When
historians and directors clash: ‘Ridley Scott was Napoleonic – there was no
doubt who was in charge’
Film and TV
have a slippery relationship with the truth when it comes to historical epics.
So spare a thought for the historical experts whose advice often goes unheeded
Simon
Usborne
Sat 16 Nov
2024 11.55 GMT
If we set
aside the more glaring historical inaccuracies in the trailers for the
long-awaited Gladiator sequel – the guy riding a rhinoceros for example – there
were early signs that its director Ridley Scott remained committed to one of
the first film’s more subtle flaws.
They are
there in the posters, if you know where to look, and they feature throughout
the film itself, which hits cinemas this week with Paul Mescal in the leading
role. We’re talking about the leather wrist guards.
“I’m afraid
leather forearm bracers have nothing to do with ancient Rome,” says Alexander
Mariotti, a historian and specialist in gladiatorial combat who worked as a
researcher and script consultant on the new film. “They don’t appear in any
imagery or sources … they just look good on film.”
And so, just
as Russell Crowe wore some heavy duty wrist-strapping as Maximus Decimus
Meridius in the 2000 blockbuster, so does Mescal in his turn as the first
gladiator’s even beefier son, Lucius Verus (who, sure enough, is also forced
into slavery and becomes a gladiator).
Mariotti,
who is based in Rome and London, says the arm armour is closer to something
that medieval archers might have worn. Yet it has appeared in almost every
screen representation of fighty Romans since Ben Hur (the silent 1907 one). He
thinks early costume departments may have taken inspiration from neoclassical
depictions of Rome.
The ubiquity
of the accessories reveals much about the way Hollywood flirts with
verisimilitude and shapes popular historical understanding, even while
consultants are in growing demand. Their role can vary, from early development
advice up to script reviews and seats on set.
Film-makers
say: Is this accurate? And you’ll say: Absolutely not. And then they’ll do it
anyway
Alexander
Mariotti
As well as
dutifully pointing out anachronistic wristwear and incongruous rhinos, Mariotti
advised Scott on the use of weapons and language. He hasn’t yet seen the film
but was heartened to see in the trailer the line “Ubi tu ibi ego” (“Wherever
you are I will be”), a Latin marriage vow that he suggested, and which is
inscribed in his own wife’s wedding ring.
Consultants
are called on even when inaccuracy is a feature rather than a bug. Amanda
Vickery, a professor of early modern history at Queen Mary, University of
London, was a Bridgerton fan before her colleague, Hannah Greig, asked her to
take over consulting duties for the third series of the Netflix Regency hit,
which has been described by its own makers as “definitely a fantasy”.
“The mantra
Hannah had, which I agree with, is that producers want to make choices, not
mistakes,” says Vickery, who binged the first series of the show with her
daughters. “The job of the adviser is to give them that information, but it’s
their job to make a hit show.”
Vickery
became involved at the script stage, filling margins with notes as
password-protected drafts arrived from production company Shondaland. In one
script a character admired some cerulean blue silk. “And I was able to say,
well, cerulean dye wasn’t invented by then, just change it to French navy or
azure, and it was changed,” Vickery says. “Little details that might obtrude
are very easy to correct because you’re not spoiling the flow.” Vickery also
spent time on set, and once prompted the reshoot of a scene in which a male
character left a young debutante during a dance without a formal farewell. The
historian scoffs when I ask if such insight is well paid. “Are you mad?! I’m
not a lawyer, none of this is lucrative,” she says.
Ridley Scott
is rather Napoleonic himself. There’s no doubt when he comes into a room who’s
in charge
Michel
Broers
Consultants
quickly learn to bite their tongues when more significant corrections or
queries are left in the margins. Michael Broers, a professor of western
European history at the University of Oxford, was about to retire when he was
summoned to a meeting with Ridley Scott. The director had read Broers’ books
about Napoleon, and wanted to consult him for his biopic, which came out last
year with Joaquin Phoenix in the titular role.
“He’s rather
Napoleonic himself,” Broers tells me of Scott, laughing. “There’s no doubt when
he comes into a room who’s in charge, and pretty soon I became fully aware that
we were making a movie, not a documentary.”
Scott had
already filmed a now notorious scene in which Napoleon’s troops blow the tops
of the Egyptian pyramids with cannon, in an explosive revision of Napoleon’s
very real capture of Cairo. “When he explained that he had done this, I was
aghast,” Broers says. “That didn’t happen, I told him, and nothing like it
happened. He said: ‘Come on, just sit down and watch it.’”
When Broers
watched the scene, he burst out laughing. “I said I thought it was the funniest
thing I’d ever seen. ‘Well, then, it’s staying in, isn’t it?’ [Scott] said. I
think if he’d simply invented the Battle of the Pyramids, which did happen,
that would have been different.”
Broers
likens the role of the historical consultant to that of a father confessor:
“You’re there to tell him he’s sinned, and he wants to know that he’s sinned,
but you know he’s not going to change his ways.” But the historian’s pragmatism
wasn’t always shared when an increasingly busy online community of factcheckers
scrutinised Napoleon.
Most
prominently, Dan Snow posted a TikTok breakdown of Scott’s truth-stretching,
including the pyramid attack. The director’s response in an interview last
November: “Get a life.” But I gather the 86-year-old Scott was privately
fuming. An insider on Gladiator II, which had just started filming when
Napoleon was released, tells me that, in response, Scott banned historical
consultants from the set. (Neither the director’s production company nor
Paramount, the studio behind the film, comments on the claim when I put it to
them.)
It’s not
Scott’s first clash with historians. Kathleen Coleman, head of classics at
Harvard, was so appalled by the first Gladiator movie that she asked for her
consultant credit to be removed. She claimed that in one message from the
production office she was asked to find evidence to show that female gladiators
attached razor blades to their busts. “Scholars are, of course, notorious for
being obsessed with detail … but detail is the repository of authenticity,”
Coleman later wrote in an essay called The Pedant Goes to Hollywood.
Scott revels
in disregarding such detail. “This is the first coffee bar in Roman history,”
he reportedly boasted after the first film came out, when one pedant pointed
out pavement cafes weren’t a thing in ancient Rome. (The new film goes further,
featuring a noble reading a newspaper at a cafe, 1,200 years before the
invention of the printing press.) But Broers shares Scott’s sentiment, and was
amused by the historical inaccuracies in one viral nitpicker’s video (he
prefers not to say whose). “It’s a movie! What do you want to sit down and
watch here?” he says. The historian recalls moments in script meetings when it
was Scott’s turn to be aghast. He’d turn and say to me, ‘What did happen?’ and
nine times out of 10 I’d tell him and his jaw would drop,” he says. Truth is
stranger than fiction and sometimes it was even too much for him.”
More
quotidian truths can jar on screen; Mariotti says that the first Gladiator
originally had a scene in which Russell Crowe’s character endorses an olive oil
brand in the Colosseum. “And they said: ‘No one’s ever going to believe that,
it’s stupid,’ and they cut it, but it was historically correct,” he says.
Actors often
call on consultants to help flesh out their roles. “Alicia Vikander phoned me
when she wanted to add her own prayer to the script,” says Peter Wagstaff, a
classical musician and amateur historian who started SceneSpan, a consultancy
for historical film and TV, when a friend in the industry said there was a
shortage of advisers. Vikander was starring as Katherine Parr alongside Jude
Law as Henry VIII in Firebrand, which charts the end of the king’s reign, and
wanted to check that the prayer rang true (it did). On the same set, Erin
Doherty, who plays Anne Askew, the doomed Protestant poet and preacher, wanted
to learn more about her character’s religious convictions. “She wanted to get
into the mindset of someone who believed so fervently in the Bible in English
that she would die for it,” says Wagstaff, whose work has ranged from a
Cadbury’s ad with a Victorian setting to the upcoming new series of Wolf Hall,
in which he also has a singing role in a choral scene.
Mariotti,
Vickery and Broers all say that they have come away from brushes with Hollywood
feeling enriched rather than abused. Vickery took her experiences to a history
master’s course she teaches, part of which considers how society engages with
history itself. In Bridgerton, she sees no contradiction in a show that seeks
accuracy in shades of blue while at the same time adapting Coldplay’s Yellow as
a wedding march.
“That’s
what’s interesting about what Shonda Rhimes has pulled off,” she says. “She’s
finding a new audience for Regency drama while having enough there to hold the
old audience for costume drama.”
Sometimes a
creative licence can serve history, Vickery adds. She admires The Favourite,
the 2018 satirical period comedy about the court of Queen Anne. “All the women
are soberly dressed and the men are floridly dressed, which wouldn’t have been
the case,” she says. “But the costumes are making a point about where power
lies, with the men as decorative. The film approaches a historical truth by
breaking the rules.”
Mariotti has
absorbed time on elaborate sets into his lectures. “Suddenly, after spending
years studying ruins, I was walking on the cobbled streets of the Via Sacra,
looking at the Temple of Jupiter,” he says of his first consulting role, on the
2007 HBO series Rome. “I found that when I was giving lectures, I was able to
do it more vividly because I’d seen these images.”
The real
Colosseum might not have featured rhinos or wrist guards, but Mariotti sees
parallels between Hollywood movies and the theatrical staging that was often
central to shows in ancient Rome. “When you sat in the Colosseum and you
watched trees pop out of the ground as they transformed the arena into a
jungle, it wasn’t really what a jungle looked like,” he says. “But it didn’t
matter, because it was entertainment.”
Gladiator II
is in cinemas now.
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