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If there’s a single film for which Russell Crowe is most associated, it has to be “Gladiator”.
However, in a new interview the actor admits he had serious concerns about the script, and had to be talked into accepting the role by director Ridley Scott.
In a new video for Vanity Fair (above), Crowe reflects on the various roles he’s played onscreen throughout his movie career, describing “Gladiator” as “my 20-something movie.”
“I was confident about my abilities as a leading man,” Crowe explained. “What I wasn’t confident about with ‘Gladiator’ was the world that was surrounding me. At the core of what we were doing was a great concept, but the script, it was rubbish, absolute rubbish.”
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As Crowe recalled, the original script contained “all these sort of strange sequences” involving chariots and famous gladiators with “endorsement deals with products for olive oil and things like that, and that’s all true, but it’s just not going to ring right to a modern audience. They’re going to go, What the is all this?”
It was his conversations with Scott, who shared his vision for the film, that convinced Crowe to overlook the script’s deficiencies.
“[Scott] said to me at one point in time, ‘Mate, we’re not committing anything to camera that you don’t believe in, a hundred per cent,’” Crowe recalled. “So when we actually started that film, we had 21 pages of script that we agreed on. A script is usually between 103 or four or 110 pages, something like that. So we had a long way to go, and we basically used up those pages in the first section of the movie. So by the time we got to our second location, which was Morocco, we were sort of catching up.”
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In fact, Crowe wasn’t certain that Scott had captured his vision onscreen until he watched a screening of the finished film.
“When I first saw it, I was blown away by it,” Crowe said. “And when I first saw it with a crowd, that’s when it really freaked me out because it was like going to a movie when I was a kid. People were so connected to the film and they were voicing that connection. The Emperor puts that knife under Maximus’ arm towards the end. People were angry, they were standing in their seats and [laughing] calling him a mother. And I was like, ‘Whoa! This is big.’”
Added Crowe: “We made that film in 1999, and I’ll bet you money, somewhere in the world tonight, that film is playing on primetime television. It has the longest legs and people, they’re not just connected to it, but they love it with a passion.”
