When “Gladiator” was released in 2000, fans and critics applauded its visual effects and production design, from the towering Colosseum to the detailed costumes and prowling tigers.
More than two decades later, the architects of that film reassembled for a daunting task: building a sequel that captured what people loved about the first film’s visuals, while also finding fresh ways to surprise viewers.
“Gladiator II” (in theaters Nov. 22) includes familiar elements — tightly choreographed sword fighting and lofty speeches about the Roman Empire — but it adds combat scenes in the Colosseum that include a rhino in one sequence and sharks in another.
“It’s epic, beyond epic,” said Arthur Max, the production designer who, along with the director Ridley Scott and the producer Douglas Wick, is part of the brain trust behind the two films. “Everything we did on the first one was amplified to a much greater size and scale.”
Much of the movie’s production design draws on meticulous research, with Max traveling to the Museum of the Roman Ships of Fiumicino, to conservation laboratories in Pompeii and to museums in Athens, among other locations. They also examined models of warships at the British Museum in London and studied illustrations from military history books.
But the film also takes some creative license, since many of the images and scenes sprang from Scott’s imagination. Eschewing a computer for pen and paper, Scott would often envision scenes and then draw them out for his team to re-create onscreen.
“Even if I haven’t found the location, I’ll imagine the location and then draw it,” Scott said. “And then the location will be found that suffices for what I drew.”
“The most valuable thing I did in my life was go to art school,” he added.
One ambitious scene involves a clash in the Colosseum once it has been flooded with water. Two ships — one packed with Roman soldiers, the other with gladiators — stage a naval battle, maneuvering around each other and colliding as sharks cruise in the water below.
These ships were designed to be as lifelike as possible: Between 55 and 65 feet in length, they had real masts, planked floors, iron nails and tar caulking, Max said. Wood and iron made up the ships’ surfaces, with lightweight steel underneath.
Once assembled, they were transferred by 120-foot-tall cranes onto two hydraulic remote controlled vehicles that each had dozens of wheels. These rolling platforms allowed the film crew to move the ships around the arena.
Aerial shots of the two ships were captured on the Colosseum set in Malta, where the original “Gladiator” was also filmed. These shots were staged on dry ground, with water added later through visual effects.
“We decided it was more practical to do water work in the dry because technology has advanced so far from the first movie that now it’s easier to put the water in than it is to work in water,” Max said.
To film the close-up scenes during this naval battle, in which the gladiators and soldiers grapple in hand-to-hand combat and some of the men fall overboard into the shark-infested water, the production team moved down the road to a gigantic tank, which was eight feet deep and about the size of a football field.
There, they built a section of the Colosseum, including water spouts shaped like the head of Neptune, the Roman god of the sea. Those spouts poured water into the tank, where a submersible pump would recycle the water and return it to the spouts.
It was Scott’s idea to introduce the sharks into the water. He had been inspired by an incident that happened years ago, when he was filming “White Squall” (1996): During the director’s stay at a hotel in the Caribbean, someone had tossed a six-foot shark into the pool, he said.
“They couldn’t get it out, so the shark had this pool all to itself,” he said.
No one really knows if the Romans actually put sharks in the Colosseum, Max said, but the goal was to intensify the drama of the scene by showing these predators lurking in the water.
Scott also wanted other new animals to be introduced to the gladiator fights, including a rhinoceros. To create the rhino, the production crew constructed a frame and covered it with an artificial skin, which they mounted on a smaller hydraulic vehicle, similar to the ones used for the ships. Another scene features baboons, which were played by stuntmen who wore black track suits and had their faces painted. They were given short crutches to mimic the creatures’ forearms.
“The idea was trying to give the audience the same thrill a Roman would have had watching it in the stands,” Wick said.
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