The second after director Ridley Scott informally tapped Harry Gregson-Williams to craft the rating to the long-awaited sequel Gladiator II, the composer knew his subsequent cellphone name could be to his early mentor Hans Zimmer, who’d created the music for the unique Gladiator movie.
“As soon as Ridley called me and said, I think you’re going do the next one,’ yeah. I called Hans immediately and said,’How do you feel about this?’” Gregson-Williams revealed onstage at Deadline’s Sound & Screen occasion Friday. “And he said, ‘Just make me proud. Go for it.’” Gregson-Williams wrote 100 minutes of unique rating for Gladiator II.
Ultimately, Gregson-Williams determined he didn’t simply need his mentor’s blessing; he wished to make use of a few of the unique music cues, too – and the identical vocalist and co-composer Zimmer collaborated with on Gladiator’s sweeping anthem “Now We Are Free.”
“A few weeks later, I called [Hans] and said, ‘Look, I don’t see any negative reason to not use your theme in a couple spots, and also to utilize [vocalist] Lisa Gerrard in a slightly different way than you did in the first movie,’” the composer revealed. “So that was the plan, and I hope when you see the film in a couple of spots it’ll give you a warm and fuzzy feeling.”
“Writing a score like this gave me such an opportunity to have a very palleted sound, and it’s an action movie on the one hand, but on the other hand, it’s a story of – not so much for revenge, but redemption, and there’s an emotional heart to it,” mentioned Gregson-Williams, who launched into his personal kind of epic journey, spanning the globe seeking distinctive musicians and devices to present his rating a particular sound infused with a way of unique sounds and a way antiquity.
“I had to chase down my friend Martin Tillman, who’s an electric cellist,” he recalled. “One of the motifs I created really was for Denzel’s character Macrinus, and that needed an instrument that could slip and slide as elegantly as he can with an electric cello.”
Traveling to “a field full of goats” in northern Spain, Gregson-Williams tracked down a musician who’d crafted a collection of devices plucked from historical instances. “He had a studio in the back of his farmhouse and played these amazing ancient instruments, all built, were based on pictures, artists’ renditions, of what instruments might have been in Roman times,” recalled the composer. “He made some extraordinary noises in that field. So I brought them back to base here and manipulated them in the way I felt. It was great fun.”
Check again Monday for the panel video.