That Massive ‘Gladiator II’ Sea Battle Was Filmed in a Desert

When production designer Arthur Max teamed with director Ridley Scott for “Gladiator” 24 years ago, he immediately knew his task would be enormous. “We started on the first one by going to the Colosseum,” Max told IndieWire. “Way up on one of the upper tiers that’s still intact, looking down, Ridley‘s first comment to me was, ‘It’s smaller than I remember.’ That was very daunting.”

Max won a well-deserved Academy Award for his meticulous recreations of ancient Rome and has continued to design nearly every Ridley Scott film since, so when Scott called on him to return to the world of “Gladiator” for “Gladiator II,” there was never any question of whether or not he would say yes. Not that he didn’t know what he was getting into: “We started to talk about it, and he said, ‘I think we should go for scale on this one,'” Max said. “So you knew you were in trouble.”

“Gladiator II” is indeed the biggest movie Scott and Max have made yet, which is really saying something when you consider that their filmography includes “Black Hawk Down,” “The Last Duel,” and “Napoleon.” The film opens with a stunning battle sequence in which the Roman Army invades the coastal province of Numidia from the sea, and it’s the first instance in which Max, Scott, and the rest of the team had to figure out how to shoot something that seemed logistically impossible on the page.

The filmmakers devised a novel approach: “Even though it was a sea battle, we decided to go to the desert,” Max said. Max consulted with the cinematographer, visual effects supervisor, and other department heads and realized that it would be easier on everyone to shoot in the desert and add water later, though “easy” is a relative term. “There were elaborate movements of ships and stunt work and weapons and fireballs, and you’re moving 12 cameras around all these elements — interior and exterior fortress, onboard ship, below the level ship, on the towers, below the walls.”

‘Gladiator II’©Paramount/Courtesy Everett Collection

To shoot the sequence, enormous hydraulic machines pulled two full-scale ships over the sand, which was replaced with digital water in post. Known as “building movers,” the machines were all-wheel-drive, remote-controlled industrial platforms designed for moving large and sensitive objects, such as nuclear reactors, tanks, and turbines. “They were all electric, battery-driven,” Max said. “You could roll the ship, you could pitch the ship, you could steer the ship, all remotely.”

To create the fortress set, Max returned to the “Kingdom of Heaven” set he built nearly 20 years ago in Morocco, which was still standing and in decent condition. Using the structure’s long wall as a starting point, Max and his team expanded on it to create the massive fortress Scott’s vision demanded. “Forty feet high was not big enough, so we added a couple of extra hundred feet to accommodate the port of Numidia,” Max said. “We added a couple of giant towers, a bunch of copper roofs, and crenulated the tops of the walls to make it look different.”

Max then overlaid a series of motifs from Numidian culture based on research, though a certain amount had to be created from imagination. “We didn’t find any architecture,” Max said. “There weren’t any ruins where we could say, this is Numidian, because it was consumed over time by so many other cultures. We found some busts and sculptures, which we incorporated into the relief motifs, and we invented the flags using textile motifs and the ancient language we found. We had to generate Numidian culture to some degree and make them different from the Romans, so that was a challenge.”

Another challenge was returning to the Colosseum and making it more impressive than the first film without betraying what had already been established. “‘Gladiator’ was great, but not quite big enough for ‘Gladiator II,'” Max said. “At the same time, I didn’t want to change it so much that you wouldn’t recognize the place. It’s only 15 years or so along in time, which is nothing really.”

‘Gladiator II’©Paramount/Courtesy Everett Collection

That said, one thing that had to be considered was Scott’s desire to stage a battle in the Colosseum, which would be filled with water for the sequence that involves a full-on naval battle in the arena, complete with man-eating sharks. “We built the Colosseum taller than in the original to accommodate the mast coming through the giant entry gate and the digital water,” Max said. The set was built to a height of around 46 feet, which was then doubled in post-production.

Though much of the water was digital, there were some shots with real water that had to be filmed in what Max described as “a football field-sized tank. It was filled to about 5 feet because that was the depth we could work in that was safe — we didn’t want people unable to get their heads above water. We brought two ships in and manipulated them with pulleys and ropes on wheels underwater and shot people falling physically in the water.” Max added that real water was only needed for the close-ups, however. “For all the wide shots, the water was put in later.”

The result is one of Scott’s most spectacular set pieces to date, which Max knew would be the case going in since, on all of their projects together, the director has continued to push himself and his department heads to go beyond what they’ve done before. “That’s the given,” Max said. “It’s never big enough for Ridley.”

“Gladiator II” is now in theaters.