When he was a little boy, British filmmaker Jim Greayer wanted to be a medieval knight. “Sometimes when my sisters just wanted to go to the beach or lie by the pool, we’d go off and visit a monastery on a hill, or something like that,” he says.
“I was always keen to put myself in the shoes of the people and see it through the eyes of the people back then, just imagine what it would be like to be a monk or a knight or something like that — just try to fill in the blanks of the landscape and bring those ruins back to life,” he says.
Visiting castles and monasteries and abbeys with his mom sparked a passion in him that has lasted a lifetime. “I’ve always been attracted to ancient history, Roman history, medieval history — just the parts of history that require you to re-create a world,” he says.
“I can’t be a medieval knight, but the closest I can come to it is to make a film about it.”
Well, close but no cigar. Instead Greayer has taken on the momentous task of overseeing an eight-episode docudrama about the Roman Empire. “Colosseum” premieres on the History Channel Sunday, and while it portrays the agony and ecstasy of that most famous arena, it’s also about the lives of eight real people who lived during that tumultuous time.
Dogging the footsteps of these ancient folk took some serious detective work, says Greayer, 47. “Depending on who the character is, determines how much detective work was needed to fully round out those characters,” he says.
“Someone like Emperor Commodus is one of the most famous Romans in history — popularized in the movie, ‘Gladiator’ — the Joaquin Phoenix character. An awful lot is known about him. But about some of the slave characters we know only fragments. And it’s a question of finding other fragments to piece together a bigger story. So, the detective work is finding other clues about where they might have come from, what their life might have looked like, and I think that detective work is something that takes place on the screen as well as in the research for the series.”
They haunted archeological sites and foraged for clues among the descriptive Roman mosaics. “Actually, those lesser-known characters are more satisfying because you're having to do much more historical detective work than someone like (physician, surgeon) Galen who wrote a huge amount himself and we know a lot about him,” says Greayer.
The filmmaker, who’s supervised series like “First Ladies,” “Eight Days that Made Rome” and “Worlds Greatest Mountains,” says the most difficult part of “Colosseum” was creating two narratives simultaneously.
“It’s almost like running two productions at once,” he says, “you're running a documentary and a drama — they both have quite different needs. One is you're trying to create a scripted drama and pull off a drama production. On the other hand, you're trying to research the history, shoot interviews (with various historians) and bring it all together. So, it’s quite a lot to juggle to keep both of those things going in a single production.”
The project took two years and was complicated by the onslaught of COVID-19. The sets utilized as many as 1,000 extras, though not all at once. “Finding extras was a big challenge in time of COVID,” recalls Greayer.
“We would always make sure for the big crowd scenes we’d have at least 100-150 extras, but with visual effects you can replicate them, multiply them many times. But in a time of COVID it was an ambitious project to do. It involved not just crowds, but crowds of excitable people shouting, cheering, jostling each other — that was a really challenging thing to do with COVID protocols,” he says. “We had to be super, super cautious about that stuff.”
Filmed partially in Italy, much of the series was shot in a town called Ouarzazate in Morocco. “Morocco it’s a great place; the weather’s amazing. It also has an ancient world feeling,” says Greayer.
“It’s a big filmmaking town just south of the Atlas Mountains, parts of ‘Gladiator’ was shot there. ‘Kingdom of Heaven,’ Ridley Scott’s film, was shot there. (As was 'Lawrence of Arabia.') There’s about five studios there, people have built different ancient world sets. Because it’s very dry the sets are not subject to weather and wind, so people come back here year after year and film different ancient worlds.”
Greayer’s first job right out of college was with the History Channel, which was just gaining a foothold in the U.K. at the time. “I sent out a million letters to production companies and only got one response, and that was from the History Channel which was staffed with lots of film school grads and people who had long careers in TV — but not much history. So, I was brought on as a kind of ‘runner,’ my job was to know a bit of history. They would teach me filmmaking and I would teach them history.” The rest, as they say, is "history."
Ron Howard's film dives into daring rescue
Ron Howard (little Opie from “The Andy Griffith Show”) has produced and directed scores of films like “Parenthood,” “A Beautiful Mind” and “Apollo 13.” But he takes a pivotal turn with his latest, “13 Lives,” which arrives in theaters July 29 for a one-week engagement and then pops up on Prime Video Aug. 5. The film is about the daring rescue of the soccer players who were trapped underwater in a cave in Thailand in 2018.
Against impossible odds expert divers navigated the twists and turns of the limestone cave in gargantuan efforts to save the 12 boys and their coach. It’s a film that practically makes itself, says Howard.
Most of his productions have been fictional forays, though they bear a common theme. “One of the things that attracts me to a story is that possibility or the reality of a real and surprising and shocking loss, and the way that changes your life and (how you) try to cope with that,” he says.
“I dealt with it comedically. ‘Parenthood’ is about the belief that you think you know how to be the greatest parent and control something and the realization that you can't, and what the toll is going to be. ‘Apollo 13’ is clearly about that. I think you can find that in ‘Ransom’ and even in ‘Cocoon.’ They’ve lost their way, who they were and their sense of purpose. And it’s certainly there in ‘A Beautiful Mind.’”
Don McLean translates 'American Pie'
Ever wonder what the real meaning is behind Don McLean’s “American Pie” classic lyrics? Well, Paramount+ has the answer from the creator himself. On July 19 “The Day the Music Died: The Story of Don McLean’s ‘American Pie’” premieres on the streamer.
When it was released in 1971 the song jetted to the top of the charts where it hovered for four weeks. It also topped the charts in Australia, Canada and New Zealand. It ranked No. 2 in the U.K. for three weeks. The poetic metaphors couched in the lyrics are about the loss of innocence – applicable today as much as yesterday.
McLean says the choruses (there are many) flowed out of him in about an hour. And after 50 years his performances of the song are as heart-wrenching as they were then.
“This documentary is something that will make people think, especially since so many throughout the years have asked me what certain lyrics meant or whom I was referring to, but now I finally can solve many of those mysteries,” McLean has said. “Everyone from Madonna to Garth Brooks to Weird Al Yankovic has recorded ‘American Pie’ and made it their own. So many people have their own interpretation of the song, and I love it.”
James Caan — Hollywood's last renegade
So sad to hear of the passing of James Caan on July 6. He was the last of the great rebels in Hollywood. Caan’s off-screen life was more exciting and iconoclastic than his on-screen performances. He wrangled with drugs, organized crime, women, and, of course, the film industry.
His work as the volatile Sonny Corleone in “The Godfather,” earned him an Oscar nomination but he was equally memorable in “Cinderella Liberty,” “The Gambler” (one of his best) and “Misery.”
The last time we spoke he told me he was a different person than he was 25 years ago. "I try to absorb a little more than I used to. I'm still rambunctious and I still like activity," he said.
His acting technique, which he honed at the Neighborhood Playhouse, hadn’t changed, he said. "That technique is looking up to God and saying, 'Give me a break.' That's my technique."
Hollywood had changed, though, said Caan, who worked with the likes of Sam Peckinpah, Francis Coppola, Karel Reisz, Alan J. Pakula and Mark Rydell.
"It's so much more corporate. It's harder now for creative people to go hat-in-hand and say, 'Hey, I've got an idea for a project,' to shareholders. That's a difficult thing,'' he said.
The audiences are not fools, he continued. "They make these pictures and when they give you the premise you know what the end is: the bad guy loses, the good guy wins. He gets the girl. So, something's gotta keep your butt in the seat. And there are a few people who can do that.''
Caan said there was a period in filmmaking when the product just didn't hold up the tradition. "A lot of mediocrity was produced. Because I think that directors got to the point where they made themselves too important. They didn't want anything or anybody to distract from their directorial prowess. There were actors who were good and capable, but they'd distract from the special effects. It was a period of time when I said I'm not going to work again.''
He did take a long hiatus but returned to the industry and said he was happy to be back. "I never did anything for the money though I was in dire need of it. It's nice to go to work with people you like. Everything else is corporate.''
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