- 6 months ago
Making of Rome E02 -
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00:01Rome, a city that invented modern living.
00:05A city that lives every day surrounded by constant reminders of its past,
00:10due in part to the distinctive Roman tradition of building,
00:13that was as much about ingenuity as it was about power.
00:18Now, let's go behind the scenes of the new History Channel special,
00:22Rome, Engineering and Empire,
00:25and officially say thank you to a civilization so vital to our way of life
00:30that imagining a world without their advancements in architecture,
00:34sanitation, entertainment and shopping would be impossible.
00:38Grazie Roma!
00:40Grazie Roma!
00:42Grazie Roma!
00:44The history of Rome has been told countless times,
00:48yet their greatest contribution of all often gets overlooked.
00:52Monuments to themselves that truly last the test of time,
00:56proving that Rome wasn't just built, it was engineered.
01:00Then, later in the show, follow the History Channel,
01:03as we prove all roads indeed lead to Rome,
01:06as we take a special sneak peek at the upcoming HBO original dramatic series,
01:12Rome, as history in the making looks at Rome, Engineering and Empire.
01:18Oh, grazie.
01:23My name is Chris Castle, I'm the producer and writer of Rome, Engineering and Empire.
01:27We need her in the blue dress, and we need her older.
01:30Okay.
01:31Yeah.
01:32Rome, Engineering and Empire is a two-hour special,
01:35one of the greatest engineering feats of the Roman Empire,
01:38as seen through the prism of the emperors who actually reigned during those periods.
01:42So in each act, we're looking at a different structure or a different engineering feat
01:46that furthered their superiority here in Europe.
01:48And we're also weaving in the stories of the emperors who were behind them.
01:52We start off with Julius Caesar, who everybody sort of knows,
01:55but few people know about Caesar's bridge across the Rhine,
01:58which was something that was built on one of his campaigns through Gaul.
02:02And he, in ten days, had his legions build a wooden bridge across a 500-meter span of the Rhine River,
02:09which is something that had never been done.
02:11And then we go through and we talk about aqueducts,
02:13and we talk about an emperor named Claudius, who was a stutterer.
02:16He had a limp.
02:17A lot of people considered him to be handicapped, both physically and mentally.
02:21He was a very interesting study, though, because he was a very successful emperor,
02:24and one of his most successful legacies, I guess, was two aqueducts that led into Rome
02:28that would carry millions of gallons of water every day from the hills around the city into Rome.
02:34My name's Jeremiah Kroll, and I'm the director of photography on Rome, Engineering and Empire.
02:38If we have to do it more than three times because of framing, that's a problem.
02:44Right now we're in Hadrian's Villa outside of Rome,
02:47and we are here because we're shooting recreations of Hadrian,
02:50thinking about designing wonderful buildings like the Pantheon.
02:58In addition to shooting at this beautiful hillside retreat,
03:02these filmmakers were intent on shooting as many of the actual locations that still existed in modern Rome.
03:09Rome is a beautiful place to shoot.
03:12Of all the cities I've shot in or been to, it's the one that's sort of most intertwined with its own history.
03:17Everywhere you go in the city, you're going to see ruins or you're going to see buildings that have been standing for 2,000 years,
03:23intertwined with the modern architecture, and it's just amazing to see that symbiotic relationship between the past and the present.
03:31Yet shooting on ancient locations is a loaded proposition.
03:35Shooting in Italy has been challenging in some ways because there's a different way of working.
03:39Guys, can I get some help?
03:41What often happens to us is we'll arrive at the place where we're supposed to shoot that day,
03:46and for some reason or another there's some catastrophe and we are not allowed to shoot there suddenly.
03:51So our local production manager here, Dario Concello, will come to me and say,
03:56you know, we can't shoot here. It's impossible.
04:01And then he'll go away and he'll talk for 45 minutes to someone,
04:05and he'll come back to us 45 minutes later and say,
04:08okay, we can shoot here until midnight.
04:10And that happens, I would say, two or three times a week while we're here.
04:15You need to have a really good fixer that's going to be able to make sure everything's running smoothly,
04:19so good old Dario came through.
04:21My name is Dario Concello. I'm a local production supervisor, or fixer if you like it.
04:27It's not a question of bridging people, it's a question of, you know, human relationship.
04:33If they like you and you like you, you're the winner.
04:37Does he speak English? No, I don't think so.
04:39They keep a very tight watch on everything that you do,
04:41you have to put everything in writing, everything has to be very specific.
04:44And, you know, they really are conscious of the fact that these sites are 2,000 years old,
04:49and they don't want some film crew coming in and burning them down.
04:52It's good that we have a mad scientist on staff to light the torches.
05:04It's been quite a challenge and something unexpected.
05:07We didn't realize the complications we were going to run into with getting into these places.
05:11Then there are the tourists.
05:13With so much to see, Rome rarely experiences a slow tourism season.
05:18Keeping things that clean while shooting all these monuments is extremely hard, especially in Italy.
05:23There are millions of tourists here, as everyone knows,
05:27and trying to keep them out of our shots and keep all of the signage and the gates
05:33and the buildings and the background, all that stuff out, is extremely difficult.
05:37See everywhere.
05:39But the main reason, the real reason, this production set their sights on Rome was the food.
05:46Eating primi piatti, secondi piatti, contorni.
05:52The Italian one is wonderful.
05:54I never ate better.
05:55I have no time to eat, but somehow I still eat more than I do at home.
05:59Last time I was here for three weeks, and I ate more than I ever eat.
06:02And I lost weight. That's how hard we were working.
06:05That's good.
06:06This time I gained weight, so I guess we're not working as hard.
06:09Ciao.
06:10It's great to be able to use actual Romans for Roman recreations,
06:14and here in Rome, you know, we have no shortage of actual Romans.
06:17So it's been nice to, you know, shoot with what probably are the descendants
06:22of some of the people we're talking about.
06:24Being of Roman heritage means to be a part of a proud lineage,
06:28one that even some locals don't consider themselves to be part of.
06:32It's something I like, in the sense that I feel Roman,
06:35I'm proud of being Roman,
06:37so I'm happy to do this role.
06:40Five generations, more or less.
06:42Five, six, almost all.
06:44No, I'm the first generation.
06:46You feel something inside to be Roman.
06:49To live the history for a Roman like me, it's fantastic.
06:53Eighth generation.
06:54When we return, we'll take an exclusive behind-the-scenes look
06:58at HBO's new original dramatic series, Rome,
07:02and their collaboration with the History Channel,
07:05when History in the Making returns.
07:08My name is Kevin McKidd, and I play Lucius Varinus
07:12in HBO's original series, Rome.
07:15As part of this landmark event,
07:17the History Channel has partnered with HBO
07:20in their efforts to promote their new original dramatic series
07:23set in the ancient Eternal City, Rome.
07:26The History Channel was invited onto HBO's set
07:29to see firsthand the level of detail
07:32that went into this massive, historically authentic production.
07:37HBO's Jonathan Stamp explains.
07:40We're using real characters, real stories,
07:42about whom there is a real historical record.
07:44There are elements in that storytelling
07:46where we've taken writer's license.
07:47So, for example, we might have a character in a place,
07:50i.e. Rome, when we actually know
07:52that he was in another place, according to the historical record.
07:55So I think it's misleading if you say
07:57that the storyline is entirely accurate in that sense,
08:00because it isn't entirely accurate.
08:02However, I would use the word authentic
08:05because I would say that the entire world that we've created
08:07in which the characters move
08:09is as detailed as we could possibly have made it.
08:12One of the most unexpected great things about this job
08:15was walking onto the set,
08:17and you realize straight away the scale of it.
08:21There's no sort of pretending there's a temple here
08:23because they build the temple.
08:25There's no pretending there's the Apia Antica or the Via Sacra,
08:29because it's there.
08:30It's underneath your feet.
08:31You can actually touch the walls.
08:33When I first came here, I had to use a map
08:36to find my way around, you know.
08:38I'd get lost all the time.
08:40I mean, you can just see every single corner
08:42and every little nook and cranny
08:44is filled with really accurate historical details.
08:48Just to try and breathe life into it
08:51and to try and hopefully put across what it might have been like,
08:55you know, to live in those times.
08:56What we're in now is the original Roman Forum,
09:00the Forum Romanum.
09:02And what we've created, what HBO has built here,
09:04is roughly half the size of the actual Forum in downtown Rome.
09:10So they've actually built something which is coming on
09:12for 50% of the size of the original,
09:14which is completely astounding.
09:17I love the insula because it's dirty
09:20and they have to sort of, they can't beautify it up.
09:23They've got all the patina.
09:25That's one word that we learnt doing this, was patina.
09:28And Rome, both the ancient city and the modern city,
09:32has patina, which is the texture of the buildings.
09:37The fact that there's layer upon layer of life going on.
09:42And that's one thing that I love about this set.
09:44And also, it's hollow.
09:47Try any of this anywhere, any of this, any of this.
09:51There's no stone.
09:55There's no stone.
09:57There's no stone in the whole of this set.
10:00Everything you can see.
10:01This is all poured.
10:02This is all resin.
10:03And most of it's resin supported on scaffolding.
10:05There's a sort of lovely Brechtian moment
10:07when you go around the back of it all
10:08and you can just see all the scaffolding.
10:10Miles and miles and miles of scaffolding holding it all up.
10:12Well, I've been coming to this set for more than a year and a half
10:15and I still come onto here and my jaw drops when I walk into it
10:19because it's just the sheer scale of the whole thing.
10:22I play Niobe.
10:24Niobe is married to one of the principal characters, Varinus, who is a soldier.
10:30We meet her after eight years of his absence because he's been at war.
10:35We are basically plebs, I'm afraid. We're very poor.
10:39At the start of the show, he's very buttoned up and does things by the boot.
10:44Get back in formation!
10:47The loss of one drunken fool does little damage to the legion.
10:51If I'm dead already then, sir, you should take care how you speak to me.
10:55As a character, he's very militarised. He's lived and breathed the military and he has to come back to here, to Rome after the battle in Gaul to a family, a wife and two daughters who he hasn't seen in eight years.
11:08So the show kind of tracks his learning curve and how he learns to become father and a husband as opposed to just a military man.
11:18I play a character called Titus Pullo.
11:24Titus Pullo is a legionary, what you'd call a common soldier, a grunt.
11:28He's got no political ambitions or financial ambitions or whatever, he's just happy with his lot.
11:34He's comfortable in his own skin, perhaps likes to party a bit too hard, I think, and fight and live.
11:42I like to kill my enemy, take their gold and enjoy their women.
11:45In preparation for this role, one of the easiest mistakes to make is to become what you think is a classical character from history.
11:54Pullo is very much a contemporary of his time and his time, you know, was Rome 50-54 BC.
12:00And to him, that's state-of-the-art downtown.
12:03You know, so he's a cosmopolitan, he's a soldier, he's a modern man in one of the most progressive modern societies of its day.
12:10I was really, first time I walked into the Forum Romanum here, I was so shocked and stunned by the fact that how many colours there were.
12:17Because when we look at the ruins now in modern-day Rome, everything is grey and that's obvious because all the colours have faded away.
12:23But I had no idea how many colours they actually had available to them.
12:27But there is one big question that everyone will be asking.
12:30The graffiti on the walls and in places like the public latrine, which we've constructed in sort of the poor part of town,
12:37100% Roman sourced, nearly all of it from Pompeii, one of the best parts of my job.
12:42I had a tremendous amount of fun with the graffiti.
12:44Any children under the age of 16, I cannot translate the graffiti in the latrine for.
12:48That's right. In fact, a lot of the set was built upon knowledge gleaned from what was found at the Pompeii archaeological dig.
12:55The Roman city that was unearthed at Pompeii was very different from the white toga poetry reading elegant refined society that we had originally envisioned.
13:06When they dug up Pompeii, there was seriously a movement among some people to bury it again.
13:12Because what they found there was so totally out of whack with what Romans were supposed to be like.
13:17Start digging up brothels. Start digging up latrines with lascivious graffiti all over them.
13:23Start finding that nearly every single doorway in Pompeii has a large erect phallus by it.
13:28Start finding statues, some of which are still regarded as so risque that they are displayed in a room in the Naples Museum called the Gabinetto Secreto,
13:38the secret room into which children are not permitted to enter.
13:41So they start finding, you know, statues that represent all kinds of sexual activity, even bestiality.
13:46And they think, something's wrong here. These can't be the Romans. They're these hustling, bustling guys on the make.
13:54They're all interested in drinking and baths and sex and gambling and gladiators and racing.
14:00And they're constantly rioting and they're constantly fighting each other.
14:03It could not have been more different from what they were expecting to find.
14:08Our intention actually is to make it accurate, but you're still going to have hundreds of questions that the drama raises,
14:15but the drama doesn't answer. And so you need something to supplement it,
14:19which is why the marriage of HBO and the History Channel is perfect,
14:22because that seems to me to be the perfect point of entry for the History Channel,
14:26because that's their bread and butter. That's exactly what they do so well.
14:29When we return, we'll take a look at the advancements in computer animation
14:33and how it will help the History Channel rebuild Rome and see just how they engineered an empire.
14:40I think Rome engineering an empire is an important story for us to note today
14:44because so many feats of Roman engineering are part of our modern architectural legacy.
14:49The Jefferson Memorial was fashioned after the Pantheon.
14:54The old Penn Station in New York was fashioned after the Baths of Caracalla.
14:57I believe that they are the most compelling in terms of what they accomplished,
15:01in not just grandiose sort of monuments, but also in very practical applications of engineering
15:07that made life simpler. Aqueducts supplied water, vast networks of roads.
15:14They had sort of what I would consider the first interstate highway system,
15:18180,000 square miles of roads throughout the empire.
15:22And this facilitated the movement of troops, the movement of trade,
15:26and things on a much larger scale than had ever been seen.
15:30So they were good at not only building huge monuments to their own ego,
15:34but also to building practical structures and practical feats of engineering
15:38that made life better for the ancient world.
15:48The guy in front was laughing. We need them all to look determined.
15:51We're going to kill Agrippina.
15:53The driving element of this program is, in addition to reenactments,
15:57in addition to graphics, it's just beautiful B-roll of the aqueducts,
16:00of the Colosseum, of the Pantheon, of Hadrian's Wall.
16:04I mean, these things are still intact to some degree.
16:07They don't look clean and new, but we've done a lot with dollies and jibs
16:11and Steadicam and cranes to bring these back to life.
16:16And they're so beautiful even in their ruined state that I think the viewers are really going to enjoy
16:20the photography that we've shot of these.
16:22I really think it's going to bring it home for the viewer.
16:25We're shooting on HD and that gives us the look of film that you'd see in a theater.
16:32For me, watching a film on television or in a theater is somewhat of an escape.
16:38Audiences get to go into a place where they've never gotten to see before, like ancient Rome.
16:44So for me as a DP, I want all the viewers to feel like they're there
16:49and to get to experience what it might have been like to walk into the Colosseum.
16:55One main element in this show is graphics.
16:57And we have a company working on building these structures,
17:01building the Vads of Caracal, building Nero's Golden Palace, building Trajan's Forum.
17:05Those structures today are nothing like they really were.
17:08And through computer graphics, we're going to help the viewer to actually know what they look like.
17:13My name is Jeff Stoyer. I'm a senior animator.
17:17So what we're doing is we're basically trying to rebuild pieces of Rome.
17:21As they say, Rome wasn't built in a day.
17:23And I know that even digitally, you can't build Rome in six months or even close to that.
17:29But we've tried.
17:31These animators were given the daunting task of returning well-known Roman landmarks to their original state,
17:37then digitally breaking them apart again so that we may gain a better understanding of how they were originally constructed
17:44and even insight into how the structure was used.
17:47Well, the most obvious one ends up being the Colosseum.
17:51We show some of the parts of the Colosseum that people normally don't get to see right now.
17:55What they see is a partially broken-down shell of what exists after 2,000 years
17:59and several earthquakes that have pretty much ruined it.
18:02We basically show the way it would look in its heyday.
18:05We show what the underbelly of the Colosseum would look like, which is called the Hypogeum.
18:10And it's the two levels underneath the middle of the Colosseum where all the activity was going on
18:15when they were trying to prepare gladiator fights and animal fights and all that.
18:19We're going to do a fly-through in the Baths of Caracalla
18:22that will sort of go from what it looks like now
18:25and then dissolve into the actual graphic of what it looked like then.
18:28And they're going to be able to see the ornate gold embroider on the ceiling
18:32or details down to mosaics and frescoes that would have lined the walls.
18:36The Baths of Caracalla were a pretty good-sized challenge
18:39just because the building is not very repetitious like some of the other venues.
18:44You can't build one pillar and just like repeat it a hundred times.
18:48Every room has its own personality and look and function
18:51and there was lots of pieces to the puzzle that are missing.
18:55We're here to shoot a vista of I guess the greater Tivoli area
19:00which is going to become our backdrop for Rome burning.
19:04And in the end we're going to have Nero looking out on the burning city of Rome.
19:08People from all over the world study the Roman Empire
19:11and one particularly interesting fellow is Peter Weller
19:14who a lot of viewers may remember as Robocop.
19:17Your move, creep.
19:19He still acts and he directs but he also is a professor with Syracuse University.
19:24Although the real spectacle happened up here in the arena,
19:26the backbone, the nerve center, the real support system of the arena
19:30was down below in the hippo jam.
19:32He's a very, very enthusiastic scholar of the Roman Empire.
19:35You hear the yells of blood, beasts, and men.
19:40He really brought a lot of charisma to the show.
19:42Last time I interviewed him, I asked him if it would be okay to ID him as Romo Cop.
19:47And he got a big kick out of that.
19:49That's not the smooth exit that I was planning.
20:03Yeah.
20:06Whether built out of necessity, a need to prove their ingenuity
20:10or simply to reinforce their absolute power,
20:14each emperor that ruled Rome left his mark.
20:17Monuments to themselves, many of which are still intact today.
20:22Further proof that Rome is indeed the eternal city.
20:26Rome, Engineering and Empire, premieres Monday, September 5th,
20:31as only the History Channel can bring you.
20:34Rome wasn't just built, it was engineered.
20:47On Our Nature Channel can bring you back from afar COMMUST
20:51to the Eciegen filosofiionare.
20:53From
21:06anybody who initially artificial intelligence for the universe is...
21:10came back from this fantasy festival.
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