30 Days of Screenplays, Day 29: “Gladiator”

Why 30 screenplays in 30 days?

Because whether you are a novice just starting to learn the craft of screenwriting or someone who has been writing for many years, you should be reading scripts.

There is a certain type of knowledge and understanding about screenwriting you can only get from reading scripts, giving you an innate sense of pace, feel, tone, style, how to approach writing scenes, how create flow, and so forth.

So each day this month, I will provide background on and access to a notable movie script.

Today is Day 29 and the featured screenplay is for the 2000 movie Gladiator. You may read the screenplay here.

Background: Screenplay by David Franzoni and John Logan and William Nicholson, story by David Franzoni.

Plot summary: When a Roman general is betrayed and his family murdered by an emperor’s corrupt son, he comes to Rome as a gladiator to seek revenge.

Tagline: What We Do In Life Echoes In Eternity.

Awards: Nominated for 12 Academy Awards including Best Original Screenplay.

Trivia: With 2 weeks to go before filming, the actors were still complaining of problems with the script. William Nicholson was brought to Shepperton Studios to make Maximus a more sensitive character, reworking his friendship with Juba and developing the afterlife thread. Nicholson went back to David Franzoni’s original script and reinstated a lot of the scenes that John Logan had taken out.

Some observations:

• For an action script, there is a remarkable ‘gap’ between action scenes in Act One: There is the opening battle which ends on 7, and then nothing else until Maximus escapes from the assassins on 32. In between, a whole lot of set up, which is to be expected in a story’s first act, but 25 pages between action scenes defies the infamous “Whammo Theory” (something has to go ‘whammo’ every 10 minutes in an action movie).
• Another interesting gap: Maximus, the story’s Protagonist and star of the movie, has zero dialogue from 31–56. Not one line. Lots of “Maximus doesn’t respond” scene description. Almost entirely due to his psychological reaction to his family’s murders, but a most interesting and unusual choice.
• The ending is considerably different than the movie and interestingly enough, the script’s ending is more ‘Hollywood’ than the movie. Typically the studios want to push for ‘happier’ endings — the script has Maximus return to his farm with Lucilla’s son Lucius, “this boy so like his own son,” to rebuild his life. In the movie, Maximus dies. So at some point, somebody determined the story needed to have an heroic death ending, despite Hollywood’s instinct for ‘happy’ endings.

What I jotted down after reading the script was this character lineup:

P — Maximus
N — Commodus
A — Maximus’ family, Marcus / Rome
M — Lucilla, Juba
T — Proximo, Quintus

If you subscribe to the idea that the Nemesis often is a reflection of the Protagonist’s shadow, I think that take stands with “Gladiator.”

Commodus is singleminded in his obsession to become Emperor, to attain that ultimate power.

Maximus is singleminded in his obsession to kill Commodus, to attain that ultimate revenge.

Yes, at the beginning of the movie, he is a stout, well-balanced individual, but the energizing dynamic to kill all the people he does in order to intersect one last time with Commodus suggests he does have an aspect to his psyche drawn toward power, even if his is distinct from Commodus in being a ‘righteous’ cause.

Re Attractor: This folds into Kevin’s analysis of the “dovetailing goals”: The death of his family resulting in his warrior mode to gain revenge for their deaths; the death of Marcus resulting in his solider mode to try to restore Rome to its ideal state.

On a more existential level, he is a Father and a Husband to his family, and we hear him say how much it means to him to return home after two years away at war. He is drawn to them — naturally — by his love and affection for them.

With Marcus, he confesses — the last words he ever says to the Emperor — “You have always been my father.” So here, Maximus is Son. And while a Father-Son relationship can be many things, here the degree of emotion between the two men in their final scene together, plus the passion they both feel for Rome suggests to me their relationship is at its core a Protagonist-Attractor one.

Re Mentor: Clearly from Lucilla’s POV as Protag, she sees Maximus as her Attractor. But at every possible overture in the script, he turns away from her. His interest in what she has to say only becomes focused when she is talking about the plan to get rid of Commodus and return Rome to its ideal state. The fact, as Kevin points out, she provides the actual intelligence and contacts to foment the plan, reinforces the Mentor dynamic in my book.

Re Trickster: I see two. Like Kevin, Proximo is both enemy — he buys Maximus, forces him to be a gladiator — and ally eventually even fighting on M’s side. And if a Trickster is supposed to test the Protagonist, the simple fact it is Proximo who makes Maximus become a gladiator — test after test after test — smells like a Trickster to me.

Quintus is a minor but important Trickster: A solider (ally) who bring Maximus under arrest (enemy) then sends Maximus off with the assassins, setting up a big test.

In terms of theme, in Gladiator we have a Protagonist who begins in a state of Disunity: He is literally disconnected from his family — has been for 2 years — while he’s been off fighting a war. In effect his family has evolved into a fantasy goal — ‘family’ — something the movie zeroes in on to solid effect with the bookend visuals of Maximus waving his hand over the fields of grain leading up to his home.

Concurrently there is this idea of ‘Rome,’ not the city itself but the concept of what Rome once was before it went emperor-crazy. Maximus subscribes that idealized version of Rome, made all the easier because, as it says in the script, he has never actually been to Rome.

So you have this fantasy idea of an idealized ‘Rome.’

And you have this fantasy idea of an idealized ‘family.’

In effect, they serve as dual pistons to drive Maximus’ ‘engine’ toward his goal of defeating Commodus.

Once the insurrection against Commodus is squelched, one piston breaks. But there is still the other one: Revenge for the murder of his ‘family.’ And that’s as it should be. Whereas ‘Rome,’ the ideal state, is entirely a fantasy, Maximus’ family is not, he has actual life experience with them. He may embrace the idea of ‘Rome’ with his mind, but he loves his ‘family’ with his heart. And that is what makes the finale so powerful [much more so in the movie].

In “Braveheart,” by comparison, there is the theme of freedom clearly at work in the story. It’s William Wallace’s last word as he dies. But his last conscious image is that of his secret wife who had been killed by the king’s men. So the political freedom for which he had been fighting becomes a spiritual freedom as he dies — to be reunited with his lover.

Similarly in “Gladiator,” the concept of ‘Rome,’ an idealized version of ‘family’ in a way, transforms into the specificity of Maximus’ family as he lay dying, spiritually set free to reunite with them.

We do not know the how and why the filmmakers had in mind when they changed the ending of the movie from the draft of the script we read, however whether conscious or not, I choose to believe that someone in that process realized the thematic importance of Maximus dying so he could reunite with his family, not go off to live in Spain with a substitute version of his dead son.

He died fighting for two ideals: ‘Rome’ and his ‘family.’ He could achieve closure only by dying to be reunited in death with his wife and son.

There are other themes in Gladiator: violence and non-violence, trustworthiness, how absolute power corrupts absolutely, but to me the dual pistons of the idealized states of ‘Rome’ and ‘family’ are the main ones — and both (especially the latter) carry significant emotional meaning.

I invited you to stop by comments and post your thoughts about Gladiator.

To see all of the posts in the 30 Days of Screenplays series, go here.

This series and use of screenplays is for educational purposes only!