听 With a burning intensity that few could match, Russell Crowe leapt off the screen in Ridley Scott's "endlessly exciting" sword 'n' sandals epic Gladiator (2000). He bagged an Oscar for his unforgettable portrayal of a Roman General who winds up fighting for his life in the name of entertainment. It cemented his A-List status in Hollywood and huge ticket sales marked the resurrection of a genre previously dismissed as a relic of Hollywood's golden age.
Are You Not Entertained?
You may be hard-pressed to spot the seams in this extended version of the film, which runs at an extra 17 minutes. In his introduction, Scott maintains, "This is not a director鈥檚 cut," but merely a chance to linger on a few pivotal scenes. The big news about this DVD is the epic list of bonus features which are spread across three discs and cover all aspects of production.
Tale Of The Scribes is an unusually in-depth investigation into the rewriting process. It all began with David Franzoni who saw the film not in terms of Roman history, but as "Los Angeles 1000 years from now," adding, "I actually modelled Proximo very consciously after a film agent." Later on, British screenwriter William Nicholson pulls no punches about the flaws in his work. He reckons, "There was confusion in the plotting," before going on to explain how he set out to make Maximus (Crowe) more sympathetic by giving him a family and the hope of being reunited with them in the afterlife.
Blood And Glory
We鈥檙e given a rare chance to see the director at work in an hour-long production journal that takes you into The Heat Of Battle. Cameras get up close and personal with Scott as he fights to capture the intimate moments amid epic scenes of chaos. "I think you need to do something really brutal," he tells one of the soldiers, "like chop his f* head off or something." It鈥檚 no wonder Crowe came away feeling like he'd been through a real-life war. "I don鈥檛 think there's a part of my body that hasn't had some kind of physical rupture," he notes.
Visual effects were key to realising Scott's vision and The Glory Of Rome gets into the nitty-gritty of reproducing the Coliseum and the massive crowd scenes. "Our job was to deliver the big idea," sums up the visual effects supervisor. But they had just as tricky a task resurrecting Oliver Reed (Proximo) when he died halfway through filming. Shadows And Dust is a detailed look at this frankly unsavoury job, but it also serves as a tribute to the man who reveals that he only accepted the job to get "a free trip to London and see a couple of shows".
Complementing the visual effects featurettes are abundant galleries of concept art and storyboards - a few sketched by Scott himself. Costumes and props get a showcase too with designers citing influences that include the Romantic Orientalist painters of the 18th and 19th century.
A section of abandoned scenes combines outtakes, storyboards and CG tests to fill in gaps in the story. Amusingly, one of the more ostentatious Coliseum scenes didn鈥檛 make the cut because nobody could figure out how to choreograph a rhinoceros.
What We Do In Life...
A key selling point for this DVD is a new commentary by Scott and Crowe, which is as jovial as it is informative. Scott talks eloquently about the nuts-and-bolts of the production and his extensive research into the period shines through. However, he does make a bogus claim to "historical accuracy" when he says that Commodus (played by Joaquin Phoenix) was actually assassinated by a gladiator who may have been his father. (And coming next on The Jerry Springer Show...) Crowe also lightens the mood with a few cheeky anecdotes about working with Oliver Reed and Richard Harris - for example, the latter chucked out rewritten scenes because he couldn鈥檛 be bothered to relearn his lines.
Other extras recall the impact of the film, plus a stripped-down look at the CGI. It鈥檚 a truly colossal package with so much more than the standard compilation of clips and soundbites. With years of preparation chronicled here, it goes to show that even the fake Rome couldn鈥檛 be built in a day.
EXTRA FEATURES
