Russell Crowe Thought the Original Script for GLADIATOR Was "Rubbish"

Academy Award-winning actor Russell Crowe recently spoke with Vanity Fair about his career, and during that conversation, he dropped a little insight into the making of Gladiator He specifically touched on the original script.

When talking about the initial script he read for of the film, he recalls it being “rubbish.” He said: "I was confident about my abilities as a leading man. What I wasn't confident about with Gladiator was the world that was surrounding me. At the core of what we were doing was a great concept, but the script, it was rubbish, absolute rubbish."

He explained why it was rubbish: "It had all these sort of strange sequences. One of them was about chariots and how famous gladiators used certain types of chariots and some famous gladiators had endorsement deals with products for olive oil and things like that, and that's all true, but it's just not going to ring right to a modern audience. They're going to go, 'What the f--- is all this?' The energy around what we were doing was very fractured."

At one point Crowe actually considered walking away from the film! "I did think maybe a couple of times, maybe my best option is to just get on a plane and get out of here.” But that also changed after he talked to director Ridley Scott.

While talking to Scott about his issues with the script, he was told that they wouldn’t film anything that Crowe wasn’t 100% confident in. That resulted in a 20-page script as opposed to the normal 100 to 110-page script that most films use. Ultimately that would end up being the first part of the movie.

Crowe goes on to say it was the "continued conversations with Ridley that gave me faith. He said to me at one point in time, 'Mate, we're not committing anything to camera that you don't believe in, 100%.' So when we actually started that film, 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 up those pages in the first section of the movie. So by the time we got to our second location, which was Morocco, we were sort of catching up."

Gladiator is one of my all-time favorite films. You would never know that the final two-thirds of the film was being written on set. I love that. The emotion and grit of both Crowe and co-star Joaquin Phoenix are amazing in this film. 

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