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This is an interview from the Norwegian magazine "Filmmagasinet".

Tough in Sandals

by Sindre Kartvedt (Los Angeles)
translated by Kim E.

Ridley Scott's spectacular Gladiator revives one of Hollywood's most iconic filmgenres with all the glory it deserves. After 40 years of silence, these brave men in sandals return to the big screen, lead by Russell Crowe in a career-enhancing role.

The movie Gladiator has a unique position in the cinematic universe - first and foremost because it is close to impossible to point to another commercial and popular genre that has been totally absent for such a long period of time. From being one of the leading film genres of American film in the 50s, the gladiator movie disappeared as the calender turned to the 60s.

At the same time, its hymn has been sung long enough for the producers of Gladiator not to need more than one single picture to get Ridley Scott to accept.

- Normally, people come to meeting slike this with a manuscript, Scott remembers today. - But here I was asked for 15 minutes, after which the producer Wather F. Parkes rolled out a repro of a painting from the 19th century named "For those who are about to die". It's a great painting, although very romantic; it shows a gladiator standing above a defeated opponent and who, with his sword raised, looks to the emperor who shows thumbs down. - We don't have a script yet, Parkes said. But this is the story in a nutshell... Ridley Scott jumped aboard without hesitating.

- All I needed was in this picture, he says. - The architecture, the beauty of teh arena, the theatre, the drama... I was hooked. The theme and the environment fascinated me; I like more than anything else to create whole worlds - that's where I find the biggest and most satisfying challenges as a filmmaker, the man who built his career on Alien and Blade Runner says. - And here we had something no-one had been close to in many, many years; I think gladiator movies led the same destiny as westerns, Scott speculates. - They reached a certain point where it became too much, and they disappeared. But westerns didn't disappear - not to the extent the gladiator films did; there aren't ten years between every time someone does a western movie and even gets an Oscar or two for the effort.

- Well, says Scott; - People stopped seeing them. And it was an expensive genre. Which was an experience that doesn't get smaller as time goes by, he laughts. - This movie was of such a size that we needed to reach a big audience. If not, heads will roll...

Russell Crowe, who in the title role does the perhaps most convincing and spectacular hero character since Mel Gibson did Mad Max 2, has characteristicly enough a less complicated version of the absence of the gladiator movie. - John Cleese and Monty Python is to blame, he says in his broad Australian accent. - I mean, when you are ridiculed so totally (and here a conspiratoric and slick Crowe whispers in British English: "say, do you like ...gladiator movies?") it's best to withdraw for a while.

- They didn't have a script when they offered me the role, he continues. - Not just that; they said that the script they had neither satisfied them nor Rid. But they showed me this old picture. And you had a great Ridley-Scott movie from 195 A.D., you start the movie as a general of Rome, and end up as a slave and a gladiator. Anybody with a tad of creative fantasy would be interested enough to have a conversation about it. And it appeared to me that I wouldn't get the chance to dress up in a toga anytime soon, so I seized the opportunity...

Amazingly enough - thinking about Hollywood's record of movies coming from an idea rather than from a well told history - Ridley Scott and Russell Crowe managed to make a splendid movie. Of course it helps to steal one's dramatic starting point from Shakespeare's King Lear; Gladiator opens as General Maximus wins the final battle of Germania for his thankful emperor, Marcus Aurelius (Richard Harris). The ageing emperor is worried about his heir and asks Maximus to become emperor instead of Marcus's decadent son, Commodus (Joaquin Phoenix). But Commodus kills his father before this decision is made public, and he sentences Maximus to death for treachery. Maximus escapes, but his wife and kid is massacred - and Maximus ends up as a slave and gladiator, but the desire to revenge his family keeps him alive. And we dare say that even John Cleese wil be captured by Maximus' epic way back to the heights of power, much thanks to Russell Crowe. When a director like Ridley Scott gets to play with a decent budget like this, the technical aspects of the movie are of exceptional high quality, from battle scenes to costumes to a digitally reconstructed colosseum - but in the end, it all rests on Crowe's broad shoulders. And this late 90s' most charismatic actor again adds to his career. It is hard to think of an actor today who manages to personalize his characters as much as Crowe - because whether we talk about his deeply underrated work as the brutal but yet tender cop in LA Confidential or the conflict-filled title character of The Insider, it is always Crowe's ability to show these people's physical character and manners that hits first.

In Maximus this talent reaches new heights and new challenges. - I wasn't interested in building up a modern, iconic gym body, Crowe says about the demanding physical preparations he had to go through to illude a real gladiator. - It was rather about getting a body that could do all the things Maximus could do. Because it soon became apparent that this shoot first and foremost would be a physical thing. We had tried to fix it so that there would be four to five days between each battle scene. We tried mixing them with scenes where I just talk or move normally. But practically you need to level with training, choreography, preparations... And now afterwards, it is the physical strain that this movie demanded of me that I am the most proud of.

It's when you are in the middle of it all, and your biceps tendons jumps out of your shoulder in the wrong direction, that you wonder what the hell you have done...

- I'm not a smart man, Crowe grins, who behaves just like you expect of an Australian man according to the thesis about Australia being a country where men are men and the sheep are terrified. - If I like a script, or even an idea like this, I say yes without thinking more about it. I'm a whore for my job; I can't say no when I get a good offer. So it's later, when it's far too late, that I notice a short and precise sentence like "He tears off his clothes and dives into the North Sea." And you think; fucking idiot - how could you miss that one?!

- So here and there you think that you should try and make your life easier on yourself, he concludes. - But in this case it was clear that it was about something that I would enjoy more afterwards than while it was going on. Because then it generally just hurt.

Crowe then refers to a relatively recent meeting between him and Ridley Scott, during the final tuning of Gladiator. - We were out together, and we sat there talking about this and that. Ridley has an old knee injury which bothered him a bit, and he accidentally gave me the following word of wisdom; - Listen, if you ever get injured during a shooting, then you should insist that they stop it all.

- I was just moping - I couldn't say a word, Crowe grins and shakes his head. - All I could think of was "You're not kidding?"...

- I broke a bone in my leg, I got a fracture in my hip and experienced that both of my biceps tendons disengaged from my shoulder - fortunately not at the same time; so I always had a hand I could use... But running about with heavy swords and shields all day long has a price. I woke up one morning and went to the bathroom - and saw a blueish stripe running down my arm. This was six or seven days into the initial battle sequence. I touched it, and immediately realized with a strike of pain that this was not a normal black mark - but something inside of me on its way out. I took a mouthful of Jack Daniels and pushed everything back.

Russell Crowe is just tough enough to be able to tell things like that without sounding like an idiot. And initially he has an extremely sceptical relationship to the press as an institution, but after a while he softens up, forgets not to swear as much as he would normally would have done, and generally seems to find the process of doing interviews less painful.

- We had a problem with one of these fire pods to the catapults one day, he contently remembers. - In some way they managed to fire a glow straight into the ass of the horse I was sitting on. And as I'm sure you realize, he had an opinion about that case.

- He threw himself backwards down the hill, and I was on him. He was wearing shades, so he didn't know where we were going, and I was wearing a helmet, so I didn't see particularly more than him. So we kind of played flipper with the trees for the next 150 metres of downhill through the forest. Eventually I ended up lying flat on his back while I grabbed his head and dragged it against me until he stopped.

- This did two things for me, Russel concludes proudly. - Firstly, I have never gotten a similar respect from the horse guys at a movie set.

- And secondly, it was one of the coolest adrenalin rushes I have ever had. I got off the horse and calmly walked away - until I was taken by all sorts of shaking for the next 20 minutes...

Luckily for Gladiator and for film enthusiasts in general, Crowe's machismo is not of the banal type; his Maximus is not a one-dimensional Charlton Heston. Quite on the contrary; Crowe's subtile physicality makes him able to give this anachronistic monolittic and clean-haired general both existensial and genuinely tragic dimensions.

Gladiator is, very much for being a movie of such a size, full of a realistic melancholy - which seems to be thanks to Russell Crowe's own experience of integrity.

- We had long discussions, Russell and I, about who Maximus was, Scott says. - And more than anything else we found that he was a farmer who had been away from his home and his earth too long. So we came up with this little thing; every time he is about to battle, he feels the soil underneath him. Something which ties him to his life a sa farmer, but also to his own mortality. So when Marcus Aurelius asks him to describe his home, Maximus describes, without realizing it, also his own image of paradise, about what is waitin gfor him on the other side. The idea of heaven being home. For everything he wants through the whole movie, is to fulfil his revenge, and then to return home.

For Crowe, Maximus's integrity was first and foremost tied to the general's relationship to Marcus Aurelius's daughter, Lucilla, who is played by the Danish actress Connie Nielsen.

- It was really important to me that the relationship between Maximus and Connies role never was fulfilled sexually. A stupid sex scene would definitely compromised this man's integrity and honour. I mean, this is a guy who throughout most of the movie just wants to die - or best of all stop a condition he finds too painful to bear, which is to live without the love of his life. And simply because Connie is such a talented and intelligent actress, we were able to give the scenes between them everything they needed of background information and details, so that the audience could draw their own conclusions. But from what is said and done, not the opposite.

This is, of course, Russell Crowe's hunting field as an actor, and right now he has it more or less to himself. And he is enough of a damn stubborn guy for the hype-machinery to distract him, at least for years. - To be a movie star, or just having the lead role in a given movie - it's not a fantasy for me, he says dryly. - Others may fantasize about it, but I see it like this; It's my job. I go to different places and play different roles. I take my turn in the salt mines, you see. I'm very little involved in the other mess. I don't live here in LA, he says. - LA is just the office in which you land on your way to the next job.

- And this winter I have just hung out of a helicopter in England and the Netherlands, so I even managed to avoid all the fuss around the Oscar awards, he says, after being passed (for the second time) for his role in The Insider.

- Mate, he says and shakes his head slowly; - I don't have a "funny" or cynical or "ironic" view on being nominated for an Oscar. Because if nothing else, it means that I, for the rest of my carreer, regardless of what I'm trying to fool you with, will be called an "Oscar-nominated actor," he grins.

- Fine with me, mate...

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