20 Things You Didn’t Know About Gladiator
19. There Were Dozens Of Drafts Of The Screenplay
Franzioni's version may have kicked off the development process, but it didn't survive it. Supposedly, his 130-page script is different in pretty much every single detail from the film that was eventually made.
That's because when Ridley Scott came on board as director he thought Franzioni's dialogue was "too on the nose", and he brought in playwright John Logan, whose recent spec script Any Given Sunday was then in development with Oliver Stone. Over several drafts, Logan rewrote most of act one, electing to motivate his protagonist by having his family murdered.
However, with two weeks to go before filming, the actors and actresses were still complaining of problems with the script - Crowe, in particular, insisted that the whole thing was "substantially underdone":
"Even the character didn't, you know wasn't, existent on the pages. And that set about like a long process, that's probably the first time that I've been in a situation where… the script wasn't a complete done deal..."
Despite the number of drafts and the number of writers who’d worked on the project, when filming began in January 1999, Scott started shooting without a finished screenplay - just thirty-odd pages. William Nicholson was brought in to make Maximus more relatable, and reinstated some of the scenes from Franzioni's version, although he then substantially rewrote those too.