Once Scott was satisfied, Max's team created scale drawings of the fragments they planned to build, placed them in the context of the existing location, and passed them on to the visual-effects department, where they were scanned into computers. Because of the extremely tight production schedule, visual effects supervisor John Nelson and his team at The Mill London/USA were hard at work on computer-graphic extensions of Rome before the sets were even built. "It was a very elaborate, very interpretative collaboration, because Ridley's vision was of a romantic but gritty world with giant scale and a cosmopolitan atmosphere," Max states. "Trying to get that on paper accurately, so it could go into the computer and come out when they were ready to start compositing the cut film, was quite a challenge."
Within the remnants of the British fortifications, Max and company raised ancient Rome, complete with an imperial palace and a fully restored Colosseum. "We went through virtually the same process that we had in Morocco," Max explains. "We used some existing buildings in the ruined fortress and rebuilt certain collapsed sections, which we also used for interiors. We then built partial, full-size, real sets of gigantic walls inside the fortress, which really helped put our sets within the context of the city!
"The sets were all built by English riggers, who are very skilled at scaffolding," he continues. "They used 100-foot-high tower cranes to erect the backbone of the sets, the structural skeleton. They had to work in all weather conditions, because we couldn't wait for them. We also took over several factories and built a lot of the sets in fragments indoors while it was raining and blowing. Later, we'd truck those semi-completed elements, like a big jigsaw puzzle, to the location and put them up in giant chunks. At times, there were 500 people working on-site and another couple hundred in the shop prefabricating. Despite the remoteness of the location and the adverse conditions, we triumphed."
Because of the mammoth scale in which they were working, Max opted to build only part of Rome's Colosseum in the middle of one of the fortress's parade grounds, dovetailing the set with the existing locale. Although they planned to enhance the Colosseum with computer graphics, Scott and Max were determined to shoot as many of the arena sequences as possible in-camera. Max details, "We couldn't afford to build the whole thing, which was 150 feet high. Instead, we built a huge, J-shaped section of the first tier, which was 75 feet tall, and some fragmentary elements like the opposite entry and the opposite box. We then cheated the reverses by flopping the negative. It was a big savings, but it required a lot of mental agility on Ridley's part, directing left-to-right and right-to-left. For the reverse angles, the actors had to carry their swords and shields in the opposite hands so their weapons would be on the proper side when we flopped the film. Then the visual-effects team 'raised' the Colosseum to its full height and added the 55,000 people held by the original structure."
While basing his interpretation of the Colosseum on projected re-creations by architectural historians, Max also returned to the original source of the film's overall style Gérôme's paintings and appointed the arena with phallic-looking columns straight out of "The Last Prayers of the Christian Martyrs" and "Circus Maximus". The set builders also created elevators to lift wild animals from below the arena's "killing floor," as well as the bowels of the Colosseum, which appear to lie beneath the arena's sandy surface but were actually constructed as a separate set. According to Max, sand was one of the few materials that was indigenous to the island. "That's what Malta has loads of," he says. "It's actually a mid-beige, powdered stone, but [director of photography] John Mathieson felt it was too light, so we art-directed it by mixing in baked, crushed, recycled road tarmac to tint it down."
Historians agree that the original Colosseum was shaded by a massive shade called a velarium, a series of canvas sails that protected the spectators from the sun. Because Max's team had not built the entire arena, there was no way to build the shade, but they still had to create its effect on the crowd. "We originally thought we could do it with CGI, but it wouldn't have been practical to do that for every shot," Max recounts. "In the end, [at Mathieson's request], we had an engineering firm design a practical sunshade that was only 75 feet in the air to create the proper lighting effect. It was fully controllable and could be drawn like a window blind when we wanted to open it up or close it down."
While using the mechanical shade to create the appropriate shadow play on the cast of thousands below, Max's team built a small section of a full-size velarium. "It was made using the right materials and the right constructional details, including the ropes, pulleys and everything else," Max says. "Then the visual effects team shot that as a plate and scanned it into the computers at The Mill, where they reproduced it by tiling to fill the oval roof of the Colosseum. The way it's put together, it brings the whole setting to life at its full scale."
Although Max says he never had the patience to build real buildings, he enjoyed the formidable task of re-creating ancient Rome over several months. "That was our challenge: to bring the scale of ancient Rome to life," he chuckles. "I mean, how many people get the chance to build the Colosseum in its original form? We were very accurate I would say obsessively accurate."
