aged
whistle-blower Jeffrey Wigand in The Insider, and had been on a strict
diet to get the weight back off. Powell, who counts Braveheart among
his past successes, carried with him a note from Scott: "Don not lose
any more weight. Chunky is hunky." So Crowe concentrated on muscle
tone and working his sword equally with both hands. "I thought if
that was your only weapon, you would swap hands during fighting,"
he reasons.
For
the spectacular opening battle between the Romans and the Visigoths
from northern Europe, Scott travelled to Bratislava, Slovakia, but
quickly had some reservations about shooting there. "I was standing
in European forests," he explains, "worrying about all the cost of
food, laundry and accommodation for a thousand extras, and thought:
"This is mad, insane. I don't want to come here. A wood is a wood."
Instead,
he contacted the English Forestry Commission which gave him access
to land it was planning to fell at Bourne Woods, near Farnham in Surray.
It became the location for the massive Roman fortifications and a
full-scale battle.
The
task of providing sufficient extras for the conflict fell to Rob Martin
of Casting Collective. The company had supplied 500 extras for Shakespeare
in Love, which it considered a tall order, but Gladiator's opening
battle called for 800. Says Martin: "It was essential that people
could get to the location early because of the 5.30am start so we
advertised locally in Farnham in January 1999. We saw about 1,200
people as possible extras and then processed them into Romans and
Germans. The Roman look was a kind of aristocratic face, the look
of an upper-class army which had been on the road for a few years,
so were now fairly hagged and beaten down. The Germans had to be a
bit more shaggy looking, all hair and beards. So we used a lot of
students."
Filming
for nearly a month, six days a week, sometimes 14 hours a day, the
extras had to put up with cold, mud and boredom. To pass the time,
a hundred-a-side football match started up, only to be stopped by
an annoyed props man who recovered the ball-a fake human head-from
the midst of the game. And with hardships came bonding, albeit with
the rowdy Germans cheerfully jeering the straight lines and strict
discipline of the Romans. The discipline paid off (and the Germans
stopped sneering) during the four days it took to shoot a sequence
that opens with Crowe's command: "On my signal, unlease hell."
Scott's
command was the more direct "Action!". When it came, hundreds of archers
sent non-flaming arrows into the air, several catapults and ballistae
hurled burning clay pots and special gas-powered launchers fired around
16,000 flaming arrows in quick succession. Underneath the barrage,
the cast, stuntmen and extras engaged in close combat with broadswords,
axes, spears and other weaponry. In the midst of all stood Crowe,
bloodied and fired up. And it wasn't all make-up. "A few minutes ago
I got caught across the head, mate," he says, "That wound is real."
The
resulting battle scene is a mixture of Braveheart and Saving Private
Ryan-fast and nasty action that left the forest scorched and littered
with severed limbs. When shooting on the sequence wrapped, the thousands
of weapons and costumes were packed up, the Roman camp was dismantled
and the catapults stored away as the production moved on to Malta.
Almost
all the arrows, however, were missing. "They were like gold," says
Crowe. "Each night you'd see these blokes, cleaned up and back in
their civvy gear, the same ones who had been these hairy monsters
running around all day, wandering off with a couple of arrows for
souvenirs."
While
the action progressed, Scott hadn't made it easy for himself by hiring
a crazy-gang cast including Richard Harris as the dying Emperor Marcus
Aurelius, David Hemmings as the master of ceremonies at the Colosseum
and Oliver Reed as the gladiatorial trainer Proximo. But the problem
wasn't that notorious booze-hounds Harris and Reed were larging it
up, but that they hated the script and refused to speak line after
line, scene after scene.
