‘Gladiator II’ Composer Henry Gregson-Williams Sought Mentor Hans Zimmer’s Approval To Tackle Sequel and Borrow Cues From The First Film – Sound & Screen Film

The moment after director Ridley Scott informally tapped Henry Gregson-Williams to craft the score to the long-awaited sequel Gladiator II, the composer knew his next phone call would be to his early mentor Hans Zimmer, who’d created the music for the original Gladiator film.

“As soon as Ridley called me and said, I think you’re going do the next one,’ yeah. I called Hans immediately and said,’How do you feel about this?’” Gregson-Williams revealed onstage at Deadline’s Sound & Screen event Friday. “And he said, ‘Just make me proud. Go for it.’”

Ultimately, Gregson-Williams decided he didn’t just want his mentor’s blessing; he wanted to use some of the original music cues, too – and the same vocalist and co-composer Zimmer collaborated with on Gladiator’s sweeping anthem “Now We Are Free.”

“A few weeks later, I called [Hans] and said, ‘Look, I don’t see any negative reason to not use your theme in a couple spots, and also to utilize [vocalist] Lisa Gerrard in a slightly different way than you did in the first movie,’” the composer revealed. “So that was the plan, and I hope when you see the film in a couple of spots it’ll give you a warm and fuzzy feeling.”

“Writing a score like this gave me such an opportunity to have a very palleted sound, and it’s an action movie on the one hand, but on the other hand, it’s a story of – not so much for revenge, but redemption, and there’s an emotional heart to it,” said Gregson-Williams, who embarked on his own sort of epic journey, spanning the globe in search of unique musicians and instruments to give his score a distinctive sound infused with a sense of exotic sounds and a sense antiquity.

“I had to chase down my friend Martin Tillman, who’s an electric cellist,” he recalled. “One of the motifs I created really was for Denzel’s character Magnus, and that needed an instrument that could slip and slide as elegantly as he can with an electric cello.”

Traveling to “a field full of goats” in northern Spain, Gregson-Williams tracked down a musician who’d crafted a series of instruments plucked from ancient times. “He had a studio in the back of his farmhouse and played these amazing ancient instruments, all built, were based on pictures, artists’ renditions, of what instruments might have been in Roman times,” recalled the composer. “He made some extraordinary noises in that field. So I brought them back to base here and manipulated them in the way I felt. It was great fun.”

Check back Monday for the panel video.