By Griff Griffin
Entertainment Reporter
The cinematographer for Gladiator 2 branded its director Ridley Scott "impatient" in a recent interview.
John Mathieson, who worked with the renowned British director on both 2000's Gladiator and its 2024 sequel, criticized Scott's increasing reliance on CGI.
"It's the CG elements now of tidying-up, leaving things in shot, cameras in shot, microphones in shot, bits of set hanging down, shadows from booms," Mathieson tells The DocFix Documentary Storytelling Podcast.
Mathieson, who also worked on The Phantom of the Opera (2004) and Hannibal (2001), highlighted the dramatic rise in Scott's use of VFX. "The first Gladiator, that was 50 effects shots. This one [Gladiator 2] would be in the thousands."
While Mathieson praises Scott as one of the most interesting living directors, he's not a fan of Scott's new multi-camera approach. "People want to shoot multi cameras because they get lots of performances and they put lots of people in,"
"He's quite impatient so he likes to get as much as he can at once. The problem is with that, you light from one side. You look at the older films, getting depth into things was very much a part of lighting. Now you can't do that with lots of cameras. But people love his films and he's Ridley Scott and can do what he wants."
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