Production designer Arthur Max uses modern methods to resurrect a fabled realm in Gladiator.
It's a long journey from the urban decay of Seven to the splendor and decadence of ancient Rome, and production designer Arthur Max has taken the road less traveled to create the vast backdrops for Ridley Scott's eagerly awaited epic Gladiator. Unlike the Romans, Max and his design team had to construct Rome in just a few months. "Our motto was, 'Rome wasn't built in a day — it took more like 20 weeks!'" he says.
The designer, a veteran of theater and music videos, worked with Scott on dozens of commercials before designing David Fincher's Seven and Scott's G.I. Jane. "What I like about the job is the variety," Max says. "I started out studying architecture, but I didn't have the patience to build real buildings it took too long! Instead, I gravitated toward set design for theater and, eventually, film, because it's concerned with different periods and styles. It's a much quicker process, and the things you build don't have to last forever!"
Max says his formal education in architecture was particularly useful in re-creating ancient Rome for Gladiator. "Every architecture student starts by drawing Ionic columns, and on this show we built them by the dozens! All modern architecture springs from the classical Greek and Roman traditions the proportions, the use of light and space - so it's a production designer's dream to re-create the architecture of a civilization that, for us, is like the Bible."
For inspiration, Scott and Max turned to 19th-century French and British Romantic painters, many of whom painted fanciful renditions of Rome in its heyday. "In fact, it was a painting by the French artist [Jean-Léon] Gérôme that inspired the entire movie," Max reveals. "Ridley and I decided we wouldn't do the classical, scholastic Rome, which could be reproduced by researching and staying totally faithful to the museum archives and the factual concepts of Roman scholars. We decided we were more impressed by the romantic vision of Rome [created] by painters such as [Sir Lawrence] Alma-Tedema, who was known as the 'Master of Marble.' We tried to emulate the accessories, pageantry, opulence and scale in his paintings."
Alma-Tedema's canvases tend to be narrow and very tall, emphasizing the glorious heights of column-lined streets that are filled to bursting with the gaily bedecked denizens of ancient Rome. "When you see the ancient ruins and the collapsed roofs, you don't really sense the grandeur of it all," Max laments. "But when you see these paintings, in which the artist has completed the buildings and added the people, you sense the scale. Because the story we were telling has a lot of sinister intrigue and mental manipulation, with people living in fear of the emperor, we had to create an ambience that reflected that. I therefore began working in a style I called 'Black Tedema,' tweaking Alma-Tedema's work a little bit."
However, Scott and Max along with art directors David Allday, John King and Benjamin Fernandez weren't influenced only by period paintings. "Ridley also touched on the weird and wonderful futuristic visions of Metropolis to evoke the busyness and density of Roman life," Max recalls. "We looked at films like Spartacus and Ben Hur several times, and Benji [Fernandez] had served as the set designer on The Fall of the Roman Empire. We were also deliberately mixing periods; for example, the Empire Period, when Napoleon was emperor, was based on ancient Rome, so we used a painting of Napoleon as an enthroned Roman emperor as a model for the emperor's throne in our film.
"Ridley also had this tremendous idea of studying Nazi propaganda films like Triumph of the Will, since they copied the Roman [aesthetic]. We copied them copying the Romans, which added an extra layer and another cultural interpretation. You know [the process]: it's fantastic, but it's not fantastic enough; it's big, but it's not big enough; it's rich, but it's not rich enough. How far can you take it before it looks wrong? You can almost never take it far enough. Ultimately, we tried to build Rome to be as big and rich as we could. After all, size matters!"
[ continued on page 2 ]