Even something like Game of Thrones would use CGI for the kind of things that we were doing for real.” 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.
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