By Erin Free
For Russell Crowe, Gladiator is a career cornerstone. Director Ridley Scott’s Roman-era action-adventure scored Crowe a Best Actor Oscar, as well as picking up a fistful of other Academy Awards. A box office triumph, Crowe was deeply attached to the film, and when asked what generally attracted him to a project, he used Gladiator as a template. “I respond to the call that says, ‘It’s 185 A.D. You’re a Roman general. You’re being directed by Ridley Scott.’ That’s something that my imagination can get a hold of.” Not surprisingly, Crowe was desperate to keep the gladiatorial fires burning after the film’s success, and was instrumental in the moves for the mounting of a sequel. There was only one problem: his character – heroic slave/gladiator/Roman general, Maximus – died at the end of the film.
Looking for out-of-the-box inspiration in how to make a sequel happen, noted music lover Crowe turned to rock icon, occasional novelist, and eventual screenwriter, Nick Cave (The Proposition. Lawless), and commissioned him to draft a script. What the famously dark and brooding cult figure turned out was highly unconventional, with Maximus first warring with Roman gods in the afterlife, before being reincarnated, and ultimately living forever, waging battle in WW2 and Vietnam, and eventually redefining modern day warfare in The Pentagon. “Luckily, it was so completely unacceptable that they didn’t even ask me to do rewrites,” Nick Cave told The Guardian. “It wasn’t makeable. I wanted to write an anti-war film and use Gladiator’s Maximus as a raging war machine. He comes back as the eternal warrior. It was just this really wacked-out script.” Russell Crowe, however, fought to get it made. “Russell didn’t want to let it go, because it worked very well,” Ridley Scott told UGO. “As storytelling, it worked brilliantly.” For conservative Hollywood, however, Cave’s demented vision was just too dark…and strange.
