Russell Crowe thought original GLADIATOR script was ‘garbage’

Oscar-winning actor Russell Crowe she recently spoke to Vanity Fair about her career and during that conversation she left a little glimpse of the making of Gladiator He specifically touched on the original script.

When he talks about the initial script he read for the film, he recalls that it was “junk.” He said, “I was confident in my abilities as a leading man. What I wasn’t sure about Gladiator it was the world around me. At the heart of what we were doing was a great concept, but the script was rubbish, absolute rubbish.”

He explained why it was rubbish: ‘It had all these weird sequences. One of them was about chariots and how famous gladiators used certain types of chariots and some famous gladiators had sponsorship deals with olive oil products and stuff like that, And that’s all true, but it won’t sound right to a modern audience. They’ll be like, ‘What the fuck is all this about?’ The energy around what we were doing was very fragmented.”

At one point Crowe actually considered walking away from the film! “I’ve thought maybe a few times, maybe my best option is to just get on a plane and get out of here.” But even that changed after he spoke to the director Ridley Scott.

While talking to Scott about his problems with the script, he was told they wouldn’t be filming anything Crowe wasn’t 100% sure about. This resulted in a 20 page screenplay as opposed to the normal 100 to 110 page screenplay most movies use. Eventually that would end up being the first part of the movie.

Crowe goes on to say that it was the “continual conversations with Ridley that gave me confidence. At one point he was like, ‘Dude, we’re not committing anything to camera that you don’t believe in, 100%. ‘ So when we actually started that movie, we had 21 pages of script that we agreed on. A script is usually between 103 or four or 110 pages, something like that. So we had a long way to go, and we basically used them pages in the first section of the film. So when we got to our second location, which was Morocco, we were catching up.”

Gladiator it’s one of my favorite movies of all time. You’d never know that the last two-thirds of the film was written on set. I love. The emotion and grit of both Crowe and the co-star Joaquin Fenice they are amazing in this movie.

I have posted a link to the video below. If you are interested in Crowe’s career, please watch it. It’s a truly compelling look into the man’s career and how he views the process. If you want to see only the Gladiator info, starts at 4:55 of the video.