Gladiator
LET THE GAMES BEGIN
A Roman gladiator stands at the center of the great Colosseum looking
up at the emperor, awaiting his decision. With the power of life or death,
the emperor's thumb is outstretched, and the monarch's expression unforgiving.
He appears poised to signal the gladiator to kill his defeated opponent.
This was the scene, captured in the painting Pollice Verso (translation:
Thumbs Down) by the 19th-century artist Jean-Leon Gerome that fired the
imagination of director Ridley Scott and put him at the helm of the epic
action drama "Gladiator."
Executive producer and co-head of DreamWorks Pictures Walter
Parkes, along with producer Douglas Wick, showed Scott the painting even
before giving him the script. Scott recalls, "Walter and Doug came by my
office and laid a reproduction of the painting on my desk. That image spoke
to me of the Roman Empire in all its glory and wickedness. I knew right
then and there I was hooked."
Fortunately for the director, Parkes also had a screenplay entitled
"Gladiator," written by David Franzoni, John Logan and William Nicholson.
Wick offers, "About two years ago, David Franzoni came to me wanting to
do a movie set in ancient Rome. We started doing the research and discovered
that almost every aspect of the culture revolved around the arena. It was
at the epicenter of all levels of society, and, in support of it, huge
breakthroughs were made in architecture, in metalwork, in drainage…almost
everything imaginable. The more we learned, the more convinced we were
that the arena would be an amazing place to set a story."
"Starting from that very rough idea, we set out to create a
hero who could take the audience on an emotional journey through this amazing
milieu," Parkes adds. "As the script came together, we realized the real
challenge would be to find a filmmaker who could deal with the sheer physical
size and spectacle of the movie with such mastery that the essential elements
of character and story would not be overpowered by the setting. From the
start, Ridley Scott was at the top of our list." Scott notes, "Entertainment
has frequently been used as a tool of leaders as a means to distract an
abused citizenry. The most tyrannical ruler must still beguile his people
even as he brutalizes them. The gladiatorial games were such a distraction.
Our story suggests that, should a hero arise out of the carnage of the
arena, his popularity would give him tremendous power…and were he to be
a genuine champion of the people, he might threaten even the most absolute
tyrant."
Despite his enthusiasm for the project, Scott was aware that
he was venturing into a genre whose popularity had not been tested in this
generation. "'Spartacus' was 40 years ago," the director observes. "'Ben
Hur' before that. These movies were part of my cinema-going youth, but
at the dawn of a new millennium, I thought this might be the ideal time
to revisit what may have been the most important period of the last two
thousand years, if not in all of recorded history: the apex and the beginning
of the decline of the greatest military and political power the world has
ever known."
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