Speaker 1: Too Much Information is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: Hello everyone, and welcome to Too Much Information, the show
Speaker 2: that brings you the secret histories and fascinating facts and
Speaker 2: figures behind your favorite TV shows, music, movies, and more.
Speaker 2: We are your two sandal class sword brandishing soldiers of Scintilla.
Speaker 2: You know, there's not that many synonyms for like trivia.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I've been learning that now that we're on episode
Speaker 1: one sixty.
Speaker 2: Nine, Yeah, Jordan. Today we're talking about a turn of
Speaker 2: the century classic, turn of the millennium classic that conquered
Speaker 2: its its own genre simply by naming itself that. That's right.
Speaker 2: We're talking about Ridley Scott's Gladiator, I guess, henceforth known
Speaker 2: as Ridley Scott's Gladiator why or Gladiator one, because now
Speaker 2: there's Gladiator two.
Speaker 1: I don't think Gladiator two is much of a competitor. Frankly,
Speaker 1: Gladiator I, the Phantom Menace, Gladiator and the Furious Glad
Speaker 1: Glad in fears.
Speaker 2: It should be it should be Gladiator too Glad and
Speaker 2: Furious too Glad too furious Gladiators.
Speaker 1: Take a page from the Alien playbook.
Speaker 2: Yeap the dollar sign. Now that movie, this, this movie's
Speaker 2: gonna flop so hard.
Speaker 1: I know my friend saw it last night and said
Speaker 1: it was a giant mess. Yeah, c G I was
Speaker 1: the worst thing that ever happened to Ridley.
Speaker 2: God love him, but this movie shows why he's he
Speaker 2: should be kept on a leash with that stuff. Anyway. Uh,
Speaker 2: that's right, we're talking about Really, Scott's The Gladiator. There's
Speaker 2: a sequel. I've heard It's bad. Live your truth. Ridley
Speaker 2: Scott still has shooters out there on Twitter. They've come
Speaker 2: after me? Really? Oh god? Yeah, may friends of the pod? No, no,
Speaker 2: friends of the pod. It was over the whole Alien
Speaker 2: franchise cluster. So I don't know. Man, be careful dissenting
Speaker 2: on Twitter about about the Rids the ridsler. Uh does
Speaker 2: that do anything anything?
Speaker 1: There?
Speaker 2: Skiddy badivity, Skimmitty's Skimbitty Scott skibbe Lee Scott Wow, already
Speaker 2: off the rails.
Speaker 1: Uh.
Speaker 2: The og remains a high water mark for the sword
Speaker 2: and sandal genre, unless, of course, you prefer three hundred,
Speaker 2: in which case that's fine, but you're probably listening to
Speaker 2: the wrong podcast. Go check out something that involves human
Speaker 2: growth hormone and MMA, and.
Speaker 1: You've probably plugged your headphones into the wrong orifice. Yeah,
Speaker 1: just hit yourself in the head with the hammer a
Speaker 1: few times. That's sad. People will yell at me. I
Speaker 1: saw three hundred the Day Open my friends.
Speaker 2: Really yeah, I mean I do remember watching that movie
Speaker 2: in college and it ended and we were all like,
Speaker 2: should we start working out crazy anyway? All right, we're
Speaker 2: gonna just we're gonna dive into this. Jordan, hit me
Speaker 2: with your gladiator you're glad's memories. You're glad, You're glad memory.
Speaker 1: Hit me with the gladiator stick. Oh, I'm glad to
Speaker 1: be here.
Speaker 2: Yeah, this is a movie.
Speaker 1: I recall my dad really like it, And when you're twelve,
Speaker 1: sometimes that's all it takes you to think something's really cool.
Speaker 2: I saw it with my dad. Yeah, you know, we
Speaker 2: got boomer dads. I'm sure there was a lot of
Speaker 2: Spartacus memories.
Speaker 1: That went into that much Gladiator movies with our dads.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, how many times are we going to get the
Speaker 1: airplane joke in here?
Speaker 2: Just enough? I trust you to be tasteful in the edit.
Speaker 1: There are admittedly a lot of pitfalls the historical dramas,
Speaker 1: because I feel like you either run the risk of
Speaker 1: coming across as self serious and overblown and therefore ridiculous
Speaker 1: or boring as hell. And this movie is charitably neither,
Speaker 1: maybe more towards the overblown and ridiculous. I haven't seen
Speaker 1: it in a while. I have to admit I love
Speaker 1: Gladiator as a kid, and bear in mind I was
Speaker 1: a weird kid because it was the last chance to
Speaker 1: see a bunch of my beloved sixties hell raiser actors
Speaker 1: on film, because part of that I'd only seen them
Speaker 1: in like old sixties movies. But suddenly you had Richard Harris,
Speaker 1: Oliver Reid, and David Hemmings being cool on screen. So
Speaker 1: that was really thrilling to me.
Speaker 2: I mean, I wouldn't say that David Hemmings is cool
Speaker 2: in this no. I think the most you could say
Speaker 2: about Richard Harris is that he is.
Speaker 1: A lot alive in it barely and didn't even clear
Speaker 1: that bar by dying midway through.
Speaker 2: I do actually like I mean, it's we'll get into
Speaker 2: it later. It is sad, but I do actually quite
Speaker 2: like Oliver Reed in this role. Oliver It's crazy. Yeah,
Speaker 2: I forgot so crazy to me that you know David
Speaker 2: Hemmings from all his British style from blow Up. Yeah,
Speaker 2: But I only know him. I mean I mostly know
Speaker 2: him from the from Deep Red, the Dario Argento film
Speaker 2: that he's in the Jallo Jallo film.
Speaker 1: I forgot like after the sixties, he just was a
Speaker 1: character actor in terrible sci fi movies for like thirty years, Right,
Speaker 1: he was almost Alex in a clockwork Orange and that's where.
Speaker 2: Two roads diverged in a wood.
Speaker 1: Yeah, life would have been really different for him had
Speaker 1: that worked out or maybe not. Anyway, where were we
Speaker 1: Maybe I'm wrong. I know we kind of touched on
Speaker 1: this with the whole three hundred point, but I feel
Speaker 1: like the this movie did the whole sword and sample
Speaker 1: thing so well that there really hasn't been one to
Speaker 1: top it since, like at least for like pure drama,
Speaker 1: certainly not by Ridley, and he took so many goddamn
Speaker 1: stabs at it, you know, Kingdom of Heaven.
Speaker 2: Immediately after this, there was King Arthur h Yeah, there's
Speaker 2: a there's like a there were a few others that
Speaker 2: I saw dredged up as the kind of aftermath of this,
Speaker 2: and none of them. I mean, people will go to
Speaker 2: bad for Kingdom of Heaven, because, like I said earlier,
Speaker 2: Ridley has shooters out there, but I don't know, not
Speaker 2: not like unanimously hailed. You know, it's it's it is
Speaker 2: all of those things. It is self serious, it is overblown.
Speaker 2: It is not boring as hell though, because it's got
Speaker 2: all that great action. And you know, Ridley, God bless
Speaker 2: him for as much of pain in the ass as
Speaker 2: he might be personally and professionally. Man can move a camera,
Speaker 2: you know. And and it's great. I mean, it's Russell.
Speaker 2: I like Russell Crowe more than I did at the time.
Speaker 2: I think he he's like the best thing he's ever
Speaker 2: done is The Nice Guys with Ryan Gosling, No right
Speaker 2: as the other Guys.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, The Nice Guys is like a Shane blackfil
Speaker 1: I think it's written by Shane Black. That is, like
Speaker 1: I sort of flew under the radar, but it is
Speaker 1: one of the genuinely most like beloved, non franchise, one
Speaker 1: off comedy movies at least on the pockets of Twitter
Speaker 1: that I'm in.
Speaker 2: And it's great. He's it's him and Ryan Gosling and
Speaker 2: he just they it's hilarious. It's a great film. But yeah,
Speaker 2: at the time, I firmly remember this being the era
Speaker 2: of like Russell crow sucking. I really didn't realize the
Speaker 2: foam throwing thing was like a full five years after this,
Speaker 2: because I've kind of into the Gladiator the Gladiator thing.
Speaker 2: But yeah, I don't know. I watched this recently and
Speaker 2: it still goes that's it. Watch it or don't. I
Speaker 2: don't care.
Speaker 1: I was reading some New Yorker profile I think it
Speaker 1: was New Yorker on Ridley Scott recently. I didn't realize
Speaker 1: that his brother Tony called him from the bridge shortly
Speaker 1: before he jumped. Oh Jesus, that was a fact I
Speaker 1: learned the other day.
Speaker 2: That hasn't left my mind. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, look,
Speaker 2: I've read a lot of I've read the whole making
Speaker 2: of Blade Runner. There's a great book that's out there
Speaker 2: about that, and I've read a lot about that, and
Speaker 2: I've read multiple set things about Ridley and I don't
Speaker 2: particularly love the direction that he took the Alien franchise in,
Speaker 2: and there's a lot of caveats that I have about him.
Speaker 2: But great movie. Great movie. Let's talk about Gladiator. So
Speaker 2: from the acts of violence, creative and otherwise that Russell
Speaker 2: Crowe brought to the set to legendary British hell raiser
Speaker 2: all over reads tragic demise and tragic comic demise, to
Speaker 2: the thousands and thousands of pieces of arms and armor
Speaker 2: they made for the film, to the perils of live
Speaker 2: tiger wrangling. Here's everything you didn't know about Ridley Scott's Gladiator.
Speaker 2: Of course, it was an Italian. The story of Gladiator
Speaker 2: begins with David Franzoni, a screenwriter best known for writing
Speaker 2: basically Amistad, Amistad, Amistad Stad. I thought it was okay.
Speaker 2: He wrote Amistad, and then he wrote Gladiator, and then
Speaker 2: not much else. Grew up in Vermont, got into war
Speaker 2: movies thanks to his dad, who was a veteran, Like
Speaker 2: a load of people from that generation that it was
Speaker 2: John Ford and the Westerns and Roger Corman and like
Speaker 2: his World War II sort of stuff, The Hell's Angels
Speaker 2: and the flying you know all that right, ringing a bell.
Speaker 2: I'm talking out in my ass there Hell's Angels.
Speaker 1: I thought was Howard Hughes.
Speaker 2: Oh that is Howard Hughes. Let me take that back.
Speaker 2: You could be wrong, It's okay. No. Franzoni, growing up
Speaker 2: in Vermont, developed an interest in war movies, likely informed
Speaker 2: by his dad, who was a veteran. He name dropped
Speaker 2: films by John Ford, Roger Corman and he wants. Described
Speaker 2: the experience of seeing all quiet on the Western Front
Speaker 2: as quote like being hit with a hammer.
Speaker 1: I'm trying to figure out if that's a good thing
Speaker 1: or not gets your attention.
Speaker 2: At least I was gonna say, depends what kind of hammer,
Speaker 2: but and where and when and how long? How and pooh,
Speaker 2: the five journalistic questions are being struck by a hammer
Speaker 2: if we have none of them. Yeah, you won't learn
Speaker 2: that in jay school. That said, Franzoni did not pursue
Speaker 2: his dream of filmmaking until a good while later. First,
Speaker 2: he majored in paleontology at the University of Vermont, as
Speaker 2: so many young men did before him, though at least
Speaker 2: white boomer men. Franzoni took time off following graduation and
Speaker 2: decided to travel. He arrived in Europe, where he about
Speaker 2: a cheap motorcycle and took off across Europe and Western Asia.
Speaker 2: It was in Baghdad where, whilst living in a yurt,
Speaker 2: he traded a book on the Irish Revolution with an
Speaker 2: Australian woman in return for those about to die a
Speaker 2: book about the Roman gladiator games. That whole thing sounds
Speaker 2: like an extended Matt Berry riff. It was in Baghdad.
Speaker 2: We're living in a yurrop. I traded a book on
Speaker 2: the Irish Revolution with an Australian woman and returned for
Speaker 2: those about to Die a book about of a Romania game.
Speaker 1: There's a lot of like mid century man's stories in
Speaker 1: this episode, things that never could happen now.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I just walked in there with my shoes,
Speaker 2: holding my shoes in my hand, and the guy said,
Speaker 2: I like your shoes and how you hold them in
Speaker 2: your hand. Would you like to direct a movie? It's
Speaker 2: like the story of every mid century man. Anyway, friend
Speaker 2: Zone was hooked. He told y'a who everywhere I went
Speaker 2: in Europe there were arenas. Even as I went east,
Speaker 2: going through Turkey. I began to think to myself, this
Speaker 2: must have been a hell of a franchise. Spoken like
Speaker 2: a true American, because yeah, Hollywood screenwriter brain there. Then,
Speaker 2: in his words, I'm more in India. I decided I
Speaker 2: wanted to be a screenwriter. Despite this, Franzoni's first script
Speaker 2: in Hollywood was the exact polar opposite of a historical epic.
Speaker 2: He sold a treatment that would become nineteen eighty six
Speaker 2: is Jumpin' Jack Flash, which is a spy comedy starring
Speaker 2: Whoopee Goldberg and directed by Penny Marshall in her theatrical
Speaker 2: film directorial debut. There's a little bar trivia question for you.
Speaker 2: The whole thing was your typical first screenplay sold nightmare.
Speaker 2: This movie was originally intended as a starring vehicle for
Speaker 2: Shelley Long, you know, in her Get Me the Hell
Speaker 2: Out of Cheers phase, but Goldberg hated the film's director,
Speaker 2: who were just peeling with nesting matroysh cadals of trivia here.
Speaker 2: Jumpin Jack Flash's director was Howard Ziefe, who's an ad
Speaker 2: guy best known for writing alcas Seltzer's That's a Spicy
Speaker 2: Meat de Ball TV spot. And then the studio hated
Speaker 2: this guy's dailies, so they bought in Penny Marshall, who
Speaker 2: sat down with producer Joel Silver, who was also in this,
Speaker 2: and they rewrote a bunch of Frianzoni script They brought
Speaker 2: in a bunch of other writers, so the whole thing
Speaker 2: was a debacle for the guy. His next project, though,
Speaker 2: was nineteen ninety two's Citizen Khan, which is an HBO
Speaker 2: biopic of framed attorney Roy Kahan played by James Woods.
Speaker 2: In a truly one to one ratio bit of casting
Speaker 2: a real life scumbag to an actor scumbag. This earned
Speaker 2: him one of those famed Cable Ace Awards that we
Speaker 2: constantly hear about but that are not real and don't
Speaker 2: mean anything. But he won a Peabody.
Speaker 1: That's real.
Speaker 2: It's pretty real, that's real. They got nominated for an Emmy.
Speaker 2: Oliver Stone then commissioned Franzoni to write The Mayor of
Speaker 2: Castro Street, which is about the assassinated San Francisco councilman
Speaker 2: Harvey Milk. That film, eventually, many years later, became two
Speaker 2: thousand and Eight's Milk, starring Sean Penn. So from there,
Speaker 2: Franzoni became the historical guy. He wrote a script about Shakespeare,
Speaker 2: he wrote about one about George Washington, and he was
Speaker 2: supposedly tapped to write Ralph Nader's life story, but all
Speaker 2: he had to say about that to the La Times
Speaker 2: was that doing research, he decided Nader was a crank,
Speaker 2: that's it, and then didn't pursue it.
Speaker 1: Further, can you imagine like people lining up to see
Speaker 1: the Ralph Naders story like a Bohemian Rhapsody style? Who
Speaker 1: would play Ralph Nader? I guess in that era Dustin Hoffman. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Ralph Nader's got a lankiness to him.
Speaker 2: She's still alive, Ralph Nader. Yeah. I'm trying to think
Speaker 2: of the you know, he's created. Ralph Nader's creating such
Speaker 2: a like Lovecraftian blank in my mind, Like trying to
Speaker 2: contemplate him is just giving me nothing but horrible, endless
Speaker 2: blackness that I don't I don't even know casting. I
Speaker 2: wouldn't even shadow cast, fantasy cast him. Kevin Costner.
Speaker 1: It's kind of James Woods if you google him, all right.
Speaker 2: Frienzoni's fortunes changed when he wrote the script for Steven
Speaker 2: Spielberg's I'm Astad before that film was ever completed, though
Speaker 2: or based on the strength of it at the timeline
Speaker 2: gets fuzzy Anyway, Works, which was then Steven Spielberg's new
Speaker 2: new studio, offered Franzoni a three picture deal. Amistad wasn't
Speaker 2: actually like a huge, chart conquering box office success, but
Speaker 2: and it was pilloried for its historical inaccuracy, but people
Speaker 2: seem to think of it fondly, and I certainly remember
Speaker 2: it being a prestige historical piece of the era. The
Speaker 2: La Times noted in their review of Abishtad that Frenzoni's
Speaker 2: script was praised for its facile, if occasionally hamhanded, synthesis
Speaker 2: of historical sources and for its unflinching description of the
Speaker 2: whrrors of the slave trade. Newsmax called it the feel
Speaker 2: good movie of the year, a laugh a minute, edge
Speaker 2: of your seat, thrill ride, wacky for the whole family.
Speaker 2: Variety called it FAFO. For his next pick with DreamWorks,
Speaker 2: Franzoni dug out his old concept for a gladiator focused movie,
Speaker 2: and he pitched Spielberg. And this was the entirety of
Speaker 2: the process that he recalled to The La Times. I
Speaker 2: get a call from Stephen's office. You got two days
Speaker 2: to come up with a pitch. I walk in and
Speaker 2: Stephen goes, David, you want to do a gladiator movie
Speaker 2: for DreamWorks. Yeah, ancient gladiators, Yeah in Rome, ancient Rome, Yeah,
Speaker 2: in the coliseum. Yeah. Okay, he says, that was it.
Speaker 2: I said yeah, four times, that was it. That makes
Speaker 2: me sad and mad. Yeah yeah, yeah, also ancient gladiators
Speaker 2: as opposed to American gladiators. Oh right, right right with
Speaker 2: drawn blaze and laser and charger and the rest the aristocrats.
Speaker 1: By the new millennium, Hollywood's rich tradition of ancient epics
Speaker 1: was well established, particularly by filmmakers of Spielberg, Franzoni, and
Speaker 1: Ridley Scott's age. Arguably the Golden Age of gladiator films
Speaker 1: began with films like Henry Costers The Robe, which I'm
Speaker 1: not familiar with, and ces B. De Mill's The Ten Commandments,
Speaker 1: which pushed the Roman Empire through Judeo Christian lens in
Speaker 1: nineteen fifty three and fifty six.
Speaker 2: Tomill's Ten Commandments had also been filmed in nineteen twenty three,
Speaker 2: I think also happened to Ben Herd. There's two of
Speaker 2: these that were like shot in like Silver Age and
Speaker 2: then Golden Age or whichever the ages were.
Speaker 1: All these sword and sandal epics of the fifties were preceded,
Speaker 1: of course, by Stanley Kubrick Spartacus in nineteen fifty That
Speaker 1: was like the movie that kind of made him starring
Speaker 1: a barrel chested. Kirk Douglas as a gladiator who started
Speaker 1: a slave revolt. Say it with me now, rapist. Oh
Speaker 1: that wasn't what I was going to go with. I
Speaker 1: am spartakus, But that works too.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he raped Natalie would.
Speaker 1: Yeah, allegedly always dead.
Speaker 2: Finally, kind of how old was he that made me
Speaker 2: believe in god? Kirk Douglas living till one hundred and decreptitude?
Speaker 1: Was he one O four?
Speaker 2: No? Just shy of one O four? One hundred and three? Wow? Wow? Yep, rapist,
Speaker 2: He's dead and in hell? Hashtag dead and in hell.
Speaker 1: That is a new That's something I've noticed cropping up
Speaker 1: a lot in our last bunch of episodes.
Speaker 2: Well, it goes back to the Warrens and the Omenyville.
Speaker 2: Hohrr guy, Oh you're right, trace the loure back to that. Yes, yes, yes, yes.
Speaker 1: There's also nineteen fifty one's quo wattis?
Speaker 2: I think?
Speaker 1: Is how you pronounced that? Because you don't pronounce v's
Speaker 1: in Latin. It's woe. It's like w It's the one
Speaker 1: that I remember from Latin, starring Robert Taylor and Debor Kerr. However,
Speaker 1: the high budget flops of nineteen sixty three is Cleopatra,
Speaker 1: famously starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton in nineteen sixty four,
Speaker 1: Is The Fall of the Roman Empire dented the genre's momentum,
Speaker 1: making it fertile ground for parody. In nineteen sixty six,
Speaker 1: Is A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the
Speaker 1: Forum starring Zero Mostelle with music by Stephen Sondheim. And
Speaker 1: also Fellini's Satrakhan in nineteen seventy, which focused on the
Speaker 1: declining decadence of the Empire. Truly weird movie. Never seen it.
Speaker 1: I'm not a big Felini guy. I should start. You
Speaker 1: would enjoy it?
Speaker 2: Okay? Cool by.
Speaker 1: In eighteen seventy nine, Monty Python's Life of Brian was
Speaker 1: using the trappings of the sword and sandal ethics to
Speaker 1: mock both Christianity and the Roman Empire, and the year
Speaker 1: following that, nineteen eighty, the disastrous spoof Airplane memorably used
Speaker 1: gladiator movies as shorthand for a pilot's queer coded conversation
Speaker 1: with a young boy.
Speaker 2: What's the actual close?
Speaker 1: Yeah? Do you like movies about gladiators?
Speaker 2: Jimmy, There's it's a series of it's a series of
Speaker 2: It's g and masterclass and editing, because it's like all
Speaker 2: this other mad cat is happening, and it just goes
Speaker 2: back to keeps cutting back to Peter Graves's pilot character asking, Uh,
Speaker 2: He's like what eight. Yeah, kid's name is Joey, just
Speaker 2: like Joey. Do you like movies about gladiators? Joey? Have
Speaker 2: you have you ever seen a grown man naked? Joey?
Speaker 2: Have you ever been in Turkish prison? Do you like
Speaker 2: to hang a men's locker rooms?
Speaker 1: Anyway, It's such a great kind of random bit.
Speaker 2: I have no idea what they what the logic behind
Speaker 2: it was. That's what makes a truly perfect mad cap bit. Yeah, like,
Speaker 2: let's make this guy creepy but in this very specific
Speaker 2: way and weave it into the editing and overall pace
Speaker 2: of this movie and not addressed. No, they don't lambshade it. Yeah, incredible,
Speaker 2: incredible stuff. Great work.
Speaker 1: All this to say that in the late nineties, the
Speaker 1: Gladiator of film's influence on culture had waned Ridley Scott
Speaker 1: acknowledged in the book Gladiator. The making of the Ridley
Speaker 1: Scott epic Spartacus was forty years old, and Ben hur
Speaker 1: was even before that. These movies were part of my
Speaker 1: cinema going youth, But at the dawn of the New millennium,
Speaker 1: I thought this might be the ideal time to revisit
Speaker 1: what may have been the most important period of the
Speaker 1: last two thousand years. Debatable.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean it's Ridley Man. He talked
Speaker 2: like that just about Breakfast.
Speaker 1: You know, is he the one that the people made,
Speaker 1: the that his crew made the t yes Governor, Yes, yes, Govenor.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, what's the fame it? I think that was
Speaker 2: actually on Blade Roy. Let me let me check that out.
Speaker 2: I think it was Blade Well been Aliens. It was
Speaker 2: an interview that he gave about Blade Runner. He gave
Speaker 2: an interview and he said that he preferred working with
Speaker 2: British crews because you could give them orders and they'd
Speaker 2: say yes Governor. And then the the American crew on
Speaker 2: Blade Runner printed up T shirts that said yes Governor,
Speaker 2: my ass and then Scott, rather than diffuse the situation,
Speaker 2: uh and every other British person on the set printed
Speaker 2: up their own T shirts that read xenophobia sucks.
Speaker 1: Not a great rebuttal but okay, but a fair point.
Speaker 2: Is he's one of those guys man where people are
Speaker 2: like seemed just short of making him like a David o'
Speaker 2: russell like this man, or a Freedkin like. Nobody wants
Speaker 2: to say that he's like an outright monster, but people
Speaker 2: all these use all these euphemisms like demanding. It's no
Speaker 2: secret that a Scott set is a charged one, you know,
Speaker 2: like all they write around it and such. He's got
Speaker 2: to have I mean, he's got some Jews, but he's
Speaker 2: got to have dirt on someone. Anyway, This is probably
Speaker 2: a good time to talk about the original book Daniel P.
Speaker 2: Mannix is nineteen fifty eight Those About to Die, republished
Speaker 2: in two thousand and one as The Way of the Gladiator.
Speaker 2: You may remember that quote appearing in the movie, said
Speaker 2: by Tigris of Gall in the film's penultimate fight scene.
Speaker 2: He says, we who are about to die, salucchu Moron.
Speaker 2: Tigris of Gall later Manix as one of those biographies that,
Speaker 2: as mentioned earlier, were only available to white men in
Speaker 2: the twentieth century. He was born to a naval family,
Speaker 2: and he was set to follow in that tradition until
Speaker 2: he flopped out of training so badly that his commandant
Speaker 2: wrote a letter to his father saying he is definitely
Speaker 2: not officer material. Now. This so traumatized the young man
Speaker 2: X that he spent the next two months in bed.
Speaker 2: Though in nineteen thirty one he earned a degree in
Speaker 2: journalism from the University of Pennsylvania after failing out of
Speaker 2: zoology first, Mannix did end up working for the Navy
Speaker 2: during World War II, where he was tasked with creating
Speaker 2: training films. After that, Wikipedia notes helpfully that Mannix's civilian
Speaker 2: career could be briefly described as engaging in various adventurous activities,
Speaker 2: which he filmed for lectures or wrote about in magazines
Speaker 2: and books. One such example was the series of Collier's
Speaker 2: articles that he turned into nineteen fifty one's Step Right Up,
Speaker 2: a book about Mannix's experience allegedly traveling with a carnival
Speaker 2: after college, where he supposedly learned how to be a
Speaker 2: sword swallower, fire eater, stage magician, escape artist, mind reader,
Speaker 2: and lock picker, working under the stage name The Great Zadma.
Speaker 2: Another big thing for Mannix was hunting. He enjoyed hunting
Speaker 2: creatures great and small, specializing in ancient or traditional methods
Speaker 2: of doing so, like a blowgun, boomerang, or bow and arrow.
Speaker 2: He also trained hawks and hounds, and also hunted with
Speaker 2: a trained cheetah, otter, seabird, cormorant, all of those things
Speaker 2: rule And then somehow, after doing all this magically funded
Speaker 2: both he and his wife, who is like his chief
Speaker 2: creative collaborator, would create movies, lectures, articles, books. One of
Speaker 2: these was turned into an OSCAR nominated short called The
Speaker 2: Boy in the Eagle. Here's just a Wild Thing. Mannix
Speaker 2: witnessed a famous herpetologist person who studies reptiles, Grace Olive Wiley,
Speaker 2: die in real time in front of his eyes when
Speaker 2: she was fatally bitten by an Indian cobra at her
Speaker 2: house in nineteen forty eight.
Speaker 1: You know, I will say, and I'm being serious right now,
Speaker 1: I find this whole story very inspiring. Going from spending
Speaker 1: two months in bed to hunting with a trained cheetah,
Speaker 1: it is very Yeah, there's hope.
Speaker 2: Well, you know you can do anything with a strong
Speaker 2: spirit and a very old white military family connection and funding. Yes.
Speaker 1: Mannix wrote a lot on topics ranging from Frank l
Speaker 1: Baum in the World of Oz. Frank Olbaum wrote The
Speaker 1: Wizard of Oz. He wrote so much about Oz. Why
Speaker 1: this guy was wildly prolific. I mean, his Wikipedia page
Speaker 1: is endless. But apparently, other than animals and adventuring, his
Speaker 1: big thing was oz like how that story was developed
Speaker 1: or like fanfic.
Speaker 2: Just like compendium like omni books about it and writings
Speaker 2: about it.
Speaker 1: Weird, huh.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Also wrote a biography of Aleister Crowley That's that's sick. Yeah.
Speaker 1: His florid style and writing on historic topics was derided
Speaker 1: by real life historians. One Oxford historian and historical fiction
Speaker 1: writer called Those About to Die the worst novel ever
Speaker 1: written set in the ancient world, pretty unambiguous, but even
Speaker 1: without inspiring the basic script and idea of Gladiator.
Speaker 2: Mannix also wrote The Fox and the I know I
Speaker 2: buried that so deep I can't that's I would have
Speaker 2: led with that. Oh my god. He wrote it.
Speaker 1: He wrote it back in nineteen sixty seven, and it
Speaker 1: was in sort of prolonged development hell until nineteen eighty one,
Speaker 1: when it was released by Disney. The film adaptation was
Speaker 1: incredibly troubled. Disney Production purchased the rights to Manic's novel
Speaker 1: the same year it was published, in nineteen sixty seven,
Speaker 1: but work on the film adaptation didn't start until ten
Speaker 1: years later nineteen seventy seven, and at that time, then
Speaker 1: Disney CEO Ron Miller wanted to use the film as
Speaker 1: a vehicle for newer talents because the famous nine old
Speaker 1: men of Disney's animation, these were the pioneers of the studio,
Speaker 1: basically launched the division we're nearing retirement. Consequently, The Fox
Speaker 1: and the Hound would be the last film that Ollie Johnson,
Speaker 1: Frank Thomas and I can't say that name, Hooly Reitherman.
Speaker 1: You've got to be kidding me. Nope, who are some
Speaker 1: of the legends of Disney would ever work on? But
Speaker 1: arguments developed between Rutherman and the younger director of the film,
Speaker 1: Art Stevens. The younger team sided was Stevens, except for
Speaker 1: Don Bluth, who eventually walked out of Disney based on
Speaker 1: this whole kerfuffle, taking eleven others with him to form
Speaker 1: his own animation studio, which you would use to then
Speaker 1: traumatize millennials with movies like Lamb Before Time All Dogs
Speaker 1: Go to Heaven. I remember, his movies were distinctly sadder
Speaker 1: than Disney movies. Anyhow, this exodus forced Disney to bail
Speaker 1: on The Fox. In the Hound's original nineteen eighty release date,
Speaker 1: though it eventually premiered a year later in nineteen eighty one.
Speaker 2: To enormous success. Also deeply sad. That's the TMI promise, folks,
Speaker 2: we get from Gladiator to Fox and the Hound in
Speaker 2: one move, really and yeah, one degree of separation off
Speaker 2: blank check you rubes? How did this get made? Suck my? Anyway.
Speaker 2: David Franzoni finished his first draft in April of nineteen
Speaker 2: ninety eight, and about six months later the second draft,
Speaker 2: completed with help from John Logan, whose credits include the
Speaker 2: HBO film RKO two eight one, which Ridley Scott produced
Speaker 2: and Oliver Stones. Any Given Sunday was completed. And this
Speaker 2: is the last detail that you'll get about the actual script,
Speaker 2: because there were many writers brought in and then, if
Speaker 2: you believe many different parties, Ridley and Russell Crowe basically
Speaker 2: rewrote it on set. So it's so funny to me
Speaker 2: that David Franzoni got a three picture deal out of
Speaker 2: one script that he wrote, and his other most famous
Speaker 2: one had like charitably four other people writing it.
Speaker 1: Uh.
Speaker 2: Franzoni told Creative Screenwriting dot Com that he studiously ignored
Speaker 2: influences from the rich history of Hollywood sword and sandal flicks,
Speaker 2: instead looking to the nineteen sixties and early seventies doomed
Speaker 2: hero canon like Easy Writer, Five Easy Pieces, more films
Speaker 2: with easy in the title one such and Jack mcafoe
Speaker 2: of them, Yeah One Flew Over the Cougar's Nest, oh
Speaker 2: and nineteen seventy one's classic badass driving movie Vanishing Point. Unfortunately,
Speaker 2: there was a back and forth with the studios and
Speaker 2: with Scott and Crow once they were all brought on board,
Speaker 2: hence why the film is ultimately credited to not just
Speaker 2: David Franzoni, but John Logan and William Nicholson and I'm
Speaker 2: uncredited Ridley Scott and Russell Crowe. John and Williams's influences
Speaker 2: on the shooting drafts were indelible, but there were too
Speaker 2: many screenwriters involved, Franzoni said, although he ultimately blamed the studio,
Speaker 2: the big differences were between competing drafts, where the studio
Speaker 2: was trying to enforce their rules on how a hit
Speaker 2: movie was composed. Studio is one of the usual audience
Speaker 2: friendly stuff, such as happy endings and heroes triumphing over adversity.
Speaker 2: For example, Franzoni wanted to begin the movie with Maximus's
Speaker 2: death and then work backwards from there. Irascible King Ridley
Speaker 2: Scott came aboard without even seeing a script. Producer Walter
Speaker 2: Parks met with Scott, who then had just wrapped Gi
Speaker 2: Jane with Demi Moore, and simply pulled up a nineteenth
Speaker 2: century painting. Ridley Scott told Variety, I'm a very visual
Speaker 2: driven director. Walter Parks opened a picture of a painting
Speaker 2: called Pelisse Verso Latin with a turned thumb by a
Speaker 2: fellow called Jean Leon Jerome. It shows the armored man
Speaker 2: with the TUNEI fork that would kill You, standing over
Speaker 2: a netted victim, which is a perfect and poetic description
Speaker 2: of a painting of a gladiator. The armored man with
Speaker 2: the tune of fork that would kill you. He's looking
Speaker 2: up for Italians.
Speaker 1: See if that comes out.
Speaker 2: I want to Google translate that. I'll do it while
Speaker 2: you're reading. Um. He's looking up at a black marble wall,
Speaker 2: at this purple faced nero out of his mind on
Speaker 2: wine or water. Really, it's a weird dude. This is
Speaker 2: a weird quote. He's got a thumbs down and I
Speaker 2: stared at it for a moment, and it was like
Speaker 2: a flash. When you're experienced like me, you can do
Speaker 2: a little knee jerk flash decision and normally it's accurate.
Speaker 2: So I said, I'll do it. Park said, hang on,
Speaker 2: you don't know what the story is about. I said,
Speaker 2: I don't care. I'll do it, and that was it.
Speaker 1: I just want to observe that they got on dream
Speaker 1: Works by saying yeah four times, and they got Ridley
Speaker 1: Scott by showing them a painting, painting that they didn't do.
Speaker 2: Truly a blessed industry. Franzoni said that as he and
Speaker 2: Really discussed the film, they continued to ignore Hollywood's tradition
Speaker 2: of gladiator movies. He told Variety that some of the
Speaker 2: movies that Ridley and I watched and talked about were
Speaker 2: the aforementioned All Quiet on the Western Front and ladoce
Speaker 2: Vita and The Conformist. I don't know that film off
Speaker 2: the top of my head. The only Roman film I'm
Speaker 2: pretty sure Ridley looked at was satirra Con.
Speaker 1: As far as casting, Franzoni recalled the Yahoo Mel Gibson
Speaker 1: and Antonio Banderiz are both considered for the role of Maximus.
Speaker 2: Gibson would have been coming off Brave Heart and Benderris
Speaker 2: had probably just done Mask of Zorro. Oh yeah, these
Speaker 2: were just the regular Zorro.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm not mad at either of those.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Well I did Gibson do The Patriot before or
Speaker 2: after this? And it doesn't matter. We don't need to
Speaker 2: talk about him.
Speaker 1: There are a couple of actors that Steven Spielberg felt
Speaker 1: he needed to go to because of his relationship with them.
Speaker 1: This is Franzoni talking, and we were all sort of
Speaker 1: hoping they'd say no. One of those actors was apparently
Speaker 1: Tom Cruise, who I cannot imagine as a gladiator. I
Speaker 1: know he played a samurai and that was weird too.
Speaker 2: I just the greatest White Savior, like the most hilarious
Speaker 2: white Savior movie of all time.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah yeah. Ultimately they went with Russell Crowe,
Speaker 1: who was then hot off of La Confidential, and those
Speaker 1: has been reported that Mel Gibson turned himself down on
Speaker 1: the basis of age. Ridley Scott told CNN in two
Speaker 1: thousand that Russell was really always my first choice. I
Speaker 1: noticed him maybe five years ago in Romper's Stomper, which
Speaker 1: I'm not familiar with, and I.
Speaker 2: Thought it was great. It's a title little, low budget
Speaker 2: movie about Australian Nazis. He is genuinely terrifying in it
Speaker 2: in the forties, and I thought he was someone worth watching.
Speaker 2: Russell crowetl Variety. I read the script and I thought
Speaker 2: it wasn't a.
Speaker 1: Movie devastating critical analysis. Then producer Walter Parks said, it's
Speaker 1: one hundred and eighty four a d. You're a Roman
Speaker 1: general and you're going to be directed by Ridley Scott,
Speaker 1: and that was enough for me to want to talk
Speaker 1: to Ridley doesn't think much.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I had a good pitch, so you want to
Speaker 2: punch this in Later. The Italian title of a painting
Speaker 2: called The Armored Man with the tune of Fork that
Speaker 2: Would Kill You is Luomo corrato conra fouquetta da tono
Speaker 2: key ti uchrebe. Sounds like a Jallo title that would
Speaker 2: have been directed by Yeah, Daria Argento. The pronunciation all
Speaker 2: these languages is so good. I just thought having I
Speaker 2: didn't take I did take Italian in college. At least
Speaker 2: I got something out of it.
Speaker 1: Gladiator cast was filled out by a roster of who's
Speaker 1: who British actors like Oliver Reed and Richard Harris, as
Speaker 1: well as jimmen holnsu Gemon Gimon Honsu fresh off Amistad,
Speaker 1: and there was also Connie Nielsen and also a very
Speaker 1: young Joaquin Phoenix. It's been said that Jennifer Lopez. I
Speaker 1: don't know why I said her name like that. It's
Speaker 1: been said that Jennifer Lopez was in the running for
Speaker 1: Nielsen's part, but producer Douglas Wick shot that.
Speaker 2: Down in Any of You with the Huffington Post in
Speaker 2: twenty twenty. It's funny because when I didn't throw this
Speaker 2: in anywhere else but Joaquin Phoenix when he got on
Speaker 2: set for when he met Johnny Cash for Walk the Line,
Speaker 2: Johnny Cash just started quoting Gladiator ride him. I could hello,
Speaker 2: walking Hello, Joaquin. I loved your work and Gladiator am
Speaker 2: I not merciful good stuff? I was gonna say, those
Speaker 2: who are about to die, salute you, those who are
Speaker 2: about to die Walking the Line, those are about to
Speaker 2: I in Reno just to watch them die. Anything there,
Speaker 2: no matter. It is a brainstorm, yes, and screenwriter friend zone.
Speaker 2: He said, my wife and I will never forget the
Speaker 2: day they sent.
Speaker 1: Over Waquin's audition tape because everyone was like Joaquin Phoenix.
Speaker 1: Isn't he some kind of stone or surf kid? The
Speaker 1: audition tape was a knockout. It was mind boggling. Jude
Speaker 1: Law was also in the running but got knocked out
Speaker 1: by said tape. That's so weird because he I never
Speaker 1: really thought of this until now. They both kind of
Speaker 1: look the same.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and Judlaw has that, you know, as he gained
Speaker 2: weight and drink drank more, he had that British tendency
Speaker 2: of all British men turning and lost some of his harea,
Speaker 2: that British thing were all men turn into Phil Collins,
Speaker 2: that the British face naturally wants to become a flat,
Speaker 2: a flat circle with little hair on top. But then
Speaker 2: he got back in control of it and got the
Speaker 2: jaw line back. But around this time he did have
Speaker 2: that sort of fay aristocratic mia from talent to mister
Speaker 2: Ripley that would have I think sold him as this.
Speaker 1: And then Gatica, I always think of him, and too
Speaker 1: kind of think I.
Speaker 2: Ever think about Gatka has when from his always study,
Speaker 2: when Charlie gets uh, he's trying to rabble rouse and
Speaker 2: instead of yelling Attica like in Dog Day Afternoon, he
Speaker 2: starts yelling Gatica the funniest throw ray jokes of all time.
Speaker 1: But even with this cast in place, the arguments of
Speaker 1: the script continued. Connie Nielsen weighed in obsensively with notes
Speaker 1: for her character. Those she wound up just correcting weird
Speaker 1: bits of anachronistic phrasing. I had a line where it
Speaker 1: just said the police state, and it's like, the police state.
Speaker 1: Do you want me to actually use that phrase or
Speaker 1: the phrase put it in a museum. I don't think
Speaker 1: at the time that people consider the word museum the
Speaker 1: same way we consider it a museum today.
Speaker 2: I you know, it's weird because I kept reading things
Speaker 2: about like in all these trivia, like Connie Nilssen was
Speaker 2: tapped for her extensive knowledge of Roman history, and I
Speaker 2: couldn't find if she was actually that or if she
Speaker 2: just went through the script, and like common sense was like,
Speaker 2: that's dumb. We wouldn't say that in Rome. But either way,
Speaker 2: salute to Connie Nilsen.
Speaker 1: These problems persisted even as the films one hundred and
Speaker 1: three million dollar budgeted production got underway. Russell Croll told
Speaker 1: Radio one and twenty sixteen we had twenty one pages
Speaker 1: when we started shooting.
Speaker 2: It's the dumbest possible way to make a film.
Speaker 1: At one point in time, Ridley gave the crew the
Speaker 1: day off because we simply didn't know what we were going
Speaker 1: to shoot the next day. That is my worst nightmare.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, I mean that's horrifying.
Speaker 2: Yeah. According to David S.
Speaker 1: Cohen in his book Screenplays, freen Joni's original draft is
Speaker 1: quote different in almost every detail from the finished movie.
Speaker 2: Or Ridley Scott told Variety, in the first act the
Speaker 2: Battle of Germania, Russell was saying, what the bloody hell
Speaker 2: am I going to say? And I said, well, there's
Speaker 2: going to be a bird on a and you're going
Speaker 2: to look at this robin, and how ironic this robin
Speaker 2: is in the field of battle where we're going to
Speaker 2: see a blood bath. So he went okay, and he
Speaker 2: looks at this twig and imagines a robin. Then he said,
Speaker 2: but what the am I gonna say? I said, I
Speaker 2: don't know. Why don't you just say, hmm, morning, it
Speaker 2: looks like snow, which he does in the film. Again,
Speaker 2: I really like Russell Crowe for nice guys, but his
Speaker 2: his loudish Australianism is so godamn funny in every quote
Speaker 2: that he gave or excited to, saying in this movie.
Speaker 1: We need to talk about show you my passions. I
Speaker 1: feel like this is probably a good moment.
Speaker 2: Yes, my time, my all time favorite celebrity tweet. Russell
Speaker 2: crow is very funny on Twitter. At one point he
Speaker 2: was just live tweeting his entire workout thing because his
Speaker 2: weight yo yo's so much for rolls and everything. So
Speaker 2: there's like a string of tweets from twenty thirteen where
Speaker 2: it's just like leg press two hundred pounds, bicep two
Speaker 2: hundred pounds, forty minutes on treadmill, like all individually nested
Speaker 2: as replies. Let me find the aforementioned explain my passions tweet.
Speaker 2: Someone was tweeting at him. I believe about Oh yes so,
Speaker 2: Russell Crowe tweeted fight back, humiliation is news, denile of
Speaker 2: climate change, etri it over education. Media should not be
Speaker 2: the enemy of progress. Brendan McClaskey at T Bones thirty
Speaker 2: two on Twitter replied at Russell Crowe, li rural Hollywood.
Speaker 2: Just keep acting, pretty boy, leave politics alone. Russell Crowe
Speaker 2: at T Bones thirty two, Simple facts. I'm not pretty.
Speaker 2: I'm not your boy, you simpleton, Send me your address
Speaker 2: so I can visit you and explain my passions. No period.
Speaker 2: It is the perfect threat. I love it so much.
Speaker 2: There's like there's been a trend like on Twitter lately
Speaker 2: or I don't know lately pass a couple of year
Speaker 2: of variations on what if I came to your house
Speaker 2: with a weapon or something like that. But send me
Speaker 2: your address so I can visit you and explain my
Speaker 2: passions is the rawest line of all time. Anyway, Hell
Speaker 2: was I talking about? Uh oh yeah? So Ridley Scott,
Speaker 2: David Franzoni, Russell crow would sit together after day of
Speaker 2: filming as new bits of writing would come in, and
Speaker 2: over whiskey and cigars, they would just decide what was
Speaker 2: going to stay for the next day of shooting. These
Speaker 2: editing sessions occasionally crossed over into real on set disputes.
Speaker 2: Writer William Nicholson recalled to The Daily Mail that Russell
Speaker 2: Crowe said to him one day, your lines are garbage,
Speaker 2: But I'm the gradiest actor in the world, and I
Speaker 2: can make even garbage sound good. That's bad, I'm not
Speaker 2: dialed into it, Nicholson added. And the funny thing is
Speaker 2: that it's true extremely beta move. Okay, the lines weren't garbage,
Speaker 2: and he was a bit aggressive, but he is a
Speaker 2: great actor, so his occasional fits of arrogance didn't bother
Speaker 2: me at all. Richard Harris, who was playing Marcus Aurelius,
Speaker 2: was too old for the and took a more dignified route.
Speaker 2: He simply ignored all rewrites as they came in for
Speaker 2: his scenes and said the original lines. This all gets
Speaker 2: so much funnier to me when you learn that throughout
Speaker 2: filming Ridley Scott wore the red USS Alabama navy hat
Speaker 2: that Gene Hackman wears and cribs and tide. It was
Speaker 2: given to him by his brother Tony Scott, who directed
Speaker 2: that film. So in all these onset photos you can
Speaker 2: see Ridley Scott with his like veteran USS Alabama with
Speaker 2: the navy wings, like red trucker hat. This is all anyway.
Speaker 2: A Time magazine article from May of two thousand and
Speaker 2: went a little further detailing Crow's shenanigans on the set
Speaker 2: of Gladiator. They quoted a DreamWorks executive who said Russell
Speaker 2: was not well behaved. He tried to rewrite the entire
Speaker 2: script on the spot. You know, the big line in
Speaker 2: the trailer in this life for the next, I will
Speaker 2: have my vengeance. At first he absolutely refused to say it.
Speaker 2: He did a lot of posturing and put the fear
Speaker 2: of God into some people. Thankfully, Ridley never yelled. He
Speaker 2: was the voice of reason dealing with many unreasonable factors,
Speaker 2: not the least of which was his lead. There was
Speaker 2: an Entertainment Weekly article in which Crow remembered originally pushing
Speaker 2: Ridley Scott to let him voice Maximus with a Spanish accent,
Speaker 2: since the character is from the Iberian Peninsula and he's
Speaker 2: referred to thusly as the Spaniard, which is a bit
Speaker 2: of historical inaccuracy. Ridley Scott pushed back and asked for
Speaker 2: the generic British you know received pronunciation style accent, which
Speaker 2: Crow said ended up as Royal Shakespeare Company, two pints
Speaker 2: after Lunch. As I mentioned earlier, this is sort of
Speaker 2: the ground zero or assent for I guess it really
Speaker 2: started with La Confidential, where he plays like a like
Speaker 2: a muscle bound passionate La police Detective. But this is
Speaker 2: all in the on ramp bleeding up to South Park's
Speaker 2: depiction of Russell Crowe as having a show called Russell
Speaker 2: Crowe's fighting round the world, which is just that a
Speaker 2: very cartoonish Australian accent and Russell Crowe just travel log
Speaker 2: style but just getting into fights. The phone throwing thing
Speaker 2: is at one point in New York he'd like literally
Speaker 2: hawked a desk phone at a clerk, I believe, and
Speaker 2: was arrested for it. But also from that time magazine
Speaker 2: article is the quote a hard drinking perfectionist Crow got
Speaker 2: into brawls with villagers on one occasion and laid such
Speaker 2: waste to his rented villa in Morocco that the caretaker
Speaker 2: protested to Ridley Scott saying he must leave. He's violating
Speaker 2: every tenant of the Quran. Another hilarious story about Crowe, Sorry,
Speaker 2: one more, well, a couple more, Sorry, two more. Russell
Speaker 2: Crowe once made reference to George Clooney having quote sold
Speaker 2: out when Clooney was doing then espresso commercials. George Clooney
Speaker 2: supposedly didn't take kindly to this, and ward traveled about
Speaker 2: this through Hollywood to Russell Crowe. Russell Crowe's apology to
Speaker 2: Clooney was a mail package that included a CD of
Speaker 2: Russell Crowe's band thirty odd Foot of Grunts, a book
Speaker 2: of Russell Crowe's poetry, and handwritten note saying he had
Speaker 2: been misquoted. Fro did supposedly improvise the line at my
Speaker 2: signal unleash hell in the Battle of Germania, which is
Speaker 2: incredibly raw, so we can call it a wash. He
Speaker 2: also did the maximum speech. He also asked to write
Speaker 2: a speech when the guy says like, what is going
Speaker 2: home mean to you? Or something? And he just jotted
Speaker 2: that speech down thinking about his ranch in Australia, which
Speaker 2: is a great Yeah, it's a nice little moment as
Speaker 2: you meditate on that. We'll be right back with more
Speaker 2: too much information after these messages.
Speaker 1: But even Russell Crowe couldn't compare it to one of
Speaker 1: his forebears. In on set hell Raising, we're talking about
Speaker 1: all of read, oh read. I don't think he's a
Speaker 1: big deal in America, but he was a legend in England,
Speaker 1: like Sean Connery, Michael Caine, Peter O'Toole, Richard Burton. Contemporary
Speaker 1: 's actually an incredible book called hell Raisers about all
Speaker 1: those guys in the fifties and sixties who you know,
Speaker 1: doing stuff. But we really shouldn't be glorifying but.
Speaker 2: Nope, really incredibly problematic drinking and abuse. Yeah. I think
Speaker 2: Oliver Reed is most known in this country for playing
Speaker 2: Bill Sikes in Oliver Yeah, yeah, yeah, and Oliver maybe
Speaker 2: in Werewolf After Midnight, one of the werewolf of I
Speaker 2: think it's Werewolf at either at midnight or after midnight,
Speaker 2: the timing doesn't matter. He was a werewolf.
Speaker 1: Oh, he's in Tommy too. He's in the Who's Movie
Speaker 1: at that poss of Tommy's. He's the dad or the
Speaker 1: step dad. I forget. He's in Margaret's Husband. In England.
Speaker 1: He's mostly known for being him drinking, for drinking. Yeah,
Speaker 1: basically he was cast as a proximous and Ridley Scott
Speaker 1: warned Red again known through his drinking and whacked out
Speaker 1: behavior on sets to keep things cool, really fought really
Speaker 1: hard for Oliver Reed. German weightlifter Ralph Mohler, who plays
Speaker 1: the towering gladiator Hagen, told Yahoo in an interview he
Speaker 1: later went to Oliver and said, look, they didn't want you,
Speaker 1: but I want you. Don't let me down, and he
Speaker 1: never did until he died three weeks before the movie ended.
Speaker 2: But before that, let's just get into.
Speaker 1: Exactly why a lot of people didn't want Oliver reed.
Speaker 1: I want to do a quick lightning round of anecdotes
Speaker 1: of this man. He famously drank one hundred and twenty
Speaker 1: six pints in a twenty four hour sitting, and celebrated
Speaker 1: this accomplishment by performing a horizontal handstand atop the bar.
Speaker 2: He invented, Heigel, I've kept.
Speaker 1: These from Heigel, so I want to get your authentic
Speaker 1: reactions to these. He invented a drink that he called
Speaker 1: gunk gu n K, which consisted of filling an ice
Speaker 1: bucket with a little bit of every single drink from
Speaker 1: every bottle in whatever. The bar he was currently sitting
Speaker 1: in had. Oh so, it's like Long Island iced tea.
Speaker 1: It's like the h bomb equivalent of Long Island iced tea.
Speaker 2: I was just saying, it's this. Did they call it
Speaker 2: a suicide run when you do with the soda fountain.
Speaker 2: I've never heard that. Maybe I made that up. I
Speaker 2: don't know.
Speaker 1: His drinking shockingly never impacted his work on set, but
Speaker 1: it cost him a high profile part in a Steve
Speaker 1: McQueen movie. Apparently, Steve McQueen flew over to England to
Speaker 1: meet with him and talk about a role.
Speaker 2: I don't actually know what role is.
Speaker 1: Offhand, they went on what's been described as a legendary
Speaker 1: pub crawl, which culminated in Reid becoming ill and vomiting
Speaker 1: all down Steve McQueen's front, and that kind of cooled
Speaker 1: the whole working together thing. During the filming of the
Speaker 1: movie The Sellout, when Oliver Reed learned how much room
Speaker 1: service drinks cost, he ordered boxes of wine and spirits
Speaker 1: shipped to his hotel room and turned his suite into
Speaker 1: a pub.
Speaker 2: Hell yeah.
Speaker 1: While on break filming in Durango, Oliver Reed noticed the
Speaker 1: production assistant and his wife sitting at the table in
Speaker 1: the restaurant in which he was drinking. Reid then politely
Speaker 1: approached them, in the form of the man and his
Speaker 1: wife that they should go back to the hotel room
Speaker 1: because quote, I'm going to smash this place up in
Speaker 1: ten minutes, and I wouldn't want to hurt you or
Speaker 1: your lady. The couple left the restaurant just as Reid
Speaker 1: hurled tooth tables through the window, not one but two.
Speaker 1: He was arrested once for brawling in a pub. I
Speaker 1: think this was a separate incident, and he apologized to
Speaker 1: the court and sent flowers to all the responding police officers.
Speaker 2: Ow, yeah, he's a real what's the no half measures?
Speaker 2: Isn't that a bit from uh A breaking bad? Yeah?
Speaker 2: He was a real no half measures kind of drinker. Uh.
Speaker 1: Once, this is a sort of a quieter act of destruction.
Speaker 1: Upset with the lighting in his home after an evening
Speaker 1: of drinking, he walked through his house and just punched
Speaker 1: out all of the light bulbs.
Speaker 2: Nice.
Speaker 1: Another occasion, impatient for New Year's to begin, he moved
Speaker 1: his clock ahead, called at the New Year, and celebrated
Speaker 1: by firing his shot good in the air and then
Speaker 1: shooting the clock.
Speaker 2: I mean making that kind of shot. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Well we don't know how far away he was.
Speaker 1: It could have been a point play.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he was someone holding the clock still he.
Speaker 1: Was actually you know what We talked about him being
Speaker 1: more famous in America for being an oliver. He was
Speaker 1: probably most famous as a talk show guest, both in
Speaker 1: the UK and the United States, because he would famously
Speaker 1: show up drunk. Yes he was. His most infamous incident
Speaker 1: in the UK was when of many there are probably
Speaker 1: half a dozen or maybe even a dozen famous instances
Speaker 1: of him on talk shows. But the most notorious is
Speaker 1: him on a show called After Dark, when he showed
Speaker 1: up drunk and offended the feminist writer Kate Millet by
Speaker 1: telling her give us a kiss, big not good.
Speaker 2: He went on The Tonight.
Speaker 1: Show frequently drunk and would share his belief that a
Speaker 1: women's place was in the kitchen. Fellow guest Shelley Winters
Speaker 1: naturally took offence and eventually dumped her glass of bourbon
Speaker 1: on his head. Read would then appear on a UK
Speaker 1: chat show months later to defend himself and claim that
Speaker 1: those comments on the Tonight Show to Shelley Winners were
Speaker 1: tongue in cheek designed to get a rise out of her.
Speaker 1: His argument was kind of undercut on this British interview
Speaker 1: by falling off his chair and making his exit from
Speaker 1: the show by crawling away. He was on Letterman a
Speaker 1: bunch of times, and when Letterman tried to ask him
Speaker 1: about an incident when he challenged Lee Marvin to a
Speaker 1: drinking contest, Reid replied, that's hearsay. When Letterman continued with
Speaker 1: this line of questioning, a seemingly genuinely angry Reid told
Speaker 1: Letterman that the showrunners knew that this topic was not
Speaker 1: to be discussed, and so he said, let's cool it
Speaker 1: with that one, get to a new subject. I love
Speaker 1: trees and boats. Cool, God bless him.
Speaker 2: I mean yeah, I would talk about trees and boats
Speaker 2: with Allie Reid.
Speaker 1: Yeah. And finally, while promoting the film Castaway, Oliver Reid
Speaker 1: appeared as a guest on the British talk show Aspell
Speaker 1: and Company. He walked on set carrying a picture of
Speaker 1: gin and orange juice.
Speaker 2: Hell Yeah, gin and juice Baby, ripped off.
Speaker 1: His sport coat and drunkenly sang along with the show's
Speaker 1: band when he sat on the couch. Another guest on
Speaker 1: the show asked Reid why do you drink? And Reid
Speaker 1: offered this all time quote. It's probably familiar to most
Speaker 1: of you.
Speaker 2: Why do you drink?
Speaker 1: Because the finest people I've ever met in my life
Speaker 1: are in pubs.
Speaker 2: Oliver read ladies and gentlemen.
Speaker 1: But his reputation had caught up with him by the
Speaker 1: time Ridley Scott cast him again, cast him against the
Speaker 1: advice of every studio, and Reid was upset by how
Speaker 1: low his stock had sung. He was complaining to director
Speaker 1: Michael Winner that Oliver Reid actually wanted him to audition
Speaker 1: because you know, oh yeah, people at this stage in
Speaker 1: their career, you know audition. Shelley Winters actually famously was
Speaker 1: asked to audition once and she showed up with a
Speaker 1: big bag, reached in and pulled out an oscar and
Speaker 1: slammed it on the table and said, here's my TV.
Speaker 1: Reached in and pulled that her second oscar and slammed
Speaker 1: it on the table and said, here's my head shot.
Speaker 2: And I believe she was given the role. So yeah.
Speaker 1: Reid was not happy about being asked to audition, but
Speaker 1: director Michael Winners, who was very close to him, said, oh,
Speaker 1: he don't with me. You're not a FA star, you're
Speaker 1: out of work. You're not old enough to retire, so
Speaker 1: you need a third act to your career. Obviously, they
Speaker 1: think if you're working with me, you can't be as
Speaker 1: drunk as people think you are. So go to Ridley
Speaker 1: and read end of story. And if he wants you
Speaker 1: to read twice, you read twice. I'm getting like Don
Speaker 1: Draper and oh you know, watch Man Man nevermind and.
Speaker 2: Ollie Bless his soul.
Speaker 1: He was sober from months before filming, and he made
Speaker 1: assurances to Ridley Scott that his drinking wouldn't be a factor.
Speaker 1: He would limit it only to weekends, and his longtime
Speaker 1: friend fellow Gladiator CASTMATEE David Hemmings, who played Cassius, also
Speaker 1: promised Ridley Scott that he'd look after Reid. Nevertheless, Oh,
Speaker 1: I felt you got You should take this story. Tell
Speaker 1: us about the sad, tragic, comic demise of Oliver Reed.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, it depends on how you. He went
Speaker 2: down swaying few things he did. He did. On the
Speaker 2: day of May second, nineteen ninety nine, the sixty one
Speaker 2: year old Reid was parked in a bar in Malta
Speaker 2: with his wife Josephine, and some Maltese friends for lunch
Speaker 2: break when a group of sailors from the Royal Navy
Speaker 2: Frigate HMS Cumberland, who were on shore leave, strolled into
Speaker 2: the bar. Eight beers in and with only one scene
Speaker 2: left to film, Reid was about to head back to
Speaker 2: his hotel when, as the story goes, he was recognized
Speaker 2: by some of the officers who called out, shall we
Speaker 2: have a drink Alie, which activates something in his brain.
Speaker 2: So Reid sits down with these guys and this all
Speaker 2: comes from. None of the Western newspapers had this. This
Speaker 2: is a Spanish newspaper, El Paiees who all of this
Speaker 2: detail comes from so grain of salt, but print the legend. Yeah.
Speaker 2: In addition to the eight beers, he'd already had read
Speaker 2: down a dozen double shot of rum while chatting with
Speaker 2: these naval men and as arm wrestling matches subsequently piled
Speaker 2: up also had a bottle of whiskey next to him.
Speaker 2: He supposedly won five arm wrestling matches against British navelmen
Speaker 2: at age sixty one. Whilsh Shoust at the age of
Speaker 2: sixty one will drunker than you or anyone you know
Speaker 2: has ever been signed autographs, hugged these guys and bid farewell,
Speaker 2: and then just said I don't feel very well, collapsed
Speaker 2: on the floor and died in the ambulance before they
Speaker 2: made it to the hospital. He was buried in Bruney
Speaker 2: Graveyard in Churchtown, Ireland, where he'd been living, and his
Speaker 2: epitaph reads he made the air move.
Speaker 1: That's amazing. I don't even know what that means, but
Speaker 1: that's amazing.
Speaker 2: He sure did read more or less predicted his own
Speaker 2: death during a nineteen ninety four appearance on something called
Speaker 2: The Obituaries Show, saying I died in a bar of
Speaker 2: a heart attack, full of laughter.
Speaker 1: You know you can't get sev and you read that.
Speaker 2: You don't want to valorize much of that, but you
Speaker 2: know the man went out on his own terms. Russell
Speaker 2: Crowe had some very terrible things to say about him,
Speaker 2: but we'll grow right. Oliver Reed's final scene, somewhat weirdly,
Speaker 2: was his character's death scene, in which he repeats a
Speaker 2: bit of a line from earlier in the film. We
Speaker 2: mortals are but shadows and dust. A clause in the
Speaker 2: production's insurance contract would have allowed them to reshoot all
Speaker 2: of Reid's scenes with another actor at a cost of
Speaker 2: about twenty five million, even though this would have been
Speaker 2: paid for by the insurer. Ridley Scott felt that the
Speaker 2: cast and crew were exhausted by this point because the
Speaker 2: movie was shot in sequence, so this would have been
Speaker 2: near it if they were writing it. Yeah, exactly, so
Speaker 2: they were. This is ultimately at the end of both
Speaker 2: filming and the plot of the movie. So he accomplished
Speaker 2: the final scene of Reid's character by finding an actor
Speaker 2: of his similar build and then they just pay did
Speaker 2: a CGI version of Reid's face over him and then
Speaker 2: overdubbed a bit of dialogue from an alternate take of
Speaker 2: that earlier scene. So this is a really early example
Speaker 2: of how what they could do with CGI, and I
Speaker 2: think it won Best Visual Effects at the Oscars, or
Speaker 2: at least was nominated for it. So it's a really
Speaker 2: As I said earlier, it's a great example of tasteful CGI,
Speaker 2: which Ridley has apparently not leaned into. In the New One,
Speaker 2: Iranian British actor Omit Djili, who's also known for his
Speaker 2: work in nineteen ninety nine's The Mummy, he has a
Speaker 2: tremendous story about working with Reid on the set of Gladiator.
Speaker 2: He says he was scared of Oliver Reed, going back
Speaker 2: to again read's Roland Oliver. They wrote this op ed
Speaker 2: for The Guardian, which we'll quote now. In the script,
Speaker 2: Ali was meant to punch me in the face and
Speaker 2: say you sold me queer giraffes. I'd worked with some
Speaker 2: of the crew a few months before in the Mummy
Speaker 2: and they knew I was scared of Oli, so they
Speaker 2: decided to play a trick on me. They thought it
Speaker 2: would be funny to get Oli to grab me by
Speaker 2: the nuts during the scene. Ollie said, do you mind
Speaker 2: if I really grab you hard to make it authentic?
Speaker 2: I said fine, so he did. Usually you do the scene,
Speaker 2: they say cut and you have a few minutes to
Speaker 2: reset before you go again. Ollie continued to hold my
Speaker 2: nuts during the reset. I was so frightened of him
Speaker 2: that I thought it was part of his acting process,
Speaker 2: so I allowed him to hold me while we talked
Speaker 2: about the food in the hotel. By take three, I
Speaker 2: became aware of a massaging sensation. By take four, he said,
Speaker 2: you do realize this is a wind up, don't you.
Speaker 2: Everyone thought it was so funny they kept it in
Speaker 2: the final cut and he didn't have to punch me.
Speaker 2: Rip Oliver reed.
Speaker 1: Makes me sad, something about like the Line and Winter
Speaker 1: type stuff with like guys, powerful guys having the power diminished. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean again, it's not a healthy thing.
Speaker 2: But no, no, no, but it's you know, there's a
Speaker 2: sort of you filter through the Jim Morrison lens and
Speaker 2: there's this sort of drunken Jester archetype that people glom onto.
Speaker 2: And you know again, man, he went out on his
Speaker 2: own terms.
Speaker 1: I didn't even mean that, like anytime, like an older
Speaker 1: guy who is like a champion of something goes head
Speaker 1: to head with like the younger guy and struggles a
Speaker 1: bit that just like hits a certain part in me.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, yeah, don't drink like that. Well you can
Speaker 2: have you can have a longer off rampant Like no,
Speaker 2: I don't even mean like I don't know.
Speaker 1: I mean it's I'm not even intentionally thinking about the
Speaker 1: Jake Ball Mike Tyson thing, like I oh yeah, not
Speaker 1: even just any anything like that, any kind of feet
Speaker 1: of skill or talent.
Speaker 2: Sure, man, I guess it's the line in winter. Yeah,
Speaker 2: the lion in the very drunk lion in the Multese bar.
Speaker 2: Arm wrestling naval Navy men. That's awesome. Yeah, I'm sorry,
Speaker 2: Like it's just so imagine being the Navy. The Navy
Speaker 2: guy who was like I'll over read housed, beat me
Speaker 2: in arm wrestling and then died. I would dine out
Speaker 2: on that story for the rest of my life.
Speaker 1: It took the last bit of his strength to beat
Speaker 1: me in arm wrestling. There are some truly incredible, like
Speaker 1: just candid photos of oliveried in bars, like clearly just
Speaker 1: taken by other patrons of like Oliver Reed stacking up
Speaker 1: all of his glasses into this like giant pillar that
Speaker 1: reaches the ceiling of all these pint glasses.
Speaker 2: Oh, the wizard wand oh yeah, is that a term? Uh?
Speaker 2: You know you can do that with if you have
Speaker 2: a roll at duct tapeley you're drinking, you just do
Speaker 2: that with all your empties, ah, wizard staff. Yeah. An
Speaker 2: on set death is never easy, but it must have,
Speaker 2: especially rattled Joaquin Phoenix. Sorry, serious voice. An on set
Speaker 2: death is never easy, but it must have especially ratted
Speaker 2: Joaquin Phoenix, who was returning to the screen for the
Speaker 2: first time since the death of his brother River from
Speaker 2: a drug overdose in West Hollywood on Halloween nineteen ninety three.
Speaker 2: Phoenix told Collider in twenty eighteen, Gladiator was one of
Speaker 2: the most intimidating films I've done, because it was the
Speaker 2: first set I went on that was just massive. It
Speaker 2: looked like it was acres of land and tons of
Speaker 2: trucks and trailers and you know, hundreds of extras, multiple cameras. Suddenly,
Speaker 2: the scale of this hit me, and I was overwhelmed
Speaker 2: by that. I didn't think I was going to be
Speaker 2: able to make it through. He continued. I went to
Speaker 2: Ridley Scott and said, I don't know what to do.
Speaker 2: I just can't do this. I don't know what you're
Speaker 2: gonna do. This just isn't going to be possible. And
Speaker 2: Ridley was really smart. He just shot me for four
Speaker 2: hours and he didn't put film in the camera. The
Speaker 2: first scene that I did, I was really nervous, and
Speaker 2: we shot I don't know, an unbelievable amount of takes,
Speaker 2: a shocking amount, over and over again. At some point
Speaker 2: at the end, after hours, Scott finally said, okay, we
Speaker 2: got it. And then later on when we were working
Speaker 2: on the film, he told me that he hadn't been
Speaker 2: putting film in the camera for like the first thirty takes.
Speaker 2: But everybody did everything. The camera did its movements, sound people,
Speaker 2: everyone behaved as if we were shooting takes. I don't
Speaker 2: understand that. Well, you just get all the nervousness out
Speaker 2: of his system.
Speaker 1: I guess it.
Speaker 2: Was another of Oliver Reed's hell raising peers who had
Speaker 2: a hand in helping Phoenix. Russell Crowe told the news
Speaker 2: service w E N N. Joaquin was very nervous on
Speaker 2: the set and I went to Richard Harris and I said, mate,
Speaker 2: what are we going to do with this kid? He's
Speaker 2: asking me to abuse him before takes so Richard said,
Speaker 2: let's get him pissed through a number of hours and
Speaker 2: a number of cans of Guinness. I got the point
Speaker 2: across to Joaquin that is actually an internal journey and
Speaker 2: everything he needs to do with the character lives within him.
Speaker 2: Just imagining like a all right mate, an act of
Speaker 2: prepas handing of a copy of the artists way. Yeah,
Speaker 2: how many affirmations you been doing in the morning? I
Speaker 2: love here, You're great, you can it lives within you.
Speaker 1: May It's amazing that your your sober Australian voice is
Speaker 1: kinda B minus is nailed.
Speaker 2: It's incredible. Another great Oliver Reed's story, Richard Harris took
Speaker 2: to Russell Crowe, but Oliver Reed hated him instantly and
Speaker 2: challenged him to a fight. At one point, Russell Crow
Speaker 2: spoke very uncharitably of him in GQ, after saying that
Speaker 2: he wouldn't in twenty ten. He said, I never got
Speaker 2: on with Oli. He has visited me in dreams and
Speaker 2: asked me to talk kindly of him, so I should,
Speaker 2: but we never had a pleasant conversation. And then he
Speaker 2: goes on to say some very uncharitable things. He says
Speaker 2: something like disgusting and undignified the way that he behaved,
Speaker 2: like striding down the set and wanting to fight people
Speaker 2: drunk in the middle of the day and dying in
Speaker 2: your own piss and vomit and like blah blah blah
Speaker 2: blah blah.
Speaker 1: Who's that sound like minus the dying in your own
Speaker 1: pisson fone?
Speaker 2: I know, I know, right, yeah, bit rich. During the
Speaker 2: film's press tour, Russell Kurt told Variety there were a
Speaker 2: lot of people in that strange journalistic habit who just
Speaker 2: wanted to poke that fire and kept asking Joaquin about
Speaker 2: his brother and then about his relationship with me, because
Speaker 2: we have that in the film. At one point we
Speaker 2: were doing some press conference and he just said something
Speaker 2: along the lines of look, Russo treated me like a brother,
Speaker 2: and it just hit me in a really heavy way. Now,
Speaker 2: not to make an immediate pun on heavy, but Joaquin
Speaker 2: Phoenix also deliberately decided to gain weight as his character
Speaker 2: gained power, which Scott noticed during the dailies and mentioned
Speaker 2: to a producer the following day. Ridley explains in the
Speaker 2: DVD commentary for the film, Joaquin walks up to me.
Speaker 2: Commitis Joaquin. It is full regalia and armor, and he says,
Speaker 2: I hear, I look like a fat little hamster. He
Speaker 2: then didn't eat any food for weeks. But enough about
Speaker 2: all this acting and personality and stuff. Let's get to
Speaker 2: the real meat of the episode minute production details. As usual,
Speaker 2: Ridley Scott, trained Lest we Ever Forget at London's prestigious
Speaker 2: Royal College of Art, was heavily involved with storyboarding before
Speaker 2: filming began. Storyboard artist Sylvan de Fretz, I don't know
Speaker 2: recalled for the film's making of book. Several months out
Speaker 2: Ridley will give very detailed sketches, shot by shot, blow
Speaker 2: blay blow. A couple weeks out, sketches get very rough,
Speaker 2: and the instruction's very loose because he just doesn't have
Speaker 2: the time. I'm imagining just like a stick figure with
Speaker 2: a story.
Speaker 1: Like blood Drops.
Speaker 2: Yeah, looks cool. But once filming, Sylvain said, Ridly changes
Speaker 2: his mind a lot and sometimes uses the storyboard to
Speaker 2: get rid of ideas rather than lock them in. He's
Speaker 2: quite loose. He shoots with five six seven cameras sometimes
Speaker 2: and can be quite spontaneous. I can't say the storyboard
Speaker 2: particularly resembles the final film that sounds like it sucks
Speaker 2: Yeah anyway. Gattire was filmed in England, Morocco and Malta
Speaker 2: between January and May of nineteen ninety nine. Production designer
Speaker 2: Arthur Max were called in the book we trumped around
Speaker 2: the Roman Empire for six weeks, scouting all of the
Speaker 2: existing remains in England, France, Italy, Eastern Europe and North Africa.
Speaker 2: But your access to us left of the real Rome
Speaker 2: is quite limited. All the ruins are historical monuments and
Speaker 2: so cannot be touched. Consequently, the film found stand ins
Speaker 2: for certain historical settings, and as we will get too shortly,
Speaker 2: used CGI to restore others to their period accurate glory.
Speaker 1: The film's opening scene, for example, is set in what
Speaker 1: was then Germania, a massive swath of eastern and northern Europe.
Speaker 1: Production originally wanted a film outside of Bratislava, a port
Speaker 1: on the Danube River, not far from where Marcus Aurelia
Speaker 1: is actually campaigned, but as scheduling issues pushed the filming
Speaker 1: into winter, shooting was switched to England and a forest
Speaker 1: near Farmham. Sorry. Another reason why the site was chosen
Speaker 1: was because production learned from England's Forestry Commission. At the
Speaker 1: area Bourne Woods was slated to be deforested anyway, so
Speaker 1: as really Scott remembered, I said, I'll do it, I'll
Speaker 1: burn it to the ground. And they said, good, incredible sound.
Speaker 2: A phone call, yeah, and a phone call this this forest.
Speaker 2: I'll do it. I'll burn it to the ground. Click. Good.
Speaker 2: It doesn't even wait to hear the response. Yeah.
Speaker 1: The weather was actually astoundingly cooperative, to the point where
Speaker 1: Crow's last minute line about the snow was actually preceded
Speaker 1: by real life snow that had started ten minutes before
Speaker 1: the take one rolled.
Speaker 2: That makes a bit of him not struggling with what
Speaker 2: to say, and that's so much funnier, Like he's staring
Speaker 2: at this thing, imagining a robin that'll be there and
Speaker 2: be like, what think Russell think what he sick?
Speaker 1: Looks up?
Speaker 2: Yeah, it starts snowing. Really, Scott's over there waiting to
Speaker 2: roll like, well it's snowing. We'll go with that. Go
Speaker 2: with that take, do a take of that. I think
Speaker 2: his line is literally in the film, just like looks
Speaker 2: like snow has so funny? Is Russell Crow a secret idiot?
Speaker 1: Well yeah, but also like a good actor.
Speaker 2: I I mean, like I said, man, I so much
Speaker 2: of it is colored by this reputation that makes seem
Speaker 2: really shy. But he is hilarious in nice guys. I
Speaker 2: don't really he has a very He's very charismatic in
Speaker 2: this era when his horizontal proportions kept up with his height,
Speaker 2: you know. I mean, he's great in La Confidential. But
Speaker 2: he does just have to play a loudish, you know,
Speaker 2: walking act of violence, and he does bring a sort
Speaker 2: of wounded, heavy browed gravitas to this. I don't dislike
Speaker 2: him in this, just when you weigh it against all
Speaker 2: this priggish stuff that you hear, Like, okay, buddy.
Speaker 1: We're leaving out some of the nitty gritty that involved
Speaker 1: trucking thousands of extras, animals, hairdressers, makeup artists, armors, choreographers
Speaker 1: and the rest of the cast and crew needed to
Speaker 1: a location over an hour from London.
Speaker 2: That doesn't sound fun.
Speaker 1: Following the opening scene, the action moves to Morocco with
Speaker 1: a crew of two hundred people, which kind of sounds
Speaker 1: small to me and a cast of almost one hundred
Speaker 1: so does that. Where scenes of slavery, desert travel, and
Speaker 1: gladiatorial training were shot in and around Iite ben had
Speaker 1: I think how you say that. The crew used basic
Speaker 1: materials and local building techniques to craft thirty thousand mud
Speaker 1: bricks that make up the arena. The fighter's first battle
Speaker 1: in this is according to a Gladiator the making of
Speaker 1: the Ridley Scott Epic Making of book. But they were
Speaker 1: also aided by the fact that Morocco just kind of
Speaker 1: looked like that. David Franzoni, the screenwriter, told Yahoo. The
Speaker 1: reason it worked is because Ridley built the real thing.
Speaker 1: When you drove up to it, it looked like it
Speaker 1: was part of the city. The gladiatorial arena, the bedroom
Speaker 1: would come in from the desert to watch the shoot,
Speaker 1: and so Ridley just put them in the movie. It
Speaker 1: has this legitimacy to it that happened naturally. The areas
Speaker 1: around ie ban Hado may look familiar to folks at
Speaker 1: this point. It's subsequently been used in Oliver Stones two
Speaker 1: thousand and four epic, Alexander Releas, Scott's historical drama Kingdom
Speaker 1: of Heaven in two thousand and five, and twenty ten's
Speaker 1: Prince of Persia. Not to mention, portions of Game of Thrones.
Speaker 2: The biggest challenge in filming, though, was recreating ancient Rome,
Speaker 2: and in particular the forum, the Senate scenes a shot
Speaker 2: and the Colosseum the Hearts of the Empire. Production designer
Speaker 2: Arthur Max and Ridley Scott settled on Port Mifha, Salfi,
Speaker 2: where the British had constructed Fort Rica Soli in eighteen
Speaker 2: oh three. This is in Malta, conveniently done at romanesque
Speaker 2: yellow limestone, aged nicely by wind and sand in the
Speaker 2: intervening in nearly two centuries. All told, the fort's existing
Speaker 2: structure and its compounds and parade grounds would be used
Speaker 2: for about half the final sets seen in the movie.
Speaker 2: So if you go to this place in Malta you
Speaker 2: can see about half of Gladiator, which is tight. This
Speaker 2: not quite the real thing, but close enough. Approach served
Speaker 2: the art direction of the film as well, which pulled
Speaker 2: in influences from Modernist architect Hugh Ferris and Nazi architects
Speaker 2: like Albert Speer. Filmmakers used large scale miniatures to model
Speaker 2: the Rome sets before over one hundred British crew members
Speaker 2: and two hundred Maltice workers took nineteen weeks to build
Speaker 2: the real thing. During the high winds and storms of
Speaker 2: what was eventually reported to be Malta's worst winter in
Speaker 2: thirty years, Production literally used one hundred percent of the
Speaker 2: plaster and plywood available in Malta and had to start
Speaker 2: importing those materials, eventually using around six hundred tons of
Speaker 2: plaster in a process that was also hampered by the
Speaker 2: storms that would leave ships unable to dock and unload.
Speaker 2: This isn't like some obscure substance wood and plaster. You've
Speaker 2: taken all of it from the siland there's simply no more.
Speaker 2: Ridley puffing on a cigar, chuck it in, burn it,
Speaker 2: burn it to the ground. I don't care. The ships
Speaker 2: can unload, Ridley, burn them, bring in new ones. The
Speaker 2: real coliseum, just a historical note, was begun by the
Speaker 2: Emperor Vespasian in seventy a d. And finished about ten
Speaker 2: years later by his son Titus and then Emperor Nero,
Speaker 2: who gifted the public the grounds from his sprawling palace.
Speaker 2: So Production thought about using these existing smaller structures, before
Speaker 2: eventually determining that they would simply build a small chunk
Speaker 2: at full scale of the Colisseum and then expanded digitally
Speaker 2: so they programmed these initial scale designs into a computer
Speaker 2: used that to determine lens angles and camera movements to
Speaker 2: figure out how much they would actually need for coverage.
Speaker 2: This ended up being a fragment of the coliseum's first tier,
Speaker 2: about one third of the circumference of the original and
Speaker 2: fifty two feet high. Now, this also included sets for
Speaker 2: the lower portions of the arena where the gladiators enter
Speaker 2: an exit and the animals were released from. And then
Speaker 2: they also made a massive seventeen sale PVC and steel sunshade.
Speaker 2: This is somewhat historically inaccurate. In the gladiated times, they
Speaker 2: did have these massive sheets hanging over the seating crowd
Speaker 2: called valarium that were necessary because of the it was
Speaker 2: the Mediterranean at high noon. This one was controlled by
Speaker 2: a massive system of rigs and pulleys, and they used
Speaker 2: it to light and shade the set. Accordingly, cinematographer John
Speaker 2: Matheson called it the most expensive shadow ever and it's
Speaker 2: really beautiful in the film. I mean to know that
Speaker 2: they were using this thing to generate all the kirascuro
Speaker 2: the beautiful light and shading the shafts of light that
Speaker 2: come in really something. And then The rest of the
Speaker 2: imaging of the coliseum was handled by mill Film in London.
Speaker 2: They filled the structure with a combination of cardboard cutouts,
Speaker 2: two thousand real extras and about thirty three thousand CGI spectators,
Speaker 2: while also adding the rest of the structure digitally. Scott
Speaker 2: relied on natural lighting as much as possible for the
Speaker 2: film to achieve the proper pseudo realism, but they didn't
Speaker 2: need to create much of their set dressing. For example,
Speaker 2: the elaborate mosaic floor of Commodis's Joaquin Phoenix's chambers. Those
Speaker 2: were bespoke linoleum tiles that arrived in Malta in one
Speaker 2: hundred and forty boxes, accompanied by a team of employees
Speaker 2: straight from the fabricator who spent weeks piecing them together.
Speaker 2: Movie magic, I love it. Just blank checks. Now, of course,
Speaker 2: we have to get into the most fun parts of
Speaker 2: historical epic filmmaking. Wardrobe in weapons, costume designer Janty yeats
Speaker 2: wonderful name. She had got her start in the world
Speaker 2: of high fashion, and so she did research from artists
Speaker 2: like Sir Lawrence Alma Tadema and George de la Tour,
Speaker 2: and the resulting wardrobe that she designed of it. The
Speaker 2: Emperor's family was of course the most elaborate for Connie
Speaker 2: Nielsen's wardrobe. For example, not only the raw materials, so
Speaker 2: the raw fabric has gold thread woven into it, but
Speaker 2: then there's also gold thread that's embroidered in and around
Speaker 2: all the detailing to make it subtly shimmer in lighting.
Speaker 2: All of the footwear for the film was handmade in Rome,
Speaker 2: although devout vegan Joaquin Phoenix refused to wear period correct
Speaker 2: leather and I guess was given full leather. The Royal
Speaker 2: jewelry was largely handcrafted by England's Martin Adams, although one
Speaker 2: of Connie Nielsen's rings was a two thousand year old
Speaker 2: signet ring that she found an antique store and I
Speaker 2: guess she found it, yeah, and I guess bought it
Speaker 2: herself or build it to production which power move The
Speaker 2: armour portions of the wardrobeough had to be flexible and
Speaker 2: much lighter than they would have been in real life.
Speaker 2: So some of them like Committis's beautiful like white marble
Speaker 2: armor thing that he wears that was made of rubber
Speaker 2: which was then covered in leather or I guess vegan
Speaker 2: leather in precious Little Joaquin's case, although Crow's armour, since
Speaker 2: he was fighting in it, had to be made from
Speaker 2: leather covered foam, so these things would have just been
Speaker 2: like basically Halloween costumes wouild I love as opposed to
Speaker 2: like Lord of the Rings or Game of Thrones where
Speaker 2: they like handhampered. This sh it was just an enormous
Speaker 2: chore for people to wear. Also, fun fact for Crow
Speaker 2: and his stunt doubles every single piece of his armor,
Speaker 2: not just the breastplate, but the gloves, all the different
Speaker 2: discrete little pieces had to be made twelve times over
Speaker 2: every single piece twelve times for continuity so that they
Speaker 2: could have different stages of combat wear and et cetera.
Speaker 2: Production also put together five hundred gladiator tunics out of
Speaker 2: rough linen and over ten thousand other costumes for the
Speaker 2: rest of the cast and extras. Costume supervisor Rosemary Burrows
Speaker 2: had the fun job of supervising the quote costume villages
Speaker 2: that had to be set up to manage costume, hair
Speaker 2: and makeup on location, which for the Germania shoot also
Speaker 2: included mud baths. That's right, folks, mud baths. Friend of
Speaker 2: the Pod mud babs mudbaths so that they could just
Speaker 2: look disgusting and grimy, and Burrows was also responsible for
Speaker 2: finding the quaint little British ferrier. Who's that's a horse
Speaker 2: equipment maker? I believe I think you're right. Yeah, who
Speaker 2: made all the film's chain mail?
Speaker 1: Oh that wasn't like like fabric made the look like
Speaker 1: real chain mail.
Speaker 2: It was real chain mail, just rings.
Speaker 1: On the film's DVD commentary, Ridley Scott and Russell Crowe
Speaker 1: reveal a neat easter egg emblazoned on Maximus's breastplate. He
Speaker 1: names the horses Argento and Scatto, which means silver and
Speaker 1: more or less trigger and Silver was the name of
Speaker 1: the horse ridden by the Lone Ranger, and trigger was
Speaker 1: the name of the horse ridden by Roy Rogers. I
Speaker 1: love that nice little bit of Americana there hit in
Speaker 1: an ancient rome, and there are a few other little
Speaker 1: Easter eggs nestled throughout the film. You can hear a
Speaker 1: sample of chanting from the nineteen sixty four film Zulu
Speaker 1: mixed into the beginning of the Germania Battle. That's cool,
Speaker 1: and one of the totems carried by the opposing forces
Speaker 1: is a mask from the much mocked Sean Connery film
Speaker 1: Zardo's that's the one of him in the in the
Speaker 1: Sling the Sling speedo. Yes, yes, it's painted gray and
Speaker 1: subjected to appropriate weathering to make it look slightly less obvious. Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: art director Cliff Robinson was responsible for putting together the
Speaker 1: film's vehicles, which included the Royal carriage, but more importantly
Speaker 1: the chariots used in the Colisseum. They both had the
Speaker 1: look cool as hell and served various functions. Twenty four
Speaker 1: of these were built in total, which is incredible rannging
Speaker 1: from the more ornate ones used by a commutus Antigris
Speaker 1: of gall and sixteen of these were used for the
Speaker 1: battle scene. For that scene, some were stunt ready, meaning
Speaker 1: they were able to take a beating and or be destroyed,
Speaker 1: but others were constructed with special combat angle camera mounts.
Speaker 1: Cliff Robinson, the art director, also built the Roman War
Speaker 1: weapons like arrow volleying scorpions and two full sized catapults,
Speaker 1: each weighing a ton incapable of launching missiles four hundred
Speaker 1: and fifty feet.
Speaker 2: What a sick day, Yeah at work, I made that catapult.
Speaker 2: It works as one would expect. Over twenty five hundred
Speaker 2: pieces of weaponry were designed and manufactured by Simon Atherton
Speaker 2: and his team, although this figure does not include the
Speaker 2: sixteen thousand flaming and ten thousand non flaming arrows used
Speaker 2: in the opening scene. I saw figures somewhere that they
Speaker 2: made twenty seven five hundred individual armor components to be
Speaker 2: mixed and matched among the different extras. Simon Atherton is
Speaker 2: the real deal. He started his life as an armorer
Speaker 2: as an apprentice in a gun shop when he was sixteen,
Speaker 2: and subsequently went to work on two Indiana Jones's A Highlander,
Speaker 2: Two Aliens, A Bond, The Three Musketeers, Brave Heart, the
Speaker 2: Fifth Element. I don't know why I emphasized it like that.
Speaker 2: He made Ridley's gun, the pulse rifle in Aliens, which
Speaker 2: is like one of the most iconic pieces of sci
Speaker 2: fi weaponry ever, the mask of Zoro and the Mummy
Speaker 2: before getting onto Gladiator once again, Happy Mumvember to everyone. Ironically,
Speaker 2: Atherton says in the making of book that there was
Speaker 2: not much reference to be found in books for weaponry
Speaker 2: and armor from this period, sure Man, and so many
Speaker 2: of the film's weapons were original concept, like scissor shaped
Speaker 2: sword gauntlets and the multi firing crossbow used at one scene.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we can't really find much. So I got, I got,
Speaker 1: I got these cool things I was thinking about, Like
Speaker 1: we could just do that.
Speaker 2: Wow, scissor hands, any precedent for that in Hollywood recently?
Speaker 2: A guy with scissors for hands.
Speaker 1: One of the most well documented periods in human history. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I can't find much.
Speaker 2: We could go scissor hands. Really, Scott literally was like,
Speaker 2: give me a machine gun. And he says in that
Speaker 2: there's there's an there's like a three and a half
Speaker 2: hour making of on YouTube and I did not watch
Speaker 2: all of so caught me sleeping. But he talks about
Speaker 2: the machine gun, cross crossbone. He's like, I could even
Speaker 2: figure out how to sketch this thing out and design it,
Speaker 2: so I just had to build it. Like so it
Speaker 2: after a fashion Athington. This is interesting because there are
Speaker 2: like specific if you're a nerd like me, for taxonomy,
Speaker 2: there are like a bunch of actually documented types of
Speaker 2: gladiators that they got from frescoes and different writings. So
Speaker 2: like Murmillos is a specific class of gladiator who have
Speaker 2: these fish helms, and if you see these, it's hard
Speaker 2: to describe with in a podcast. But if you see
Speaker 2: these sort of goggle eyed, grilled mask with the big
Speaker 2: almost conquistador style helmets, like those archetypes are present in
Speaker 2: frescoes and stuff. And now that's how they pulled out
Speaker 2: of this. The aforementioned men with a tuna sword who
Speaker 2: could kill you in the source painting is called a
Speaker 2: reterrioris or retire. They were specifically armed with a trident
Speaker 2: and a net. Thracians had a very specific kind of
Speaker 2: almost boomerang as curved short sword. There were basically guys
Speaker 2: who just fought with enormous brass knuckles or like knife
Speaker 2: gloves and were otherwise unarmored. And then there was a
Speaker 2: special guy who appears in the film named for Pluto,
Speaker 2: the Roman god of the dead, and you can see
Speaker 2: him in the film. His job is to just he
Speaker 2: was specifically just to walk around the arena afterwards and
Speaker 2: with a giant spear combo spear club combo, just bash
Speaker 2: people's heads in real good if it didn't look like
Speaker 2: they were going to be able to recover. And so
Speaker 2: that one of those weapons is on auction, I believe
Speaker 2: currently it's called the A lot of this is on auction.
Speaker 2: It's all over Julian's in different prop places because they
Speaker 2: made so much of it. So if you want to
Speaker 2: for a loved one, or say a podcaster you really like,
Speaker 2: go buy one. They're called Elysium Dispatchers. So that's cool, man.
Speaker 2: The fun note that everyone about the hip hop nerds
Speaker 2: will note about this is that MF. Doom wears a
Speaker 2: version of Maximus's mask. Jordan. Hip hop is a genre
Speaker 2: speak rhythmically over beats. It might be a bit of
Speaker 2: a blind spot for you since the fifties. But sorry,
Speaker 2: that was necessarily mean. But yeah, that Maximus's mask that
Speaker 2: he first wears just became stage makeup for this for
Speaker 2: British rapper m F. Doom, who sadly died a few
Speaker 2: years back. At this point, I think Tigris of Gulls sick,
Speaker 2: absolutely raw as hell. Tiger head face mask that has
Speaker 2: a tear on one eye, it's so unbelievably cool as
Speaker 2: hell that was made up. Copies of certain weapons were
Speaker 2: also rendered in leather or rubber for close ups that
Speaker 2: required people to take real hits. And then I just
Speaker 2: want to drop in a quote about from Simon Atherton
Speaker 2: about archery, which is cool Roman archery. He said, while
Speaker 2: Roman soldiers would use they typically use short swords, spears
Speaker 2: and shields and military situations. He gave this very interesting
Speaker 2: breakdown of the Roman field tactics. You know, they had
Speaker 2: the They would first throw these spears that were very
Speaker 2: weakly constructed so that they couldn't be repurposed. They were
Speaker 2: javelins essentially that were designed to break. And then they
Speaker 2: would advance either with longer spears that were more sturdy
Speaker 2: behind shields, or the short swords which are called gladyeye.
Speaker 2: That's where you get the term gladiator from. And what
Speaker 2: Simon said is that Romans didn't actually like archery very
Speaker 2: much as a concept. That was more of a I
Speaker 2: think it evolved more of British stuff. But then he
Speaker 2: gives this insanely minute detail of how they were made.
Speaker 2: They used a horn and sinew bow because from that
Speaker 2: part of the world, Mediterraneans very dry wood. So you
Speaker 2: make a bow on a small wooden cord, and then
Speaker 2: on the outside you lay sinew from the achilles tendon
Speaker 2: or the backstrap of an animal dried out, and then
Speaker 2: the inside of the bow you put horn from an animal.
Speaker 2: So in fact what they were making was ancient. Three
Speaker 2: layered fiberglass. Wow, I think that's all so neat, really cool.
Speaker 1: You titled this next section do you like to hang
Speaker 1: around in men's locker rooms? We've been jerry judicious at
Speaker 1: the airplane quote.
Speaker 2: I must say, yeah, we haven't brought it back that much.
Speaker 1: Russell Crowe, Jim and Hansu and Ralph Mohler really hitting
Speaker 1: all my pronunciational blind spots.
Speaker 2: Here a real international casting of beefy Men.
Speaker 1: They were all trained by stunt coordinator Phil Nilsen and
Speaker 1: fight master Nicholas Powell. Russell Crow had an uphill battle
Speaker 1: from the start, sweating through farm chores at his ranch
Speaker 1: in Australia to try to lose forty pounds, and he'd
Speaker 1: put on for the insider to get back into fighting shape,
Speaker 1: so we maintained he didn't do much more.
Speaker 2: Than that, which is good for him.
Speaker 1: The three principal gladiators also lifted weights every day in
Speaker 1: a mobile gym on set where Moler, a former Mister Universe,
Speaker 1: would keep them pumped up. But all the training in
Speaker 1: the world doesn't account for accidents, and by all accounts
Speaker 1: there were a fair number. Hans So told Variety, I
Speaker 1: almost accidentally stab somebody in the head. In the fight
Speaker 1: sequence at the coliseum where Maximus gets on the horse,
Speaker 1: most of us got carried away, and I think when
Speaker 1: you're truly doing it for real, the pretend sort of
Speaker 1: goes out of the way and the emotion takes over.
Speaker 1: So a lot of people got hurt.
Speaker 2: He was also one of them.
Speaker 1: During the scene where he fights the gladiator and the
Speaker 1: horned bullhead Helm, the other actor made an unexpected head
Speaker 1: movement and one of the horns missed haunts Who's eyes
Speaker 1: by inches, instead cutting a deep gash into his shoulder.
Speaker 1: Jesus naturally. Russell Krog got the worst of these accidents.
Speaker 1: He was at one point told by production to stop
Speaker 1: playing soccer between filming because of the risk it post.
Speaker 1: He responded to this with a memo of his own, saying,
Speaker 1: I can wrestle four tigers, but I can't play a
Speaker 1: game of soccer. Get over it, love Russell. You know
Speaker 1: that's really missing. That's really lacking when it's not done.
Speaker 1: In the Australian accident, can you give us a I.
Speaker 2: Can wrestle with four times, but I can't play a
Speaker 2: game of soaka, get over it, love Russell. We have
Speaker 2: a love Russell, I'm doing a very specific like bogan
Speaker 2: like a it's a it's not like the nick Cave
Speaker 2: Australian accent, posh. It's a kind of rednecky Australian accent.
Speaker 1: It's a holeover from Crocodile dundee. Yeah, an experienced horseback rider.
Speaker 2: Crowd did his.
Speaker 1: Own riding during certain scenes, including during the fairly dangerous
Speaker 1: initial charge in the Germania battle scene the Betel Variety.
Speaker 1: There were shots in there where other people would double
Speaker 1: me and then they would complain about a shot and
Speaker 1: I would just be like, we'll just let me do
Speaker 1: it then. But that particular slope down into the battlefield
Speaker 1: with all the fire is going off and the explosions
Speaker 1: going off, that was actually a pretty hairy day.
Speaker 2: Russell Croade later detailed the breadth of his injuries from
Speaker 2: this film on inside the actor's studio. A lot of blood,
Speaker 2: a lot of blood, a lot of grazes, you know.
Speaker 2: I mean, I've still got a little scar here one
Speaker 2: under here on this elbow, a discolouration of the skin
Speaker 2: that is directly from Gladiator or just from being Australian.
Speaker 2: They are sun drenched people, Okay, it's.
Speaker 1: Right under the ozone the hole in the ozone layer exactly.
Speaker 2: He said. I've had achilles tendons go out, knees go out,
Speaker 2: both shoulders, this shoulders actually had an operation on it.
Speaker 2: I've got a lower back thing that just won't go away,
Speaker 2: and that's from a couple sort of fall impacts during
Speaker 2: fight sequences or whatever. I've got a ribub here that
Speaker 2: pops out every now and then, which is not very comfortable.
Speaker 2: Twenty years after the film, Crove joked to Variety, when
Speaker 2: you're younger, you're made of rubber and you can bounce
Speaker 2: back again. I do remember saying to my mom when
Speaker 2: I got home from that shoot. She said, how do
Speaker 2: you feel? I said, I actually feel like a football
Speaker 2: player who's played one season too many.
Speaker 1: Oh again, getting back to the Ali Reid thing that
Speaker 1: makes me sad. I just started, as you know, working
Speaker 1: out and training for the first time of my life
Speaker 1: at age thirty six, and I'm I'm kind of here's
Speaker 1: stories like this, and I'm kind of terrified. For a
Speaker 1: delicate flower like me. I'm sort of shocked. I haven't
Speaker 1: like hurt myself yet in the last couple of months.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but here I am here you are. You're surviving
Speaker 2: and shouts to your trainer, Lewis Luise. Yes, the Luise.
Speaker 1: He knows about the show. He wants me to send
Speaker 1: them episodes. Yeah, speak, he has me. Uh, let's see.
Speaker 1: It was deadlifting one seventy five this week. Damn dude,
Speaker 1: I was bench pressing one thirty five.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, man, check you out.
Speaker 1: Yeah trying, I'm trying. Only been a couple months. The
Speaker 1: film's menagerie of animal co stars were obviously yet another
Speaker 1: logistical hurdle. One particularly fraught situation was actually the dimensions
Speaker 1: of the Colosseum. The set was actually about fifteen percent
Speaker 1: too small for the horses, and they're five hundred pound
Speaker 1: chariots plus actors to turn around it and once they
Speaker 1: emerged up that long entrance ramp at full gallop, Ridley
Speaker 1: Scott says in the making of book, they can't turn
Speaker 1: because they're going too fast. They just have to rein
Speaker 1: in and slow down fast. And I knew I was
Speaker 1: fifteen percent short, so it was really tricky. They were
Speaker 1: grazing the other end of the stadium.
Speaker 2: Ooh, that sounds dangerous.
Speaker 1: They also used cameras on rigs being towed by ATVs
Speaker 1: for some of these shots, which added another fun element
Speaker 1: of unpredictability. Chief animal trainer Paul Reynolds sourced most of
Speaker 1: the animals on the film, including tigers, leopards, girafts, lions, vultures, zebras,
Speaker 1: and let's not forget an elephant. Owing to the difficulties
Speaker 1: of transporting exotic animals over international boundaries. However, production had
Speaker 1: to borrow animals from a local zoo when they were
Speaker 1: shooting in Morocco, of which Reynolds has the following cheerful
Speaker 1: note in the book. Of course, these are not animals
Speaker 1: that have been raised and trained for this work. They're
Speaker 1: really wild. But everyone survived and we sent all the
Speaker 1: animals back healthy.
Speaker 2: But you don't want to hear about that. No, you
Speaker 2: want to hear about Russell Crowe fighting tigers. Oh yeah,
Speaker 2: which would be said to learn he did not actually
Speaker 2: do on Phil James Brown Outs bands right now? Yeah, yeah, fellas,
Speaker 2: can I tell him about Russell crow fighting tigers? Tell
Speaker 2: about Russell coll fighting tigers? He didn't actually do it?
Speaker 2: Take him? Yeah, So really, Scott had storyboard in that
Speaker 2: whole fight, and he had overconfidently budgeted a mere four
Speaker 2: days for tiger's shooting purposes. This ended up taking weeks.
Speaker 2: The workflow was, at least in some parts alarmingly real.
Speaker 2: Animal trainers would use bait to get the tigers to lunge,
Speaker 2: leap and roar with, you know, just chunks of meat,
Speaker 2: and their controls were just the chains you see in
Speaker 2: the film, just a caller and some chains to run
Speaker 2: through ira eye hooks, you know, in the ground. But
Speaker 2: these were done independently of Crow's stuntwork and his stunt actors,
Speaker 2: So basically they would composite shots. Basically, the tigers do
Speaker 2: something in one take that they put Crow or his
Speaker 2: stunt double in a you know, another in the same background,
Speaker 2: film their reaction, and then they paste it together. And
Speaker 2: this happened daily. Film editor patro Scalia would view the
Speaker 2: dailies to see if he had enough of these angles
Speaker 2: to edit with and then ask for reshoots accordingly, Now
Speaker 2: that there were some shots that they did do within
Speaker 2: a degree of distance, Ridley Scott in the book says
Speaker 2: that he allowed for fifteen feet of distance between the
Speaker 2: tigers and actors most of the time, although in recent
Speaker 2: years that number has shrunk. In the telling, he said
Speaker 2: to Variety the tiger would come out of the hole
Speaker 2: and Russell would roll out of the way and he
Speaker 2: said me, that was close, and I said, we were
Speaker 2: there as well, Russell, you were two feet I was
Speaker 2: like four feet. Anyway, four six hundred pound tigers were
Speaker 2: used for that fight scene. Two were more docile ones
Speaker 2: from the US that had been hand raised, and two
Speaker 2: were quote less predictable ones from France. This is where
Speaker 2: you fade in the so fade in that music. In France,
Speaker 2: we do not trains italielles MWC and feeds in the
Speaker 2: cigarette wine, collected cameo and paperback. Buff.
Speaker 1: What does buff means?
Speaker 2: It's just like buff is like a standard French interjection
Speaker 2: that's kind of like, you know, just saying like m
Speaker 2: er yeah, I guess like buff usually a companied by
Speaker 2: like an eye roll. So much of the close distance
Speaker 2: shots that you do see were created with a full
Speaker 2: size animatronic tiger that could be positioned over Maximus's shoulders
Speaker 2: and move or on top of him and move suspended,
Speaker 2: be suspended in mid air for leaping shots, and so
Speaker 2: the shots that you see in the final film were
Speaker 2: achieved by a combination of compositing, real tigers, with the
Speaker 2: actors and the animatronic one and some subtle CGI work.
Speaker 2: One of the live tigers actually did get sort of
Speaker 2: loose one day. It reared back suddenly on its chain
Speaker 2: and it knocked its handler to the ground, and so
Speaker 2: all this slack went into the chain and he had
Speaker 2: to run and scramble to grab it before the thing
Speaker 2: had enough lead to I guess eat crow, get it work.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that was good. That was nice. That was nice.
Speaker 2: Thank you. There isn't a count in the fantastically named
Speaker 2: Russell Crowe a life, a book I found in Google
Speaker 2: Books that claims there was a point at which Tigers
Speaker 2: of gall actor seven ol Thorson was pinned to the
Speaker 2: ground by an arrant tiger at one point which Russell
Speaker 2: Crowe distracted by swatting it on the butt with his
Speaker 2: rubber sword. Which, okay, man, I believe that he said,
Speaker 2: winking heavily. And Maximus' dog meant to be a wolf, obviously,
Speaker 2: the Roman Romulus and rimas you know, the whole thing
Speaker 2: about Rome Wolf, et cetera. Britain's strict anti rabies laws
Speaker 2: meant that they could not use a real wolf for
Speaker 2: filming those nanny state Yeah, I know, because of woke
Speaker 2: They don't want you to have a wolf for a pack. Yeah,
Speaker 2: the woke left doesn't want you to have wolves, so
Speaker 2: they used a teruvi teruvein Belgian shepherd dog's name was Kite.
Speaker 2: He appears with Russell Crowe in the Battle of Germania scenes.
Speaker 2: Now that dog may be familiar to the anglophiles among you,
Speaker 2: because it plays Robbie Jackson's dog Wellard in the British
Speaker 2: TV show east Enders.
Speaker 1: English Friends there, John and company. Yes, yes, he doesn't
Speaker 1: strike me as an EastEnders fan though.
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly. So. Oh, here's a depressing historical sidebar. Annimal
Speaker 2: blood sports were so popular in Rome that records suggest
Speaker 2: one emperor killed up to five thousand animals in one
Speaker 2: three day stretch of games. Elephants, rhinos. So you'll notice
Speaker 2: in the sequel there's a scene with a rhino. Ridley
Speaker 2: wanted to put a rhino into this film. They could
Speaker 2: not wrangle it. So, of course, like what's his name,
Speaker 2: Streisan director John Peters, So of course, like John p
Speaker 2: who was agitating for a giant spider scene in the
Speaker 2: Kevin Smith Superman, didn't get it. That film didn't get made,
Speaker 2: and so then in Wild Wild West, which he also produced,
Speaker 2: got an enormous CGI monstrosity giant spider. Ridley Scott wanted
Speaker 2: a rhino ingladiator and twenty four years later got his
Speaker 2: damn CGI rhinos scene. So yeah, they would use rhinos, tigers, cheetahs,
Speaker 2: all leopards, just anything they could get their hands on,
Speaker 2: and throwing an arena against humans bears. Sorry, what are
Speaker 2: you laughing at?
Speaker 1: I just love how you phrased animal blood sports like
Speaker 1: animal blood sports?
Speaker 2: What are they and what can they do for you?
Speaker 2: And now a letter?
Speaker 1: Yeah, here's a letter.
Speaker 2: Here's a letter. Commodus. So he's the emperor portrayed by
Speaker 2: Joaquin Phoenix was in reality quite an ace with a spear.
Speaker 2: According to some records, he once gave himself one hundred
Speaker 2: spears to kill one hundred lions and did so.
Speaker 1: A spear a lion. I appreciate that he I guess
Speaker 1: you wouldn't remove your spirit from a dead lion.
Speaker 2: That's just he was throwing them, I believe.
Speaker 1: Oh oh oh okay.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah yeah. This wasn't out of concern for economy
Speaker 2: or the animals.
Speaker 1: What was the quote from was a shade O'Connor described
Speaker 1: some man as a swordsman.
Speaker 2: Oh, that was you're referring to. You were referring to
Speaker 2: Sinead O'Connor describing Peter Gabriel as a bit of a swordsman.
Speaker 1: Excuse me wrong, member of Genesis.
Speaker 2: Yes, yes, yes, yeah, because because Kate Bush turned him
Speaker 2: down when they did their duet. Ah right, I'm so
Speaker 2: glad she was never sullied by him. As you meditate
Speaker 2: on that, We'll be right back with more too much
Speaker 2: information after these messages.
Speaker 1: The gladiator Tigris is played by a Danish strong man
Speaker 1: named spann Ole Thornson. I feel like I could have
Speaker 1: given more to that, Penincia.
Speaker 2: I'm pretty sure it's svan Olthorson, not ole, as a
Speaker 2: Spanish interjection used in bull fighting, him being Danish, right, right,
Speaker 2: right right.
Speaker 1: He was an old bunny of Arnold Schwarzenegger's Going Back
Speaker 1: to the Mister Universe days, and Old Arnie brought him
Speaker 1: along with him into the film world for films.
Speaker 2: Like Conan, the Barbarian and The Running Man.
Speaker 1: He ultimately wound up in fifteen of Arnold's films. He's
Speaker 1: the boter hat wearing security guard La Four's in Molrats
Speaker 1: also Kevin Smith.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well and that's our second Kevin Smith Reverence. John
Speaker 2: Peters story is from Kevin Smith Prevence. How about that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, for him, the role of Tiggris was a hot
Speaker 1: one pension Tigris.
Speaker 2: Jesus Christ, he's got tigers.
Speaker 1: You're right, I'm sorry, the role of Tigris again, I'm sorry, yes,
Speaker 1: but tiger Tigris. I said Tigris. You said Tigris then now,
Speaker 1: and now I said Tigris.
Speaker 2: There's a really funny pressed junket clip of when they
Speaker 2: were doing I think it was Nightcrawler Jake Gillenhall, and
Speaker 2: they're doing one of those junket things with the whole
Speaker 2: principal cast, and the director says something like, well there's
Speaker 2: a real sense of melancholy in this film or something,
Speaker 2: and a furious Jake Gillenhal interjects melancholy. It's melancholy, and
Speaker 2: everyone sort of nervously jitter laughs, and then he just
Speaker 2: very cataly goes and it's not the first time today,
Speaker 2: So sorry, Yeah, it's it's Tigris, buddy.
Speaker 1: The role of Tigris was a hot one production, originally
Speaker 1: thought of stunt casting Arnold himself to play the Gladiator
Speaker 1: while ex incredible Hulk. Lou Farigno, who I always thought
Speaker 1: was kind of a punchline, though I guess he's huge,
Speaker 1: claimed that he was originally cast on the role before
Speaker 1: Schwarzenegger threw his weight around.
Speaker 2: Pun intended you.
Speaker 1: Right to get Florence and cast for Igno's quota is
Speaker 1: saying Schwarzenegger was jealous and he would rather have his
Speaker 1: friend because I was more of a threat. I was
Speaker 1: in the film. I had auditioned twice and I had
Speaker 1: the part. The casting agent told me that it had
Speaker 1: to do with Schwarzenegger. Apparently he was kind of jealous,
Speaker 1: so they switched rolls and Spenn felt bad about it.
Speaker 1: He's a good friend of mine. Schwarzenegger for Rigno have
Speaker 1: this weird dynamic because they're both in pumping iron together
Speaker 1: or the former can be seen mocking Loo's body.
Speaker 2: It's so funny too, because, like you know, if you
Speaker 2: see Schwarzenegger, he's actually short for weightlifter, and there's a
Speaker 2: pick of him. I mean, he's not short for a human,
Speaker 2: but like Forigno towers over him. There's that shot on
Speaker 2: Conan two where it's Wilt Chamberlain and under the giant
Speaker 2: like lifting up Arnold Schwarzenegger, and he looks like a toddler.
Speaker 1: It looks like the Twins poster, but he is.
Speaker 2: Two. Macho macha man. I didn't know where else to
Speaker 2: put this, but here's a surprise cinematographer moment, yay. John
Speaker 2: Matthey detailed his work on the film for the American
Speaker 2: Society of Cinematographers, explaining that he and Scott would as
Speaker 2: the storyboard artist. Earlier said employed up to seven cameras
Speaker 2: at a time for various scenes, from handheld cameras to
Speaker 2: the so called giraffe cranes, but his real trick for
Speaker 2: the film was shooting the battle scenes at various frame
Speaker 2: rates and with a forty five degree shutter. This is
Speaker 2: a method that had been recently seen in Saving Private Ryan,
Speaker 2: which helps make fast moving action feel more real and
Speaker 2: better captures minute movements without getting too nerdy about how
Speaker 2: lens's work. When you're shooting moving images, the anger the
Speaker 2: angle of the shutter forms a proportion to the time
Speaker 2: that each frame of film, the length of time that
Speaker 2: each frame film is exposed. A one hundred and eighty
Speaker 2: shutter angle is considered normal for your twenty four frames
Speaker 2: per second film shooting, So a tighter shutter angle will
Speaker 2: constrict motion blur. And when you see this in Saving
Speaker 2: Private Ryan, and you see this in Gladiator, that means
Speaker 2: when the look in quality changes, that's the shutter angle.
Speaker 2: But then what it means is that stuff like swords
Speaker 2: rather than blurring or sand in Saving Private Ryan, rather
Speaker 2: than blurring, you can see a lot more of the
Speaker 2: kind of individual frames of those action scenes. And this
Speaker 2: is also different from what would then be seen in
Speaker 2: three hundred and what has become a signature move of
Speaker 2: that jerk Off Zack Snyder called ramping, which is an
Speaker 2: effect that happens in the battle scenes where the overall
Speaker 2: rate of action suddenly slowed down to like a slow
Speaker 2: motion thing, and then very immediately sped up within the
Speaker 2: same shot. That's called ramping. That's different than shutter angle.
Speaker 1: It's like when you're tubing and the boat turns really
Speaker 1: quick and the rope hasn't had a chance to catch up,
Speaker 1: so you're just sitting there very still and you know
Speaker 1: it's about to like whip you, and then it does.
Speaker 2: Some people listening may get that that was such a
Speaker 2: far field reference from you. I could not bear to interrupt.
Speaker 2: I've been tubing. I just wouldn't connect that to movie magic.
Speaker 2: Oh you peasant, I connected the pain. Uh sorry. Since
Speaker 2: we're talking about camera stuff, it is also worth pointing
Speaker 2: out that one of the definitive images of the film,
Speaker 2: Maximus's hand passing over the grass in his fields as
Speaker 2: he dies, was a last second addition to the film,
Speaker 2: and that is not even Russell Crowe's hand as really.
Speaker 2: Scott explained it to Deadline in twenty twenty three. It
Speaker 2: was the last shot of principal photography. Russell didn't come
Speaker 2: to Italy. That was his double. The guy was standing
Speaker 2: there in this field smoking. I say, get out of
Speaker 2: the field. Are you joking? It was midsummer dry, He says,
Speaker 2: oh sorry, man. He walked off the field and did
Speaker 2: that thing with the hand. I said, stop right there,
Speaker 2: get the steady camp. We followed the hand. It became
Speaker 2: the list for immortality or Heaven if you like. Right there.
Speaker 2: It was discovered the last day. Spontaneously, Russell said, you'll
Speaker 2: never use that. I said I will when he saw
Speaker 2: the scene. When he saw on the scene, he groaned,
Speaker 2: I said, too late. It's shot I got it, mate.
Speaker 2: It was put out that cigarette and get the steady
Speaker 2: cam and don't walk on the wheat. What a character
Speaker 2: he is.
Speaker 1: Hans Zimmer, who sucks before before you, before you go?
Speaker 2: Do you see?
Speaker 1: There was some junket I must have been for Gladiator too.
Speaker 2: Who really?
Speaker 1: Scott was being interviewed and the reporter had previously talked,
Speaker 1: like in the months earlier to some famous filmmaker. I
Speaker 1: forget who it was, and he had the clip up
Speaker 1: on an iPad that he showed Ridley and was like,
Speaker 1: look look at this this director saying like how much
Speaker 1: you mean to him? And really was like I think
Speaker 1: I'm gonna cry. And the interview was like really He's
Speaker 1: like no, and they was just like what.
Speaker 2: A dick. Never forget he was an ad man, you know,
Speaker 2: he is literally don draper, Hans Zimmer, controversial guy. I
Speaker 2: didn't know that. Yeah, some of the charge. I mean,
Speaker 2: he doesn't read music, which is sort of the thing
Speaker 2: that immediately puts a lot of people off of him.
Speaker 2: He's incredibly gifted with a piano midi scoring piano role
Speaker 2: what they call it in midi when you can just
Speaker 2: you basically are just orchestrating an entire thing through MIDI
Speaker 2: just to the keyboard. So he's supposed to be very
Speaker 2: like a virtue also with that, but doesn't read music properly.
Speaker 2: One of the big charges from him is that he's
Speaker 2: one of those guys who, you know, this happens all
Speaker 2: the time. Composers come in and they just go, here's
Speaker 2: the theme, like, here's the melodic structure for this moment.
Speaker 2: I want to make it sound like ex composer, and
Speaker 2: then like five or six interns or staff orchestrators they're
Speaker 2: called fill that in. And that is apparently like especially gratuitous.
Speaker 2: In Zimmer's studio. It will just come in and be like,
Speaker 2: you know, here's this melodic frame, and then like all
Speaker 2: of his people who are either not credited or very underpaid,
Speaker 2: actually make it sound like what you're hearing and do
Speaker 2: what a lot of people would consume is the actual
Speaker 2: work of composition, harmonies, rhythmic motif elaborations, etc. But that's
Speaker 2: not even what we're talking about here. We're just talking
Speaker 2: about straight up theft. Zimmer's score for Gladiator contains what,
Speaker 2: depending on where you fall in this conception, this understanding
Speaker 2: of art is either homage references jumping points, or just
Speaker 2: straight up theft to Gustav Holst's suite the Planets, in
Speaker 2: particular Mars, the Burner of War. Now nerds will also
Speaker 2: remember that this dramatically informs John Williams's score for Star Wars,
Speaker 2: particularly the Imperial March is the one that's widely cited
Speaker 2: as using Mars as jumping off point. Zimmer didn't stop there.
Speaker 2: He also decided to yank stuff from Wagner, particularly the
Speaker 2: ring cycle. Now this this is standard practice, you know,
Speaker 2: this happens all the time. But Zimmer's quotation of Holst
Speaker 2: was glaring enough to merit a lawsuit from the Holst Foundation,
Speaker 2: who sued Zimmer over it in two thousand and six. Now,
Speaker 2: in the liner notes, Hans himself copped to using quote
Speaker 2: the same language, the same vocabulary, if not the same syntax,
Speaker 2: which is an incredibly weasily thing to say. Let's parse
Speaker 2: that for a second. The same language, the same vocabulary,
Speaker 2: but not the syntax, meaning all of the words and
Speaker 2: all of the specific.
Speaker 1: Words put in a different rhythm.
Speaker 2: I don't know. You can go on YouTube and find
Speaker 2: this in ten seconds and make the judgment for yourself.
Speaker 2: This was, of course settled out of court, presumably by Zimmer,
Speaker 2: who just wanted to avoid the bad press, I guess,
Speaker 2: and he has literally also copped to this in interviews.
Speaker 2: I found one where he said, and I love this.
Speaker 2: I managed to assume the style of Wagner so easily
Speaker 2: that I was able to write that piece and Gladiator
Speaker 2: in an hour, although also in that interview he says
Speaker 2: the whole theft evolved as an accident. I also read
Speaker 2: one other thing that says an early part of Zimmer's
Speaker 2: queue for the battle lifts a melodic passage from Tchaikowsky's
Speaker 2: Symphony Number six. So take all this theft homage however
Speaker 2: you will, but the Gladiator score drama doesn't stop there.
Speaker 2: A few years later, fans noticed a striking similarity between
Speaker 2: one of Gladiator's themes and the main theme of the
Speaker 2: Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, Caribbean. Whatever the emphosisis is
Speaker 2: there Paramel. The film's music was originally supposed to have
Speaker 2: been done by Alan Silvestri, who left that production over
Speaker 2: differences with producer Jerry Brockheimer. Zimmer took over the job
Speaker 2: with another composer named Klaus Badelt, who was employed by
Speaker 2: Zimmer's film scoring company, and Zimmer supposed that they wrote
Speaker 2: much of the themes for this for Pirates in a
Speaker 2: single night. He repurposed, allegedly, if you will, rather than
Speaker 2: self plagiarized or just recycled themes from not only Gladiator,
Speaker 2: but also a score he wrote for a movie called
Speaker 2: Drop Zone. And he may have also taken stuff that
Speaker 2: he composed for The Lion King to Simba's Pride. So
Speaker 2: punch all this in because it's difficult to describe, but
Speaker 2: people on YouTube have done the legwork of comparing the
Speaker 2: Gladiator theme to the Pirates theme and yes, also to
Speaker 2: the line kicked two simplest Pride theme. Yes, so yeah,
Speaker 2: I don't know. I don't I don't like Han Zimmer
Speaker 2: very much. The vocals, though, are interesting. Apparently Pavaratti was
Speaker 2: offered a song on the Gladiator soundtrack and he turned
Speaker 2: it down. He said later in an interview with Billboard
Speaker 2: that it was a regret of his but he performs
Speaker 2: the song titled unsurprisingly ill Gladiatore in concert. Lisa Girard
Speaker 2: is the woman from much of the score. Throughout the
Speaker 2: eighties and nineties, she had been one half of the
Speaker 2: Gothic world music, experimental Melbourne ensemble. Dead Can Dance music
Speaker 2: was described once by Ian McFarlane as constructed soundscapes of
Speaker 2: mesmerizing grandeur and solemn beauty, African polyrhythms, Gaelic folk, Gregorian chant,
Speaker 2: Middle Eastern music, mantras and art rock plug for Dead
Speaker 2: Can Dance. The group disbanded in nineteen ninety eight, but
Speaker 2: Gerard continued as a prolific solo artist. She comes into
Speaker 2: the film world with nineteen ninety nine's The Insider, which
Speaker 2: is the film that Russell Crowe got super fat for
Speaker 2: and then had to lose a bunch of weight for
Speaker 2: for Gladiator, and then she worked with on the Zimmer
Speaker 2: on Gladiator. Interesting only Zimmer was nominated for Best Score
Speaker 2: at the Oscars, but the Golden Globes at least recognized
Speaker 2: Gerard's contributions to the film. She has a contralto register,
Speaker 2: but she can also access the higher ranges of a
Speaker 2: mezzo soprano, which is why you hear music journalists cliches
Speaker 2: like otherworldly being fixed to descriptions of her voice. Many
Speaker 2: of her songs this is interesting, especially in Gladiator, are
Speaker 2: sung in what's called idioglossia, which is a technical term
Speaker 2: for self created idiosyncratic language. You might hear it reference
Speaker 2: in terms of singer ros, where the lead singer Jonzi
Speaker 2: sings in a made up language that he has termed Hopelandic,
Speaker 2: but the more technical linguistic term for that is idio
Speaker 2: glossia like.
Speaker 1: David Bowie and Lowe or sawa.
Speaker 2: Oh he's made up Italian gibberish. Yeah, forever immortalized it.
Speaker 2: That parody video, I just sing a bunch of a
Speaker 2: weird tangibbirch. Wow, that was a that was a good bullie.
Speaker 2: I love the one that the quote from that video
Speaker 2: I love is it's really doing depressing piece of music, Brian.
Speaker 2: If I don't put it on one of my arms,
Speaker 2: why don't we just save it for one of your
Speaker 2: weird ones.
Speaker 1: Tony Visconti doing a lot more than people think.
Speaker 2: Can we add some reverb on there? Sure thing? Co
Speaker 2: producer Tony Visconti adding reverb. Probably doing a lot more
Speaker 2: than most people would actually think on this record. Uh
Speaker 2: punch that in, man, Yeah, it's so good instead of
Speaker 2: my impression, and folks can compare so well.
Speaker 3: Have you been up to while I've been away? Brian, Well,
Speaker 3: I've been working on a piece of music. Actually, David,
Speaker 3: if you don't like it, I'll use it on one
Speaker 3: of my weird albums. Do you want to have a listen?
Speaker 2: Yes, I'd love to hear it.
Speaker 3: I could use some cheering up. Could you roll the
Speaker 3: tape for us, please, Tony Visconti, Yeah, sure, I mean
Speaker 3: I am co producing this record, so it's not a
Speaker 3: big problem for me doing a lot of co production.
Speaker 3: Probably more than people think.
Speaker 2: Here we go, so there you go. Lisa Gerard has
Speaker 2: stated of this approach, I sing in the language of
Speaker 2: the heart, to which I say it is an invented
Speaker 2: language I've had for a very long time. I believe
Speaker 2: I started singing in it when I was about twelve.
Speaker 2: I believed that I was speaking to God when I
Speaker 2: sang in that language. Sure thing, Lisa Jordan stifling a yawn, No,
Speaker 2: I wasn't a yawn it.
Speaker 1: I'm just thinking of like her and torri Amos and
Speaker 1: died oh uh and who else? And Kate Bush maybe
Speaker 1: and maybe even Stevie Nicks. I'm just thinking of this
Speaker 1: coven of like slightly Celtic witchy ladies. Yeah, there's something
Speaker 1: that's a big one. I'm forgetting only one.
Speaker 2: Of them had the brass balls and dame an entire
Speaker 2: song after a reverb patch would be our Deer or
Speaker 2: an engineer, which would be our dear Enya.
Speaker 1: And yeah, that was the one I was thinking of that.
Speaker 2: I yeah, Orinoco Flow fun fun fact for people is
Speaker 2: both the name of the river and let me just
Speaker 2: double check that. Yes, the title of Orinoco Flow is
Speaker 2: an illusion to both the river and the studio where
Speaker 2: it was recorded. Ah, And she says that in the
Speaker 2: song with Rob Dickens at the Wheel also co producer,
Speaker 2: this is so funny to me. I just think it's
Speaker 2: so funny. Then, and everyone whateveryone thinks about or the Flow,
Speaker 2: They just go sllo way say hello way way right.
Speaker 2: But in those lyrics, she literally says, with Rob Dickens,
Speaker 2: executive producer of the album at the Wheel and then
Speaker 2: also co producer Ross Column, we can sigh say goodbye
Speaker 2: Ross and his dependencies, which is a pun on the
Speaker 2: Ross dependency region of Antarctica, and yeah, man that whips.
Speaker 1: Should we do a I was joking about this with
Speaker 1: front of the pod Dora. Should we do a Pure
Speaker 1: Moods episode?
Speaker 2: Yes, Jordan, we should.
Speaker 1: I can't tell if everything sarcastic, but I know I'm.
Speaker 2: Being dead series that could be a joint one. And
Speaker 2: let's do pure moods. That would be awesome.
Speaker 1: Because there's so many great songs on there with insane stories.
Speaker 1: I mean, even Mike Oldfield and you what else is
Speaker 1: some pure moods?
Speaker 2: X Files theme a trance a trance remix.
Speaker 1: Of the X Files theme of memory serves right, right,
Speaker 1: right right, Vangelis share it's a fire. Of course, there's
Speaker 1: Anyo Marconi song which I don't remember which one, uh
Speaker 1: Chiemihi's not familiar with. I would have thought they would
Speaker 1: have gone with, Oh and the mission and theme from
Speaker 1: the mission too.
Speaker 2: I was gonna say Gabriels Gabriel's Obo.
Speaker 1: Kenny g Songbird of course, another Green World Brian Eno
Speaker 1: Twin Peaks theme of course.
Speaker 2: Yep, great, Yeah, that would rule. Yeah, No, that's really fun.
Speaker 1: And now we get to kind of my favorite section
Speaker 1: of this episode, historical fact checking, granular, pedantic No. So yes,
Speaker 1: as you may have gleaned from what everyone said so
Speaker 1: far about this film, total historical accuracy was very much
Speaker 1: not a concern for this production. Aside from the spinning crossbow,
Speaker 1: which we know for a fact didn't exist. There are
Speaker 1: a number of other inaccuracies that have been raised since
Speaker 1: the film first hit screens, which allegedly costs historians working
Speaker 1: as consultants on the film to either quit or ask
Speaker 1: their names be removed from the credits. Fact number one.
Speaker 1: Despite looking cool as hell, catapults and the arrow firing
Speaker 1: scorpions depicted in the opening scene probably wouldn't have been
Speaker 1: deployed for ground combat in a forested area. Those were
Speaker 1: largely siege tools and considered unwieldly for fighting in open battles,
Speaker 1: particularly one surrounded by trees. Fact number two. In real life,
Speaker 1: Marcus Aurelius did not ban gladiator fights as his filmic
Speaker 1: version did.
Speaker 2: He did stop attempted to do right.
Speaker 1: However, he did stop funding them from the Imperial Coffers
Speaker 1: as a budgetary move, and some historical records also claim
Speaker 1: that he suggested a switch to wooden swords so that
Speaker 1: skilled gladiators wouldn't die in the arena, which was itself
Speaker 1: a way to ensure that he'd have reserves of gladiators
Speaker 1: to draft in battle. So okay, anything nice that he
Speaker 1: did for these people was done purely to benefit the state.
Speaker 2: Love it.
Speaker 1: Marcus Aurelius was not murdered by his son Commitists in
Speaker 1: real life. He died of probably disease related natural causes
Speaker 1: in one eighteen CE after three years of essentially acting
Speaker 1: as co emperor with Commdasts.
Speaker 2: Commonists only ruled.
Speaker 1: Alone for about twelve more years until his death in
Speaker 1: one hundred and ninety two CE. Common era fact number three,
Speaker 1: The film's hero never existed. This one's had of a
Speaker 1: gimme Maximus is likely a combination of several historical figures,
Speaker 1: including Tarutinus Patronus, the commander of Roman forces at the
Speaker 1: Great Battle against the Germanic tribes in.
Speaker 2: One seventy nine A. D.
Speaker 1: Narcissius, the wrestler who actually killed Commodius in real life.
Speaker 2: Which was originally the name in the script. That was
Speaker 2: Maximus's character in the script got to give it to
Speaker 2: David Franzoni for that.
Speaker 1: Did he change it because everyone thinks of narcissists when
Speaker 1: they hear that, or.
Speaker 2: Just I think Ridley Scott bullied him. Any change of
Speaker 2: this could probably come down to like an irascible Englishman
Speaker 2: and an old fish Australian man leaned over him and said,
Speaker 2: I think we should do this.
Speaker 1: And also another real life person who likely factored into
Speaker 1: the character of Maximus is Tiberius Claudius Pompeianus. That sounds
Speaker 1: like a made up name. That sounds like something from
Speaker 1: money Pipon's Life of Barn. He came from a humble
Speaker 1: background in Syria and became a favorite general of Marcus
Speaker 1: Aurelius in real life, marrying.
Speaker 2: His daughter Lucia.
Speaker 1: I'll tell us more facts.
Speaker 2: I love the facts. Well. Keen, Phoenix's commodist was so
Speaker 2: much worse in real life. He was only eighteen at
Speaker 2: the time of the death his father and was very
Speaker 2: serious about his gladiatorial training. He allegedly boasted six hundred
Speaker 2: and twenty victories according to his own writings, and this
Speaker 2: is actually probably accurate because nobody would actually try and
Speaker 2: kill the emperor, so like he was the Harlem globetrotters
Speaker 2: of Gladiator or by deforce, he's spinning the sword on
Speaker 2: his finger, just stab him. He's got a lumper, he's
Speaker 2: got a ladder, so this would he would spare their
Speaker 2: lives though, But while he was practicing, though, he did
Speaker 2: like to kill his sparring partners. He was just kind
Speaker 2: of a male slot of the era. A lot of
Speaker 2: writings make reference to his good looks and height, but
Speaker 2: he didn't have a thing for his sister. Just hundreds
Speaker 2: of conki male, one of which may have been a sister.
Speaker 2: Who's to say they slip in in the middle of
Speaker 2: one of the lurgies done, you know, there'd be no
Speaker 2: way of knowing, there would no be yeah, you know,
Speaker 2: writings about the real Commudists paint him is just kind
Speaker 2: of stupid with a sadistic streak, a bit cowardly and
Speaker 2: overly impressionable. Mostly just a himbo who was really into
Speaker 2: slaughtering exotic animals in Rome's arenas, but not just limited
Speaker 2: to that. He publicly slaughtered amputees who were veterans of
Speaker 2: Roman wars, a fun little quirk, and though he wasn't
Speaker 2: actually killed by a gladiator in the ring, he did
Speaker 2: meet a suitably brutal end. First, he was poisoned by
Speaker 2: his mistress, and although that didn't take while recovering from
Speaker 2: this process, his enemies tasked Commatist's wrestling partner, the aforementioned Narcissus,
Speaker 2: with strangling the emperor in the bath. The entire thumb system,
Speaker 2: and this is much funnier, is actually inverted. In ancient Rome,
Speaker 2: thumbs up meant raise your sword and strike the killing blow,
Speaker 2: while thumbs down meant lower and sheath your sword. But
Speaker 2: because of the ingrained modern associations with the gestures, they
Speaker 2: have been inverted in pretty much all gladiatorial depictions. Is
Speaker 2: that interesting, Jordan?
Speaker 1: That's I like that a lot.
Speaker 2: I didn't know that. Now we give somebody the thumbs up,
Speaker 2: you can really mean I want someone to raise a
Speaker 2: sword and kill you. The film's nod to Christianity as
Speaker 2: religion are completely incorrect. The movie opens in one ADC,
Speaker 2: but Christianity didn't make any headway over the Roman Empire
Speaker 2: until about two hundred years later. Most characters in the
Speaker 2: film referred to the arena as the Colosseum, the twenty
Speaker 2: first century name of the massive structure. However, in the
Speaker 2: ancient world it is known much less casually as the
Speaker 2: Flavian Amphitheater, after one of the emperors who aided in
Speaker 2: its construction. Not until the Middle Ages did people refer
Speaker 2: to it as the Colosseum. The notion of Maximus being
Speaker 2: known as a Spaniard is preposterous. The Romans had occupied
Speaker 2: the Iberian Peninsula and the region was known as Hispania,
Speaker 2: but it was just considered part of Rome. The earliest
Speaker 2: use of the term Spaniard didn't even pop up until
Speaker 2: the fifteenth century. The entire naming conventions used in the
Speaker 2: movie are inaccurate. Romans had three names, the first name,
Speaker 2: the family name, and then an added name denoting position
Speaker 2: e g. Gayis Julius Caesar, who would went by Caesar.
Speaker 2: High ranking Romans went by their second or third name,
Speaker 2: since they weren't as common, so as in the film,
Speaker 2: someone named Maximus Decimus Meritis would have been addressed as
Speaker 2: either Decimus or Meredis. While there are plenty of minute
Speaker 2: anachronisms as far as the wardrobe, arms, and armor, one
Speaker 2: of the worst is probably the every German in the
Speaker 2: opening scene are depicted as wearing Stone Age era clothing
Speaker 2: like animal skins and such, which ended about two thousand
Speaker 2: years before the events depicted in the film. Lastly, the
Speaker 2: entire note of the film ending on the restoration of
Speaker 2: the republic and the rule of the people in Rome
Speaker 2: as Maximus peacefully dies, that sure didn't happen. Firstly, horrible
Speaker 2: things happened to commentist's sister, Lucilla Chilla. For being Italian,
Speaker 2: she was married off twice to her father's political allies,
Speaker 2: and then after her brother succeeded their father as emperor,
Speaker 2: she became concerned about his behavior and concluded that he
Speaker 2: must be overthrown. She orchestrated an attempt to rid rom
Speaker 2: of her brother, but this plot failed and she was
Speaker 2: banished to the Isle of Capri, where she was later executed. Then,
Speaker 2: when the next assassination attempt on communist did succeed, rule
Speaker 2: hardly returned to the people. There was a predictable rush
Speaker 2: to fill the power vacuum, and the year one ninety
Speaker 2: three CE following his death was dubbed the year of
Speaker 2: five Emperors. The last of those guys was Septimius Severus,
Speaker 2: and the forty two year dynasty of his messy, messy,
Speaker 2: turbulent family then precipitated a period in Roman history known
Speaker 2: as the Crisis of the third century. So that sucks
Speaker 2: for him and his family. Most hilariously, the filmmakers omitted
Speaker 2: one actual piece of document historical fact that they simply
Speaker 2: found too silly for the film. Gladiators were like today's athletes,
Speaker 2: popular figure for product endorsements, and one of the script
Speaker 2: drafts contained a real life detail that Maximus, who is
Speaker 2: then named Narcissus, would have seen himself portrayed in an
Speaker 2: ad for all of Oil, with the copy Narcissus would
Speaker 2: kill for a taste of Golden Pompeii olive oil. Wait,
Speaker 2: is that like actually the extent dead ass? Bro? Wow?
Speaker 2: Take out the fact that I said that. I don't
Speaker 2: know why I responded in that way. Was I going
Speaker 2: to find something a little bit more, a little bit
Speaker 2: more in detail about this live.
Speaker 1: You know, I never really thought of them as being public.
Speaker 2: Well you see them, I mean, you see in the
Speaker 2: film the action figures, which were a real thing. I mean,
Speaker 2: I guess we're splitting hairs over what product placement or
Speaker 2: endorsements actually means, because there would have been mosaics and
Speaker 2: literal advertisements in the day portraying specific gladiators, But if
Speaker 2: there were products associated, they were not They did not
Speaker 2: receive funds from them. So depending on what you're but yes,
Speaker 2: they would they were used in product advertisements. Anyway.
Speaker 1: As filming dragged to a close, there was a bit
Speaker 1: of a pal around the project. In Hollywood, the death
Speaker 1: of Oliver Reed kicked the rumor mill around production into overdrive,
Speaker 1: that it was over budget, that it was at the bacle,
Speaker 1: that it was dead on arrival. Funnily enough, early in
Speaker 1: pre production, Spielberg suggested that the film's producers use a
Speaker 1: fake name will shooting, as he'd offered them with his movies.
Speaker 1: He pitched them the name the hot Rod Project, as
Speaker 1: he was worried that other studios would catch wind and
Speaker 1: rush their own rejiggered Sword and Sandal epics out to
Speaker 1: beat the new studio on the block to the punch.
Speaker 1: Because this was very early in DreamWorks life is probably
Speaker 1: in the first like four years. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The
Speaker 1: rumor mill did turn out to be wrong, but in fun,
Speaker 1: hilarious ways. Screenwriter David Franzoni told Yahoo, a lot of
Speaker 1: people thought we were making Cone in three. They had
Speaker 1: no idea what the hell we were doing. In fact,
Speaker 1: somebody suggested that perhaps we had Schwarzenegger as the big
Speaker 1: gladiator with the tigers. The other level was that we
Speaker 1: were out of our minds and shooting a terrible, horrible
Speaker 1: Sword and Sandals movie that nobody would go see. Franzoni
Speaker 1: also alleges that Russell quote, until he saw the final cut,
Speaker 1: thought it was the end of his career. That's my impression.
Speaker 1: I guarantee you he was really worried. Our beloved Australia
Speaker 1: need not have worried.
Speaker 2: Please don't come to my house, Russell Crowe and explain
Speaker 2: your passions.
Speaker 1: Gladiator was released in the United States and Canada on
Speaker 1: May fifth, two thousand. The film spent a toll of
Speaker 1: ten weeks at the top of the box office and
Speaker 1: was in theaters for over a year, finishing as theatrical
Speaker 1: run on May tenth, two thousand and one, for a
Speaker 1: total gross of one hundred and eighty seven point seven
Speaker 1: million dollars. Released to the rest of the world, Gladiator
Speaker 1: grossed two hundred and seventy two point nine million for
Speaker 1: total worldwide gross a four hundred and sixty point six
Speaker 1: million against the budget of one hundred and three million,
Speaker 1: making it the second highest grossing film worldwide in two thousand,
Speaker 1: behind Mission Impossible Too. I guess big, no, lot first
Speaker 1: one was the first one?
Speaker 2: Was DiPalma? Right? Who did the second one? Oh, that's
Speaker 2: a good question. I don't know. You forget how big
Speaker 2: that movie was that's the one where he's like hanging
Speaker 2: on the cliff, John woomb that's why woh hanging on
Speaker 2: the cliff and Metallica's like, ooh yeah, that's the fuel song.
Speaker 2: Or no it's not no, it's I Disappear.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It was five years before the
Speaker 1: next one. It was John Moodon Lately not much eo
Speaker 1: ooh yo, this is bad looking.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he remade A he remade A well, he got
Speaker 2: really obsessed with Oh no, that was Angley that got
Speaker 2: really obsessed with sixty frames per second and made that
Speaker 2: bad action movie with Will Smith and cgi younger Will
Speaker 2: Smith against himself, John Wu I think just recently remade
Speaker 2: The Killer for Netflix, but a woke version in which
Speaker 2: Chaiu Fat's role has been usurped by a black woman,
Speaker 2: which I did watch, and it's a perfectly crimulent film.
Speaker 2: It's just it's not the Killer. Nothing will ever be
Speaker 2: The Killer again. Yeah, I don't know, man, he's kind
Speaker 2: of stumbled in Hollywood. I felt bad for him. He
Speaker 2: had a great ron he did Hard Target with JCVD,
Speaker 2: Face Off Am I two and then.
Speaker 1: A lot of the critics, however, really had it in
Speaker 1: for the script. Ian Nathan of Empire magazine called the
Speaker 1: dialogue pompous, overwritten, and prone to plain silliness. Well, Roger
Speaker 1: Ebert said, the script quote employs depression as a substitute
Speaker 1: for personality.
Speaker 2: That's my thing, Roger, come on, Bud and believes that
Speaker 2: if characters are bitter and morose enough, we won't notice
Speaker 2: how dull they are.
Speaker 1: You're not dull, but you know what, Critics be damned.
Speaker 1: It got a decent amount of hardware at the Oscars.
Speaker 2: Yes, Gladiator entered the stacked arena of the two thousand
Speaker 2: and one Oscars with twelve nominations, and it did face
Speaker 2: stiff competition that year. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Almost Famous, Traffic,
Speaker 2: and Aaron Brockovich were all popular Academy picks, and Gladiator
Speaker 2: won five of the twelve awards. It was nominated for
Speaker 2: Best Picture, Best Actor for Crow, Best Visual Effects, Best Sound,
Speaker 2: and Best Costume Design. Ridley Scott lost out on Best Director,
Speaker 2: and Franzoni went away empty handed for Best Original Screenplay
Speaker 2: and Joaquin Phoenix lost Best Supporting Actor. Hans Zimmer lost,
Speaker 2: which is great, and they also lost Best Cinematography, Art Direction,
Speaker 2: and Film Editing. In case you were wondering. Stephen Soderberg
Speaker 2: and Benzio do Toro won Best Director and Best Supporting
Speaker 2: Actor for Traffic. Best Original Screenplay went to Cameron Crow
Speaker 2: for Almost Famous, which is objectively correct, and Best Score
Speaker 2: went to Tan Done for Crouching Tiger. The other Technical
Speaker 2: award we're also given out Ridley's memory. I mean, I
Speaker 2: mean it's such a bummer man, Like they really need
Speaker 2: to give out a stunt oscar first of all. But like,
Speaker 2: even though I'm in ther for this kind of it
Speaker 2: is just so funny that like they literally give the
Speaker 2: technical awards out like a completely different day and broadcast.
Speaker 2: People work their entire lives in Hollywood, create all these
Speaker 2: magnificent technical you know, contributions push the art form forward,
Speaker 2: and they're like, yeah, you get four pm the day
Speaker 2: before and we're not going to televise it. No open bar, yeah,
Speaker 2: cash bar. H Ridley's memory of the night in Variety
Speaker 2: was I was knocked over in the trample so bitter.
Speaker 2: I love it. I mean, maybe justifiably so. I don't know.
Speaker 2: I was knocked over in the trample to get on
Speaker 2: stage because I'd actually given up the right to be
Speaker 2: a producer. Because there's so many producers. I said, oh,
Speaker 2: what the I won't bother and I was run over
Speaker 2: when they all got up on the stage. So I
Speaker 2: just sat down, thinking I'm not gonna do that again.
Speaker 2: Why do people go to bat for him? Man? He
Speaker 2: seems like such an a It's all because of Alien
Speaker 2: and Blade Runner, right, Yeah, I mean, I solid bragging
Speaker 2: rights man. Ridley's story does have a semi happy ending,
Speaker 2: though years later, despite not getting the Best Director trophy,
Speaker 2: he did wind up with a different statue Italian actress
Speaker 2: jen Nino Faccio, who played Maximus's murdered wife. That's nice.
Speaker 2: He just married a lady he met on a film stories.
Speaker 2: Yeah now, yeah, you said people finding love? People finding
Speaker 2: love on movie sets. He checked at House of Gucci. Jesus,
Speaker 2: that film has the most preposterously offensive alive face I
Speaker 2: have ever seen in my life. Yo. Obviously we should
Speaker 2: get to all the sexual misconduct allegations first for Jared Leto,
Speaker 2: but then we need to break a pain or a
Speaker 2: thumb or something for what he does in that movie.
Speaker 2: It is so it's, like I say it, it's like
Speaker 2: an Italian minstrel show. I said, but enough of this, this,
Speaker 2: this preceding two hours has been but a taste, an apport,
Speaker 2: not apperteeve an amused boosh for the real meat of
Speaker 2: this episode, Nick Cave's batch script for Gladiator too. It
Speaker 2: is a well known bit of law at this point
Speaker 2: that Australian vampire crooner and goth icon Nick Cave was
Speaker 2: tapped to write a sequel to Gladiator, And that's basically it.
Speaker 2: We don't know that much about this thing other than
Speaker 2: one interview and Mark bron and like glancing bits of
Speaker 2: commentary from Ridley Scott, but everyone is in love with
Speaker 2: it because of how cool it is. Who tapped him
Speaker 2: to do that? Russell Crowe supposedly Astralia. This is I know, right,
Speaker 2: there's like six of them that have succeeded, right, so they.
Speaker 1: Have to like Peter jacksone's going to Doric.
Speaker 2: No, he's New Zealand doesn't count. It's like ac DC,
Speaker 2: Nick Cave, Russell Crowe. I guess they let in old
Speaker 2: girl now writing it in John No, not her, Barbie
Speaker 2: Macarab obviously Paul Hogan, Oh yes, yeah, And they just
Speaker 2: all get together like the QAnon Cabal and plan things
Speaker 2: for Australia uh. Crow rang me up and asked if
Speaker 2: I wanted to write Gladiator two. Nick Cave told Mark
Speaker 2: Maron on I think twenty fifteen episode of What the
Speaker 2: Mark Marron, I'm gonna.
Speaker 1: Call you, just ask you randomly if you want to
Speaker 1: write Gladiator too. I guess Gobby three.
Speaker 2: Now, yeah, I'll take I'll take a stab at three.
Speaker 2: I just don't know if I could top this. So
Speaker 2: Nickavid previously only written one film script. It was for
Speaker 2: something in the eighties about I think it was about
Speaker 2: Australian I remember. Uh. It was quite an ask. He said, Hey, Russell,
Speaker 2: didn't you die in Gladiator one, which Crow responded, yeah,
Speaker 2: you sort that out. Cave did as follows quote. Maximus
Speaker 2: goes down to purgatory and is sent down by the
Speaker 2: gods who are dying in heaven because there's this one god,
Speaker 2: there's this Christ character down on Earth who is gaining popularity,
Speaker 2: and so the many gods are dying, so they send
Speaker 2: Gladiator Maximus back to kill Christ and his followers. I
Speaker 2: wanted to call it Christ Killer. And in the end
Speaker 2: you find out that the main guy was his son,
Speaker 2: so he has to kill his son and was tricked
Speaker 2: by the gods. He then becomes this eternal warrior, and
Speaker 2: it ends with this twenty minute war scene which follows
Speaker 2: all the wars in history right up to Vietnam and
Speaker 2: all this sort of stuff. And it was wild. It
Speaker 2: was a stone cold masterpiece. I enjoyed writing it very
Speaker 2: much because I knew on every level that it was
Speaker 2: never going to get made. Cave turned this far out
Speaker 2: vision into Crow, who, in Cave's words, responded, don't like it. Mate.
Speaker 2: Cave asked what about the end, to which Crow responded, again,
Speaker 2: don't like it, mate. And I guess this got worked
Speaker 2: out because Scott had said in the intervening time that
Speaker 2: he did actually work on this idea with Crow and Cave.
Speaker 2: We tried to go with Cave's script riddle. Scott told
Speaker 2: Ugo Russell didn't want to let it go obviously because
Speaker 2: it worked very well. And then an all time Ridley
Speaker 2: Scott quote. When I say worked very well, I don't
Speaker 2: refer to success. I mean as a piece it works
Speaker 2: very well storytelling. It works brilliantly. I think Cave enjoyed
Speaker 2: doing it, and I think it was one of those
Speaker 2: things he thought, well, maybe there's a sequel where you
Speaker 2: can adjust the fantasy and bring Maximus back from the dead.
Speaker 2: In an interview just this month, Ridley Scott gave another
Speaker 2: quote it got rich and started to go to time warps,
Speaker 2: which frankly I thought was bloody silly. But the one
Speaker 2: thing I added to it was this great idea of
Speaker 2: opening portal of time in death, and it would have
Speaker 2: come from the dying soul of a dying soldier in
Speaker 2: a battlefield. Isn't that cool. I kept it as a
Speaker 2: little silver bullet, thinking I'll use that again somewhere. I
Speaker 2: hated it, it was silly, we killed it, but my
Speaker 2: addition to it was great and I'm keeping it. Love him.
Speaker 2: Years prior to all that, Nick Cave was sanguine about
Speaker 2: the Project Dissolution. He told Variety, I'm very comfortable my
Speaker 2: day job as a musician. The last thing I ever
Speaker 2: wanted to get involved with was Hollywood. The way it
Speaker 2: works is that people get an idea, you could possibly
Speaker 2: do something, but there's a one and one hundred chance
Speaker 2: that it could get made. It's a waste of time
Speaker 2: and I have a lot to do, like being Nick Cave. Yeah, man,
Speaker 2: all right, that takes us to the end of Gladiator.
Speaker 2: I had this whole idea in here for a bit
Speaker 2: of like, oh, here's my day as a twenty one
Speaker 2: year old gladiator in film. And then this is a
Speaker 2: smash cut of a skull getting caved in with a
Speaker 2: mace TikTok style. But you'll have to imagine that great film.
Speaker 2: Love it, Go watch it with your boys and hit
Speaker 2: each other with sticks, as the spirit of the film intended.
Speaker 1: And don't watch the second one.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and Russell Crowe don't come to my house and
Speaker 2: explain your passions, Ridley, I think I could take So
Speaker 2: if you're an elderly British man who's pissed off that
Speaker 2: I've painted you as a bit of a prick, visit me.
Speaker 2: Let's settle this all over a Reek style. This has
Speaker 2: been too much information. I'm Alex Heigel, thanks for listening,
Speaker 2: and I'm Jordan run Talk.
Speaker 1: We'll catch you next time.
Speaker 2: Too Much Information was a production of iHeartRadio. The show's
Speaker 2: executive producers are Noel Brown and Jordan Runtalk.
Speaker 1: The show's supervising producer is Michael Alder June.
Speaker 2: The show was researched, written, and hosted by Jordan run
Speaker 2: Talk and Alex Heigel.
Speaker 1: With original music by Seth Applebaum and the Ghost Funk Orchestra.
Speaker 2: If you like what you heard, please subscribe and leave
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