This was Rome’s war: brief, bloody, and beautiful. It’s invading Russia.” He pauses, “You have to think about the retreat, as well.” “Planning for a big TV series like is like planning for war, for a campaign. “Most films, and even TV, is planning for battle,” Heller says. Heller is even more succinct in describing Rome’s making. And I think they figured out, it seems, ways to do it smarter or for less… because our show came out of the gate just huge and bawdy and big, and unapologetic.” Says McKidd, “Ours, it was the first time anybody had tried this, so we just had to spend the money. Whereas Rome was budgeted at $100 million when it premiered, Game of Thrones debuted with a more reasonable starting price tag of $60 million. “I mean listen, none of these budgets were small, but I think Game of Thrones ended up being smaller than ours,” McKidd correctly points out. Even something like Game of Thrones would use CGI for the kind of things that we were doing for real.”Īctor Kevin McKidd, who played one half of Rome’s soul, the honorable to a fault Lucius Vorenus, expresses similar awe when he thinks back at what they accomplished.
It gives me goosebumps now thinking about it, seeing a hundred tribesmen on horseback with great furry helmets charging down a hillside yelling, that sort of thing. “Walking out there at dawn into the Forum and seeing this world created, it was just magical. Every morning Heller would be up at 4am, arriving early on set and getting lost in the art direction’s colors. “We used the most modern scholarship, which suggests that all the sculptures were painted,” Heller says over Zoom as we reminisce about Rome and its Cinecittà extravagance 15 years after the series’ 2005 premiere. From the austere grandeur of the pre-imperial Roman Forum to the eventual seediness of the gangs on the Aventine Hill, the final days of the Roman republic were reimagined in sweaty, shocking, and spectacularly expensive detail. Filmed at the legendary facilities of Cinecittà Studios in the actual Rome, HBO and showrunner Bruno Heller oversaw a vast recreation of antiquity during the life and times of Julius Caesar. In its debut, Rome was even more gargantuan in scale and opulent in design than Thrones’ first few years.
But before HBO’s song of ice and fire, this was also the origin of the first actual modern TV epic. These details might be mistaken by many as the genesis of Game of Thrones. Yet HBO gambled big with a budget that exceeded $100 million on its first season. Not with its hundreds of extras in lavish costumes, and not with its cast of more than a dozen major characters. Filming in exotic international locations and on sets that went on for blocks, it was an epic spectacle that many whispered couldn’t be done on television. It was the biggest show ever produced when it premiered on HBO.