'Gladiator II' DP, John Mathieson, breaks down how they shot the flooded colosseum scene on both dry land and a water tank using remote operated ships in combination with VFX.
Category
✨
PeopleTranscript
00:00My name is John Matheson. I'm a cinematographer and I've just shot Gladiator 2 for Ridley Scott.
00:18Things have got more technical and faster and easier in visual effects. They can make more
00:23intricate stuff quicker and they can go to town a bit more, but for me, camera's a camera still.
00:29The language he uses is the same. This was going to be a lot more visual effects heavy,
00:33which is all the way through the industry now. The first film, he was a bit more suspicious of
00:38it. I mean, he was in a more build the sets, fight real tigers, shoot real arrows, great fun.
00:44I mean, there are improvements in technology and some of the things we did better because we did
00:48once before, but the Senate was there, the Coliseum was there, the Forum was there.
00:52So everything is where we left it.
00:54The camera comes on quite late. I came into the back of the office and they'd started already
01:02with something and Neil Kulbal and Ridley were talking about a sea battle in Wazzazat,
01:07which is on the edge of the Sahara. And I said, well, I'm in the wrong room here.
01:13Sahara is not known for its coastline. And so they were going to shoot this battle dry
01:17and then add the water later. That would not have happened 20 years ago. Those ability to use CGI
01:23now really embraces it. Our character has become a bit of a leader of the gladiators. He's the one
01:31who speaks out and he conquered the rhino and he's getting a bit too powerful. They wanted to kill
01:35him off. So they devised a sea battle in the Coliseum. They flood the Coliseum so they could
01:40have this sea battle. It's got these fun little pantomime type islands and they come out in these
01:44mini little galleys and they go at each other. I mean, it's my favorite sequence, even though for
01:49me, lighting and things, I didn't really do much. I missed a few bits and pieces, but as a scene
01:55that's come together, it's totally unique to anything you'll see. It's incredibly colorful
02:00and contrasty and the boats are all different colors. The gladiators are kind of pantomimed up.
02:05It's totally over the top. The boats come out and they do this dancey dance, you know,
02:08Lucius having been the man of the sea, grown up by the sea, helms the boat and does a double take
02:13and disables one and turns back on it, rams it and makes a mess of them. And then they
02:18jump across and they all start throwing each other in the water. In the water are, you know, sharks.
02:26Ridley wants to shoot it as much as he can, all at once. So you put lots of cameras in
02:30and you position them around the arena because the boats are moving. Not all the cameras will
02:34be on all the time, but the boats will come to you. The action will come to you. They're plotted out
02:39to meet bits of action as they come towards you. It's like going shopping. Did you get the
02:43rice? I'm getting the pasta. You have to just talk to everyone, all the operators and say,
02:48don't worry about that. He's going to get that. The good thing about doing it all at once is that
02:52it's in continuity. So the boat's burning, walls have been broken, guys are falling off. You know,
02:57if you cut to another shot and the guy's falling off in the wide shot and you cut to a close-up,
03:01Paul, he's still there and he falls off. You can't use that shot. But since everything's running at
03:05the same time, when he falls off in the wide, he falls off in the close-up as well. So we shot it
03:10dry again on these things called SPMTs, which are multi-wheeled, multi-steering bases. It's like
03:16putting a thing on a massive skateboard with lots of wheels on it. And the guy walks along next to
03:21it and he's got a joystick and he drives it. The good thing about that is that if you do anything
03:24in water, water drifts the whole time. You set the camera up, set the boat up, put the guy in the
03:27water and just the slightest breeze, everything goes like that. It's really time consuming water.
03:32So we did it dry. And then we moved the tank in Malta, which is the probably largest tank in
03:37Europe. It's 300 by 400 feet and it can be up to two meters deep. They put the Coliseum in there,
03:43but only the ring edge of it and the roll box and some bleachers. Then we shot the whole
03:47other half, which were the boats interact with the water. If you think most of the time
03:51you're fighting on the boat with, you know, and you're on the top. When you fall in the water,
03:56then you need the water. People get knocked off. There's a whole lot of stuntmen pushing a bunch
04:00of cardboard boxes about the size of a van around trying to get under that guy when he falls off.
04:05So he lands on something. He doesn't take a dive onto the Coliseum floor, but then you go in
04:09to the wet tank and then you do what you couldn't do on the dry tank.
04:18Story-wise, there's only a few shots in the water, but they took
04:21maybe twice as long to just to give you some idea how difficult water is to work in. They
04:25had to remember what they did in the other one to fall in the right place, to get the right
04:29continuity. To me and the cameras, when you're shooting that dry, as long as you're
04:35under the water, because you know the water's going to go put over your head, you're okay.
04:38You put the cameras where you want, rather than being on the raft and coming up alongside and
04:42doing all that. Really, you know, down to the ADs and the coordination, the special effects,
04:47the visual effects. It's a fantastic, and Ridley, of course, who's overseen. It's a fantastic scene
04:51that's been put together. We had a lot of cameras. You've got this old shape of people around you,
04:59all going screaming, shouting and shadows. I think the answer is just to stay back with
05:03the camera and reach in rather than going very wide and very close, because then you lose
05:08everything. Because I was shooting you, you're head to toe. But if I shot you very close,
05:12well, I see you and see much of the room. If I come find the back, I actually see what's behind
05:15you. That's very important to feel like you're there and to feel you're always in the action.
05:20And then we've got these amazing cranes these days that we didn't have 25 years ago, which
05:24the stabilized cranes, they're telescopic. They can reach to 75 feet or more, but we use the
05:29short ones. We lay big tracks down as well. Some of the tracks are a hundred foot long or more.
05:33The shooting of it is, it's observing and planning. You don't write lists of what is
05:38going to happen because there's so many things going on. You might say, well, this guy goes from
05:42the front to the back. Well, let's put a camera that goes from the front to the back down the
05:44side. Well, no, wouldn't it be better if you were sitting at the front and he ran to you?
05:48Those decisions only come by watching it and having a lot of experience, a lot of very experienced
05:53operators. They plan, they rehearse, the stunts rehearse, special effects guys to try and reverse
05:58and we follow their lead really. And so the language of the film from the first one to this
06:04one hasn't changed much. You know, cameras are still cameras, lenses are still lenses,
06:07but we had more cameras and more visual effects possibilities.
06:15The lenses, we've got some Sphero Primos, but we never use them because they're prime lenses.
06:20We like zooms because they're just quicker. That might sound like a bit of a philistine.
06:26When you're working that quick and your crane's up in the air, the last thing you want to bring
06:29down is bring it down, pull the matte box off, pull the motors off, pull the lens out,
06:34change the bridge plate, put another lens back on, rebalance it, put the motors back on,
06:38put the mouse mounts back on. And that can happen quite quickly. We've got a zoom lens,
06:41you just go zip. So it's all about the zooms, I'm afraid. You know, much as I admire cinematographers
06:46who choose the right lens, that's not what we're doing here. You've got a lot of people who've
06:50been up since 2.30 in the morning. You've got to be ready. You've got to be quick. You've got to
06:54be on it. All the cameras are standards. I went to Panavision and said, what have you got lots of?
06:59They said Alexa Mini LF. So I said, right, we'll have those. Because I didn't want a mixed bag of
07:04stuff. Because if you are all over the Coliseum, everything's got to be compatible. You can't have,
07:10oh, this camera has this lens, or this one has this bridge. No, no, no. Oh, it's a much nicer.
07:14Yeah, I know it's a nicer look, but look at the time. You know, you don't have that pleasure.
07:21Doesn't mean we don't take great care. But it was zoom lenses, wide zooms. They've got a lot
07:27better. The zooms are much more sharp than they were a few years ago. They've got a better range.
07:31They're faster. These modern lenses made by computer are much better optically. It goes
07:35in straight. But if you give it a deep aperture as well, you'll get really good black shadows.
07:39And I wanted that. If you're shooting a shot with a lot of depth in, close up of me, and your
07:45aperture is too wide, that becomes mush. You want to see a bit of detail back there. You don't want
07:50to just have swimming out of focus, nothing. So shooting deep with standard one camera,
07:57Alexa LS, and just zoom lenses, that was it. Just simple. But I have to say, it looks great. We just
08:03didn't agonize over different lenses and flares and Zeiss and Cook and this. Yeah, it was mixed
08:11stuff. But as long as you've got the range, long and wide zooms, that was it.
08:22I saw it dry a lot because the water comes later. I saw the dry stuff, and that looked great.
08:28Because you can imagine it. Because it's all there. All the action's there. You just have
08:31to ignore the bottom of the frame where the water is. I didn't really see it put together
08:36until I started grading through all the colors on the film. I think it's very important as a
08:41cinematographer to actually, you know, make sure that the images that you want to get
08:45end up on the screen. Since we're grading as we go, you know, we're doing that on site,
08:49things are pretty much mapped out. Quite often we have a sort of dusk and a night and a dawn scene,
08:53and the night scene goes away. Then you're left with a dawn and a dusk together, and there's got
08:57to be a timeline. So you've got to shift one of them away from the other. You follow the colors
09:01by the story arc. This scene looks too like that scene. You want it to be somewhere else. You've
09:04got to bend it a bit. You know, I grade films fairly quickly, and I did probably about five
09:08days on it total. It is a film with very few looks. It's, you know, sunny Rome. Well, it's
09:14Numidium, which is very dry and white desert, hazy skies. Everything's just dust, and it's dry,
09:21it's dusty, it's sage colors. It's everything that's a bit burnt. And then you go to Rome,
09:25which is color. And so it went from this dusty, dry, arid, nothing, to Rome, which is more colorful
09:33and opulent and kitsch, camp, gaudy, vulgar. Then you have your night scenes, which are
09:39candlelit or gorgeous ambers. They kind of always stay in the same zone. You know, the
09:43violet ones, I made a bit more lemony. The warmer, softer ones, the more intimate ones,
09:48they're kind of a bit more orange and flattering. That was about it. Done a lot of that when we shot
09:53with the DIT on set when we were shooting.