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All Of It with Alison Stewart
Dressing Ancient Romans in 'Gladiator II' (The Big Picture)
00:22:58
Dostume designers Janty Yates and David Crossman discuss dressing gladiators, emperors, senators, and schemers in Ancient Rome for "Gladiator II."
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WNYC Studios
Listener supported WNYC Studios.
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Alison Stewart
You are listening to all of it on wnyc. I'm Alison Stewart. Costume designer Janti Yates won an Academy Award in 2001 for her work on Gladiator. Now she's nominated again for Gladiator 2 alongside fellow costume designer David Crossman. Janty and Dave split the work for this epic tale of vengeance and scare in ancient Rome. Janty worked on the costumes for Roman civilians, including Denzel Washington's beautiful robes. And David worked on the military costumes, which meant making many, many, many suits of armor. Jantee and David are both nominated for best costume design and we are speaking to them now as part of our Big Picture series. That's when we speak to people who worked behind the camera to make movie Magic in 2024. Janty H. Joins me. Hi, Janty.
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Janti Yates
Hi there. How are you?
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Alison Stewart
I'm doing well. And David Crossman joins us as well. Hi, David.
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WNYC Studios
Hi there. Hello.
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Alison Stewart
Hello. This is the big picture question for you outside of this one film. Janti, I'll start with you. What do you see on your, what do you see as your job on a movie set? The job of the costume designer.
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Janti Yates
Well, without us sleeping naked.
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Alison Stewart
And David, to you, what do you think is the job of the costume designer?
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WNYC Studios
Well, it's a similar answer to Janty, really, but I suppose it's to try and fulfill the director's wishes and help them achieve the look of the film, you know, what they're after. Plus the naked part.
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Alison Stewart
Plus the naked part. Dave, you worked with. I'll get back. Dave, you worked on Napoleon with Janty and Ridley Scott. What did you learn from that experience that was useful to you on Gladiator 2?
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WNYC Studios
I think Gladiator 2, weirdly, was a bit easier than Napoleon, to be honest. It was kind of less complex. So it was Janti and I, we worked together for a long time for like 20 years. We've known each other for a long time and I've done a few Ridley Scott films. So I know roughly how it all kind of works on his films. And I think really for us, it was more of a logistical kind of race against time, really, to get lots of armor ready. I think that's one of the Biggest. Whenever you're doing an arm film it's always about just time and trying to get everything done in time and into a certain place in time. So it's all. It's all of that alongside what you have to do for the actors.
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Alison Stewart
And, Chanty, you won an Oscar for your work on Gladiator. What was it like to return to this world and these characters all these years later?
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Janti Yates
Well, it was very exciting, we were told, actually, while we were doing Napoleon. So it was like, oh, it's really going to happen. So I just went. I dove back into research because it was 24 years ago and the brain's not as it was and had to, as usual, research the hell out of it. But it was very exciting. With Connie, for example, she's hardly changed in 24 years. She's still 6 foot. She still has amazing bone structure. She still has got a body to die for. We did go a bit. We went a little bit haute couture on her to start with. And we cut a lot of costume and we fitted it. And neither she liked it, nor did Ridley, nor did I. So we went back to the original. The original feel of her look. Denzel was a complete unknown and he'd asked for a couple of garments to just practice with at home. And I hadn't really realized what he meant by that. But his way of handling his costumes was so much part of his act. Not his act of his Persona. He was always just swinging his toga over his shoulder in a nonchalant way and marching off. And I just thought, my God, this man really works. Works at it. The twins, they were just mad. They were like my sons. I loved them to bits. We just put gold and gold on gold and then some more gold.
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Alison Stewart
Fred Hechtinger is a friend of mine since he was a little, little boy. So that was quite a joy. To see him play a crazy emperor.
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Janti Yates
Crazy beyond crazy. Ridley's brief for them was Johnny Rotten.
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Alison Stewart
That's a genius. Oh, that makes me want to watch it again. Dave, when you're thinking about the costuming in the army how much of the original Gladiator did you look at initially?
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WNYC Studios
Well, I've. Well, you know. You know, I gave it another look. I mean, I'm well aware of Gladiator. It's been with me for 20 years. People always think that I did it with. Worked on it with Janti. And I said, no, I didn't do Gladiator. And so, no, I was aware of it. I mean, obviously, I wanted to do a bit of my own thing. And then I think the thing that kind of ties most of the first film of the Praetorian Guards we kind of gave them a kind of 20 year makeover and we made lots of the Roman army in New Zealand. And then we remade Paul Mescal's mini journey of his kind of new median armor going all the way to Maximus's armor, which we remade. We found a set of the original Maximus armor, scanned it and then made a version for Paul. So, yeah, I'd say the difference was this time we had an Italian leather maker called Gianpaolo Grassi who did a lot of the kind of armor work in house. So it's kind of. We blended traditional and modern techniques together, I think. And, you know, we had a bit of time to do that. So there were slight differences in the approach, I suppose, in the time. And I suppose we know a bit more than you did say 20 years ago about certain things.
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Alison Stewart
Yeah. Janti, on Gladiator you had both military and civilian costumes. That was your responsibility. And this time you had Dave to help out. What was most valuable to you about that collaboration?
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Janti Yates
Everything. I adore working with Dave and for the rest of my life. He takes, for example, all my military, which I did before. He's taken it and enhanced it so brilliantly that it's unrecognizable. Also, I only had 15 gladiators to design, actually that fought Russell and He had about 150. And they constantly were making padded shoulders, padded arms, padded knickers, you name it. They were just making so many different varieties so they could dress. You know, you always need 200 if you're dressing 150. It was a huge feat what he did.
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Alison Stewart
I'm speaking with costume designers Janti Yates and Dave Crossman. They are nominated for an Oscar for their work on Gladiator 2. You mentioned research is a part of your job. Genti, how much research? Where did you go to research? How did you start?
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Janti Yates
Well, I really did exactly what I did in the first Gladiator. Ridley is very painterly and will always be passionate about specific artists for a specific film. And this one for Denzel, he was mad. For the Orientalists, for Jerome, for Benjamin Constant, he always adores. There's one particular artist that even the art department, excuse me, use, for example, the petals in the first one. And his name is Alma Tadema. And we copied a lot. I won't say copied, but we had drew a huge amount of inspiration from Alma Tadema. And for example, the tunics were wrapped around with a silk ribbon. I'd call them sausages because they were doubled up and you drape them around the bosom, round the waist and around the hip and hanging down to the ground. And that was wonderful in a different color. Until we got to Malta and found that they weren't all six foot and dressed as a. They weren't looking like horse, you know, clothes, horses. So they look more like bags of potatoes. Anyway, we managed.
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Alison Stewart
Dave, how about you? Where does your research start?
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WNYC Studios
There's a kind of. There's a wealth of material here in England. I was on holiday with the kids in Rome the year before me. Kind of had an inkling that we thought it might happen. So I was dragging them to a few museums and things. So we. We looked at. Looking at contemporary things just to see where. Where you can either take license or, you know, what's real, what's not and all that kind of thing. And. But there was a lot in the British Museum, there's a place in Cambridge where you can look at copies of sculptures. There's lots of plaster cast off original sculptures that you can look at and photograph. And so all of that. There's so much of it and. And then just dating all the Roman helmets so that our periods kind of correct, you know, for. For what we're doing 20 years on from the original gladiator. And yeah, so it's. It's nice. It's nice research to do. It's a nice subject.
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Alison Stewart
How are you able to make sure the costumes are flexible enough, Dave, for the actors and the stunt doubles to perform these action sequence sequences? And also that they. They look good.
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WNYC Studios
Well, you always make. Because we made a lot of them in leather, so it's way more comfortable to wear than usually. They're made in kind of plastic polyurethane. They're molded and so after about two minutes, everyone's bought it. It's really hot. The heat in Malta, Morocco was kind of unbearable. So actually the leather cuirasses kind of saved us a bit with Pedro Pascal and with Paul Mescal because it's a kind of natural material. So anything we. Any plastic pieces that we added to it, like Pedro's kind of embossed Medusa head on the. Is. Is. Doesn't. Doesn't affect him in any way. So he's always wearing leather. And then the. All of the Roman armor is made out of a polyurethane. But it hadn't quite got so hot by then. But it's all made in a Kind of flexible. The materials have come on a long way since the first Gladiator where they were doing a kind of new technique of spraying out hundreds of sets of armor. So we've, over the years, that's developed. Now the materials are way better. There's more materials that are softer. They're more flexy and they look the same. It used to be the case that anything that was soft just looks silly. It looked kind of dull gray and you could spot it a mile off. But now it's very hard to tell the difference. You can have.
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Alison Stewart
Spongy. Hey, Jenny, I want to ask you more about Denzel's costumes because aside from the robes, the gorgeous robes he is loaded down with jewelry. He's got them on the rings, he's got earrings. He's got big necklaces. How did you decide to have him wear so much jewelry?
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Janti Yates
Well, again, looking at the reference that Ridley gave us they were very, very ornate, the paintings. And so actually, we kind of dressed Denzel down. I was astonished that he'd wear the earrings because I never thought he would. He seemed to want a lot more jewelry than I'd ever anticipated. So it was kind of a joint venture. But not really, because he, in the end, is the one that puts them on in his trailer without any interference and he'd just appear looking magnificent. I just said, oh, blimey. That was wonderful.
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Alison Stewart
I agree with you, Dave. I saw mentioned in an interview that you used vodka to keep the costumes fresh. Is that true?
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WNYC Studios
No, I just drank vodka and then they seemed fresh. It was like. It's a way of. You put it into a bottle and you spritz it into the costume. So it's. It's. You're more or less just saying alcohol, you know, so it just kills the kind of bacteria. So it stops that when. When you can't wash things or they get sprayed with a kind of. And it's usually vodka. There's always cheap bottles of vodka on the costume truck waiting to be spritzed into things that can't touch water.
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Janti Yates
I'm speaking. Is that in our. In our civilian wear as well?
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WNYC Studios
We do also use tea tree oil as well. Just for anybody who has an alcohol.
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Alison Stewart
Issue I'm speaking with costume designers Janti Yates and Dave Crossman. They're nominated for Oscars for their work on Gladiator 2. When we first meet Lucius, he's a soldier in North Africa. This is the Paul Mescal character during that time. What would he have worn and what would his wife have worn? She was a soldier as well.
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WNYC Studios
Yeah. So we. We gave. We. We tried to do the contrast between the kind of might of the Roman army. They've got the most technically advanced armor. You know, there. There they are. They're kind of all the money and the. And then Paul's Numidian armor is just a very kind of cheap kind of woven leather, hand hewn kind of look. And then his. And the most basic kind of under tunic underneath the skirt. And so he's. He's very. And then a very kind of round kind of primitive piece of metal on his chest for very basic protection. His wife. The. His wife wears an. Actually a kind of half breastplate. And that's because Ridley wanted to. He kept looking at his wife, how he wanted to dress her. And then he wanted to kind of emulate from the first gladiator some of the. The women in the arena on the chariots when they're being killed by Russell. And so we kind of did a version of that cuirass for her. And then she's got a sort of basic helmet. So she's a kind of sharpshooter, kind of archer. So, you know, in a way she's kind of more, you know, elite than Paul is in some ways. You know. And it's. But yes, Paul was a kind of primitive look that was based on a Pasolini film. Ridley had seen something. He was quite excited by this pale armor. So it started off very pale. It got slightly darker as we wove it. But it was all kind of woven in house. We made about nine sets of it. And. And then he develops on. So he goes into a kind of slave tunic and then into his kind of gladiator look which is kind of a nod to the first film. It's the language of the first film. Gladiator, cuirass. And then eventually into the Maximus after that.
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Alison Stewart
Janti. Let's talk about the emperors, the twin emperors. They have this sort of almost white face they wear.
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Janti Yates
Yeah. And bright orange hair. It's all Ridley and it was all from Johnny Rotten. Because that's not only the characters. They were sort of to base themselves on but he wanted their look to be that in a sort of Roman style.
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Alison Stewart
It's interesting though. You know, they're unstable. They're a little scary in some parts. How did you want to communicate their sort of fearsomeness, their scariness through their costumes?
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Janti Yates
Well, to be honest, I was leaving that up to them because I wanted more on more and more layers and more this so that they would be quite Intimidating in their actual appearance or their characters. So, you know, they would be in the brightest colors or the most jewels or the most gold. And I mean, just greeting Pedro on the steps, these hysterical emperors in gold on gold cuirasses, which Dave very kindly did for me. It was just. They looked magnificent. I thought they looked hysterically funny.
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Alison Stewart
Dave, General Acacius, played by Pedro Pascal, has this awesome armor, and it's pretty cool. You mentioned it earlier. It's got sort of. The head of Medusa is right in the middle. Why Medusa?
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WNYC Studios
I think it was a. It was a commonly used symbol and it was. It's kind of. Kind of heroic symbol. It had a lot more. We kind of overdid it on the snakes a bit. I think we had a lot more snakes to begin with. And then there was a snake reduction process as we looked at on the breastplate. But they were definitely. They were definitely exaggerated. Just as they kind of extended more, they were kind of crawling all over the chest. That was the kind of. That was the idea. So it's meant to invoke fear in, you know, his enemies and that kind of. But yeah, we did look at it for a long time. That was his main. And then we kind of to more traditional. In his white arm, he's got the kind of more classic double griffin, kind of mythical creatures on his. On his breastplate.
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Alison Stewart
Is that when he's wearing the white and he comes back, he looks. He looks good in the white.
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Janti Yates
Can I just tell you?
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WNYC Studios
And then the kind of special forces. The special forces version of the snakes later on when he's sneaking into the Coliseum. Then he's got kind of dark version of the Medusa head snake ensemble.
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Alison Stewart
Johnny, that was really interesting. You said at the beginning of the interview that you wanted to sort of evolve Lucilla's, Connie Nielsen's outfits, but that you said, no, no, we have to go back to the beginning. Why did the sort of haute couture. Why didn't it work?
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Janti Yates
It was too plain, in actual fact. We were taking Madame Gray. We were doing all sorts of, you know, lovely Yves Saint Laurent early work. Lovely single tubes that were sort of like shoulderless and with an inbuilt cloak. And really, Connie wanted more. I looked at her and I thought she looked beautiful. But basically we needed those drapes. We needed a drape from the head, a drape from the hips, a drape from the shoulder drape. You name it, we draped it. So everybody was happy then.
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Alison Stewart
Dave, there are so many extras, so many soldiers, so many gladiators who need to wear the armor as well. What's the process for dressing so many different people?
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Janti Yates
Well, can I just say, there's nowhere near. We had 3,000 a day on the original gladiator. They were starting at 2, 2:30 in the morning and I'd probably join them around four of a lion. But then we get rid of them all by 11. So we only had 7 or 800 in the crowd. And Dave, how many did you have with your. When your praetorians met your Romans?
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WNYC Studios
Well, I feel bad now because we haven't got as many as the first gladiator, but that's because digital technology has moved on and it would have been too expensive. Expensive to, you know, dress. We usually on the bigger. On the biggest days we had around 500. We had about, I think we went up to 200 Praetorian Guards. And then on some days we had 500 Roman soldiers. So it depended what we were. But you, you, you basically spend a couple of weeks before you start shooting pre fitting all these extras. So about 100 people a day come to you and they get fitted in the armor, ready or not, basically. Sometimes you're fitting 50 people with one set of armor because it hasn't arrived yet. And. But they're all going through that kind of process and then they're all given a number and then on the day of shooting they come with their number and then they go into the tent, they kind of roll through. So you, you try and get it as systemized as you can because of time, you know, because, you know, you try and not have the kind of 2:00 in the morning situation anymore. You try more like 5, 5:30, kind of on set for 8:30, that kind of feeling. So you're not killing everybody in the process.
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Alison Stewart
Janti, what is the thing that you are the most proud of in Gladiator 2?
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Janti Yates
Oh, God, all of it. All of it. I love every single, every single vision. I love Dave's work, I have to say. I think his praetorians were just spectacular and his gladiators, all of it. I loved how Denzel looked, but I also loved how Connie looked and I loved how the emperors look. All of it.
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Alison Stewart
What about you, Dave? What are you particularly proud of?
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WNYC Studios
I think, I don't know most parts. I like the boats fighting. I like the emperors. I like Pedro's costumes. I like Paul's costumes. I mean, you know, there's, there's nice moments, you know, in the film. Yes, I'm proud, Proud of a lot of it. I'm glad I did it. It's one of those nice jobs where you're happy you were involved, you know. And thanks to Janti basically.
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Alison Stewart
Janti, have you figured out what you're going to wear? I have to ask the costume designer to the Oscars.
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Janti Yates
I thought I might wear one of Denzel's off cast gesture to him.
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Alison Stewart
I've been speaking with costume designers Jantia Yates and Dave Crossman. They are nominated for an Oscar for their work on Gladiator 2. It was such a delight to have you here.
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Janti Yates
Thank you so much.
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