Like John Powell, the Massachusetts-raised composer James S. Levine got his start writing advertising music. Arriving in L.A. in his early twenties, he eventually made his way to Media Ventures, which he later called “everything. Aesthetics, story, what to say, what not to say, where to take chances, where to play it safe. It was an apprenticeship from heaven.” But James’ first job there may have been a particularly hellish one: the poorly received action film Chill Factor, which also required the services of Hans, John, Klaus Badelt, Jeff Rona and others. Weirdly, after a stretch of multi-assignment years, Chill Factor was the only movie that came out in 1999 that had Hans’ name on it. A partial explanation was that he was contributing to the long-developing The Road to El Dorado. Burnout may have played a part as well. “After The Thin Red Line, I thought I didn't know how to find the joy of writing.” But he found salvation in early 1999 when Ridley Scott invited him to England for the first week of shooting on his new movie, the Roman epic Gladiator starring Russell Crowe which was planned as a summer 2000 release. It reinvigorated Hans. “The deepest, darkest farmland in the south of England. I mean, you’ve never seen mud like this. We suddenly left the 20th century behind.”
An early frustration as Hans conceived his score was certain folks asking why he wasn’t trying to emulate classical music like Ottorino Respighi’s Pines of Rome or film music such as Alex North’s work on the 1960 Spartacus movie. “There was some mumbling, not from Ridley. Where was the big fanfare? I did not want to turn into a musical anthropologist, to research ancient Roman music. I kept saying, ‘But Spartacus is not the movie we are making.’ It made me wonder who Alex was asked to listen to. Then I realized [they were looking for] the experience they'd had when they saw the film as young boys. As long as I could give people that same sort of experience, I knew I would have done my job well.” A key difference from that expected style would be how Hans applied his longstanding fascination with the power of the female voice. “Gladiator used to be: title and you’re in the battle. And I know Ridley well enough, I know that he’s a painter, he’s a poet. I wanted to give him something that would say right at the beginning of the film, hang on, this is not the gladiator movie you expect but it’s going to be interesting. My ambition was to make it romantic, to not have a single woman get out of her seat or be bored or put off by it.”
The conversations between Ridley, Hans, and editor Pietro Scalia led to them adding the film’s evocative opening shot of a hand running through a wheat field. Scalia had a CD from the Australian band Dead Can’t Dance nearby, and thus Hans and Ridley decided to reach out to the band’s singer Lisa Gerrard. Gerrard initially declined - in part because she had just worked on the Russell Crowe-starring movie The Insider - but was persuaded to join after watching footage, something Hans admired. “I would rather work with somebody with artistic integrity than with somebody who [says] yes to anything.” Her singing had a striking effect in the film, but the collaboration extended beyond that. Gerrard played her ersatz hammer dulcimer and stuck around for three months, and her contribution to the score led Hans to give her a co-composer credit. Gerrard wasn’t the only significant instrumental contributor. Hans had teamed with Heitor Pereira, the former guitarist from the band Simply Red, on As Good As It Gets, originally just to provide Brazilian-flavored songs, but they became fast friends and Heitor would have an active role in that score. On Gladiator, Heitor’s guitar was used as a frequent instrumental accent.* The project cemented his role in the Media Ventures empire, and a decade later he’d be the lead composer for Universal’s lucrative Despicable Me franchise.
*More explicitly Spanish ideas were discarded, probably for the best as Crowe comes off as Spanish in Gladiator as Robert Redford comes off as British in Out of Africa.
The action sequences in Gladiator, especially the opening battle in the German forest and the midfilm Colosseum fight in Rome, were undeniably enhanced by the thrilling bombast and rousing thematic statements in Hans’ music. Those passages derived part of their effectiveness from a waltz format used by Hans. “I was starting to think how civilized Rome was, but at the same time it’s all built on blood, savagery, the backs of slaves. How can I write a piece of music that has that duality in it? A Viennese waltz, you can’t think of anything more civilized. What if I make them brutal?” It was pointed out by some that the waltz felt heavily inspired by Mars, The Bringer of War from English composer Gustav Holst’s well-known concert work The Planets, and in 2006 the Holst estate filed a plagiarism lawsuit. This came off like an opportunistic entity belatedly targeting an extremely popular and lucrative work, especially when you consider the other estates who weren’t too peeved. Hans copped to getting inspiration from William Walton’s piece Battle in the Air from the 1969 film Battle of Britain and also some Richard Wagner pieces, the latter because he thought the entrance to Rome felt like a Nazi propaganda documentary and thus quoted the fascists’ preferred composer as a conscious in-joke. Never mind that film music in general had a long history of seeking inspiration from older music, including all the influences John Schlesinger called out in Hans’ work on Pacific Heights a decade before Gladiator.*
*In contemporaneous interviews, Hans acted like the similarities were minor and acceptable, namely his quote to IGN in 2001 that “it’s just a bunch of notes.” Another comment by Hans that “anybody can tell that he influenced it; it doesn't make you very smart” was strikingly similar to what Johannes Brahms reportedly said when people pointed out the similarities between Beethoven’s ninth symphony and his first symphony - “any ass can see that.” To be fair, the Wagner pieces were in the public domain by this point, unlike the Holst pieces, and Hans hasn’t been quite so glib publicly about the subject since legal action was initiated. Hans also wrote the following about copyright lawsuits in 2017. “Most artists are insured against these claims. Which makes it easy for someone to see a way of making some easy cash. Someone tried to sue me for copyright infringement recently, and everyone told me to just let the insurance company settle it. But I couldn't stand the idea of someone getting away with a groundless and personally hurtful claim. To fight the accusation is very time-consuming, disruptive and costly. Not just for me, but the people that worked for me. Obviously, I won the case. But it's still not something you want to go through.”
Proximity to other composers at Media Ventures was valuable. Hans recalled “sitting there feeling insecure, John Powell walking by, and we say, ‘Is this complete garbage?’ And him going, ‘Well, this bit is garbage, but this one you can build on.’” Klaus Badelt, the primary additional composer on Gladiator (one who arguably should have been a credited co-composer given his contributions to around 30 minutes of score including the famed conclusive Elysium and Now We Are Free tracks), delighted that he occasionally could take a breather by listening to the “comedy music” Harry was writing for Chicken Run.
The film emerged in May 2000 to strong reviews and solid worldwide box office earnings, and the score was widely praised. At a preview Hans’ then-wife Suzanne punched him, saying, “Now I know why you were so unbearable for the last six months.” It proved so popular that an album of additional music was released to align with the film’s awards promotion efforts in early 2001, but that turned out to be a colossal flop; despite the presence of a few worthwhile tracks, the album was ruined by an abundance of movie dialogue. Hans had intended for the album to be a window into his working process, but he agreed that “the dialogue on it sucks. It's not what I had in mind.” Still, Hans’ score got him his seventh Oscar nomination.
The Oscars have had an evolving set of rules on what’s eligible for the Best Score award, which has occasionally resulted in some confounding results. Studio music department heads originally won the award instead of composers. Nino Rota’s music for The Godfather had its nomination revoked over a reprised theme from Rota’s earlier music for the 1950s Italian film Fortunella, but Bill Conti was forced to use Tchaikovsky’s violin concerto as his main theme for the 1983 film The Right Stuff and won the Oscar anyway, and three years later jazz pianist and bandleader Herbie Hancock controversially won the award for arrangements of preexisting songs used in Round Midnight. Meanwhile, Quincy Jones’ score for the 1985 film The Color Purple had eleven other named collaborators; Fred Steiner was one of them and later laughed over how absurd it would’ve been trying to fit all of them on stage if they won.
The rules had changed after that last instance, so despite Gerrard’s essential role in the creation of the score her name was stripped from its Oscar nomination. Hans felt “it's a very good thing I didn't get the Academy Award for Gladiator, because it would have been embarrassing since Lisa had been disqualified. I think the rule implemented after The Color Purple is a good one, and it protects composers, but collaboration is a good thing in the film business.” Despite the loss to Tan Dun’s music from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon at the Oscars and the BAFTAs (where Gerrard was credited) plus a loss to Thomas Newman’s American Beauty score at the Grammy Awards, the album sales for Gladiator - platinum certified in the U.S. and elsewhere - likely meant Hans was laughing all the way to the bank.
That album was also enormously consequential for me as it was the first album I ever purchased on my own. I bought it while on a trip to see family in San Francisco and we stopped by the famed record store Amoeba Records. I’d heard some film music before, including via a cassette tape of the album for The Lion King and the CD for Titanic which my parents bought just like seemingly everyone else in the country did. I didn’t have an immense interest in film music at the time; the Gladiator purchase was driven by me being a big fan of the film. But it ended up getting played a lot on my portable disc player in high school, to the point that I’m certain I’ve listened to the score from Gladiator more than any other score I’ve discovered since. It, along with Howard Shore’s music for The Lord of the Rings, was my gateway into film scores. In the years since, some elements have started to wear on me a bit. Some of the action music is quite similar to what Hans wrote for The Peacemaker, a score I didn’t discover until over a decade later (if the score for Pirates of the Caribbean is “Gladiator on the high seas” then the music of Gladiator is “Peacemaker in ancient Rome”). Gladiator also kicked off trends in scoring that became obnoxious in their repetition, namely a reliance on the duduk (an Armenian woodwind) for all things Middle Eastern, power anthems persisting outside of modern action films, and wordless female vocals accompanying shots of ancient and/or desert landscapes, something a later Slate article would term “wail watching.”
But it’s not fair to blame Hans for others doing a lesser version of something he did an exemplary version of the first time, in the same way that the scores from Black Rain and Crimson Tide aren’t responsible for the subpar variations that followed them. And there are so many other exceptional elements of Gladiator that hold up very well, including Hans’ theme for Maximus, Gerrard’s voice, the tortured music for the villain Commodus, and the new-age vibes of the finale. It remains one of Hans’ finest career achievements.
Gladiator - ****½ - Hans Zimmer & Lisa Gerrard; add’l music & arranging by Klaus Badelt & Nick Glennie-Smith;
produced by Hans Zimmer & Klaus Badelt; featured guitars by Heitor Pereira; duduk by Djivan Gasparyan;
source music by Jeff Rona; orchestrated by Bruce Fowler, Suzette Moriarty, Walt Fowler, Ladd McIntosh, Liz Finch &
Jack Smalley; conducted by Gavin Greenaway; Jim Dooley and others as Hans’ assistants; Marc Streitenfeld & Justin
Burnett as technical score advisors; thank you’s to Michael Brook, John Powell, Nick Glennie-Smith & Jay Rifkin
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But one has to ask…do you really need more music from Gladiator?
That’s not a commentary on the quality of the new 3CD set, which includes great new interviews with both Hans Zimmer and Lisa Gerrard - including the revelation that Steven Spielberg wasn’t sold at first on Lisa’s involvement (Klaus Badelt’s absence from the notes suggests a more problematic breakdown of their relationship than has ever been publicly confirmed, though Hans is fairly gracious in his comments here about Klaus’ help with getting things over the finish line and Lisa shares fond memories as well). But the original album was a great representation of the score, one that hit most if not all of the musical highlights, and as stated earlier the initial attempt at putting more music out there was a borderline fiasco.
Across the new 42-track, 2-hour main score program,
- Around 72 minutes are unedited versions of the 58 minutes of film score that made the original album (To Zucchabar was an early demo). One could argue that Hans made some very good editing and sequencing decisions on the original album, though the brief brooding quote of Maximus’ theme prior to the opening battle is a welcome addition. The sole ancient-sounding fanfare Hans wrote that was left in the film, a subtle variant on Commodus’ material, is here as well, though the tighter original album presentation of Barbarian Horde / I Think I’ll Meet Him (10:33 then vs. 13:48 now) remains a better listening experience.
- Another 23 minutes are unedited versions of the score tracks that made the More Music album: the retro Media Ventures action of A Soldier’s Death / Home (Homecoming on More Music), the Marrakesh arrival music that feels like a holdover from The Prince of Egypt, the bellicose Six Man Fight (The Mob on More Music), the ticking suspense material in Wish of a Dying Man (Death Smiles At Us All on More Music), and three tracks that rely heavily on Gerrard’s contributions. The main asset here is the removal of the pesky dialogue.
- The remaining 26 minutes (a mix of contributions from Hans, Lisa, and Klaus) is generally similar to the aforementioned material, including the late prison escape music which is very close to the opening battle material. Exceptions include Walk to the Colosseum with its almost swaggering take on the theme introduced in Strength and Honor, the slowing down of Hans’ battle waltz for Tiger Fight, and the subsequent building energy for Waiting for Judgment, but all that only amounts to around three minutes, which could make the set a “be careful what you wish for” scenario for some folks who’ve been demanding a complete Gladiator release for decades.
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I did not oversimplify my original entry - https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=107376 .
But ooooof, those early posts were way too long. Sorry folks.
(Message edited on Wednesday, June 18, 2025, at 1:19 p.m.)
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