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Maximus escapes the executioner's blade and is sold into a troupe of gladiators, including the African Juba (Djimon Hounsou). Their job is to fight and die, and their Vince McMahon is the wily Proximo (Oliver Reed). Act II of Gladiator is a backstage show-biz story, the one about the old pro who makes a comeback in a new role. Maximus' battleground is now the arena; instead of barbarians, his opponents are hungry tigers. Proximo tells Maximus he must make the crowd love him. If he does, he'll go out there as Tiger Chow but come back a star.
The gladiator revue is such a hit in the provinces that it is soon playing Rome. There, Maximus takes two wary allies: Senator Gracchus (Derek Jacobi), who needs help in restoring the republic; and Lucilla (Connie Nielsen), Commodus' 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 briskly lurid history of the Roman games. "It really made a connection between that era and ours," Franzoni says, "about how sports heroes are slavishly worshiped by their fans." A few years ago, while writing his script for Steven Spielberg's Amistad, he worked on an idea about gladiators as "commercialized idols, their endorsements on frescoes, chariots and jars of olive oil." When Scott was hired, he brought in John Logan (Any Given Sunday) to create Maximus' life as a slave and playwright William Nicholson (Shadowlands) for further character shadings.
Casting the film, Scott tested Jude Law for Commodus but went with Phoenix, an odd, inspired choice: beneath the villain's sliminess is an unloved child with vivid plans for vengeance. Scott's choice of Nielsen also was resisted, but the Danish beauty brings a regal presence to the film. The boozy, 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 (which also added tiers to the Colosseum). Crowe, deep into his Jeffrey Wigand character in The Insider, 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. Says a DreamWorks exec: "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. He was the voice of reason dealing with many unreasonable factors, not the least of which was his lead."