Gladiator II cinematographer John Mathieson is offering context and clarification after seemingly anti-Ridley Scott feedback surfaced.
Administrators have a tendency to make use of the identical cinematographers all through their profession. And whereas Ridley Scott solely started working with DP John Mathieson with 2000’s Gladiator, the 2 have had sufficient collaborations for Mathieson to know simply how Scott operates. And apparently that’s not at all times for the higher.
However first, some context. John Mathieson says {that a} two-hour interview he did – most of which wasn’t even about Gladiator II, because it was eight months from launch – was lower down to simply half-hour, leaving loads of room for interpretation and out of context feedback about each the movie and Ridley Scott.
Essentially the most damning discovered Mathieson saying that Ridley Scott has grown lazy in his age, counting on post-production to deal with any sloppy work he employed on the set of Gladiator II. “It’s really lazy…It’s the CG elements now of tidying-up, leaving things in shot, cameras in shot, microphones in shot, bits of set hanging down, shadows from booms…And they just said, ‘Well, clean it up [in editing].’…Look at his older films and getting depth into things was very much part of lighting. You can’t do that with a lot of cameras but he just wants to get it all done.” Right here is the place it is best to word the entire ellipses, strung collectively from The Telegraph in a manner that helps spotlight simply how a lot these items had been cobbled collectively.
GTo clear the air, Mathieson and the host of the podcast, Nigel Levy, sat down with Deadline forward of Gladiator II’s second week in theaters. In his personal assertion, Mathieson mentioned that he bought to speaking in regards to the digital age of the movie business and the work that goes into it from the angle of a contemporary cinematographer. “We talked about that and I said that people just come in the morning, switch the coffee machine on, switch the cameras on, say, what are we doing? Because the digital stuff doesn’t cost anything, but so you shoot a lot. And I saying that is that, and I said, this was the quote. I said, the industry, it’s really lazy. Lazy and sloppy are not two words I would ever put with this gentleman of a certain age and genius. But if you slide out — and you can hear it — you slide out a paragraph and put it right next to, oh, let’s talk about Rid and multi cameras. And he edits the piece down to 30 minutes…I could hear the blip of the sound. I said, well, that wasn’t said against that. That was probably said maybe 20 minutes later. However, this is what has risen to the surface. And I’m deeply regretful of that.”
For his half, Levy labored to salvage the interview, defend the advertising and marketing of Gladiator II and push for nothing however positivity for Ridley Scott. “One thing I was sure about was that John never intended to criticize Ridley. It does seem that bringing separate comments closer together might have made things ambiguous if people chose to take things out of context – which they did. I’m sorry John and I didn’t have a chance to go through it after my cutdown. In the end, some people have chosen to listen to it and imply things John certainly never meant…I’m sorry for any problems this has caused John, the film and Ridley Scott. He is, after all, a clearly brilliant film director.” Now, will Ridley Scott rent John Mathieson again for Gladiator III…?
