Ridley Scott: A Biography by Vincent LoBrutto

Author:Vincent LoBrutto [LoBrutto, Vincent]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
Published: 2019-10-28T16:00:00+00:00

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RIDLEY SCOTT’S SPARTACUS

Gladiator

Ridley Scott does very well on controlled chaos.

John Mathieson

Gladiator (2000) is one of Ridley Scott’s most popular films and was extremely successful at the box office. Gladiator is another war film—a time-trip back to an ancient society where men are primal and rule dangerously.

Screenwriter David Franzoni, who scripted Steven Spielberg’s Amistad (1997), approached studio executives Walter Parkes and Laurie McDonald with his idea to write a film set in ancient Rome with the Coliseum as its focus. Franzoni had plenty of film history to draw from, with The Robe (1953), Ben Hur (1959), Spartacus (1960), King of Kings (1961), and other epics of that era. The first screenplay draft was completed on April 4, 1998. The writer had been inspired by the 1958 novel by Daniel P. Mannix, Those about to Die. After reading the Augustan History, Franzoni decided to base his story on Commodus—Marcus Aurelius Commodus Antoninus Augustus (161–192), who was Roman emperor from AD 180 to 192 and whose reign attempted to reimagine and transform the Roman Empire in his own image.

Ridley Scott was invited to a meeting by Walter Parkes and Douglas Wick of DreamWorks during which they pitched Gladiator. Parkes showed Scott a reproduction of a nineteenth-century painting, Pollice Verso (1872), by French artist Jean-Léon Gérôjme. Gérôjme created most of his work in the academicism style and was deeply involved in the historical painting genre. Pollice Verso depicts a gladiator in a Roman arena from the sand’s perspective: he stands with his weapon over a beaten foe, his foot on the man he is about to put to death. Watchers are in shadow, with strips of light beaming in. The gladiator is looking up at the emperor, waiting for the thumbs-down signal. This classical painting became a major reference for Ridley Scott’s Gladiator. Pollice Verso popularized the thumbs-up and thumbs-down gesturing in gladiatorial fighting—its title is Latin for “with a turned thumb.”

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