Interview: Production Designer Arthur Max on Rebuilding Rome and Filling the Colosseum with Water in ‘Gladiator II’

Production designer Arthur Max knows Rome wasn’t built in a day, but that doesn’t mean he couldn’t rebuild it in a few months. In Ridley Scott’s latest spectacle, Gladiator II, Max recreates an incredibly realistic, large-scale version of Ancient Rome, complete with a water-filled Colosseum that makes the rendering of the structure in Gladiator feel just a little bit smaller. Max’s Rome is massive yet incredibly tactile, with winding roads leading in and out of the city walls, opulent thrones befitting the evil emperors, and hand-carved statues that look like the art department borrowed them from the Greek and Roman wing at The Met. “Always bigger, always higher, always more. That was the brief,” Max recalls.  

Before beginning his decades-spanning career with Scott, Max worked with musicians, first as a lighting designer at The Fillmore East, the iconic venue in the East Village, and then as Pink Floyd’s lighting and stage designer throughout many of their shows in the early 1970s. Like many great filmmakers and crew members, he then ventured into the world of TV commercials, meeting one of his earliest collaborators in the process. His first film as a production designer was none other than David Fincher’s disturbing (and highly detailed) crime thriller, Se7en. With Fincher at the helm, the jump from the world of musicians and perfect product placement was a natural next step for Max, and Se7en, with all of its gritty and grimy props and interiors, proved Max was a fully formed production designer right out of the gate. 

After winning an Academy Award for Gladiator, Max went on to work with Scott on fifteen additional projects. Together, they recreated the Colosseum and The Battle of Waterloo in Napoleon. They invented and designed The Pyramid, the alien compound in Prometheus, and The Hab, the octagonal artificial habitat-turned-greenhouse in The Martian, earning Max his second Academy Award. Max’s creations span centuries and fill each frame with an authenticity befitting the period and an imaginative spark that pushes the world of the film to an unexpected space.

I was delighted to speak with Max about his longstanding creative partnership with Ridley Scott, his extensive research process, and how he expanded the world of Gladiator. Max’s passion for building sets with his crew and conducting art history and architectural research was palpable, making his brilliant work in Gladiator II seem that much richer.

Sophia Ciminello: You’ve designed and built so many different sets with Ridley Scott over the years: Medieval sets, sets in space. How did it feel to return to the world of Gladiator in particular? 

Arthur Max: Well, classical architecture’s one of my favorite genres. It really is what all of us in the art department love to do. It’s elegance and grandeur and opulence. We also try to show the decadence of that world and the depravity. So it’s part of the spectrum that we try to recreate. We also went for the scale and the grandeur of the glory of Rome that we had in Gladiator. We had more time on the first one but fewer resources, both financially and technically. On this one, we had less time but more resources and techniques. We have digital techniques that we were only just getting into on the first one, which meant we could produce more statues. We had huge statues on the first one, but they’re handmade now. You can do them both handmade and digitally in tandem. So, we tried to combine all the tools in the toolbox to get the best result, the most economically and the fastest. So we had many more statues than we did and many more structures and buildings than we did. 

SC: When you mention the new technical resources, I immediately go to the scene where the Colosseum is filled with water. How did you work with the visual effects team to bring that to life?

AM: So, the Colosseum was enlarged to accommodate the water battle. The ships were coming through the gates, so they had to be much higher. It was about six meters higher and the whole Colosseum went up two meters to accommodate the water level. But there was no water. There was some, I mean locally, coming out of the mouth of the Neptune sea god through the spouts, but they were just little catch tanks with circulation pumps. But the rest of the Colosseum was dry. The reason for that was the visual effects director, Mark Bakowski and I, and the visual physical effects director, Neil Corbould, we all worked hand in glove right through the movie to figure out what the best approach for every sequence would be, as we did with all the other departments sitting around a table with with Ridley. We were page-turning the script and discussing amongst ourselves what would be the most effective way to do each sequence. And we arrived at the fact that it was easier to put in the water than it was to put in all the sets and the live crowd and the animals digitally. 

So we went the other way. We had a bit of water in Morocco for the sea battle, which was ironic that we should have just a small bit of water and go to the desert to shoot a sea battle. But we used hydraulic platforms that Neil Courbould sourced, which were used for shifting enormous industrial structures around like nuclear power station cooling tanks and such. We also had giant generators, which had all-wheel steering, could pitch and roll, and give you the sense of being at sea. We prefabbed in England, we prefabbed in Morocco, and we built and prefabbed in Malta–all the same places where we filmed Gladiator. We had to because we had a compressed schedule and billed time compared to the first one. But as I say, we had more tools in our toolbox which compensated for the shorter schedule. And we managed, I think, to enlarge the scale of everything we did. We went to more locations in Malta and built more statues, and we built more edifices. The edifices were larger and taller, and the finishes were more detailed than in the first. All credit goes to all the technicians who worked on it and the craftspeople as well. 

SC: I read an interview back from around the time when Gladiator came out and you shared a great story of how when you and Ridley first went to Rome, he looked at the Colosseum and said it was too small for what he had planned. Now, even that version was too small. 

AM: (Laughs) Oh, yes! He also told me that he thought it would be bigger. I knew I was in trouble then and this time, he said, “I think this time we should go for scale.” And that’s very evident when you see the film because now, you can shoot with twelve cameras and aerial cameras so much more easily than you could 25 years ago when we made the first one. He’s the master of that, shooting with so many cameras at once. You really get the best out of the sets. I mean, you see every square inch of them, but you have to finish all the rooftops as much as possible, at least to give an indication of what they should be. Plus, you have to draw as much as possible for visual effects to follow the set extensions of what the rest of Rome would look like. We worked with technical advisors who had built a complete model of Rome, as it would have been in our period, and we worked off of that. We also dropped in our actual physical site in Morocco. We expanded the parameters of the set physically and then extended them digitally. 

SC: And even though everything is bigger and higher, it still feels so tactile. You mentioned that you filmed in Malta, but did you go back to Rome to conduct additional research on the ruins and existing structures like you did for the first film?

AM: Exactly. We went to Rome and we marched around the ruins and when you’re there, you feel the scale of it. You stand under one of the triumphal arches and you realize how big it really was, even from the fragments that are still standing. And you know, when you study architecture, you see a lot of reconstructed drawings of what people, having studied and measured the ruins, have derived from that in terms of what the scale should be and so on. But I have to say that Gladiator II is really an homage to itself in the sense that a lot of the motifs and finishes came from the first movie because things wouldn’t have changed that much in twenty-five years. In the history of Rome, which is 1200 years long, twenty-five years is the blink of an eye. So physically, the arena, the Colosseum, wouldn’t have transformed much, but we needed to increase the height to accommodate the sea battle and the ships coming through the gate, so we went up. We finished pretty much the same footprint, a little bit more of the exterior than we had in the first one, and we finished the Senators’ box as well as the Emperor’s box. We did the Emperor’s Box twice because we did go to the water for stunt work and practical water photography. We were fortunate to have one of the biggest tanks in the world down the road from Fort Ricasoli, where we did most of the Rome sets. We built a duplicate of the Emperor’s box, and we trucked our Colosseum boats on our famous hydraulic platforms down the road about half a mile and into the actual water. We finally had some water in the Colosseum. 

SC: When we think of Rome, we sometimes think of a very particular type of art and iconography. But here, I also noticed some different influences outside of Roman art and architecture, especially with the thrones and some of the interior design. I was thinking of scenes in paintings from much later periods. Did you have any artistic inspirations outside of the traditional motifs or artworks that you would have seen from the period? 

AM: That’s exactly right. First of all, there was the return of the Orientalists and the 18th and 19th-century Romantic painters who fantasized about the Ancient World, both Greece and Rome, particularly Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, who was a Dutch painter who made his fortune in England during the Victorian period, and also Jean-Léon Gérome, who’s a French Orientalist who did the original Pollice Verso, the thumbs down painting that originally inspired Ridley to do the first one. So, we used a lot of their work because they brought it to life. I mean, I visited all the museums and libraries and workshops in Pompeii and Herculaneum, but you’re looking at ruins and artifacts, whereas in these paintings they brought it into life with magnificent detail and color and ritual. They illustrated daily life. So they were a great reference. 

SC: Wow, of course. Seeing people carrying out their daily lives from that period must inspire the drama in a different way.

AM: Yes, and that was really where the research stopped because we would invent and assume based on that research. It’s a drama, not a documentary. You mentioned the Emperors’ thrones, too. Those were based on a modified Imperial throne that I saw in the Louvre. But it was in stone, and it wasn’t gilt, and it wasn’t quite that proportion because it had a very high back, which would have been obstructive on reverse angles. So you push things around to suit the camera and play with that. The floor layout and the geometrics were inspired by San Lorenzo fuori le mura, Saint Lawrence’s Outside the Walls, which is the second most important basilica in Rome. It had these gigantic geometric motifs and marble in the floor and on the walls. We did a version and an homage to that using richly colored marble, all hand-painted by our magnificent Italian scenic artist. All of the sculptures were done in combination with Maltese, Spanish, Italian, and English sculptors in a vast warehouse workshop where everyone was working. It was very good for me, because I could visit them all at once and just walk from one end to the other of this enormous warehouse and see all of the carpenters, metal workers, sculptors, plasterers, mold makers, and painters, every morning on my way to the set. So, you know, it was just joyful. And we’re talking about big pieces that could never have been assembled there. They had to be shipped in by trucks in sections and then put together like puzzle pieces with giant cranes. It was epic (laughs). 

SC: (Laughs) That’s very fitting for the movie. Thank you so much, Arthur, and congratulations again on the film. 

AM: Oh, it was more than a pleasure. Thank you.

Gladiator II is in theaters now from Paramount Pictures.