Here’s how the ‘Gladiator II’ visual effects team staged the Colosseum naval battle

For a blockbuster sequel with several massive set pieces – including brutal scenes of war, a gladiator brawl with a furious baboon, and another with a charging rhinoceros – few moments are more epic in “Gladiator II” than when the Roman Colosseum is flooded to reenact a naval battle, complete with massive ships and hungry sharks.

It’s a sequence the “Gladiator II” producers have discussed as being one of the most costly and widely debated. But director Ridley Scott was adamant that the movie should include the centerpiece sequence, and he tasked his expert visual effects team and Oscar-nominated production designer Arthur Max with executing the moment. And so they did it, without flooding the meticulously built Colosseum set.

“The shots of the water pouring into the Colosseum were real, but the water poured into tanks that were recycling the water back to the top, like fountains,” Max tells Gold Derby, noting they had 14 large tanks around the perimeter of the set. “The ships were running around on hydraulic all-wheel drive vehicles, so they could pitch and roll like real ships. It was the only way to do it. But then to get the water to work, where you have people falling in the water and cameras in the water, we went down the road in Malta. They have one of the biggest tanks in the world there, and we recreated kind of stone for stone, molding for molding, column for column, the Emperor’s box and all its dressing canopies and tassels and all the thrones – it was a duplication of what we had in the main arena, plus, you know, 25 yards of seating by the side up, just to get those sequences of close up and water shots.”

For Mark Bakowski, the visual effects production supervisor for ILM on “Gladiator II,” the naval battle was equally challenging – largely because it wasn’t always the plan to shoot dry for wet.

“We had planned to do a lot of the key interactions in the water because you get it for real, right? Why wouldn’t you do that? But then along came the actors’ strike in the middle of this thing,” he says. Before the labor stoppage fully shut down production, however, Scott was able to shoot a small portion of the naval battle, but without actors and without the water tanks ready to go. That meant using stuntpeople on dry land, something Bakowski and his team just decided to run with when production resumed in earnest.

But recreating the water in the Colosseum digitally led to its own set of challenges – chiefly, the way the water itself would look onscreen. Bakowski, who has also worked on such major films as “Gravity,” “No Time to Die,” and “Avengers: Age of Ultron,” and his team used the canals of Venice as a reference point, making the water murkier and cloudier than it might normally appear. But Scott had other ideas, Bakowski says, even sending the visual effects team photos of his swimming pool to illustrate what he wanted.

“We kind of got a compromise with the two kinds of water. Like everything, it kind of develops over time. And as you put it into more and more shots, you learn more and more, and you make it better and better, and you kind of go back and you improve everything,” he says.

Bakowski remembers seeing the original “Gladiator” in theaters 24 years ago and says he considers it almost a personality flaw if a person doesn’t think Scott’s Best Picture winner is an all-time classic. “I could never, ever imagine working on something like that. I remember actually thinking that to myself,” he says. “So given this opportunity to work on this was very damn cool. Ridley is an amazing character. He’s fun, he’s hilarious, he’s gruff, and he’s an old-school filmmaker and a visionary. It was a unique experience. I’ve done a few films. And although I’ve seen some scale with some other films, I don’t think I’ve ever seen this scale before. And so I think it was amazing, an amazing experience working with him.”