Blood on the Script: That's Entertainment

William Nicholson ©03-25-2001

Sunday Times (UK)

Gladiator screenwriter and Oscar hopeful William Nicholson has learnt from Hollywood how to write a better novel

"I know you're a man of his word, general. I know you're ready to die for honour, or Rome, or the respect of your ancestors. I, on the other hand, am just - an entertainer."

The speech is from Gladiator, spoken by the cynical old trainer Proximo, played by Oliver Reed. The first two sentences were written by me. The third was written by an earlier writer on the project. This line has a private significance, because my experience on Gladiator, and in Hollywood in general, has taught me to value two concepts I used to regard as beneath me: collaboration and entertainment.

Today I'll be at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles, where for the second time I've been nominated for an Oscar for best screenplay. I didn't win last time, for Shadowlands, when Schindler's List swept all before it. I don't expect to win this time, but I'm proud to be there, and grateful for the honour, grateful for the income, and grateful for the education in writing.

Twenty years ago I was writing novels nobody wanted to publish. After several years of screenwriting, I've returned to the novel form, this time with stories for children. They carry as much passion and meaning as my early works; the difference is that they're fun to read. This I owe to Hollywood.

Second chance: Nicholson missed out with Shadowlands in 1993, but could win an Oscar tonight

The first shock to an English writer is that Hollywood isn't interested in authorship. The writer is valued and important, but if someone else on the team comes up with a good idea or a suitable line, it goes into the script. The movie is considered to be bigger than its writer, its director, its producer and its stars. In an ideal production, all the talent serves the movie. It doesn't happen every time, but it happened on Gladiator.

I came onto the project shortly before filming began. Doug Wick, the producer, needed a writer to build on the work of the two earlier writers, to develop the character of the hero, Maximus. Ridley Scott, the director, and Russell Crowe, who was to play Maximus, both felt that the character needed to be more emotionally engaging.

The sets were being built, the fight sequences were being story-boarded, but they knew that fights alone, however great the adrenaline rush, are not enough. For the true lasting high, you have to love the hero.

In this story, there was a second problem: the hero was to die at the end. How do you stop that from being, as Scott and Crowe put it to me, "a bummer"? I agreed to do three weeks' work.

As Scott started shooting the enormous battle scene with which the movie opens, I started rebuilding the character of the hero. My idea was simple. Since Maximus was to die at the end, I must make death his goal, the one thing he wants more than anything else. That way, in dying, he wins.

The story I took over already offered two ways in which his death could be seen as a victory: he gets his revenge on the evil emperor, Commodus, and he gives Rome back to its people. Revenge is strong; serving your country is strong; a good man might be willing to risk death to achieve either.

But in both cases, death is still a negative, a price to be paid. I wanted to make the hero's death a moment of joyous triumph, an act of love. So I took his already-

established love for his wife and son and added many extra moments to strengthen it, to make us feel that this man of action wanted only to go home to his beloved family.

Then, crucially, I built in an afterlife. A hunt through a book on Graeco-Roman belief systems supplied the concept of Elysium, the place where the sun always shines and your loved ones wait for you. I found places to work it into the script, even before the first battle.

As he's about to lead the mounted charge, Maximus cries to his men, "If you find you're on your own, riding through green fields, with sun on your face - you're in Elysium, and you're dead!" I developed a picture of Maximus's home, and had him describe it to Marcus Aurelius, consciously eliding in his mind the memory of home and the image of Elysium, the home after death.

In this way, once his family was dead and his home destroyed, we knew he could never be happy until he had returned to them in that sunlit orchard. Scott prefigures Elysium with the very first image, a hand passing over ripe ears of grain. We return to it at the end, as Maximus dies.

My changes had knock-on effects that required more work. My three weeks became four, then five, then six. The job of a screenwriter extends beyond the writing of dialogue. Important as it is, dialogue is only one way the story can be advanced. Action sequences, character developments, moods, wordless images, all must be "written" before they can be shot. The screenwriter learns to think in what are known as "story beats", the crucial twists and turns with which the movie unfolds.

Should Maximus have a past love affair with Commodus's sister, Lucilla, or not? Should we show Commodus killing his father on camera? How much Roman politics could the audience take? How far could we go with the incest theme without losing sympathy for Lucilla? How could we make Maximus's decision to kill in the arena feel inevitable and right? Should Maximus kiss Lucilla? What about his feelings for his dead wife? Why didn't Commodus just have the imprisoned Maximus killed? Which secondary gladiator character should die, if any?

Hundreds of interlocking questions, the answers to which must all fall into place to make the audience believe in the story, care about the characters and feel satisfied by the ending.

It became clear that the action of the last third of the movie needed rethinking. I plotted and replotted Maximus's escape and recapture. Then, as my task was almost done, Oliver Reed died, and I was back on a plane to Malta, the location for ancient Rome. Reed's character, Proximo, was important to the story, and he'd been playing the part with such glorious raddled charisma that his death seemed somehow impossible. As the initial shock faded, we realised that we were faced with the strange task of killing him again, fictionally.

His character, the cynic who has learnt to bury his better self, was due to reveal his core of nobility in the final scenes. He

was even to have had the last words in the whole movie. Now we had no choice but to contrive a death for him within the story: but it must be a death that would redeem him.

As the script stood, Proximo was going to renege on his deal to let Maximus out of his cell, remaining cynical until the final conflict in the Colosseum. We decided to show him honouring that deal, in the full knowledge that it would lead to his death. This was achieved with body doubles, and out-takes digitally altered to suit the new requirements. Reed's mouth was not animated to speak words he never spoke. His few words all come from earlier scenes.

His last words come from a speech made to Maximus before he enters the Colosseum to fight the tigers: "We mortals are but dust and shadows!"

In our new ending for Proximo, he sits patiently as the Praetorian Guard closes in - a backshot with a body double - which tell us he accepts his death. He clasps the sword given him by the noble Marcus Aurelius - a close shot that doesn't require the actual actor - which tells us he's thinking of his nobler self. Only then do we see Reed's face, with the Praetorian Guard digitally inserted into the frame behind him, raising their swords. His words now carry his stoical acceptance of death: "Dust and shadows!"

By the end I had been pumping out scenes for 15 grueling weeks from my home in Sussex, from hotel rooms in Morocco, and from trailers in Malta. All that time, my work was chewed over daily, almost hourly, by Walter Parkes, the studio boss; by Doug Wick, the producer; and by Scott. Not a solitary creation, but the product of a creative group.

The paradox at the heart of the Hollywood system, when it's working at its best, is that ambition and ego drive the creators of movies to look beyond themselves and their egos to the thing itself. What they all want, with real passion, is for the story to work. And achieving that is far, far more difficult than it may seem.

For the writer, there's no doubt it's a hard school. The criticism is savage. Nobody is there to make you feel good. At first this is bruising. Then it becomes curiously liberating. They're not trashing your life, they're trashing your lines. So write more lines. Don't get precious, get writing. It's astonishing the way the best scenes can come when everyone's shouting at once, when you're fending off other people's lousy ideas.

You lose as many battles as you win - I always hated the line in Gladiator about "queer giraffes", and I never wanted the two-sword decapitation, which was Russell Crowe's own idea - but they're both in the movie, rightly, and audiences love them. The goal is great entertainment.

There, that's the giveaway. Entertainment. Not exactly art. But it's storytelling, it's drama, it's excitement and passion, and it doesn't cheat you at the end. What's more, when you look back, you find you've left parts of yourself in the final mix that you never even knew about.

For me as a writer this has been a revelation. Learn to entertain and, lo and behold, your deeper, grander, dreams come along for the ride. Writers write what they are, whether they know it or not. You just can't help it. In my case, I've always been fascinated by how we come to terms with death. It's in Shadowlands. And there it is in Gladiator.

And now it's in my books. My heroes are searching for a homeland, racing for a place of safety where they can build a good life with those they love. But they know that, to get there, at least one of them must die.

The first book, The Wind Singer, bubbles over with private passions I never knew I had: hatred of exams and love of mud, fantasies of mind-power and American high school cheerleaders, and a hunger for the close embrace of a loving family.

The second book, Slaves of the Mastery, adds flying hermits, the most beautiful girl in the world, and a ritual killer dance called the manaxa - yes, an echo of gladiators. The third and last book, Firesong, which I'm writing now, would take the genius of Ridley Scott and the deep pockets of DreamWorks to bring to the screen, but I can do it all for nothing with my pen.

All the way through my work on these books I'm hearing the voices of Doug Wick and Walter Parkes in my ear, saying: why do your characters do that? Why should we care? Can't you do better than that? Surprise us! Entertain us!

 (Thanks to Darcy for providing this article)