Everybody knew it had to be big. More than two decades after having a huge hit and winning Best Picture with “Gladiator,” Ridley Scott was not going to be low-key in the opening sequences of his long-awaited sequel “Gladiator II.”
“I crept in the back of Ridley’s media room, and he was deep in conversation with Neil Corbould,” cinematographer John Mathieson said. “They were discussing doing a sea battle in the Sahara.”
He paused for a second. “Which is not known for its coastal regions. There were some bottles of Ridley’s rosé there, which I have to recommend as a very drinkable rosé. And I thought, well, I’d best be quiet and sit here.”
And yes, that’s exactly what the opening stretch of “Gladiator II” is: a siege by the Roman army in the North African province of Numidia, home to Lucius Aurelius (Paul Mescal), who loses his wife and his freedom as Roman ships led by General Acacius (Pedro Pascal) attack the fortress from a sea that in real life is nowhere near the filming location in Ouarzazate, Morocco.
The fortress itself was a bit of Scott recycling: First built for his 2005 film “Kingdom of Heaven,” the set had been sitting in the desert ever since, occasionally used for filming on projects like “Game of Thrones.” Production designer Arthur Max changed design details and added an extension to fit the new film — but his new touches couldn’t make a completely landlocked set look like it was perched on the edge of the Mediterranean.
It fell to visual effects supervisor Mark Bakowski to turn the sand into water and to special effects supervisor Neil Corbould to figure out how to have full-sized wooden warships “sail” through the Sahara to attack the fortress.
“My first meeting with Ridley was that he wanted to do this big naval siege in the middle of a desert, with 100-foot-plus boats weighing in excess of 80 tons each,” Corbould said. “I left that meeting thinking, How the hell are we gonna pull this off?”
His first thought was to lay tracks across the sand, but that would mean the boats could only travel back and forth on a fixed path. But Corbould had seen video of modular hydraulic movers used to transport oil rigs and wind turbines. “These things were capable of carrying hundreds of tons, so our boats were nothing,” he said. “They could go anywhere and we could spin the ships around. We could move these 100-foot boats quicker than they could move the cameras.”
Mathieson, who had a camera department of more than 300 people to accommodate Scott’s desire to run as many as 11 cameras simultaneously, said that Corbould’s technology made his job easy.
“These guys would walk alongside the boats like the remote controls you used to have for little toy cars in the ’70s when things were still on cables,” he said. “And then Neil’s effects team would have huge bowls of water, and they’d blow the water around, which kind of looked crazy in the desert. But on the camera end, it was pretty simple. My cameras were on remote arms of 70 or 75 feet long, which gives you 150 feet of movement. That’s usually enough to rise up, go down, go to Pedro Pascal as up comes the tower and he crosses the drawbridge.
“The height was potentially dangerous — you had people in the air, people falling down, you’ve got fire going. But you just have to be organized — I mean, really organized.”
Bakowski’s visual effects team hid the dust, added the waters of the Mediterranean, created lots of virtual soldiers, extended the fortress, added more boats and put new details on existing ones and even changed the sky. “The desert gave us these flat skies, with atmospheric dust that bleached things out a little bit,” Bakowski said. “In the end, we did a lot of sky replacements, which I wasn’t expecting.”
But he was expecting a uniquely Ridley-esque problem: erasing the numerous cameras that the director uses to shoot almost every scene. “It complicated things outrageously,” he said. “It’s great, because he gets dynamic action. There are explosions going off and water spouts going off and people pretending to fight and so on. And there are cameras — some of them are on the boats, some of them are pointing at each other. They’re everywhere. And it does mean that there are implications for us. But what we do for a living is deal with those problems.”
The scene was initially scheduled to shoot for almost a month, but Scott — who famously prepares incredibly detailed storyboards, knows exactly what he wants and likes to move very quickly — shot it in less than half that.
“He said, ‘I don’t need four weeks to film this,’” Corbould said. “‘I need 10 days.’ Nothing else changed. It was still the same scene. He just did it quicker.”
The common denominator among the craftsmen responsible for pulling off a sea battle in the desert: admiration for their director and his insistence on shooting in the real world rather than the studio. “To my mind it’s great, because it all starts with practical photography,” Bakowski said. “Even if you end up replacing some of it, you’ve still got a suggestion of what’s grounded and what’s real in terms of camera movement or light or perspective.”
Or, as Mathieson put it, “I didn’t get into this business to shoot men in latex underwear flying around with lasers coming out of their nostrils against green blankets. I got into it for occasions like this, doing epic films on location.”
This story will appear in the Below-the-Line issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine.
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