The ancient and unusual musical sounds at the heart of Gladiator II

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Published: Saturday, 16 November 2024 at 10:00 AM

It’s over 24 years since Ridley Scott first gave the world Gladiator, one of the most popular films of all time. The music for that 2000 film, starring Russell Crowe as a Roman general who found himself out of favour, hurled into slavery and having to, quite literally, fight for his life, was by Hans Zimmer.

Flash forward to 2024 and Scott’s long-awaited sequel, Gladiator II, is finally on the big screen. This new story features at least a couple of familiar characters, and a little of Zimmer’s iconic music. The lion’s share of the music for Gladiator II is by Hollywood-based British composer Harry Gregson-Williams. He cut his teeth working with Hans Zimmer in the 1990s, going on to form an early creative partnership with fellow composer John Powell. Together they scored animated classics like Antz, Chicken Run and Shrek. Gregson-Williams soon went solo, and has become a go-to composer for big-budget, big-action films over the years. Ridley Scott has called on the composer a number of times over the years, with the pair working together on Kingdom of Heaven, The Martian, Prometheus, House of Gucci and The Last Duel, among other things.

For Gladiator II, Gregson-Williams works with an enourmous palette of sounds, instruments, players and singers, drawn together from across the globe. I sat down with him to discuss what it takes to deliver a film score of this size, and the ingredients he came up with to help tell this epic story.

Did you feel any pressure in taking on the sequel to what is an iconic film?

I was suffering from quite a lot of anxiety to begin with, considering who did the first film and my relationship to him. I called Hans to tell him I was doing it and told him how anxious I was, but he told me to just enjoy myself and make him proud, so he was very encouraging. 

What’s the starting point for you on a film of this scale?

I think the first thing I did with this movie, and have done with other epic things, like Kingdom of Heaven, is to try and lay out my sonic template. That helps and inspires me to go onto the next stage which is themes. I lay out a wishlist of instruments I could have at my fingertips, that I could put into my samplers in my studio, but which I could then have played by real people. 

You incorporate a few unusual, ancient instruments in the score. How did you go about making those choices?

There were some things that came very quickly to me, and you might think are pretty obvious places to go, things like big blown sea shells, instruments that might have been played at that time. Judging from pictures and literature, one can see that there were some brassy instruments being played, some sort of horn-type instruments. So I searched on the internet and came across this chap, Abraham Cupeiro, who was in a field in Spain as far as I could work out. He’s a multi-instrumentalist and builder of ‘ancient’ instruments that might have been played. So I contacted him and said, ‘if I were to show up in your field with some recording equipment, would you be up for playing on this thing?’ 

I didn’t really know what I was going to find, but I found him in his barn studio and there were some beautiful instruments that he had made, especially the Carnyx, which is a very florid-looking instrument that looks as if it could double as a weapon, actually. It’s a long, straight tube with a kind of serpent’s head on top, and it made a pretty foul sound, I have to say, just in its rawness. But Abraham ran me through the instruments and showed me what they could do. There’s no point writing anything too chromatic for a Carnyx I can tell you.

And you’ve brought back Gladiator’s original vocalist, Lisa Gerrard…

There were various vocalists who I felt I wanted to work with on the score; I didn’t sample them, I just listed them and asked them if they’d be interested. Among them was, of course, Lisa Gerrard and I knew I wanted to use her in a couple of spots. Ridley had also mentioned that he might want to use ‘Now We Are Free’ at the very end as the End Title, but that wasn’t really my concern, as that was an exisisting song. My challenge was how I would incorporate Lisa into my score in an original way, but still give the audience a warm, fuzzy feeling of recogniton.

Were there any non-negotiables from Ridley about what music or themes you might need to bring in from Hans Zimmer’s first score? Or was it up to you?

Not at all; in fact he called me and asked whether I thought we needed to tap into the first score, or Hans’s theme. Together we decided that there were two spots in the theme; an early spot when Lucius arrives in a cell complex and finds Macrinus’s shield and sword and takes them into himself, and then at the very end of the movie. Ridley was keen that we should not be distracted by that, but the inherent DNA of the spiritual essence of the first movie should be carried over into the score, without thematic material needing to be carried over. One of the first things I wrote, actually, away from the picture, was as a result of listening to Hans’s main theme from Gladiator. 

I was seeing what I liked about it and whether I could find anything unusual about it, and what I liked was this descending seventh, so I thought what if I were to make that descending seventh a part of a fresh, new theme for Lucius? By the time we get to the end of the movie where Lucius becomes Maximus, Lucius’s theme becomes Maximus’s theme from the first movie. So that was a concept and you’ll have to judge whether I got that right, but I really liked that idea. You can hear that in the track ‘Strength and Honour’. That was great fun to do and it was the first thing I sent to Ridley and he hopped up and down, and when Ridley hops up and down you know he likes it.

Does Ridley Scott have a musical sensibility as a director?

He absolutely knows the power of music in his movies, and funnily enough I think I’ve written more music for his scores, in terms of total volume. Like in Kingdom of Heaven I think it was three hours of music; the one that ended up in theatres was less than three hours, but not the version that I scored. I’ve also written the least for Ridley; House of Gucci, that was about six notes of score I think! He had a lot of ‘needle drops’ there, or songs of the day. But then with something like Gladiator II I think there’s about 100 minutes of score, and only four or five minutes of that are direct thematic links to the first movie. 

Tell us about some of the other elements in your score… who else is playing?

Together with these ancient flutes and wotnot of Abraham was able to play, I managed to sneak in a viol consort called Fretwork, who I first used on Kingdom of Heaven. They’re amazing, playing very difficult instruments. Kingdom of Heaven was set during The Crusades and the viol wasn’t invented. The violin, viola and cello are much later, but there’s something about a viol consort that gives you the feeling that it must be much more ancient than it actually is. I also used The Bach Choir, as I have done on several movies. They’re like an ocean liner of a choir – you have to give them about ten minutes’ notice if you want them to slow down or speed up! They’re brilliantly directed by Richard Hill, and I’ve loved using them. The gravitas of 80-100 people, and their enthusiasm is unequalled. 

There are some other solo vocalists, too?

I was also able to use Grace Davidson again, she’s an outstanding soprano; I used her on The Last Duel, also for Ridley. She has a beautiful voice; just put her with a single microphone in the middle of Abbey Road Studio 1 and it’s amazing. 

There is one other vocalist I’d love to point out, and you’re going to be hard pushed to hear him in the film, because we chose, in the final analysis, not to use his vocal too much in the body of the film, but you’ll hear him quite a lot in the end of the film. I was looking for a very unusual female voice and I was actually pointed toward this chap Lior Attar who was, on the face of it, an Australian singer-songwriter. I wasn’t sure I needed that on Gladiator II, but my friend had just been to a concert of his in Australia and said he had performed one piece falsetto and in hebrew. I thought that sounded interesting. I had used a countertenor before – Iestyn Davies, who is outstanding, so I investigated Lior. I had this emotional, muted string theme for Lucilla, the mother of Lucius, but I felt I wanted a vocal over it. So I got in touch with Lior and sent him my music and he sent back some exquisite, very unusual lower motifs above my track. I was able to edit those and, in some places, detune them to fit the music with a little delay and a little reverb, and I just absolutely loved it. I was so happy with it and I sent it to Ridley; he adored it, but said he thought it might be pushing the emotions too much to have it over Lucilla. He liked what I’d written originally, but said if I like the vocal version I should make sure it goes into the End Credits. So you’ll hear it there. 

These sorts of things are trade-offs and Ridley will be really direct and tell me, ‘It’s great, but…’ He’s very encouraging, and I’ve worked with some directors who don’t come in with, ‘great, but..’ they come in with the ‘but’ straight away. Working with Ridley is pretty special and I count myself very fortunate to have done this.

When you are visualising those more unusual instruments in the score, are you just dealing in sounds or timbres and waiting to hear what the performer can do?

In some ways. For instance, for Denzel Washington’s character, Macronus; looking at him, reading the script and seeing the first cut of the movie, this guy is plotting and scheming, and we’re not quite sure if we like or trust him. We decided not to give him a conventional, long theme; he weaves his way in and out of the movie in quite a slippery way, and Ridley and I discussed that. I mentioned the electric string instruments earlier, the electric cello and the electric baritone violin, so I know these two players very well and know what they can do. So I wrote this motif which can’t make up its mind if it’s major or minor; it’s kind of an open fifth coming to a diminished fifth (or augmented fourth), so it’s a ¾ note pattern that’s wavering between major and minor and I thought that would describe this character quite well. I also knew that I wanted it to be played in a slippery, slidey way. So if I’m imagining some of these colours, I’ll go as far as I can with imagining how to direct them to do that. 

There are other instruments, like the Santoor for instance, the player had full score there and it might be a quick 4/4 rhythm. We’d just find some patterns that I really liked and asked him to repeat. Then he’d do two or three hours of recording with me and then I’d be left with this raw material and could do what I needed to do with it.

And what about the action scenes; are you mainly trying to get out of the way of the sound effects?

When I came to do many of these sequences that take place in the Colosseum, for instance, this was not a fine-cut film. The sound effects guy is working in paralell to me and with the film editors and with Ridley. The sound effects are far from done; so, for example, when I did the Baboon fight – a sequence that is three or four minutes long, or something like that – these were humans in blue tights, not baboons, and there was no sound. The finished article has some very high-pitched squeals from the Baboons and they look monstrously real. So there’s a big gap between those two things and, as such, so I’m constantly in touch with the sound editor, asking what he’s doing with it, what pitch etc. 

For the large Colosseum scenes the sound effects editor had put in something that probably resembled Chelsea Football Club on a Saturday afternoon; it was just the noise of a crowd, like white noise with no texture. It’s very difficult to write music to that, but I knew it would be changed and replaced with textured sound, with cheers or boos, the sound having an ebb and flow. But do I wait until I can hear that? I can’t! If I waited until everything was perfectly in order, so the cut of the film was fine, the sound effects were complete, it would be 15 minutes before I have to get on the plane to Abbey Road to record the score the movie. It just wouldn’t be possible, and so we’re all working in tandem; and that’s the fun of the thing. 

If I had been an international sports player, I wouldn’t have been a tennis player or a golf player, I’d definitely have been part of a rugby team or a cricket team. It’s definitely about teamwork and as a composer you’re relying on other people, and that’s kind of the appeal of the thing; we don’t exist in a vacuum, we’re all part of something, and if you like, the fly-half or opening batsman is Ridley Scott. Or maybe he’s the umpire! It’s a spirit of collaboration anyway and there’s a unique sense of teamwork that occurs on the making of a film like this, and one only has to sit through the end credits to see how many people it takes to make. It still astonishes me.