Welcome back to Scoring for Films with Vito Lo Re and Fabrizio Campanelli. Today we’re looking into what lies beneath the Gladiator’s song, meaning we’ll explore how and where this famous song was born. A song we all know by heart... Can you sing the lyrics?.. There’s a reason why no one knows the lyrics to this song: the lyrics don’t exist. Lisa Gerrard – who co-wrote the score for "Gladiator" with Hans Zimmer – is also the singer of the very famous “Now We Are Free.” Since the age of 12, Lisa Gerrard developed a way of singing based on her own language, called idioglossia: a stream of sounds completely devoid of meaning.

I’m thinking of something but it’s not a joke... If you create a song like this and then register it, is there a lyric?... Technically she’s the lyricist, even though the lyrics have no meaning... so does she register the lyrics too?... Dear old Hans – interested in this way of singing but above all in the unique quality of Gerrard’s voice – calls her... What is Zimmer looking for?

First of all, for this scene he’s looking for something particularly evocative. Maximus Decimus Meridius (Russell Crowe) returns home and finds his family dead... his house burned down, and here Zimmer wants to go far beyond, beyond the borders of the Empire and language, and reach straight to emotion and to archetypes. Lisa Gerrard is the perfect creator of a language that speaks like poetic language. It’s a connotative language because it lacks literal meaning, it’s coded: it’s the language of symbol. It’s the language that conveys a set of meanings, a polysemy that allows us, the viewers, to not place the scene geographically, but to universalize it: speaking in an unknown language because through the unknown we grasp the essence of the experience of Russell Crowe and thus encounter what is called the “universal language.” Yes, this was the brilliant intuition behind this piece: managing to stir something ancestral within us, perhaps a kind of collective memory, something rooted in our DNA...

In this, they truly hit the mark though it didn’t win them the Oscar... We talked about it here, in “The Wrong Oscars” – the Oscar went to “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon”... Beautiful!... but maybe here we’re dealing with something else... And it’s in the final scene that even more the value of the choice to use Lisa Gerrard’s unique style emerges... Her idiom seems to have meaning!

It could be an ancient, ancestral language... And so the values we perceive as belonging to Maximus Decimus Meridius are the same values that Gerrard is singing to us: The idea of home, the idea of the land in which his roots are embedded... the strength of a character who is rooted in the earth, endowed with justice, endowed with everything that in Russell Crowe is righteous and perfect. And that is exactly what we see reflected – in the events of the protagonist – our own desires, our dreams, our mechanism of identification. Yes, because what’s special about this way of singing is that the voice is used as a real instrument. So it has the typical expressiveness of the human voice, it’s completely detached from the meaning of the lyrics; what she sings isn’t tied to words, but to the emotions that the music conveys.

As if she were a human cello. After all, they say the voice is the most expressive instrument that exists – and in this sense, she creates something truly magical. But why do you think at some point Hans Zimmer picked up the phone and said: Lisa, come over here… from Australia. Zimmer had seen a fairly recent film – The Insider, a film again with Russell Crowe and Al Pacino. The director, Michael Mann – who’s known for being a control freak – decided to handle the film’s score personally. He didn’t want to write it himself, obviously, but he wanted to develop a real concept for the score: he would choose all the tracks; so they worked with synchronizations: they took existing pieces, already used in other films or from albums, paid a fee and included them in the film.

Michael Mann wanted to bring this project home – I believe to have full artistic ownership of this aspect too. Mann had heard a track by Gerrard called “Sacrifice”. Starting from this single track, Mann asked Gerrard and her collaborator Pieter Bourke to write three pieces. They met and had what is called a "spotting session," where the composer and director agree on when music should start, stop, and what it should convey. The two – script in hand, but without having seen a single frame – returned to Australia. Bourke later said that the first seven tracks (they had been asked for only three) were written without seeing any footage, and he said this was actually a blessing...

Though, you know, in hindsight... it’s probably always better to see the images. They did the seven tracks, sent them to Mann, who said: “Guys, you know what?... Maybe we can do a few more... He brought them from Australia to Los Angeles. They recreated a studio just like the one they had in Australia, so they would feel comfortable and able to compose, and in the last two months of post-production they created this soundtrack.

Keep one thing in mind: the director during production is busy 18 hours a day... and it’s really complicated for someone – like the composer – who needs a constant and ongoing relationship with him, to sometimes simply find the time to watch something together and discuss about it... Mann would write them little notes with somewhat vague and rather cryptic phrases. In fact, after working basically, let’s say, in the dark, they were finally able to engage a bit more. And they also discussed the use of the track Mann originally wanted (Sacrifice), to reshape it to fit the images. The piece wasn’t distorted, it’s still the same; it was simply adapted to the scene.

They – somewhat instinctively, since the setting of the film is partly Middle Eastern – had created a piece that was a bit Islamic in style... It seemed like a perfectly reasonable choice, but Mann said: “No, you have to take out this element – it’s overly Islamic and too ethnic-sounding, because we’re not making a documentary. This isn’t National Geographic!” Gerrard said, “This helped us not so much to understand what the director wanted, but at least we understood what he did NOT want; and that’s already a good start to understanding what needs to be done.” So, Jeffrey Wigand (Russell Crowe) is the executive fired by the tobacco company who reveals that... smoking is harmful! Not only that... he also reveals the truth behind criminal activities that will come to light during the film and here, the meaning we get from the use of Lisa Gerrard is no different than in Gladiator, even though we’re in different centuries...

but here is the principle of universality in what the music is conveying to us, also through the voice: the voice of truth, the voice of strength, the voice of justice. So the century changes but the dynamic is the same, because the pursuit of truth, the pursuit of justice, the strength to stand up in a legal case of this kind, and the revelation made by the protagonist has that dynamic and those psychological traits that are absolutely identical to those on which Gladiator is based. It’s amusing that all this rests on the rather broad shoulders of Russell Crowe – always in the same role: champion of justice, champion of freedom, champion of strength and truth, and with the essential support of Lisa Gerrard’s singing, without which none of this would exist: without that singing, we wouldn’t have perceived the same things, we wouldn’t have overcome that contextual barrier that leads us toward a universal language and toward a sense of universal values; we would have remained within the bounds of normalcy... a more traditional soundtrack could’ve been written, but this is the extra step up. That’s why Hans and Ridley said: “Hey, hand me Gerrard’s number for a sec...!” Subscribe to the channel, leave a like, and let us know if you are true, just, and strong... but especially if you’ve invented your own language!

See you in the next episode, bye!