Gladiators, ready!

Gladiators, ready!


By Michael Pickard
July 19, 2024

IN FOCUS

Those About to Die production designers Johannes Muecke and Laura Pozzaglio join costume designer Gianni Casalnuovo to reveal how they brought to life the world of Ancient Rome for this epic, action-packed drama set in the corrupt world of gladiators and chariot racing.

With blockbuster credits including Independence Day, Moonfall and The Day After Tomorrow, director Roland Emmerich now brings his brand of thrilling action to television for the first time in a series that blends sports, politics and family drama against the backdrop of Ancient Rome.

Those About to Die, which is now streaming worldwide on Prime Video, centres on the blood-soaked gladiator battles and chariot races that take place in the wealthiest city in the world – events designed to keep the starving and restless population at bay, with their minds turned away from revolt against the ruling classes.

Introducing a huge number of characters all fighting to survive in 79AD, the series opens as ageing Emperor Vespasian (played by Anthony Hopkins) faces a decision about which of his sons will succeed him – military commander Titus Flavanius (Tom Hughes) or his more politically minded brother Domitian (Jojo Macari).

Charged with bringing to life the world of the series were production designers Johannes Muecke and Laura Pozzaglio, plus costume designer Gianni Casalnuovo, who were tasked respectively with building dozens of sets and dressing a cast of thousands.

Muecke has previously partnered with “visionary” Emmerich on almost all his film projects since his 2008 apocalyptic movie called 2012, and was approached by producer Harald Kloser in 2021 to create the first visuals that would set the tone for Those About to Die. Then in 2022, he moved to Rome and jumped into production.

Those About to Die brings to life Ancient Rome’s gladiator battles and chariot races

Muecke and Rome-based Pozzaglio split the huge workload between them. The former focused on large sets like the Colosseum, the Circus Maximus chariot arena and its underbelly, and more than 30 different sets that were created on the virtual production stage at Rome’s iconic Cinecittà Studios, where almost the entire series was shot. Pozzaglio, meanwhile, created the beautiful villas, palace interiors, slum housing sets, the senate, the Vesta temple and many others.

“We knew we were going to double-spearhead the art department with an Italian production designer, not only because of the sheer workload in the short amount of prep time given but also because I wanted to have someone on my side who was well connected in Rome and experienced with the inner workings of the Cinecittá Studios,” Muecke tells DQ. “Laura was a true godsend. She has a great understanding of Roman culture and a vast experience in creating beautiful historical sets. I, on the other hand, had designed all these gigantic sets for [Emmerich films] Independence Day: Resurgence and Moonfall.”

Like Emmerich, Muecke wanted to steer the series away from the “stereotypical dusty and slightly decayed” depictions of Rome previously seen in similar swords-and-sandals series. Instead, he was inspired by the paintings of Lawrence Alma Tadema, which depict a very colourful, “visually abundant, almost romantic or baroque atmosphere” of the period.

He describes previous screen depictions of the city as a “Versace version of Rome, but in fact Rome at that time was very gleaming and a highly eclectic culture. So I decided to take the work of Alessandro Michele, the previous chief designer of Gucci, as a conceptual direction as opposed to borrowing from Versace.”

Similarly, Pozzaglio was inspired to look at the city with “fresh eyes” and wanted to bring a new identity to her sets to differentiate them from other works. “Pre-production was spent finding strong inspiration in museums, art books and in the wonderful archaeological sites I visited on weekends,” she says. “The sources of inspiration in Rome are incredible, and as I live there I’m constantly drawing from its beauty.

More than 30 different sets were constructed at Rome’s Cinecittà Studios

“I also had expectations about working with Roland. He’s a director of colossal, large-scale disaster movies and we were starting a project on Roman emperors, so there was going to be no lack of intensity and ambition in his vision.”

The designers also felt it was particularly important to bring a strong contrast between not only between the upper class and the impoverished lower classes of Rome, but also Rome itself and the empire’s furthest provinces in Europe and northern Africa.

“This way we ensured that our idea of Rome provided a hugely detailed and diverse world for this gigantic show,” adds Muecke.

Created by Robert Rodat (Saving Private Ryan), Those About to Die takes its inspiration from the non-fiction book of the same name by Daniel Mannix. Though the designers strived to be as historically accurate as possible, the show’s focus on sports at the centre of Rome allowed them to bring their own ideas to the look of the series, with the chariots becoming the F1 cars of Ancient Rome.

“We researched a lot about the enormous impact the races and games had on the Roman society, the unfathomable economic machinery behind those games, the life-and-death character of the competitions, their high level of engineering and the sweaty locker-room atmosphere of the backstage areas – and tried to come as close as we could to the mindboggling reality of the games in ancient Rome,” Muecke says.

Pozzaglio picks up: “The series is quite accurate with respect to the historicity of the period, but sometimes we had fun constructing and proposing fictional things. On the other hand, we are making cinema, not a documentary; naturally we have taken some liberties.

The production designers wanted a vibrant-looking Ancient Rome

“Reading, studying and visiting museums and archaeological sites, I have been astounded by the modernity of certain artefacts and the boldness of their colours and their choices of décor and architecture, and perhaps nothing we have proposed is really out of context.”

Such was scale of the series that only a few scenes were filmed on location – aerial drone shots of Pretorian guards riding across the landscape and the seaside camps at Torre Astura. The rest of the show was filmed on Cinecittà’s extensive backlot – including the Circus Maximus arena, the Ludus Magnus training area, the Forum Romanum and the slums of Suburra – and its virtual production stage.

For the virtual production shots, VFX firm DNEG came on board to create the digital assets that needed to be built before shooting started. For the relevant scenes, the actors would then perform on dressed sets in front of a giant LED wall – measuring 51 by eight metres – that depicted monuments, buildings or the Ancient Roman skyline.

“Shooting almost exclusively on constructed sets was a tremendous opportunity for Laura and me to fully maintain creative control over the look of the show, since we were independent from any existing locations and able to create every environment from scratch,” Muecke says.

If the scale of the task facing Muecke and Pozzaglio seemed overwhelming, costume designer Gianni Casalnuovo had a similar challenge to dress thousands of cast and supporting actors across the series, which comes from AGC Television, Centropolis Entertainment, Hollywood Gang Productions and Street Entertainment.

Feeding into Emmerich’s ambitions to create a “unique” show, Casalnuovo was given the freedom to bring his own interpretations to the costumes. He would hold daily meetings with Emmerich at Cinecittà to update the director on fabric choices and prototype designs.

Gianni Casalnuovo wanted viewers to instantly know things about characters from their costumes

There were 10 prototypes alone for the chariot racers, while numerous colour tests were carried out to ensure their costumes would stand out during the races as they compete in different-coloured teams. Numerous designs were also needed for the various social classes living in Rome, while each main character also needed more than a dozen copies of their costumes owing to the damage and stress they sustained during the show’s action scenes.

“With the costumes, you need to help the director tell the story,” explains Casalnuovo. “When a character comes in, you need to show the audience how much money they’ve got in the pocket; if they’re happy, if they’re unhappy, if it’s a bad person. All these things will help the director tell the story.

“When I met Roland the first time, I asked him, ‘What do you want to do with this show?’ He said something that I never forgot: ‘I want to smell the costumes. I want to smell the perfume when they are a patrician, and I want to smell them when they’re bad people.’ So this meant a lot to me and really showed me the way to go.”

For the production, Casalnuovo assembled a team of costume cutters, seamstresses, a dyeing department, jewellery makers and groups responsible for leather and metal. He scoured Europe and India for the correct fabric with which to make the robes belonging to the show’s upper-class characters, and also carried out extensive research to find the appropriate costumes for the Numidians – Cala (Sara Martins), Kwame (Moe Hashim), Aura (Kyshan Wilson) and Jula (Alicia Edogamhe).

When the show begins, Cala travels to Rome to free her three children after they are captured by Roman soldiers, with Kwame taken to be trained as a gladiator. Other central characters include crime boss Tenax (Iwan Rheon), star charioteer Scorpus (Dimitri Leonidas), Norse gladiator Viggo (Johannes Johannesson) and Judean queen Berenice (Lara Wolf), who is held captive in Rome.

Casalnuovo scoured the globe to find the right fabric for the show’s upper-class characters

But Those About to Die couldn’t be further from Casalnuovo’s previous project, Netflix’s Andrew Scott-led Ripley, not least because the 1960s-set series was released in black and white. As such, the costume designer was also tasked with dressing the characters in black, white and shades of grey.

“At the very beginning [of Those About to Die], I said, ‘Oh my God, am I still able to use colours?’ because all the work on Ripley was black and white. [Ripley director Steven Zaillian] wasn’t sure that it was going to air in black and white so he asked us not to use colours. It was crazy because you have to find all the fabrics, everything, all in shades of grey, black and white.”

There was no such request here, with the designer encouraged to use vibrant colours throughout. By the end of a day’s shooting, most of the costumes were covered in shades of red, thanks to the bloody action scenes taking place in and outside of the chariot and gladiator arenas.

Even with the use of visual effects to extend crowd scenes, Casalnuovo had to dress up to 1,000 supporting artists to appear in various moments through the series, each with their own complicated outfit.

“Patricians and servants are all very complicated, because they have belts, sandals, capes, cloaks and rings, and the soldiers have under armour, armour, belts, a tunic underneath and boots. One thousand may not sound a huge number, but the day you do it, it is.

The show’s cast includes former Game of Thrones star Iwan Rheon

“It was a great thing when all the cast were very happy. Every time they came for a fitting, they said, ‘Oh, I was worried about what you were going to put me in, but now I’m getting into the character. Now I feel comfortable.’ This is a great thing for a costume designer to hear from the cast when they’re happy and when they feel comfortable. It was very rewarding.”

On a show as big as Those About to Die, the designers all credit their teams with enabling them to do their best work while Emmerich and fellow director Marco Kreuzpaintner shot the series across nine intensive months.

“I am very proud of the colourful and diverse world we created with Those About to Die. And when I saw how the sets were put to life already in the first edits, it was truly a goosebumps moment,” Muecke says. “But moreover, I am so happy that over these 14 months I spent in Rome, so many crew members grew together so closely that now, being back in Vienna, it feels like I left a part of my family back in Rome.

“Actors, crew members and even the producers – we all shared so many fantastic moments and had such a great time together, not only on set and in the production offices but also in our time off, that this whole production will always have a very special place in my heart.”

Pozzaglio adds: “I loved everything that was done equally, and for that I also thank our formidable departments: the helpers, the draughtsmen, the decorators, the builders, the painters, the sculptors, the prop makers, the labourers… just everyone!”

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