That said, a formidable task remained: how to re-create the grandeur of Rome without bankrupting the studio (which nearly happened the last time Hollywood revisited the Roman Empire, for 20th Century Fox's 1963 spectacle Cleopatra). "That was the challenge, and there was no margin for error," Max concedes. "Everything was on a timetable and a budget. The entire art department was originally cramped into the porta-cabins in the parking lot at Shepperton Studios [in London], then we eventually set up in the greenhouse building near Ridley's offices. The wardrobe, armory, prop and art departments were all one. Some armor was worn, some was set dressing, and we made a lot of it. Our set decorator, Crispan Sallis, had several draftspeople drawing different-shaped vases and amphoras and furniture, and he had rooms full of things that were made in his department because they just didn't exist anymore. It was tricky to integrate all of those aspects so that everything fit together; everything was going on simultaneously in different places and would suddenly come together on the day."
Max dispatched his three art directors to each of the film's principal locations. "David [Allday] stayed in England, John [King] went off to Malta and Benji [Fernandez] went to Morocco to start surveying, and then I did the rounds," Max says. "It was like the old Hollywood system, when everything was all under one roof except in this case, we were under three roofs. It was like making three movies simultaneously!"
For the film's first act, Max and Allday helped mount a battle between the Roman Legion, headed by General Maximus (Russell Crowe), and the barbaric German hordes in England. "We were lucky enough to get the British Forest Commission to give us a big tract of pine forest that they were scheduled to sell for cutting," Max explains. "We made it into a battlefield by chopping down some of the forest, and then set fire to it as part of the actual battle scenes."
Production then segued to the provincial Moroccan Roman Empire, the site of the film's second act (in which Maximus is reduced to a gladiator). Max worked alongside Fernandez to incorporate as much of present-day Morocco as possible into their re-created settings. Their crew built the slave markets, the gladiator school and the provincial arena in Ait Ben Haddou, using the ancient town as their backdrop a brilliant design aesthetic that added tremendous scale at little additional expense. "It's this wonderful kind of Casbah, a big mountain made of mud-brick, full of houses standing on a hill," Max enthuses, "and we built our gladiator arena at the foot of this medieval fortress town. It was like a natural amphitheater surrounded by hills. When we did the gladiatorial scenes, we used the landscape as part of the stadium, with 3,000 extras standing around on rooftops and on hills overlooking the arena. It was very exotic, full of wild animals and caravans, and it really gave you a sense of the ancient world."
But the gods were not always with Max and his crew, who often overcame hardships of Biblical proportions to achieve their goals. "During prep, we had bad weather everywhere we went," Max relates. "In London, we had to contend with terrible rain and winds while we were trying to build tent cities in the mud! And in Morocco, we had severe sandstorms." Still, nothing could prepare Max and King for the challenge they faced when attempting to re-create the imperial splendor of Rome on the island of Malta, where the weather and the isolated location magnified every difficulty. "We were in the middle of the Mediterranean during the worst winter of the decade," Max recalls. "Malta had some of the biggest hurricanes they'd seen in 20 years. We couldn't work on the sets on certain days because they were dangerous to be in; some of the sets [actually blew] down. We had to have most of the materials and equipment brought [to the island], which created huge problems."
Fortunately, not every bit of Rome had to be built. Director Scott remembered that he had previously used a tank at a Malta studio that was surrounded by ruined, limestone barracks built by the British for their campaign against Napoleon. Scott thought it would be the perfect backdrop for Max's Rome set. Using the original architectural plans of the fortress, Max's team made an enormous scale model of the actual site. Scott and Max then played chess with proposed set pieces to see how their additions would fit within the structure.
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