As soon as he was hired to write the score for Ridley Scott’s “Gladiator II,” Harry Gregson-Williams knew that he’d need to come to terms with the music Hans Zimmer had written for the original “Gladiator” in 2000. “I’ve done sequels before, but this was perhaps a bit more complex emotionally since I’m buddies with Hans, and his score for the original is so loved, quite rightly,” he said. But just as Scott used a couple of flashbacks to Russell Crowe’s character, Maximus, but spent most of his time on Paul Mescal, who plays Crowe’s son, Lucius, Gregson-Williams wanted to be sparing with the quotes from Zimmer’s themes.
“There’s 100 minutes of score in this movie, and probably five or six minutes that contain Hans’ themes,” he said. “At the end of the film, I wanted to just slip into Hans’ theme as if it evolved there naturally. So when I constructed Lucius’ theme, one of the elements was this falling seventh, an ostentatious two-note progression that was very Hans.
“When I got to the climax of the movie in the script I remember reading, ‘This is where Lucius becomes Maximus.’ And I thought, ‘Well, hello! This is where Lucius’ theme becomes Maximus’ theme. So I called Ridley and said, ‘This is what I’m gonna chase after. What do you think?’ He said, ‘Brilliant. Don’t f–k it up.’”
It’s safe to say he didn’t. Gregson-Williams, a veteran British composer who’s never been nominated for an Oscar despite a filmography that includes “Shrek,” “Enemy of the State,” “Gone Baby Gone” and six Ridley Scott movies, among them “Kingdom of Heaven,” “The Martian” and “The Last Duel,” wrote a muscular, expansive 100 minutes of score as big and bold as Scott’s vision for the sequel.
It started with Lucius’ theme, which had to be robust enough to carry the character through fights with baboons, rhinoceroses and Roman armies, but which also needed to contain the sadness he carries after his wife is killed in the film’s opening moments. (A little reverb and delay on a passage from the Ethiopian vocalist Ejigayehu “Gigi” Shibabaw provided the appropriate sense of loss.)
And because Lucius appears at the beginning of the film running his hand through a field of wheat in a nod to his father in the original movie, Gregson-Williams tried to summon up what he calls “the spiritual essence of the first film” by writing a motif for an ethnic flute played by Richard Harvey. “We use all these little ways of poking and prodding the audience and also adding some subplot,” he said.
For Denzel Washington’s character, a powerful owner of gladiators who has secret plans to become emperor, the composer also found an instrument to convey the person. “He’s a schemer, a bit of a slippery snake,” he said. “So I had a friend in Zurich, Martin Tillman, play his electric cello, which is very handy because unlike a guitar, there are no frets. You can slip from one note to another, so I created these diminished and augmented intervals where you’re not quite sure, is it major or is it minor? Is he true or is he a liar? What’s he up to?”
He also found a musician on YouTube who plays an instrument called the carnyx, a brass instrument the length of a room. “What a beast,” he said. “I saw him playing it and thought, man, I’ve got to have a bit of that. It made a very low sound, and quite unruly.”
Because “Gladiator II” was a Ridley Scott movie, with Scott editing and re-editing up until the last possible moment, Gregson-Williams also had lots of time to tinker with the score. And that made him think back to Hans Zimmer once again.
“I can’t remember what film I was on, but once I said to him, ‘Oh, my God, this is endless, Hans. I’ve been on this film for six months!’ And he said, ‘Harry, more time means you can do it better, so just get back in your room.’”
He laughed. “Quite a truism, I think. So I’ve decided to embrace that.”
This story first appeared in the Race Begins issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine. Read more from the issue here.
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