The supernatural, Nick Cave-scripted Gladiator… | Little White Lies

The super­nat­ur­al, Nick Cave-script­ed Glad­i­a­tor sequel that nev­er was

10 May 2020

Words by Simon Bland

A man in a gladiator costume shouting with arms outstretched.
A man in a gladiator costume shouting with arms outstretched.
The Bad Seeds front­man wrote a screen­play for Rus­sell Crowe, res­ur­rect­ing his Roman warrior.

Twen­ty years have passed since Rus­sell Crowe’s scorned war­rior Max­imus went on a bloody quest to avenge his dead fam­i­ly in 2000’s Glad­i­a­tor – but his jour­ney wasn’t meant to end there.

Rid­ley Scott’s Roman epic was such a huge suc­cess, the film’s star want­ed a sequel and approached an unlike­ly pal to tack­le scriptwrit­ing duties. Oh, and the minor issue of bring­ing his sword-wield­ing hero (erm, spoil­er alert) back from the dead. I know Rus­sell real­ly well,” revealed musi­cian and Bad Seeds front­man Nick Cave on Marc Maron’s WTF Pod­cast in 2004. He rang me up at home and asked me if I want­ed to write Glad­i­a­tor 2, which for some­one who had only writ­ten one film script was quite an ask.”

Hav­ing forged a fast friend­ship dur­ing pre-pro­duc­tion of The Propo­si­tion, the 2005 Out­back west­ern that Cave wrote and Crowe almost starred in, the actor believed Cave was just the guy to bring Max­imus back into bat­tle. Not only that, Cave had a killer idea for how to side­step the orig­i­nal ending.

That’s where it all went wrong,” Cave has said of the ill-fat­ed expe­ri­ence. I was like, Hey Rus­sell, didn’t you die in Glad­i­a­tor one?’ He was like, Yeah, you sort that out…’ so he goes to pur­ga­to­ry. There’s this Christ char­ac­ter down on Earth who is gain­ing pop­u­lar­i­ty and many of the Gods are dying so they send Glad­i­a­tor back to Earth to kill Christ and all of his fol­low­ers. I want­ed to call it Christ Killer’.”

If Cave’s descent into the myth­ic Greek under­world sounds a bit too far out, his wild ideas didn’t stop there, with Glad­i­a­tor 2: Christ Killer cul­mi­nat­ing in an epic, era-span­ning cli­max. In the end you find out that the main guy was his son. So he has to kill his son and he’s tricked by the Gods and all this sort of stuff,” teas­es Cave. He becomes this eter­nal war­rior and it ends with this twen­ty minute war sequence that fol­lows all the wars of his­to­ry, right up to the Viet­nam war. It was wild.”

Wild, indeed. And when Cave’s unpro­duced screen­play leaked online back in 2009, fans were able to see just how out-there his sto­ry was – with Crowe’s immor­tal war­rior ulti­mate­ly com­mand­ing World War Two tanks and mak­ing an appear­ance in the mod­ern day Pentagon.

Cut to 2020 and it’s no secret that Cave’s flight-of-fan­cy fol­low up didn’t see the light of day, prov­ing a lit­tle too larg­er-than-life for its would-be star. I said, What do you think?’ Don’t like it, mate,’” chuck­les Cave, recall­ing Crowe’s reac­tion to read­ing the fin­ished script. “‘What about the end? Don’t like it, mate’.”

That said, his sequel idea didn’t seem too out­landish for the film’s direc­tor. It was a good idea,’ Scott remarked dur­ing a jun­ket inter­view for 2017’s Alien: Covenant, before shed­ding some more light on the think­ing behind how Max­imus was able to return to Earth. I knew how to bring him back,” he added. “[Cave] used a por­tal of a dying war­rior as a por­tal that could bring some­body back.”

Despite Cave’s ready-to-go script and Scott’s appar­ent enthu­si­asm, it wasn’t enough to res­ur­rect Max­imus for anoth­er clash in the colos­se­um. When quizzed on the cur­rent sta­tus of Glad­i­a­tor 2: Christ Killer, Scott was quick to reit­er­ate its dor­mant sta­tus, It’s on the shelf some­where at DreamWorks.”

How­ev­er, while the sto­ry may have end­ed its life on a dusty stu­dio shelf, Cave doesn’t regard the expe­ri­ence as a com­plete waste of time. In fact, accord­ing to his chat with Maron, he looks back on the whole expe­ri­ence very fond­ly, adding just one more colour­ful and unex­pect­ed string to the musician’s mul­ti-faceted bow. I enjoyed writ­ing it very much. I enjoyed writ­ing it because I knew – on every lev­el – it was nev­er going to get made.”

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