You really can’t make this up. In a recent podcast interview with DocFix, “Gladiator 2” cinematographer John Mathieson has seemingly thrown Ridley Scott under the bus.
Mathieson has worked as Scott’s director of photography on six films, including “Gladiator,” “Matchstick Men” and “Kingdom of Heaven.” There’s a good chance they won’t ever collaborate again after these comments.
In the podcast interview, Mathieson claims that Scott has become “lazy,” and “rushes" to get things done. He further adds that Scott's current approach has negatively impacted the quality of his recent films, including their look and feel.
He went on to claim that the director has “changed” and was now “quite impatient” on set, which he felt had a detrimental effect on the finished production. Mathieson told the podcast that Scott now shoots scenes with multiple cameras, rather than just one, resulting in less attention to detail.
“It’s really lazy,” Mathieson continued. “It’s the CG [computer graphic] 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 [on Gladiator II], ‘Well, clean it up.’
“He is quite impatient so he likes to get as much as he can at once,” Mathieson said of Scott’s use of multiple cameras. “It’s not very good for cinematography,” he explained, saying it means you “can only light from one angle”.
He added: “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.”
“Having lots of cameras I don’t think has made the films any better…It’s a bit rush, rush, rush. That’s changed in him. But that’s the way he wants to do it and I don’t like it and I don’t think many people do, but people love his films and he’s Ridley Scott and can do what he wants,” Mathieson continued.
“People want to shoot multi cameras because they get lots of performances and they put lots of people in,” he added. “But there’s not the care.”
“Now it is this thing of ‘generally covering stuff’ rather than me being the cook cooking you something wonderful in my kitchen downstairs,” he said. “You just go to the supermarket and get one of those really big trolleys and you just put your arm on the shelf and just chuck all that stuff in and we’ll sort it out later.”
Scott, 87, well known in the industry as a workhorse, has released four films in the last three years: “The Last Duel,” “House of Gucci,” “Napoleon,” and “Gladiator II.”
He also has a whopping eight projects currently in development, including his next film “The Dog Stars,” starring Paul Mescal, which is set start production in January. The other seven projects in development, that we know of, are his Bee Gees biopic, “BOMB,” “The Battle of Britain,” “Gladiator III,” “Big Dogs,” and “Queen and Country.”