Gladiator II

Today on Art of the Cut, we speak with Sam Restivo and Oscar-winning editor Claire Simpson about their editing of Ridley Scott’s Gladiator II.

Claire and Sam have previously been on Art of the Cut for their work on Ridley’s Napoleon

Claire won an ACE Eddie, a BAFTA, and an Oscar for her editing of Best Picture winner Platoon. She was nominated for another Oscar and an ACE Eddie and won a BAFTA for editing The Constant Gardener.  Along with Platoon, she’s edited two other Oscar Best Picture nominees: The Reader and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.

In addition to Napoleon and Gladiator II, Sam was an additional editor on The Last Showman, The Last Duel, House of Gucci, and Robin Hood. 

One of the first things I wanted to talk about was the structure. You’ve got these three storylines: 1) You’ve got Lucius, Macrinus, and the Gladiators, 2) You’ve got Acacius and the Twin Emperors, and 3) You’ve got Lucilla and the Senate plot. Did any of that change from the script? 

RESTIVO: Most of the movement of the structure was based on when we’d let the audience have information about the characters, so some was shifting around of scenes that were slightly different from how it was scripted, but it was more just to keep the mystery - for starters - of who Lucius was and when Macrinus finds out about it.

Then also when Lucilla finds out that her son is still alive. We did play around with the order of that a bit.

I’m always interested in that idea of the script being different from when you actually have the material in front of you in linear time, and saying, “When is the best time to have these revelations?” Did you feel like the way it was scripted was a little too soon, or was it too late? 

SIMPSON: The studio felt that the revelation of Lucius’ identity came too late. They wanted a much earlier reveal, but Ridley always wanted to keep it hanging.

He wanted the first suspicion of his legacy to be his mothers; in the ring fighting the rhino, he mimics Maximus grabbing the earth and smelling it and creating a dust cloud, as if he’s protecting himself and obscuring himself.

Then there is the unfinished poetry that Geta tries to recall Lucius recite at Thraex’s party. - Lucilla understands the significance of the poetry and the linkage to Lucius’ childhood. Her reaction also alerted Macrinus. He becomes aware that there is something special about Lucius, Hanno, his Gladiator adopted name.

Macrinus senses that he is obviously of noble birth, educated and potentially useful.

So, you’ve got the studio pushing for an earlier reveal, and you’ve got Ridley pushing for a later reveal, and guess who’s in the middle? (LAUGHTER) Tell me about what kind of discussions you had and how did you walk that tightrope of maybe you think the studio is right, maybe you don’t, but you’ve got to do the note. How does that work? 

SIMPSON: We experiment. We do our due diligence - Sam, myself and Ridley. It’s all in the service of the narrative. Ridley is on board with that. He’s not at all rigid and that is what makes the process very exciting: He’s up for trying different things. 

RESTIVO: We’re open to being surprised as well. That’s the fun of the editing of it. Even within a scripted scene, he’s wondering if maybe certain lines that are later in the scene should maybe go sooner or if there’s a way to reorganize it so that you’re landing on the most important thing at the right moment in the scene.

So there was a fair amount of experimenting with that as well. We never know how it’s really going to work out, but we’re always going to be open to trying to make a thing that creates the simplicity that we’re looking for in the storytelling. 

Editor Sam Restivo, Additional Editor Danielle El-Hendi, and editor Claire Simpson. 

Why do they have tennis on the screen? Read on!

You’ve got a very complex movie from a technical standpoint with first unit and second unit, fighting, stunts, all that kind of stuff and previs. How do you deal with when stuff is arriving into your editing room? Did you have previs? 

SIMPSON: Ridley doesn’t like previs at all. He does his own in the form of storyboards. It’s his way of telling stories through images. His storyboards are full of information, really incredible detail so we are well armed about his intention even before he shoots a frame of film.

His boards are really quite beautiful. Even in post-production, he can’t leave the image alone. He’s constantly adding things to the image. We give him screen grabs and he draws on them.

You might get a shot of an open field, then suddenly there is Notre Dame in the background - reference Napoleon. Or you’ll get the Colosseum or something. He’s a consummate artist.

Avid timeline for Gladiator II

Did you bring those storyboards into the Avid? 

SIMPSON: Oh, yes. We had them all over the walls and in the Avid. 

Ridley actually draws those? Or it’s a storyboard artist? 

SIMPSON: Oh, yes. Ridley’s an artist. He’s a painter. 

RESTIVO: I think he enjoys that most, actually - the drawing. 

So a scene like that opening scene where you first see the warships sailing across the ocean - for months or something you would have just had a storyboard in that spot?

RESTIVO: We had plates, basically. Since we didn’t have previs, there was concept art, so we had an idea of what it was going to look like, but we didn’t have any, like, motion images or anything.

And so it was just a bunch of drone shots for the wide shots, and we had to use our imagination for how it was going to fit together and the pacing of it. We were all on the same page because we would ask him, “How many ships are going to be in the shot?”

He’d say, “200 ships or something.” So we realized that we need to have the span of time for an audience member to look at this shot and see everything that’s going to be there before you cut to the next thing. That battle was week one of the movie, because they wanted to start turning stuff over right away. I think ILM did most of that stuff.

They were sending us rough renders of things pretty quickly, but we had an idea of how long these shots were going to last.

One of their many international cutting rooms

The opening credits were a painterly special effect mixed with shots from Gladiator. Did you have to do anything to select shots or time that out?

SIMPSON: The visual artist, Gianluigi [Toccafundo], chose the majority of them, then we vetted them but ultimately Ridley chose the final shots. From our first preview we learned that at least a quarter of the audience hadn’t seen the first Gladiator.

They were viewing Gladiator 2 as a complete entity in and of itself. So we felt that we had to give the audience a certain amount of background or context. 

We didn’t want the legend at the front of the film to be endless paragraphs of words. We were hoping that the story of the first Gladiator told in the animated title sequence would help provide context or at least, draw the audience in for the exciting ride.

Do you organize or have a different approach for action or fight scenes than you do for dialogue scenes? 

RESTIVO: Maybe not intentionally, but when the action scenes are happening we obviously have the most amount of cameras for that stuff. 10 to 12 cameras on things, and when you’re watching the dailies, you look at each one of them, as you would with anything.

It’s only different in the sense that probably there’s just more footage to look at for the action ones, and the cutting will probably be quicker, but really it’s still just an intuitive thing, just based on the type of sequence that it is. 

Now, granted, most of these action scenes, they took place over multiple days and sometimes up to a week. You’d asked earlier about how do we deal with the volume of things that we’re cutting over the whole time?

For example, the naval battle in the arena was shot at three different times, so we did have to assemble the things that were already there to help identify the things that we were going to need later on down the line, because they basically started with the stunt guy stuff on that battle, so we had all those pieces in there knowing that we were eventually going to have Lucius covered specifically, then also the tank shots of the guys going the water, and whatnot.

So we did approach that more about pieces that we knew that we were going to need versus any of the dialogue scenes between Macrinus and Lucious. We were blessed with amazing performances in those moments, so it’s a different feel, but we may not necessarily be approaching it all that different.

Are you cutting with storyboards for that missing material?

SIMPSON: As Sam suggests, pieces of the scenes were shot at different times. For instance, the crowd reactions were shot later than the main action. There were ADs marching around the arena saying, “Now there’s a shark coming and attacking somebody!”

They just thought it was hilarious. They just had to imagine what was going on in the arena. The sharks were the last elements of the scene to arrive in the cutting room so the storyboards were very helpful.

Do you do have scene cards on the wall to understand structure? Or do you color code them differently in your timeline?

RESTIVO: I’ve seen some editors make each part of the storyline blue or something. We didn’t do anything like that. 

SIMPSON: No. Editing for me is totally intuitive and I don’t really approach it in any kind of very structured way. I think you feel your way  through the story and how it should be told. Cards can be helpful sometimes but trying to kind of tabulate things, I find very unhelpful. 

Sam’s agreeing with that. 

RESTIVO: Yeah, 100%. On Napoleon we did have storycards on the wall specifically because there were just so many scenes and you could change the order of things, so it was important for us to be able to visualize that in one space.

With Gladiator, we didn’t really have it quite like that. It was pretty straightforward. We could move some things around, but not really all that much. It’s kind of audience members reacting to stuff that’s there and kind of intuitively figuring out, “You know what?

This scene is interesting up to this point,” or we want to keep things moving along. It’s just something based on how we feel.

Are you both selects reel people or do you like to have shots in a bin and you just find the shot that you want that way?

SIMPSON: It really depends on the type of scene. For instance, we had a lot of bins of reaction shots of people responding to what was going on in the arena and also Cityscapes of Rome, street scenes etc. so we could plunder these bins when we had to. In terms of the scenes themselves, the dialogue scenes, that is not really possible.

For me these are always the most difficult scenes to cut because you’re really trying to find the emotional core.  Action is more fun to do. Unfortunately, you have to wait for a lot of visual effects to come in, and that’s frustrating, trying to build the excitement and hold onto the emotional and narrative thrust.

But by and large, they’re fun to do; You can break all kinds of rules. You can be as disruptive as you want with action scenes, whereas that’s much more difficult with dialogue scenes. It can be very distracting to cross the line unless you really want to disrupt the scene in some way. 

What about creating what I call “The River Styx montage” that happens after Lucius’ wife death. Also were the flashbacks to the Styx montage that are sprinkled throughout the movie written into the script? Or did you add them in post as you felt they could deliver something for you?

RESTIVO: We knew that Styx montage was going to happen. But it was late in the shoot, so we didn’t have it for a while.

Once we got it and knew we were going to have this kind of very moody piece there - once we got those shots specifically - it became useful to find places for us to callback to that later on, and that wasn’t necessarily scripted.

Like after Acacius’ fight in the arena, that was a really late cut back to Styx so that when the light comes up on Lucius holding the [arrow] fletch, it’s a direct link to that moment. But otherwise, most of the other flashbacks were scripted. Then also maybe one at the end of the film.

What about the creation of the initial Styx montage?

SIMPSON: Ridley always called the Styx montage his Ingmar Bergman moment? He does draw a lot from various directors whom he adores. That was his Ingmar Bergman moment, then Acacius’ death was his Akira Kurosawa moment.

That’s really interesting to me. I always talk about muses and the way that we communicate with directors. Do you feel if he says something like that then you should maybe I should re-watch some Bergman movies?

SIMPSON: Oh! I’ve seen every Bergman movie that was ever made and every Kurosawa movie - who’s my favorite filmmaker. I’ve seen all of them, so I applaud him. I’d bring more of it in if I could.

Talk to me about temp music. Did you temp from the original Gladiator? Did you temp from music from the composer that you knew you were going to use? 

SIMPSON: We knew we were going to have Harry Gregson-Williams from the beginning.

RESTIVO: We did temp the Styx montage from a different movie, but otherwise it was either Gladiator I or other stuff that was Harry’s from other movies.

SIMPSON: And Harry was composing while we were shooting, so it was great to have the opportunity to review scenes with him while we were shooting and he could develop ideas with Ridley’s input early on in the process. It was always very organic.

I think it was very helpful for Harry. We always knew that we wanted to incorporate some of the original soundtrack from Gladiator 1 as well, and he was very up for that. I think that was quite a challenge for him actually.

Let’s discuss building the suspense in the Rhino Gladiator scene just before Lucius reprises the moment from the first movie. I definitely felt that sense of building tension. Can you talk about stretching out of time, or whatever it was that you did to make that final Rhino attack as tense as it was.

RESTIVO: Music was a big part of that. Also, we were focusing on Lucilla’s reaction to the fight there. I’m trying to remember the order of things…

We were extending that moment using some music there, and the reaction shots in the crowd to highlight the moment - that it was going to become an important thing - even if we weren’t going to do a full flashback at that moment. I think we just used the shot of the sword in the ground at that moment. 

This movie has a lot of fighting. Do you have any tricks or anything you can talk about concerning editing the fighting - specifically what you do to cut a good fight scene?

SIMPSON: Basically there is a kind of logic to action cutting. it’s action and reaction. If somebody is throwing a great big stone or something. You want to see some kind of reaction. Somebody gets hurt or dodges the bullet.

The thing about Gladiator II was that there were so many different ways to kill somebody and so many different contraptions used that visually it became stunning. We had a really wonderful special effects guy, Neil Corbould.

We would just ask him, “Neil, can you just get us a few fellows falling over with arrows sticking in them?” He would just run off and do it. He was extraordinary. He was really an amazingly resourceful guy. I don’t think the violence is excessively gory.

I think we were quite restrained. But the trick in the end is to stay with the main characters and follow their predicament and not get lost in the chaos!

RESTIVO: One thing I would add to that is because we had such an incredible stunt team, by the way, led by Nikki Berwick, that in some of the scenes when it’s stunts, I’m happy to let a lot of that play out because it’s just kind of a stunning thing.

A lot of the stuff with Acacius at the beginning of the film, and then the naval battle in the arena. A lot of the hand-to-hand stuff is really incredible stunt work. And. Yeah. So it’s just highlighting that.

SIMPSON: Also no animals were hurt in the making of this film. 

I read that in the credits.

SIMPSON: There were no baboons killed.

What about editors? Did the editors all make it out alive?

SIMPSON: Only the editors would feel the scars.

Where did you shoot? And where did you edit? Do you like to be near set? 

SIMPSON: Oh, yes. We love to be near set. Sam and I have done a bunch of Ridley’s films. We’re a solid unit with Janty Yates and David Crossman, costume designers, Annie Penn as script supervisor, Arthur Max Production Designer, and Stephane [Bucher], our brilliant sound recordist.

Our editorial team is dedicated and loyal and brilliant: Danie El-Hendi, Stefano de Marco, Michael and Jena Cheung. As you can see by their names, we are a very international crew. Everybody’s really at the top of their game. It makes you work your hardest to be as good as the team.

You want to make sure that their work is represented in the film really beautifully - from the performances to the sets to the costume design, it’s our responsibility - at least I feel it’s our responsibility to protect all these people and show their best work. 

RESTIVO: One of the biggest logistical challenges during the shoot is making sure that we are replicating what they are seeing on the set.

Ridley works in this trailer where he’s got giant TVs showing him each of the cameras, and we want to make sure that what we are seeing is the same thing there. So there’s a ton of technical discussions early on to try to make sure we’re all on the same page.

Like with color space?

RESTIVO: Yeah. All of the things: colorspace, lighting, all of it. Obviously, there are so many links in the chain when you have a movie of this size. There’s just so many people and so many departments and it’s a moving circus.

We shot in Morocco first, and then we did Malta and we’re always near set. We don’t want to be ON the set. We want to be close enough where Ridley can have kind of a respite from the madness of set, because it IS madness, especially at this size.

There’s just so many people and so many things, and it’s obviously a very stressful thing for him that we like for editorial to be this calm from the storm for him. Then, because we’re nearby, we can assess any problems and try to get things solved much faster.

Like if we have a continuity issue with how it looks on his screens versus ours, we have either John Mathieson or the DIT [Gastone Ferrante] calibrate them as needed. So it’s a team effort especially when we are on location.

SIMPSON: We set up our Avids usually in offices nearby.

Talk to me a little bit about your interaction as co-editors. How did you choose the division of labor and how did you work with Ridley? Did he use you by jumping from room to room? Did you all try to be together as a three person group? 

SIMPSON: Oh yeah. We do everything as a group. Initially, in the assembly stage, we just jump on whatever - who’s available to do what when. We assemble the scenes very fast because Ridley really wants to see them almost before he’s actually finished shooting them.

It’s quite challenging for the assistants to prepare the dailies for us quickly because of the multi-cameras and multi-speeds.

Once we’ve got a rudimentary cut together, we often sit and work on scenes together. It’s very democratic. No one person really taking charge of one thing or another. We do it together and Ridley looks at the cut when we are ready to show him.

We sit in a room. The three of us. We’ll take his notes, and sometimes I do the changes with Sam sitting behind me, barking orders. 

RESTIVO: “NO! Not there!”

And CUT! (Snapping fingers decisively)

RESTIVO: Exactly! 

SIMPSON: Or sometimes I take that role! (Laughter) But we get on really well. We have a very similar sensibility. And if we don’t, sometimes it’s good to have different opinions, but we work it out. But it’s fun and I enjoy working with Sam.

Also we have great lunches and we have chats about tennis every morning, because tennis is one of the most important things in our lives.

RESTIVO: And with Ridley too, by the way. So that’s why it’s great for this kind of three-headed-monster - the three of us in the room. For starters, with Ridley and giving notes, he’ll talk about absolutely anything in there.

So if we were to be in different rooms, that would actually probably be a destructive process because he might say one thing and then something different unintentionally.

Then we’d be confused about what we’re supposed to do. It really does help for the three of us to be in the room, just enjoying the process of solving any of the problems that we’re having within a scene.

Do you ever feel like one of you needs to do notes on reel 2 while the other does notes on reel 3, then join up later?

SIMPSON: Yeah. We sometimes do, but we talk about the notes. If Sam comes up with an idea that’s great for him to pursue and I’ll take the credit for it. I’m quite happy with that.

RESTIVO: Obviously, there’s always pressure to get things done fast with Ridley, but it’s rare that we take seven reels of notes and have to do them all tonight. Sometimes, maybe a couple days before a screening or the preview or something like that, where we have a volume of things we need to get through.

Otherwise we really do try to just do most of it, together, just because then we’re in agreement, and we can talk through any issues or questions. During dailies if there’s at least two people kind of bouncing the ideas off each other, you have kind of a consensus that this is the best way to do it.

In our closing minutes here, I would love to ask you to pick a scene that you cut during dailies that you are either very proud of or that was very difficult.

RESTIVO: The one for me that means a lot is: I got to do Lucius waking up in the water and wading out to embrace his wife in the surf. That was a combination of a lot of amazing little things. It was a really quick thing.

It was shot at two different locations. One in Morocco - up front facing Lucius, toward the wall in Namibia. Then the second half was done in Malta. Once we had those things together, it’s a really beautiful moment and a great performance from Paul, cradling her in the water. It was just that combination of things. It was really emotional, and it was gorgeous.

Then we had some great music underneath it. That was a real “this is cinema” kind of moment. I was really proud of that one. 

SIMPSON: I was very anxious to do the baboon attack scene. I couldn’t figure out how to sort out the dailies for that scene. There were so many layers of it, and it was one of the first scenes that was shot. It was maybe overcomplicated in the shooting of it. I really struggled with it.

Also, the baboons were men in gray suits with stilts on their arms. They happened to be really good actors, and actually I got quite emotionally attached to their performances.

RESTIVO: Don’t bite him!

SIMPSON: Right. I thought the stunt performers did an amazing job. Eventually, when they were digitally erased and we got the CGI baboons, I kind of missed the stuntmen in a bizarre way. I feel a certain nostalgia for them; for the stunt men in gray suits and stilts on their arms.

They were emoting like crazy. When the teeth fall out of one of the stuntmen after he grabs the chain, he showed such pain and so much humiliation when he was overpowered. I thought, “How is a CGI baboon going to replicate this?” So I want to salute the stuntmen.

Claire, you talked about the difficulty of dialogue scenes. I wanted to ask specifically about the final Lucius monologue scene to the troops. When to be on Lucius? When to be off of him? How to deal with that? Were there discussions around creating that very emotional moment?

SIMPSON: To be perfectly candid with you, it was a little bit underwritten. I thought Paul Mescal did a wonderful job. As Sam’s already alluded to: there were some scenes where the pieces came in at different times.

It was logistically very complicated to pace the timing of the arrival of the two opposing armies and at what point in the Lucius, Macrinus confrontation they should arrive and listen to the two protagonists.

Paul is a very sensitive actor. I think he represents the modern male. I thought Russell was brilliant in G1, but that was 24, 25 years ago. I think things have changed. And I think Paul represents more of a contemporary male. Tough physically but sensitive and thoughtful too.

He has a lot of power, a lot of presence, even if he’s off screen. His voice is just very commanding.

So to your question, when do you cut to a reaction shot in a dialogue scene. There maybe a million different reasons but in the end it is about finding the emotional and narrative weight to a line of dialogue. It might be the listener who tells you more about the impact of a line than the person that delivers it! It is also about breathing, about space, about timing to allow the dialogue to “land”.

It takes remarkable skill and intuitive understanding of character for an actor to perform. It takes brazen artistry for a director to hold on a shot and it takes courage for an editor to fight for “the pauses”  in a dialogue scene.

I know you talk about editing intuitively, but did you think - or have a discussion about - when to specifically be on Paul when he uttered a specific line, or when to be on a reaction? “We shouldn’t be on a reaction on this exact moment. This has got to play on his face.”

RESTIVO: That last sequence was complicated because we also got pieces at a lot of different times, and there was additional dialogue that they wanted to get as pickups. All of this was at the 11th hour. We were looking at this thing at the end of the final mix, and Claire was the one that was willing to say, “I think it’s playing too fast.

We’re not giving enough time for the weight to set in about what Lucius is saying and to give the soldiers a moment to consider the thing for us to have the payoff of the final scene.” So it was really at the very end, she did one quick pass, and we just extended a few of these shots by a number of frames to just give it a little bit of breath.

Something like that really goes a long way, because otherwise we were just hurtling through a lot of things because there was also tons of pressure about making the movie shorter. But we knew that there’s got to be times when we are giving the movie enough breath so that it has the impact that we want to have with the audience.

The editing and sound teams on the Mix stage

SIMPSON: I felt the rhythms were all wrong for Lucius’ last speech. There were a couple of lines that we added right at the last minute in ADR and stupidly but expediently, I tried to fit them into the existing framework.

I realised to my horror as we reviewed the final mix, that everything was off kilter and that the scene did not have the emotional punch that the whole build up to the final battle and the confrontation with his nemesis, Macrinus required.

I went back to the cutting room and examined the scene and realised that by adding pauses, it gave the speech more gravitas. But it was complicated by the fact that the couple of additional lines recorded were not on camera.

I had to find reaction shots of the soldiers who were gathered around listening to the speech and - through their reactions - express a radical emotional shift in allegiance from one leader to another.

RESTIVO: So, that sequence was a perfect example of the complication of editing and just seeing how it feels by the end. We had seen the movie a thousand times at that point, and for her to have the wherewithal to say, “No. We need to extend these things to really make it hit home.” That was extremely important. 

Describing how something hits home for the audience is a great place to leave this interview. Thank you both so much for a great interview. 

SIMPSON: You’ve been a great host. 

RESTIVO: Thank you.