How Russell Crowe’s ‘Gladiator’ defied death, fire, tigers and a ‘rubbish’ script to become a Hollywood classic

nypost.com:

Vanity Fair in 2023. “I did think, a couple times, maybe my best option is just to get on a plane and get out of here, you know?”Even more troubling was the fact that the rubbish script was less than a quarter finished. “When we actually started that film, we had 21 pages of the script that we agreed on,” he said. “A script is usually between 103 or 104, 110 pages, something like that, so we had a long way to go, and we basically used up those pages in the first section of the movie.

So, by the time we got to our second location, which was Morocco, we were sort of catching up.”Scott ended up having to give crew members extra days off because they didn’t know what they would be filming the next day. “It’s the dumbest possible way to make a film,” Crowe told the BBC in 2016.

Connie Nielsen, who played Lucilla, had her own concerns about the script after being cast. “Ridley called me and asked me what I had thought about the latest draft,” she laughs, “and I said, ‘Well, this is where I’m seeing an issue because blah, blah, blah.’ I was like, ‘That kind of word just didn’t even exist at the time, it’s weird that I would be using it.

It’s culturally and historically wrong. It just won’t work,’” she recalled telling the director. “And he said, ‘OK, stop. Write everything down and send it to me.’ So, I wrote 20 pages because I was a young and very hungry artist, and I wanted to put my mark on this incredible story.”Script problems persisted on set, with pages being written on the fly.“‘Russell was getting his lines at such a late date that he had built up a real irritation factor,’” Scott once recalled, according to Nicole LaPorte, who documented much of the on-set drama in her book “The Men Who Would Be King: An Almost Epic.