‘Gladiator II’ production designer Arthur Max on rebuilding Rome for the sequel

At 78, Arthur Max has spent much of his professional life working alongside Ridley Scott. He describes the filmmaker as a “force of nature,” something Max likely realized back to their first feature film collaboration, 1997’s “G.I. Jane.” In the years that followed, it was Max who helped Scott realize his visions for 1970s Harlem (“American Gangster”), the far reaches of space (“The Martian,” “Prometheus”), and even 12th-century Jerusalem (“Kingdom of Heaven”). But perhaps Max’s most famous contribution to Scott’s oeuvre is 2000’s “Gladiator.” He helped the legendary filmmaker recreate the Roman Colosseum for the blockbuster Best Picture winner and, in the process, earned the first of four Oscar nominations.

So when it finally came time for Scott to make good on the promise of a “Gladiator” sequel – a project that was in some form of development since 2001 – Max says he had one feeling above others.

“Fear,” he tells Gold Derby. “Intimidation about the concept of doing it again, because how do you improve on it? It’s daunting because if it was so good the first time around, you don’t want to paint a mustache on the Mona Lisa. You don’t want to ruin what is quite an extraordinary, phenomenal film, and the magic of it. You feel a great sense of responsibility to the people who loved it, but you also want to do your best to make the sequel work in its own right.”

Set roughly 15 years after the events of the first film, when a Roman soldier-turned-gladiator named Maximus (Russell Crowe, who won Best Actor for the original) killed the tyrannical Roman emperor Commodus (Joaquin Phoenix, an Oscar nominee for the original), “Gladiator II” primarily focuses on Lucius (played by Paul Mescal), the secret son of Maximus and Lucilla (Connie Nielsen). (In the original “Gladiator,” it was not explicitly suggested that Lucius was Maximus’s son, but Scott and screenwriter David Scarpa decided to turn the fan theory into franchise canon to help extend the story.) In keeping with the “Gladiator” universe, the new film returns Lucius to the Colosseum, where he must fight for his life and try to inspire the city to rise against its new evil overlords, twin emperors played by Joseph Quinn and Fred Hechinger.

For Max, the chance to step back into the world of “Gladiator” was exciting because of the many new tools at his disposal. “You can do more both more quickly and more efficiently,” he says. “So if our goal was to make Rome as grand as it really was in scale, in opulence, and in detail, in the richness of the fabric of these interiors – we could do it. But we could also create the squalor and the decadence of it as well. I mean, Rome, then, was probably the biggest city in the world with more than a million people in the population. And although it was very sophisticated for its time, it still had an overlay of squalor and decay because of the period that it incorporated.” 

Scott famously uses several cameras – usually around 12 – to capture what he needs during production. That meant Max had to make sure every inch of the Roman set was camera-ready – even more than was required for the original.

“The Coliseum itself is pretty much a duplicate in that sense of detail, from the first one. But we finished more of it,” he says. “Whereas we only had the balcony rail and a bit of column for the senators’ box looking across at the Empress in the first movie, we now have a full Empress box set. You could do reverse shots on that instead of having to flip the negative and dress it, which we did on the first one…. The whole scale of everything we did was just pumped up larger.”

Scott turns 87 later this month and has shown no signs of slowing down – indeed, he’s got two projects, including a reunion with Mescal, on the books for 2025. Max says Scott is one of the last of his kind, an epic filmmaker who values scale and detail in a way that few directors since Akira Kurosawa have even dared to imagine.

“He has a kind of telescopic and microscopic approach to everything he does, whatever the genre,” Max says. “He’s the master of time and space, whether it is the past, present, or future.”

It also helps, Max says, that the film gods seem to smile at Scott when needed. Production on “Gladiator II” was stopped for months last year due to the writers’ and actors’ strikes. So when the cast and crew were able to resume production late last year, the season had changed – and sets that were built to exist in warmer temperatures were now forced to contend with more inclement weather. Before they were ready to shoot the finale – a confrontation between massive armies – rain pounded the set. 

“But when the camera started rolling, the sun came out, of course, and so he got the light he needed,” Max says. “That is part of the blessing of the gods you could never project.”