Nominated for 12 Oscars, winning 5 including Best Picture and Best Actor, and earning over $455 million worldwide, there’s no doubt about it: Ridley Scott‘s “Gladiator” was a massive hit. However, according to the film’s star Russell Crowe, who has an Academy Award on his shelf thanks to the movie, the production of the movie was “the dumbest way possible to make a movie.” And as he explains why, it seems like a miracle that they managed to make a movie as good as they did given they were basically flying by the seat of their pants.
Chatting with BBC1 earlier this summer, Crowe revealed that when cameras started rolling, there were only 21 pages of actual script. And so, it didn’t take long for Scott and co. to start scrambling for the rest of the material with new pages arriving in a hurry from screenwriters William Nicholson and John Logan.
“You had this situation where versions of what could possibly happen next kept arriving from different writers,” Crowe said.
However, the actor credits Scott for nonetheless managing to keep a firm handle on the production, and weaving not only a decent picture out of the situation, but also a hugely successful one. Check out Crowe’s full story below.