Ridley Scott: The Real Fight Club

Q: Were any of the men nervous about having to expose so much flesh?

A: Russell isn't tall but he's a big guy, a natural sportsman. He's in pretty good shape anyway but it was tricky because he'd just put on about 50 pounds to play a middle-aged man in The Insider. When we met, he was always parting his tummy going, "Don't worry, this will come off." As with all films now, we brought in a guy to assist him not just with pumping iron but also with diet, controlled exercise and moderation so that you don't push it coo far too fast. We got him up to a level where it was real without being over the cop. If someone is in good shape, you're picking up where they left off and it takes about a month to achieve the best stage. With Demi [Moore] in G.I. Jane, for instance, she's only five-feet-two-inches or something, though she'd insist five-three or five-four, and weighed about 105 pounds naturally, but she worked so hard she was up to 136 pounds of muscle and was able to do 15 one-arm push-ups on each side right on camera.

Q: How did you come to choose the virtually unknown Connie Nielsen for the female lead in Gladiator?

A: At the moment there are a lot of very good young actresses appearing in films. I've been in situations where you only see a couple of women who stand out, but right now there are a dozen or more in the race. We looked at about 20 women for this part, but I kept coming back to Connie. For this role, I needed someone with a certain maturity, someone who was regal and could have been a queen. That narrowed it down to three or four. Connie was clearly it. The role is not just "the woman who would have been king," she's got many strengths and interesting qualities. Her real-life counterpart was a woman of authority, the daughter of a king who was rather a fascist. Her character has a past relationship with the lead character, and there's a very powerful relationship between her and her brother, the emperor, who's actually in love with her--which is his problem. [Laughs] But we resisted going too deeply down that path.

Q: You also have Djimon Hounsou and the six-foot-six German actor and former Mr. Universe Ralf Moeller in the cast. Were any of these guys thrown by the number of wild animals they had to work with?

A: [Laughs] We had great handlers, but, I mean, eventually Russell had to stand in the arena with six Bengal tigers. The real danger is that you for-get, when a tiger is lying on the ground licking its paws, how wild it is. The Bengal is the most dangerous because it's a big, beautiful pussycat who makes you want to go over and give it a hug, but they're actually very tricky bone-crushers. We always had four or five people surrounding each animal who would never let you for-get that if you go too close to a tiger, you'll be knocked down and that once you're down, that's it.

Q: In previous movies like this, the dialogue, particularly the way actors delivered it, was often unintentionally hilarious. How did you handle that?

A: I avoided period vernacular. And we left out the "my lords" and other English theatrical versions of the Roman Empire. What we've come up with can be called just good plain Anglo-Saxon.

Q: Do you have any concerns that today's audiences may not know any-thing about the Roman Empire?

A: One of the comments we got in previews was from a 32-year-old woman who said she hated to admit it but she knew nothing about the Roman Empire, hardly knew it existed. That's shocking but it's a fact of life, so you'd better fix it. That's where a preview can be useful. We put a simple legend at the opening of the movie to explain who was who and outline some of the events of the time.

Q: In this movie, you've re-created things like the Forum, the Senate steps and the Colosseum, and everything looks as detailed, precise and lived-in as the environments in Alien and Blade Runner.

A: One of the things I'm very attracted to, as a director, is to create a world. Creating a world on film gives me more to do than just say "action" and "cut." With my art director and various production designers, I wound up building a whole world. It was a huge research job, just in the process of design and construction. I find that utterly fascinating because you find out the way everything was. That's one way the movie feels more real to me, as well as to the actors and, hopefully, to the audience.

Q: Having been a painter and illustrator yourself, what were your visual influences here?

A: The 19th century painter Alma-Tadema, whose subjects were Greek, Roman or Egyptian. He was almost a pre-Raphaelite and sometimes too pretty, almost chocolate boxy but perfect, beautiful. He painted marble better than anyone. When you look into his paintings, you see his imagination running wild because he'd thought such a great deal about how these people lived. I'd just look into the corners of his work and they'd always trigger some logic.

Q: Several of your movies, particularly Alien and Blade Runner, made such an impact in part because of what came to be called the sense of a "used future," which was such an interesting change from the gleaming, shiny world we'd seen in so many science fiction movies.

A: It's a matter of keeping your eyes open today and applying contemporary logic to the past. When I was planning Alien, I was flying often on transatlantic flights. Over time, I noticed that those planes were get-ting scruffy and rundown and I applied that logic to the ship and the crew in Alien.

Q: How much help did your script give you?

A: Walter Parkes came in with a script by David Franzoni, which was a really good idea--three acts, all there. The only thing we felt we needed to change was that the central act used up the experience of Rome and the gladiator arena too quickly. So, we went through a draft with John Logan, with whom I'd worked on RKO 281. After John, we worked with William Nicholson, who wrote Shadowlands. The whole script effort was a very civilized series of discussions. We all wanted to make it so badly that it was like "All hands on deck" to get this script up to where it needed to be.

Q: In the '50s and '60s, big-budget ancient historical epics like The Robe, Demetrius and the Gladiators, Ben-Hur and others spawned cheesy gladiator movies that show up on TV all the time. Did any of those make you think twice about doing this movie?

A: Oh, yeah. I realized something, though. That Charlton Heston was really brave. He made one of the greatest of those movies, Ben-Hur. But he also did every other conceivable kind of world. He had his eye on the ball. He did Planet of the Apes, Soylent Green and The Omega Man--which I nearly remade with Universal and Arnold Schwarzenegger. Sometimes he had great success, sometimes less, but Heston was an inspiration here. It was like, be brave and go for it.

Q: What's involved with updating movies like this?

A: The audience tolerance level in terms of reality is making it tougher and tougher. War films are now expected to be like Private Ryan, meaning the reality level has gotten to the point of being almost 100 percent. When you're doing a period movie there are no excuses anymore. You've got to get it right. I think we got it right.

Q: Hasn't the financial and critical mauling you took on Blade Runner eased a bit now that the film has been vindicated as one of the most influential of the last 20 years?

A: Revenge isn't really sweet when it comes too many years later. As you mature, you realize all the more that the key audience member you must make truly happy is yourself. I'm always sufficiently pragmatic now by the end of a film to sit back, stare at it and go, "That works" or "Not a bad patch-up, despite a few errors here and there." Beyond that, you need luck in everything. Why do people go for a film in a huge way when you look at it and go, "Well, it's OK but it doesn't warrant this giant reaction." Certain movies just color peoples imaginations and you can't predict that.

Q: So, from your dispassionate point of view, how is the movie?

A: I think it's really good. [Laugh] I'm happier with this than I have been with anything for a long time.

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Stephen Rebello interviewed Leelee Sobieski for the March issue of Movieline.

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