Friday, November 29, 2024
Maximus Effort: "Gladiator II" Production Designer Arthur Max on Creating Colossal Constructions
The Credits: Oscar-nominated production designer Arthur Max has worked on 16 of Ridley Scott’s films. These include some of American cinema’s most indelible cinematic spectacles, such as the original Gladiator (for which Max scored his first Oscar nod), Black Hawk Down, and The Martian. Despite the impressive body of work between them, Max thinks that the Roman epic actioner, Gladiator II, is their most ambitious yet.
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4 comments:
Listening to Arthur Max discuss the settings and process behind Gladiator II is absolutely unfathomable. The scale, detail, and process seems too much to bear at all times and hearing about the filming of movies continues to astound what is possible and how it is able to be achieved. What was most surprising was the amount of the set that was actually built and not constructed in post with CGI or video editing. From this surprise follows many questions about how they were able to manage all of this scenery and also if it is one company behind the film that creates a lot of this or how many companies are involved in the building of these intricate sets. The overall breadth of construction and the work being done must mean there are several companies behind each specific site, but it would be amazing to hear more from producers and other upper management from this production to better understand these processes.
I have yet to see either Gladiator or Gladiator II but this interview makes me really excited to watch both movies whenever I can next. Their process of recreation for the screen is exactly what I love to see on screen. Having a physical set that actors interact with and all the details of light and distress that happens over time is very magical when it is seen on screen in ways that fully green sets don't have. However, the integration of digitally extending and augmenting the set when the building they were shooting in was physically constraining the creation of a larger set is a great use of technology to fill in gaps that would otherwise leave parts of a set that would never be physically filled in due to budget or other such reasons even when the technology wasn't available. The mix of having a physical set in the foreground and the gaps filled with technology is what I envision as an ideal balance of new and old technology to not forget why prior technology was good and use new tools to fill where the old fails.
It was just yesterday that I watched Gladiator 2, and was absolutely blown away by the quality of the production as a whole. The acting, set, choreography, and cinematography worked together seamlessly and I would say it definitely did the first movie justice. I do not often find myself wishing I had been able to work on movie sets, the large use of CGI simply does not interest me as much. However, Gladiator II is one exception. The sheer size of what they had to do is so impressive and must have been extremely fun to work on. I really like the idea of the giant RC warships, and using different sails and colors to make two warships look like several dozen is genius. I also read the follow-up article where Arthur max explains that for the naval battle in the colosseum, they raised the entire thing about five feet to work with the water line, and I'm really curious how they were able to achieve that.
I have not seen Gladiator or Gladiator II, and I am not really sure what the films are about besides what the name suggests about the setting and characters. However, from the promotional pictures and content that have cropped up from time to time I can see how they might have a big audience.
Just from reading this article, I can tell that the production designer really wanted to give the fans of the first movie a sequel that they would remember. Building two colosseums was a bold choice that seems to have paid off, seeing as the movie is a box office success. The pictures in this article show an extremely detailed and well thought out set that I’m sure looks amazing on the big screen. I am now a little curious to see what the story is about, but I will need to see the first Gladiator movie before going to the theater.
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