Gladiator director Ridley Scott, enjoying a long-awaited thumbs-up from the crowds, talks about life and death.

It seemed a quixotic notion: "Hey, let's make a movie in a genre that went out of fashion when The Sound of Music came in; that will cost $100 million, require arduous location shooting and elaborate computer effects; whose director hasn't made a film grossing over $50 million domestically in 20 years; whose script will be retooled by three writers turning in new pages during shooting; and whose 'star' is a gifted actor but also, by all accounts, a severe rectal itch." We can hear the moguls chorusing: "Gladiator? Thumbs down."

Today Douglas Wick, the movie's producer, can say, "Anyone with a little showman in his blood knew it could work." And now the rest of Hollywood knows too. Gladiator is a hit. No. 1 at America's box office, its early glow has movie people saying "Of course!" Of course there's a magnetic pull of audiences to Roman Empire epics. Of course Ridley Scott, whose only big hit was the 1979 Alien but who directed influential films such as Blade Runner and Thelma & Louise, possessed the vision and stamina to bring a complex story to screen life. And you bet Russell Crowe has the unfakable maleness to become one of Hollywood's most wanted actors. He simply needed a showcase as grand as this one.

Gladiator is quite a good movie — a big, fat, rousing, intelligent, daring, many-adjective-requiring entertainment. Walter Parkes, the production boss at DreamWorks who greenlighted Gladiator, says, "Recently there have been very successful movies — Titanic, The Mask of Zorro, Saving Private Ryan — that introduced classic genres to new audiences, employing modern writing and digital techniques. The Roman epic occupies a special place in the heart of moviegoers. We love the good ones like Ben-Hur and Spartacus." Scott recalls seeing these epics in his youth. "I remembered that world vividly," he says. "But I also knew you can't bring that to bear today. You've got to reinvent it."

The plot, familiar from the 1964 epic The Fall of the Roman Empire, is this: in A.D. 180, Emperor Marcus Aurelius (Richard Harris) is ailing. He anoints his best general, Maximus (Crowe), a man whose motto is "Strength and Honor," as Protector of Rome until it can again become a republic. Before announcing his decision, Marcus informs his son Commodus (Joaquin Phoenix), who lusts to be Emperor. Commodus is displeased by the news; he smothers Marcus in his bosom, murdering him with a filial embrace, and proclaims himself Emperor. In short order, the nasty boy has swiped Maximus's job, ordered his death, razed his home, and had his wife and son defiled and slaughtered. The soldier has reason for revenge.

Maximus escapes the executioner's blade and is sold into a troupe of gladiators. Their job is to fight and die. Maximus's battleground is now the arena; instead of barbarians, his opponents are hungry tigers. Proximo (Oliver Reed) tells Maximus he must make the crowd love him.

The gladiator revue is such a hit in the provinces that it is soon playing in Rome. There, Maximus takes two wary allies: Senator Gracchus (Derek Jacobi), who needs help in restoring the republic; and Lucilla (Connie Nielsen), Commodus's sister, who loved Maximus. But it won't be easy outfoxing Commodus. His Heinous Highness loves an unfair fight.

The idea for Gladiator began in the '70s when screenwriter David Franzoni read Daniel P. Mannix's Those About to Die, a lurid history of the Roman games. When Scott was hired, he brought in John Logan to create Maximus' life as a slave and playwright William Nicholson for further character shadings.

Casting the film, Scott tested Jude Law for Commodus but went with Phoenix, an odd, inspired choice. Scott's choice of Nielsen also was resisted, but the Danish beauty brings a regal presence to the film. The exuberant Reed gave a superbly knowing performance — alas, his last. He died toward the end of shooting; one scene was accomplished with a body double and some digital legerdemain. Crowe was persuaded to discuss the lead role. Scott was impressed and knew he could spend more money making the film look good if he spent less for a star name.

To judge by reports from the set, Crowe could have played Maximus or Commodus: he was all warrior, all tyrant. A hard-drinking perfectionist, he got into brawls with villagers on one location and laid such waste to his rented villa in Morocco that the caretaker protested to Scott, saying "He must leave! He is violating every tenet of the Koran!" Crowe questioned every aspect of the evolving script and strode off the set when he did not get answers. A DreamWorks exec says, "Russell was not well behaved. He tried to rewrite the entire script on the spot. You know the big line in the trailer, 'In this life or the next, I will have my vengeance?' At first he absolutely refused to say it. He did a lot of posturing and put the fear of God into some people. Thankfully, Ridley never yelled."

Crowe could be a nicer fellow but hardly a better actor. His Maximus is a delicate, indelible portrait. To Gladiator, a film in need of a star and a working-class hero, Crowe brings strength and honor.

Film director Ridley Scott's triumphs, among them Alien and Blade Runner, may have made him famous. However, after Thelma and Louise in 1991, the British-born director had languished nearly a decade without a hit, turning out the reviled White Squall in 1996, followed the next year by the overhyped Demi Moore G.I. Jane.

He has had his high points (an Oscar nomination for Thelma and Louise) and Lows (1985's Legend was a disaster that even Tom Cruise couldn't save). The Duellists' producer David Puttnam, while acknowledging Scott's "erratic greatness", says the problem is that "Ridley is always in a hurry to shoot. And, although he knows that a script may have flaws, he will rely on his immense technical virtuosity to cover them over." Scott started as a set designer, and, 13 feature films later, he still has that designer's vision; his work offers plenty to keep the eyes dazzled. As he mines certain themes, his collective work has also, over the years, acquired a certain depth. If there's a significant female character, she'll be one tough cookie. Scott was influenced, he confesses, by "my mum. She's 95 and still going strong. During World War II, when my father was away fighting, she had to do the work of both parents. That's where I get this admiration for powerful women."

Now, like Maximus, director Ridley Scott, 62, once again hears the crowds cheering his name. In the U.S., his sword-and-scandals epic topped the box-office charts with a $34.8 million debut weekend, and across Europe and Asia it is proving to be a similar success.

In Rome to oversee Gladiator's Europe roll-out, Scott knows he is back on the A-list. He says with a smile: "Back in the seventies, when I had been making TV commercials for 10 years, I was desperate to do a film. But Hollywood would never give me anything. They doubted ad directors could handle long-form. So I got my own projects together."

The breakthrough came with 1977's The Duellists, a bizarre tale of two French soldiers who duel at every meeting. It won a special jury prize for best first work at Cannes, and attracted the interest of 20th Century Fox, which offered him Alien. To date, that film has grossed about $165 million worldwide and spawned three sequels. Blade Runner came next. Scott was suddenly a major filmmaker.

His personal life has affected his choices. Gladiator brings out most vividly a theme present in all his movies: mortality. In 1980, Scott's older brother Frank died of cancer. Soon after, Scott began work on Blade Runner, a film whose principal characters are fighting slow deaths. Was there a link? "Frank's death freaked me out," Scott concedes. "I knew that I had to work through it, had to get shooting. So I plunged into Blade Runner. It kept me occupied." And for all its apocalyptic darkness, Scott notes that the ending of the original release of that film is fairly upbeat: that we will all go, but let's make the most of life. "That," Scott says firmly, "is a point in all my films. It's my philosophy, and Frank certainly believed it."

A painting of ancient Rome inspired Scott to take on Gladiator. "I have to see every detail," he explains. He describes the first day's shooting of Gladiator in London, when Joaquin Phoenix, who plays the evil Emperor Commodus, walked in full costume onto the set for the first time: "He stood, cigarettes in one hand, lighter in the other, completely shocked. Because the set recreated the Emperor's imperial chamber so perfectly. It even smelled Roman. That is very important. It's like saying to the actor, 'Let's play the Roman Empire,' and then you give him the Roman Empire. He feels more relaxed in the game."

In 1995, Scott and his younger brother Tony, himself the director of such crowd-pleasing hits as Top Gun and Crimson Tide, took joint control of England's Shepperton Studios, in a move he half-jokingly describes as "payback time". "Hollywood," he moans, "is only a bloody village, yet it has a massive movie business. I thought, 'Why haven't we got a billion-dollar film business in the U.K.?'" With the proliferation of media and the Internet, he insists, the world outside America is becoming increasingly significant. "The U.S. used to account for 75% of a film's market. Now that balance is evening out." He intends to "bring pride back to the British industry".

To that end, Scott has bought facilities, including special effects house the Mill — which created effects for Gladiator as well as such films as Entrapment and Mission Impossible 2 to add to Shepperton's portfolio. "Hollywood," he concludes, "has become so expensive that films are going elsewhere. And there's such a film culture in London that the studios are beginning to realize that they get a better bang for their dollar in the U.K. I'm not a fool, it's not sheer patriotism. It's the right time for me to get involved." Recent American films that were at least partially shot in Britain include Saving Private Ryan, Shakespeare in Love and Star Wars: Episode I — The Phantom Menace.

(from TIME， May， 2000)