‘Gladiator 2’ Production Designer Arthur Max Made Everything Bigger and Better: It Was ‘Gladiator’ on ‘Steroids’

Jazz Tangcay

8 November 2024 at 12:05 pm·2-min read

Ridley Scott had one directive for production designer Arthur Max on “Gladiator II”: “I want to go big. I want to imply the grandeur of the Roman Empire,” he told the veteran artisan.

Max, who has been Scott’s go-to production designer for over two decades, delivered a concept that he calls “‘Gladiator’ on steroids.”

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For the sequel to the 2000 blockbuster, which was filmed in Malta and Morocco among other locations, Max kept many of the same architectural details. Once again, Max was tasked with building Rome’s Colosseum set combining digital and practical effects. The set is the size of one football field and two stories tall. For “Gladiator II,” Max had the stories built higher to accommodate a sequence in which the Colosseum is filled with water and a mock naval battle is staged.

“The main entry arch in the first movie was about 20 feet high. In the sequel [it] was a little more than 30 feet high to accommodate the ship that had to come through with its full mast and sail,” Max says.

With Scott wanting practical sets, special effects director Neil Corbould suggested that the ships, which were over 100 feet long, be built on wheels. “We had two of those in Morocco, which we eventually sent to Malta, and two more in Malta for the Colosseum. They were all on remote-controlled hydraulic wheel devices. They could tilt and spin around,” Max says.

A section of the Colosseum set was built in Malta in a studio water tank for the close- ups of the battle and hand-to-hand combat on the ships.

Max also points out that the face spewing water on the Colosseum wall near the VIP seats during the naval battle is Neptune. “We built the face and the water was really spewing, but it went into a big bucket.”

Pedro Pascal plays General Acacius in Gladiator II from Paramount Pictures.

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