Gladiator II director Ridley Scott, 86, thrives on the adrenaline of film-making

It has been 24 years since director Ridley Scott scored one of the biggest hits of his career with Gladiator (2000), a swords-and-sandals epic starring Australian actor Russell Crowe that won the Oscar for Best Picture.

- Kyle Buchanan

Now 86, Scott still works at a prodigious pace, sometimes even directing two films in the same year.

The English film-maker's latest is Gladiator II, which picks up two decades after Crowe's character, Maximus, died heroically in the arena.

In the years since, Lucius (Paul Mescal) Maximus' secret son has been shuttled to North Africa where he, too, has become a capable fighter. But war waged by Roman general Marcus Acacius (Pedro Pascal) will draw Lucius back to his birthplace, where the clever arms dealer Macrinus (Denzel Washington) will try to manipulate the young man to further his own ambitions.

In October, I met Scott at his Los Angeles office, which was decorated with posters of some of his memorable films such as Alien (1979), Blade Runner (1982) and The Martian (2015).

True to form, while gearing up for the release of Gladiator II, he was already deep into pre-production for his next movie - a biopic on British-Australian pop group Bee Gees set to shoot in February - and had even begun storyboarding the one after that (a sci-fi adaptation).

"I feel alive when I'm doing something at this level," he said. "I don't call it stress, I call it adrenaline. And a bit of adrenaline is good for the (streaming) platforms.

I love the platforms because instead of a film sitting on a shelf dying after it's opened, it's online, and the quality is always superb, as good as when it was released. So, I kept hearing how people loved Gladiator.

I thought, "You know, we better do something."