This is your third film with Ridley [Scott], right?
Yeah, we did Black Rain. We did Thelma & Louise. And we, you know, just fought the battle of Rome, Germania, Morocco.
Is it a very collaborative effort with Ridley?
Oh, it's really simple. He gives me all the freedom in the world so I'll do exactly what he wants me to do by the end of it. No, I mean it's very collaborative. The whole idea on this film was that we would work together in, for instance, the same building. His cutting rooms are here at the studio which makes a big difference because it makes sense of how one makes a movie. You know, not everybody is just sort of stuck away in a corner somewhere doing their own thing.
Tell me what you thought when you first got approached for this project.
The first time Ridley phoned and said, "What about a gladiator movie?" I just started laughing because I was thinking about men in skirts and sandals. The he said, "No, it's not like that," and he started telling me the story. I thought this could be good. This could be pretty amazing. And I went out to England in the first week when they were shooting up there. I went down to deepest, darkest Farnum in the South of England, and it was snowing. It was cold. It was muddy. You've never seen mud like this. And as we were driving off the road into this wood where the battle was taking place, you suddenly left the twentieth century behind, and there you were in Roman times, and it was pretty amazing. Ridley and I kept having meetings in Marcus Aurelius' tent, so we were surrounded by these incredible Roman busts, and it was amazing.
So as far as creatively approaching this film, how did you do it?
Literally from that first day in England a couple of things happended. First of all, sitting in that tent, I was saying to Ridley, "Hang on a second. This is supposed to be a battlefield. He's Marcus Aurelius; he's got all these great furniture here; he's got all these amazing works of art around. This can't be real." And Ridley said, "No, no, no. He was here for 16 years fighting these battles. He would have brought all the things he needs as an emperor to have around him." I was suddenly starting to think about how formal, how gracious, how civilized, Rome was. And then we were looking at Roman architecture, we were looking at books of Rome. And it's this civilized, this formalized, thing - but at the same time it's all built on blood; it's all built on savagery; it's all built on the back of slaves.
I was thinking, How can I write a piece of music that has that sort of duality in it? Ridley always let's me be crazy, so I had this idea that all the action sequences should be waltzes, like Vienesse waltzes. You can't think of anything more fluffy and civilized and such a beautiful form - everything is just so, and perfect. And I thought, What if I take the shape, the form of a waltz and make it bloody, savage, and brutal? I don't think anybody has ever done that. I went away and wrote all this stuff before they even finished filming and the Pietro started cutting to the music, so we were literally working the other way around form the way people naturally work. We were doing music way ahead of the cut.
That's highly unusual in this town, isn't it?
I did it with Terrence Malick on Thin Red Line. It's a good way of working because everything informs everything else. Think about the first image we have in the film. It's called Gladiator, and the first image that you see is the wheat, the hand on the wheat. It's so poetic. And in a way it's music that gives you the license to be that poetic.
What's the biggest challenge for you in this film?
The biggest challenge is to step sideways off the clichés. The first thing I talked to Ridley about was that Gladiator is such a boy's movie. You just think it's going to be an action movie, and my ambition was that the music would support the story and be really emotional so that no woman would ever leave her seat in the theater. That is sort of what I was going for.
Let'a talk about a couple of the scenes in terms of the music you put to it. The battle sequence ...
The infamous waltzes. I do think I pulled it off. You never want to be caught at the idea. You just want people to feel that maybe there is some thought going on. Let them work it out themselves. When we were recording it in London, the orchestra played amazingly well. They suddenly realized what I was doing and they knew that I needed blood and guts from them, and they gave me blood and guts. I've done so many film scores, and I have never seen the members of the orchestra wanting to know that much about the movie, wanting to see the images, wanting to be told the story, being so involved.
How about the Moroccan chain fight?
This movie moves around a little bit geographically. We take in at least half the Roman Empire. We go from Germania, Germany, to Spain, and then to Morocco, and then to Rome. Once we were in Morocco I wanted it to be really tribal, dirty, gritty. It's pretty out there. I think the music will frighten the children, let alone the images. But the idea was that you go from this incredible ethnic, sort of tribal thing, into this sort of beautiful thing of actually getting into Rome. The two scenes really flow from one into the other, so one becomes the other. So the two parts of the Empire actually are linked. When I first looked at what Ridley had done with Rome I suddenly realized that this was really a Leni Riefenstahl homage to Rome. And so I shamelessly put on my German hat and went into this Wagner territory. The scary thing was how easy it was for me to get into in this sort of Wagner stuff. You know there's a fascist in all of us.
You also gave it the Middle Eastern kind of feel and I guess the haunting vocals.
Very early on somebody kept playing a Dead Can Dance CD; it was Lisa Gerrard singing. And the more we were listening to it, the more we were going, Can't we do something like that? And, you know, Can't we find a singer to do something? And finally, the answer, of course, was, Let's phone Lisa herself. And we sent her some footage and she thought it looked amazing. She was really interested and she came over for what was supposed to be three or four days; that turned into four or five months. And I sort of found this musical soulmate suddenly. I mean she's a formidable character and so for that she has an incredible aesthetic sense. She is a real artist. There are very few artists. Everybody is called an artist these days, but trust me, there are very few who are the real thing. We just started trying things together. When you put the picture up - and you'd better be in record if she sees the picture because amazing things will start happening and you'd better capture it. We'd all be working together. Ridley would be sitting in this room. Lisa would be singing. We'd do one take and we'd turn around to Ridley and go, "What do you think?" He'd be all sort of emotional and go, "Oh. I don't know; it works for me." I think it sort of shocked him, partly, the sort of emotional onslaught that comes out of her voice. She digs very deep and sometimes it's nearly terrifying what depths she can go into herself, and project that out to you.
The chariot fight is a huge sequence. The music thought behind that?
It's a huge sequence, and, you know, I am the luckiest man alive because those sequences are really hard to write. But because I had written what we used to call the "Gladiator Waltz", Ridley and Pietro just took it and cut the scene to it. So suddenly I knew exactly how things would be going, and it really, truly, informed us how the first scene in the Colosseum should work. It's part of what you need to do in that scene because storywise it's quite complicated. I'm really using the music for a long time to tell a story. These are the good guys, these are the bad guys, this is what's happening now, ta da ta da ta da. Because you can't really have dialogue throughout all the crashing and banging.
When you worked in this film, did you get the feeling you were working on something special?
Oh yeah. I knew we were working on something special the first day I turned up in England. I went down to see Ridley on that battlefield. And there's an image which keeps repeating in the movie which is Russell Crowe before a fight, reaching into the earth and touching the earth. I mean he's a farmer. That's the idea. He needs to touch the earth. And I didn't know about this image, but I remember sitting there with Ridley in this muddy field. And because I suddenly had been shifted from the twentieth century to somewhere else, I remember reaching down and just taking up a clump of earth, and suddenly I was in the movie, you know, and it's funny that this image meant something to other people as well.
Do these musical thoughts in your head help you to create?
Yeah, absolutely. I mean before you even start writing, that's the most important work you do, because once you have the scent of the beast, you know, once you can really follow it and try to sort of hunt it down, then you can start writing instinctively. You don't have to think anymore.
Is that what works for you? Once you get in the flow, you start flowing and it keeps coming out?
We were rocking.
Tell me about the main theme?
The thing that became the main theme, Lisa kept calling it the "Earth Theme". The first time I played it to her, she absolutely got what I was going after, which is actually this very, very beautiful theme. But I can turn it on its head, and before a battle scene hear it down in the basses, and it's very threatening. And at the same time it becomes the kiss. It becomes the figurines. It becomes the thing about family. But it really is about this personal life of this character. And what was fun was to take this very humble theme and turn it into a thousand different emotions just the way it would be. Really, it's about danger. At the same time it's about peace.