THE MAKING OF A GLADIATOR

Russell Crowe had never played an epic hero. Ridley Scott had never told an intimate story. But everything changed when the two came together to make the film Gladiator By Jonathan Mahler. Photos by Michael Birt.

Russell Crowe is just shy of six feet tall. Like Maximus, the title character he plays in Ridley Scottâs Gladiator, he as the thick build of a man who has come by his muscles honestly. But this being Russell Crowe, an actor who expands and contracts on demand, he hasnât. This body was designed specifically for the role.

ãHeâs just a big-ass fucking bloke, you know,ä Crowe says of Maximus, with big, long, fat muscles from wielding swords and driving a horse with 70 pounds of armor on. I mean, you try doing that day after day. It beats the piss out of a StairMaster.ä

Itâs hard to believe that Russell Crowe, whose career has been dedicated to ennobling the small struggles of ordinary men, would be willing to don a loincloth, arm himself with a shield, and take on the Roman Empire. It just seems silly. Even to him. ãYou canât, as an actor -- as a bloke with a sense of humor -- go into a situation where somebody taps you on the shoulder and says, ÎMate, Ridley Scott is going to make a movie set in A.D. 185, and youâre a Roman General. OK?â And you go, ÎOh, right-o!âä

Youâd think Hollywood would have learned its lesson from Cleopatra. Released in 1963, it was one of the last big studio epics, about the Roman era, and it was a complete disaster. Not even Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton could save this four-hour boondoggle, which cost on the order of $40 million (an almost inconceivable $219 million in todayâs dollars) and very nearly drove 20th Century Fox into bankruptcy. The first $6 million produced only 11 minutes of usable film, and the movieâs original director, Rouben Mamoulian, never made another picture.

Cleopatra also brought down the curtain on a genre of film -- ãsandal movies,ä as theyâre derisively known -- that has since become the butt of jokes in the industry. They were pageants, short on character and story but long on togas: classic postwar creations that gave Hollywood a chance to impress audiences with its technological might. Forget the fact that the glorious Roman Empire glimpsed in these films was strictly back-lot A.D. 150, this was cinema! But for more than three decades it seemed safe to say that this genre was as dead as Julius Caesar himself. Never again would moviegoers be subjected to the sight of grown men in garlands chasing after each other in chariots.

Then, in May 1996, David Franzoni, one of the writers of Amistad, told Walter Parkes, cohead of DreamWorks' film division, that he wanted to write a gladiator script. Amazingly, Parkes didn't show Franzoni the door.

In fact, less than a year later Parkes found himself pitching the idea to the renowned director Ridley Scott. Parkes showed up at the meeting armed with a folder stuffed full of notes. He also happened to bring along a color Xerox of a 19th-century painting, Pollice Verso (Latin for "thumbs down"), in which a triumphant gladiator stands in the ring of the Roman Colosseum looking up at the emperor, who is about to rule on whether his defeated opponent will five or die.

As Parkes passionately sketched out the plot of the film, Scott's eyes kept drifting back to the painting. When Parkes finished the 10-minute pitch, the two men sat silent for a beat. Unfazed by the inherent perils of the genre and seemingly unconcerned with the ins and outs of the film's narrative, Scott simply looked up at Parkes and nodded.

"Yeah," he said offhandedly, pointing at the picture, "I can do that."

Ridley Scott has never had any trouble manufacturing realities, whether he's looking ahead (the decaying megalopolis of 2019 Los Angeles in Blade Runner seemed more real than contemporary Los Angeles itself) or casting back (even the calamitous 1492: Conquest of Paradise is filled with evocative shots of the Spanish court, island forests, and Columbus' fleet). A filmmaker with a painter's eye, he has been known to whip out a sketch pad in the middle of a story meeting and in a few moments dash off a perfect rendering -- a "Ridleygram" -- of the scene under discussion.

But Scott has paid a price for these gorgeous tableaux: The hero of Blade Runner was so thinly developed that the film's devotees are still arguing over whether he too was a "skin job" (Blade Runner-speak for robot) - Scott's characters are iconographic and his stories perfunctory. In other words, putting a gladiator movie in the hands of a director so easily seduced by the splendor of images seemed to all but guarantee a late-night television stoner movie about bare-legged men in hand-to-hand combat. Sure, it would be great to look at, but would that alone be enough to justify the $100 million investment that DreamWorks was going to lay out?

There was another reason to doubt the wisdom of this project. The actor cast to play the lead was the intensely combative and obsessively involved Russell Crowe -- not exactly someone who would relish the prospect of becoming just another detail in some Ridleyscape.

Yet, miraculously, the audience approval ratings for Gladiator in test screenings have been among the highest DreamWorks has ever seen, and almost certainly higher than those of any of Scott's previous movies. And it is a truly great film, an irresistible action movie wrapped around an undeniably tragic story of fraternal jealousy.

As it turns out, the genius of Gladiator lies in the unlikely pairing of its director and star. That becomes clear about midway through the film. By this point Maximus has been betrayed by the Roman emperor's evil son and sold into slavery as a gladiator. As such, his lot is to kill his peers for the paying public's amusement. In this scene he has just bludgeoned, decapitated, and otherwise disposed of a raft of fellow fighters, to the delight of the roaring masses. After extracting his sword from the body of his final challenger, he turns toward the stands. Hurling his weapon up into the owner's box, he screams, "Are you not entertained?"

This is not just the righteous and wronged hero lashing out at his oppressors. Crowe introduces a subtle layer of self-loathing into the moment: His Maximus does not spare himself the disgust he flings at the crowd. In Crowe's portrayal, Maximus's valor is not dependent on virtue.

Nor does Gladiator unfold in the two-dimensional version of the Roman era to which we've grown accustomed. Scott delivers this world in its entirety; his Rome isn't dependent on eunuchs and peeled grapes.

Scott allows Crowe to be an epic hero, and Crowe allows Scott to be a human director. The result is a huge, mesmerizing canvas that tells a profoundly intimate story. Merely watching it transports you.

THE GLADIATOR

When I meet Russell Crowe at his hotel in London, he has just returned from a day of rehearsals for his next project, a movie about a hostage negotiator who falls in love with the wife of the man he's trying to rescue. He's dressed in a blue sweater, jeans, and well-worn brown boots, but despite the attire and the five o'clock shadow that he wears with it, there is nothing laid-back about Russell Crowe. He exudes a manic energy that is combustible but always tightly controlled. It's as if bracing for a fight is his natural state.

In the course of our conversation Crowe is alternately funny, pugnacious, insightful, and angry. The shift from one demeanor to the next is usually abrupt and always absolute. just as in his acting, there's never any ambiguity about who he is at any given moment.

Crowe has been moving in and out of character since he was six years old, when he began his acting career in a television show for which his mother worked as a caterer. In the late 1980s, when he was in his mid-twenties, he toured Australia and New Zealand with a theater company. He did Grease and Blood Brothers, and logged 416 performances of The Rocky Horror Show. The stage production of Rocky Horror is even more interactive than the film, and Crowe had to learn to think on his feet, adapting his character as the moment required. One evening when he was playing the show's dastardly villain, Dr. Frank-N-Furter, a man in the audience called out, "Nice legs!" Crowe spun around to face the heckler. "You'll never make a transvestite, darling," he shot back. "There wouldn't be enough lipstick to go around your mouth." After that evening's performance, Crowe was heading into a nearby pub when he was stopped by a couple of crew members from the theater. "You know that bloke that called out before?" they asked. "Well, he is a transvestite. He's in there with eight of his mates and they want to buy you a bottle of wine."

 Right now Crowe lives in a trailer on a 560-acre cattle farm seven hours north of Sydney that he bought for his parents five years ago. He was born in New Zealand but came of age in Australia, moving from apartment to apartment over a series of pubs his father managed. It was an ideal environment for a young actor to start collecting characters. "You get to see people at their absolute, scrubbed-up best. And you get to see them at the end of the night when they're in left-hand drive," Crowe reflects. "The tie is no longer done up and the woman is holding her shoes in her hands and tilting into the wind."

At the age of 36, Crowe has already made 19 movies, and his dedication is staggering. By all accounts he's working all the time, and when he's not driving the action he's sitting back studying those around him. "He's like a psychologist, taking it all in," a friend says. "And it all comes out when he's acting."

Even Crowe's recreational activities seem to be in the service of his performances. After The Insider wrapped, he led 11 guys on a weeklong motorcycle trip around Australia, in hopes of getting a better sense of the responsibilities that would weigh on Maximus.

It's no surprise, then, that one of the first songs that Crowe wrote for his rock band, 30 Odd Foot of Grunts -- he's the band's lead singer, lead guitarist, songwriter, and cofounder -- was apparently called "I Wanna Be Marlon Brando." Crowe, who is single, tells me he's most prolific as a songwriter when he's heartbroken, and that he's been especially prolific lately. So I ask the obvious question:

"Have you been heartbroken recently?"

"Oh, by many things."

"Such as?"

"The death of a good cow. That will really knock me out."

Crowe makes much of the fact that his "real life" nourishes his acting. As if to prove his point, he ticks off the various professions of his friends -- gardener, insurance salesman, accountant -- who are not in the movie business.

"I'd like to talk to them."

"Bad luck."

"Yeah?"

"Get out of my real life and stick with the fantasy, baby."

But the passion with which he describes his acting and the detachment with which he talks about his personal life make you wonder whether he hasn't confused the two. Or, at the very least,whether the distinction between his real life and his life as an actor isn't an artificial one.

Stories of Crowe's relentlessly provocative nature -- he convinced a reporter that he was going to strand her in the Australian outback, and narrowly missed a beating in a Canadian bar after having some fun at the expense of the country's national pastime are piling up quickly. Making people like him is simply not a priority for Crowe. Even in an interview he indignantly deflects questions he deems too probing.

"What are some of your favorite nature spots in LA?ä

"I'm not telling you. Why the hell would I do that? So the next time I go out there there's somebody saying, 'Hey, Russell, yeah, I read about this in the magazine. It's beautiful. Want some gum?'"

Those who know Crowe well have learned not to take these confrontations personally. Rick O'Bryan, a personal trainer from Los Angeles who has worked with the actor for years, recalls being roped into a 7 a.m. rugby game, his first Crowe quickly explained the rules and then proceeded to ignore them as the game progressed. O'Bryan followed suit. "Play by the fucking rules!" Crowe screamed at him.

"I am playing by the rules -- as you are" his trainer shot back. "If someone had been watching they'd have said, 'Russell's a jackass,'" O'Bryan observes in retrospect "But we were having fun.

Russell wants people to throw it back at him, but they rarely do because he can be such an intimidating force. If people aren't used to having that kind of intensity around them, it can put them off."

To be fair, though, it's Crowe's intensity and sense of commitment that set him apart as an actor. He can literally become anyone. In the 1991 Proof, an independent Australian film, Crowe plays a naive dishwasher who grows close to a blind photographer after a chance encounter. The blind man comes to rely on his new friend to identify the images in his pictures, to reassure him that the world around him is indeed what he imagines it to be. Crowe strikes the perfect tone, meting out just enough of his own intelligence to give the character depth without actually making him intelligent.

And Crowe seems to be able to find humanity everywhere. He went from sweet and boyish in Proof to jaded and nihilistic the very next year, when he starred in Romper Stomper, a movie about Australian neo-Nazis. It's a hard picture to watch: The hatred and violence are relentless, and because it's a low-budget film the gore is especially nauseating. Crowe is extraordinary as the ringleader Hando, a primitive, hate-filled skinhead who somehow manages to retain an air of vulnerability.

Sharon Stone saw the 1992 film and immediately set about trying to cast Crowe in The Quick and the Dead , which she was coproducing at the time. "I thought it was the most remarkable performance. So deeply emotionally intelligent," she says. Stone saw in Crowe an old-fashioned macho quality that is rare among the more refined actors of his generation: "He has a grit and luminosity at the same time."

Curtis Hanson, the director ofLA Confidential, also admired Crowe in Romper Stomper and thought he'd be perfect as Bud White, a volatile, repressed cop in 1950s Los Angeles. "With Russell I was confronted with an actor of such intensity and emotion that could be channeled into Bud White's persona that it just seemed an unbeatable combination," recalls Hanson, who decided to open the film with an attenuated close-up of White's tense, rapt face. "I would not have begun the movie that way if I didn't think that the audience would look at this face -- a face that most of them had never seen before -- and ask two questions: Who is this guy, and what is he looking at?"

In the James Ellroy novel that provided the basis for the screenplay, White is the most physically imposing cop in the LAPD, so Crowe initially balked at the role: "I said, 'You know, you're just being ridiculous.' And Curtis was like, 'You're being too literal.'"

A couple of years later, Michael Mann asked Crowe to read for the part of Jeffrey Wigand, a flabby middle-aged scientist with two children, in The Insider. This time Crowe was convinced that someone had sent him the wrong script. When Mann assured him that was not the case, Crowe replied that there were plenty of 50-year-old actors who could play the part perfectly well. "And he just put his hand on my chest and he said, 'I'm not talking to you because of your age, I'm talking to you because of what you have in here,'" Crowe recalls. "And I thought that was pretty damn cool..

Crowe is obsessive about physically inhabiting his characters: "If you're playing a pirate, you know, you need the fucking eye patch." For Wigand he put on 35 pounds --and kept them on with a steady diet of Booker's Bourbon and cheeseburgers. To play Bud White he tailored his eating habits and workouts to cultivate the look of a former football player who's straining against his snug, wrinkled clothes.

But it's Crowe's ability to construct an internal emotional coherence for his characters, to fill his imagination with every choice they've ever made, that distinguishes him as an actor. "Emotional truth is the first and most detailed thing that you can really follow," he says. "It's just like a singer listening to another singer and they scat on a note or something and they smile and they go, well, that was pretty cool. Because they know what that is, to just actually let yourself go there instead of trying to fully control it."

And Crowe is forthright about where that truth takes him, never shying away from the ugliness he may find. In imagining the life of Bud White he considered how the character would have felt toward LA's growing black community: "It offends people when I say it because people get romantically attached to a character, but. the truth is Bud was a racist, foul- mouthed son of a bitch, and if you would have met him on the street you would have probably fucking hated him."

If a pent-up, narrow-minded cop is an unlikely hero, so too is a shy, pasty-faced scientist. Al Pacino may have been the "star" of The Insider, but Crowe's understated intensity carried the film. His Wigand is transcendent in the truest sense: It seems as if all of humanity hangs in the balance with every seemingly insignificant decision the character makes. Wigand is a simple man, but in Crowe's interpretation he becomes profound.

I ask Mann in his Los Angeles office how Crowe pulled off one particular scene, the one in which Wigand learns that the 60 Minutes segment with his interview is never going to air. How had he made it so heartbreakingly clear that this man was melting down-without doing anything? "No training, no prior training, no theatricality is going to take you through this moment if you're an actor. You build it in yourself and you go through it. If he does it, the camera will see it. If he doesn't, it won't," Mann replies. "Now, you go back and look at the moment and you know what's going on with this guy. And there are no tears, no bullshit, no burlesque. And then he gets up and he just walks away. That's the quintessence of Russell Crowe."

THE EMPEROR

Ridley Scott's first choice to play Maximus was not Russell Crowe. It was another Australian, Mel Gibson, who laughed when Scott called to sound him out on the idea: "I'm too old, mate!"

I first meet Scott at a sneak preview for Gladiator, at a multiplex in a strip mall in Thousand Oaks, More than an hour north of Los Angeles. DreamWorks wanted to keep it a safe distance from Hollywood, both to get a more reliable read from the audience and to avoid premature publicity for their summer blockbuster.

When I arrive, Scott is in line at the concession stand buying a tub of popcorn. He's a short, barrel-chested man with gingercolored hair and a scruffy, graying beard. His manner is at once affable and dignified.

As a teenager Scott wanted to sign up for the British Royal Marines, but his father, a former military man himself, insisted that he go to art school instead. So Scott was trained as a painter, a background that is borne out in the endless layers of detail that he lavishes on his films.

Almost without exception Scott's movies have been assailed for elevating atmosphere to the role of protagonist and reducing characters to statues in a brilliantly conceived wax museum. Scott has no patience for this criticism. and he becomes heated when talking about Alien: "The complaint at that time was that the characterization was thin. I said, 'Well, Jesus Christ, you don't need much more than that, mate. You've got this motherfucker coming after you-you know, what else do you need?"'

Scott's also a throwback to a time when directors didn't necessarily have personal agendas or aesthetic visions. They were eyes for hire who simply took hold of a screenplay and did their best to bring it to life. In this way he is more of a master craftsman than an auteur. And there's no particular sensibility that unifies his body of work- Scott's films are often dark and convey an unmistakable bleakness about man's place in the world, but what holds them together is that they are all great to look at. As a result, even his failures are memorable. And like the directors of old, Scott is remarkably prolific.

As a director, Scott is greater than the sum of his movies.

Even the visual power of his two most recent efforts, White Squall and G.I. Jane , couldn't animate their formulaic narratives, and his latest epic, 1492 , is a beautiful, lumbering mess. Scott's last real success was Thelma & Louise , and none of his films have quite lived up to the promise of his protocyberpunk film. noir, Blade Runner , which was a flop when it was first released in 1982. It wasn't until years later, when the movie became a darling of academic theorists and midnight moviegoers, that it took its place in the pantheon. "Yeah, I thought I really nailed it with Blade Runner ," Scott laughs. "And we went down. I hope Gladiator performs better."

Scott's most entertaining films don't just provide entertainment; they are expressions of a cultural moment. Blade Runner and Alien offered a sinister, even paranoid, view of the future at a time when Ronald Reagan was lulling America into a bleary optimism. Years later Thelma & Louise touched off such a heated debate about feminism that the movie landed on the cover of Time. Gladiator may unexpectedly find itself in a similar position. After all, in an era of alienation in which Dilbert has become everyman, it's hard not to feel as if we're all on our own and fighting daily battles in which the odds are stacked against us.

That's an appropriate metaphor for Scott's experience shooting Gladiator, actually. The film opens during the final days of the reign of the emperor Marcus Aurelius. The aging emperor wants his star general, Maximus, to take the reins when he dies. This doesn't sit well with Marcus Aurelius's son, the power-hungry Commodus (played by Joaquin Phoenix). When he hears the news from his father, he strangles the old man. With his father dead, Commodus orders Maximus killed. Maximus escapes but has to conceal his identity; and is soon sold into slavery and forced to become a gladiator. The remainder of the film traces the hero's journey back to Rome, all the while building toward a final confrontation in the Colosseum with Commodus.

Scott, of course, wouldn't think of shooting on a back lot: He built ancient Rome from scratch, and on the island of Malta, no less. The centerpiece of the set was a replica of the Colosseum. Erected in a 500-year-old Maltese fort, it had 50- foot walls, a marble emperor's box, and vast overhead sun screens to enhance shadows. And since Scott wanted to be able to pan onto the audience whenever he was Mining gladiator scenes, the arena had to be filled much of the time. When shooting finished at the end of each day, thousands of tunic-clad extras would rush for the exits in a spectacle worthy of Monty Python. ("They were the biggest crowds I'd ever been in," one actor says.)

In one scene a Roman senator, played by British actor John Shrapnel, goes to meet another senator, played by Derek Jacobi, in the Roman equivalent of a local cafe. To get there Shrapnel had to cross a square filled with 1,500 Romans and seven cameras. "Those seven cameras will tell a massive story about Roman life," the actor says. "You'll see a live city, not just loads of people dashing around in chariots."

At the center of all of this pandemonium was the film's emperor himself, who never for a moment lost control. "To watch Ridley orchestrate a of those camera crews is a hell of a thing to behold," says Crowe. "Working with him was like doing quantum physics with Picasso. "

Adding to the chaos was the fact that the script, virtually complete six months before shooting began, had unraveled substantially by the first day of filming, which took place in a mud-soaked hollow in a forest outside London. For the opening battle scene, Hell's Angels were imported from Los Angeles to play the unruly Germanic barbarians who were pitted against the Romans. Within days locals were complaining about the damage being done to their beloved woodlands. One English paper ran "exclusive" photographs alongside a story that compared the environmental havoc Gladiator was wreaking to the rampage of Julius Caesar in 54 B.C.: 'Nothing could stop the mighty legions then... and nothing is stopping them now."

Not only were there major elements of the narrative to sort out after filming began, there was a great deal of debate over how the film should end, a debate complicated by the death of one of its stars, Oliver Reed. A hard-drinking British actor who played Proximo, Maximus' owner and a former gladiator himself, Reed suffered a heart attack before they managed to film a critical final scene. (The small pub that Reed frequented during filming has since turned into a tourist attraction, and his rumored last round of drinks eight beers, 12 double rums, and half a bottle of whiskey-has become the stuff of legend. So too have a few of the pub altercations that Reed participated in with members of the Maltese Navy.)

The day after Reed died, Scott ordered a moment of silence in the Colosseum. "You've got animals padding around, chariots waiting to go, and some flags flapping in the wind, and there was absolute silence,' Shrapnel recalls. "It was a very moving moment. And when that had gone, we powered into the most productive day that I can remember."

Scott ultimately patched together outtakes from earlier scenes with Proximo, computerenhanced a previous close-up of him, and changed his final scene. "I found the solution for it, which I think worked out well for him," Scott says. "Which was redemption."

There are elements of truth to the Gladiator story. Marcus Aurelius did in fact have a miscreant son named Commodus, who was his only surviving heir. But the real Commodus had his father's blessing when he acceded to power. It's true that Commodus was a disaster as an emperor. His tenure marked the beginning of the decline of the Roman Empire, and he was ultimately assassinated. The film's gladiator scenes are plenty gory but nothing compared with what actually went on inside the real colosseum. Prisoners of war and Christian martyrs who refused to renounce their faith were condemned to die ugly, public deaths at the teeth of wild beasts, many of which were brought in from as far away as sub-Saharan Africa. The animals would attack each other, too -- somewhere between 5,000 and 9,000 were killed during the Colosseum's inaugural ceremony alone.

As the era unfolded and the Public's appetite increased, the killings grew more perversely imaginative: A criminal, presumably condemned for a sexual act, was forced to perform the mythical role Of Pasiphae, whose lack of self-control prompted her to have intercourse with a bull. A bear and a bull were reportedly chained together, and slaves were sent out one by one with a key to unlock them. The enraged animals invariably ripped the slaves to bits. Full-scale battles involving thousands of men were also reenacted in the Colosseum. Naval face-offs, for which the arena would be flooded, were especially popular, and to enhance the spectacle wild animals were trained to swim.

Then there was the fate of being cast as Orpheus, the son of Apollo, whose lyre-playing charmed wild beasts in Greek myths. A criminal was ordered into an arena dressed as the mythical character, only he was chained to a rock and the beast in question was a bear that proceeded to tear him limb from limb.

When Ridley Scott first approached Russell Crowe about Gladiator , Crowe was completely immersed in The Insider -- so immersed, in fact, that he nearly turned down the role. It was Michael Mann who ultimately persuaded him not to miss the opportunity, walking into Crowe's trailer one morning and telling the actor that while he appreciated all the effort he was pouring into Wigand, before Crowe let the part of Maximus slip away he should think about the fact that Ridley Scott was one of the best shooters in the history of film.

"And you know, he really is," Crowe tells me. "And when he says shooters he means shooters. He means people who look down that bloody camera and they see it, You know. They see it before they even put their camera up."

That doesn't mean it was an easy working relationship. Scott's style of filmmaking does not exactly cater to actors. Jodie Foster and Robert Redford dropped out of his aborted 1994 film Crisis in the Hot Zone because they were disappointed in the facile plot and simplistic characters, and Harrison Ford once called Blade Runner the worst experience of his acting career. "Being a foot soldier in Ridley's army" is how Crowe describes working for Scott.

Not that Crowe's any picnic either. Craig Lahiff who directed him in the 1997 film Heaven's Burning , says that Crowe gave him 110 percent. "To put it tactfully, he gave me more than I asked for. He has strong ideas," Lahiff remarks. "He uses a lot of negative energy, and to give a good performance he makes the other actors suffer. He gets so wound up."

Crowe and Scott had their clashes as well. "It was a tough, tough job," Crowe admits. Scott too acknowledges that they had their "ups and downs."

When it came to developing his character, Crowe insisted on what was -- for Scott, at least -- an unusual level of collaboration. "If the script's not perfect to start with, it is possible to work toward something more special," says Crowe." "And that was the sort of arrangement that Ridley and I made in our very first conversation. We'd do it together."

And they did. Scott hasn't been this happy with a film since Blade Runner , and while Gladiator does not raise the sorts of existential questions embedded in the earlier film -- What does it mean to be human? How trustworthy is a memory? How are we to deal with our own mortality? -- it certainly does move you.

And Scott recognizes that his hero is part of the reason why: " At the end of it all, the key is that Russell's worth it. That's the key He's worth it."

Walkng out of the crowded theater in Thousand Oaks and into one of the most dismal of modern achievements -- the endless strip mail parking lot -- no one said much. It can take a certain measure of will to cede Scott's reality to one's own.

And that is how it should be. "You can take them on a journey, take them way, way away, and fill their lives with all the details of the character," says Crowe, describing the ideal movie experience, "and then let them gently go back into the real world, having been on this great adventure."

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