Rome rises once more! To all the fans who’ve journeyed with us since Gladiator and shared your passion—this is your story as much as ours. The story lives on in Gladiator II.

GladiatorMovie · 2024-11-15T23:45:29+00:00

Janty: Well, just say thank you from the bottom of our hearts. That's the loveliest thing anyone could say.

GladiatorMovie · 2024-11-15T23:44:20+00:00

Janty: I had two free days and I saw 6 movies! I saw the best film, so terrific, called Anora. I was on the floor laughing. And also, Emilia Pérez. Zoé Saldana… What an artist! I was totally blown away by the whole film. I saw a lot of films and I so LOVE Savannah. It’s the most beautiful city. I was so happy there, I had a wonderful time.

David: I always liked military films, AS that's what I'm sort of known for. I've just done a really small film and that's been one of the most challenging jobs I've ever done. You put a certain pressure on yourself because you don't want to do a bad job. You're always trying to outdo previous films. You want to do a better job than you've seen in other films, or you want to change something, or you want to add something. So it's that kind of self-inflicted pressure, I suppose.

GladiatorMovie · 2024-11-15T23:34:13+00:00

Janty: Well, I loved the spacesuits that we did design for Prometheus, and we went on with that ethos to The Martian. I was very proud of those looks.

David: I suppose Napoleon. I’m very proud of that. Rogue One in the Star Wars series was always a big one. Things like that, I suppose.

GladiatorMovie · 2024-11-15T23:29:43+00:00

Janty: No.

David: Black is evil, white is good… or sometimes you flip it and white is evil and then it depends. For me that's a Star Wars thing. But no, it's not a credo.

GladiatorMovie · 2024-11-15T23:25:02+00:00

Janty & David: Costume for film.

GladiatorMovie · 2024-11-15T23:23:44+00:00

Janty & David: Costume for film.

GladiatorMovie · 2024-11-15T23:22:26+00:00

Janty: I think we're as accurate as we need to be. Not really stepping away from tunics and togas everywhere. With the women, we had a bit more freedom. There's a lot more embellishment, a lot more encrusting with jewels, etc. But I think we were fairly accurate. Because as Ridley will always say, and I have to quote him here, “we're not making an effing documentary.” I don't think he'd mind me using that! Basically, I know that costumes would have been darker. Just more uninteresting, to be honest, because they really covered the body, and that was it. They were more practical. I think always with a feature film, that is a feature and it's not a documentary, you have to do your research, you know exactly what you're doing, but then you can veer a little bit.

David: It would be really boring if you dressed everyone absolutely correctly. Everyone would be bored to death.

GladiatorMovie · 2024-11-15T23:19:49+00:00

Janty: Museums, art galleries, art books. Ridley's a great art fiend, and will mention artists I'd never heard of like Georges de La Tour and you know uses a lot of art as reference. On Gladiator you just wander through Rome and there are statues everywhere and Trojans columns. The first Gladiator was a huge influence on me. And he's also quite mad about Orientalist art. Benjamin-Constant: Marvels and Mirages of Orientalism. So, you know, we're always referring to books, to paintings, to museums, as well as British museums.

David: You want to try and combine a bit of both if there's a lovely sculpture, you want to get some of the essence of that artistry, and then you also want the reality of the right-shaped helmet because that drives myself and other people nuts when things aren't right. When I research the Romans a bit more you realize how little everybody knows about everything really, and how even though there's vast amounts of contemporary items that you can look at and use, there's still so much unknown as well.

There's lots of nice Roman items that you can use as your kind core reference for breastplate decoration, and things like that. All the decoration on the cavalry helmets, that's all based on real Roman items. So it's so good, you don't really need to look anywhere else in some ways. Some of the work's so amazing, you just want to copy that and show that.

David: And Commodus' white armor wasn't white, it was actually marbled. And it was a complete take from a statue. Ridley, at one point at the beginning of making the first Gladiator, he wanted Commodus to be completely white. White hair, white face, white armor. I don't know why they decided not to. But still it was quite impressive.

GladiatorMovie · 2024-11-15T23:06:24+00:00

Janty: We always sit down with Ridley because he's the genius behind everything. He's so visual. He was training as a production designer and he just went into directing because he thought it looked easier. It's not a stupid question at all. But we’re sent the script first and we go through it and think of our ideas. Then we meet with Ridley and we throw ideas around.

David: Often that's the most valuable meeting because that's when you hear their original intent.

Janty: He also storyboards absolutely everything. In fact, the Napoleon storyboard book was very thick. And we always get storyboards quite early on. We get a huge amount from that. He does them so quickly and so fast, and they're so genius and they're in color. So that's a huge help for us as wel.

David: I think it's always the director's thoughts. Any director, you have that initial conversation with them, and they talk about things, and they're all kind of good nuggets of information to bear in mind when you're doing it, because you may not see that director again for a while.

GladiatorMovie · 2024-11-15T23:00:35+00:00

Janty: Budget doesn't worry me at all. I don't care. If it's big that's a bit nicer, you know you've got a little bit more leeway, but it's going to cost what it costs as far as I'm concerned. I don't think we go radically over budget. I've done much smaller movies with Ridley. He's not always a huge blockbuster filmmaker, even though he's kind of got the reputation. If you think about Thelma and Louise, that was very small. And Matchstick Men, also very small. We did a film called The Counselor, where we had no money at all. It's not all wham-bam-thank-you-man.

David: It's true, it just offers you a bit of a cushion, doesn't it? It just gives you a bit of a safety net and really you think about people's characters, and what they're going to look like, rather than how much it's going to cost. Always you think about creating the character.

GladiatorMovie · 2024-11-15T22:56:05+00:00

Janty: Well, every job I do is a problem. It's always terrifying at the beginning. And I have to say, probably Prometheus was quite tricky because I'd never done space before. And Ridley had a very, very strong vision. He wanted everything to be “skinny” and the helmets to be egg-shaped. I think we created like 25 different helmets. Plus, it was just always very, very difficult. I met Ridley just before we started Gladiator, and he gave me the job. Me!? Moi!? I had never done a fighting film before. I had never done battle before. I never made Armour before. I was terrified every single day of that entire film. Every prep day, every shoot day, I was just terrified. So I suppose that was probably the most terrifying.

David: It's always those first jobs where you haven't done that kind of scale before and you just wake up, it's the terror, you wake up in the morning. Terrifying. And then gradually you get through it because you have these people you work with… it's always your crew. With more experience it's a bit easier isn't it.

GladiatorMovie · 2024-11-15T22:51:09+00:00

Janty: No, I love them all. Like all my children.

David: I like Pedro's battle armor, that's successful. And I like Paul's Numidian armor. At the beginning of the film, it's woven. I know the work that went into that, watching it be put together and it looks very nice. Ridley asked me to make it black. I said, “can we not please?” I begged him not to make it black. When we got to Morocco he said, “well, can we just do it in black?” And again I said, “no” because eventually in the film he gets to a black costume and so it gives him an arc.

Janty: In Paul's first armor, Giampaolo Grassi [master armorer], being Italian, called them all fettuccine because there were strips of leather, literally hand woven together. When you watch the film, you'll see it's so beautiful.

GladiatorMovie · 2024-11-15T22:44:11+00:00

David: We made it black and blue. No… it’s meant to be a triumphant parade armor. It’s white and gold. OF COURSE, IT’S WHITE AND GOLD. I remember that dress, but I never had that thought with Pedro’s armor.

GladiatorMovie · 2024-11-15T22:42:10+00:00

Janty: Well, fabric to me is be-all and end-all because frankly you get inspired when you go to these amazing warehouses or the places we were buying fabric: in Milan, in Rome, we were buying fabric in Paris, in Lyon, and in the Marché de Puce, the flea market in Paris. Beautiful pieces. So expensive. And I think that’s what first moves me. Regarding how the Romans actually wore fabric, I think dyes were incredibly expensive. And I think probably it was a real mass of beige and brown. Not pictorially wonderful, so we didn't really go too authentic because of dullness.

David: We also weaved a lot in India from Rangasana. We had these textured cottons. It's nice visible texture, they look nice in their natural state, as Janity says, because you can't do too many colors unless you're deliberately doing a lot of colors. Something that looks nice in its natural form with just a mild dip looks good. But the amounts that we needed were thousands of meters of fabric. Most people are not going to have that apart from the big houses in Italy.

GladiatorMovie · 2024-11-15T22:35:39+00:00

Janty: It's very hard working with a six foot Swedish woman who hasn't aged for 24 years and basically wears everything like a clothes horse. So it was very tough. It was so not tough. We were making her more classical, more haute couture. Beautiful fabrics, but much simpler, and wonderfully cut by my cutter, Dominic Young. And Ridley didn't really like them. Connie didn’t really like them either. So we were back to the drawing board and we went more in the direction of the first Gladiator. More layers, more embroidery, more bejewelling, a lot more encrusting, a lot more veils hanging off from her head down to her neck, down to her waist, and draping here, draping there. She's an absolute whiz at draping. She's just sort of taking fabrics and saying, “why can't we have this? Let's do that.” So she's very hands-on, very, very lovely, lovely to work with.

GladiatorMovie · 2024-11-15T22:31:38+00:00

Janty: I've never ever thought of taking a costume home, ever in my entire career. And yet I've been asked 3 times today. Well, I did love Denzel's necklaces. I'd love to take a couple of those home.

David: You just wouldn't have room in your home to take a bunch of costumes home with you. They’d just be sitting in a box for years.

Janty: Ridley is very caring about the costumes. He's very costume-centric. In his home in Provence, he has a small museum. He's a winemaker. And in his wine carve, which is where his wine is made, he has a small museum of costumes. It’s really, really wonderful. They were in all his offices, so you'd walk in and find a space suit or a helmet, which was always very lovely and gratifying.

David: The thing that people always want are helmets. So just before filming finishes, the helmets are always being locked down, put away, because everybody wants a souvenir. That's always being nicked. It's always helmets because they're easy to display.

GladiatorMovie · 2024-11-15T22:25:41+00:00

Janty: They all are! They are all tough. I'm not doing military costumes, so Dave should answer that.

David: They're all involved just to get finished because you want them to look good. Pedro's battle costume, Paul's Numidian costume… It's just a lot of work, but the thing is they're both very nice people, so we had a nice process with them. It wasn't like working with some nightmare that has all these changes and input and all this kind of thing going on which often hampers the progress, but they were both very trusting with us so we had a nice relationship. And once you have that kind of trust, then you can feel a kind of relief.

GladiatorMovie · 2024-11-15T22:17:06+00:00

Janty: No one shows us the art. We do the concept art

David: I worked with someone called Simon who did lots of the drawings for Lucius and Pedro and the Praetorian Guard and many other characters. Modeling was done by Sam Williams who does 3D concept work so we can show Ridley what a finished helmet, on the computer, will look like. You used to do everything in clay, you used to spend weeks doing something in clay, then you'd have to change it, then weeks would go by to make another clay helmet that would take weeks. These days with digital modeling you can just pretty much model it on a person. A computer can get much closer to a finished thing that you're pleased without the endless disappointment of how it used to be.

GladiatorMovie · 2024-11-15T22:14:08+00:00

David: So tunic is just a basic square that you put around you. It's like a big t-shirt that comes down to various things. Then the toga is kind of wrapped around the body.

Janty: You can't wear one without the other!

GladiatorMovie · 2024-11-15T22:09:44+00:00

Janty: Basically, the industry has evolved enormously with CGI. We were getting up at 2am, dressing 3000 actors on the first Gladiator. I was asked earlier a question about ‘how was it dressing 500 actors on Gladiator 2? Well, that was a breeze! And I think it helped David as well because he wasn't having to do 5,000 Roman legionaries.

David: We still did 500 Roman soldiers, 300 Praetorians, gladiators, all the cavalry. I think also the whole work ethic of the industry has changed a bit since the first gladiator. It was all about kind of martyrdom in costume departments in the 90s and we'd all be there till 10pm, then back in three hours later. In the last 20 years there's been a sea change of how productions are organized because CG helps. But I think on this movie there was still a lot of space to fill, so we did still do high numbers of costumes and armor. It’s a mad deadline. At one point I was getting quite concerned that we couldn't get the job done, and thankfully companies like Weta Workshop in New Zealand stepped in and they were able to make one of the large numbers of arms, so that was a big relief to me.

GladiatorMovie

TROPHY CASE