Sitting in the moody blue-gray light that streams in a hotel-room window on a rainy Chicago morning, a very subdued but lethally appealing Mel Gibson seems a bit like a warrior after battle.
Maybe because, cinematically at least, he is. He plays a warrior in his most ambitious project to date, “Braveheart”–a sweeping, brawling, romantic, exhilarating epic film about William Wallace, the courageous knight who led Scotland’s independence movement in the 13th Century against the brutal English tyrant King Edward I.
Gibson obviously has put his heart and soul into “Braveheart,” which opens Wednesday. He stars in it and also directed and co-produced it, managing a cast of thousands.
Playing Wallace is a splashy star turn for Gibson, who wears flowing hair and a kilt and speaks with a Scottish accent in the role. He thunders through the misty countryside on horseback and, his face smeared with blue warpaint, leads his grossly outnumbered troops in bloody battle against the English. He takes an arrow in the chest but fights on.
“The first brush I had with Wallace was through the script,” says Gibson, a quick-witted man with a resonant voice and a modest, boyish demeanor.
“That’s one person’s interpretation of who William Wallace was, and it demanded further investigation. One thing I was dredging all the books for was the notion of what could possibly have motivated him to do all these things. And I unearthed a lot of interesting things which told me about his character. He had an uncompromising nature. He was a ticket for a lot of people who thought, `How can we use this guy?’ He was a man of influence and power because he was able to inspire people. People would follow him to hell because he was totally berserker.
“He was offered everything–land, money. Every kind of power and toy was thrown in his direction. He refused all of them because he didn’t want to be ruled. He didn’t want to be influenced. So I think he was really sincerely concerned with freedom for himself and his colleagues and making some kind of country. Reading the script at first you think, `Well, goody twoshoes,’ but his ideals were there.”
Gibson pauses. “He used to eat people’s hearts, too. Savage people! No, he didn’t really eat people’s hearts. . . . He did make a belt out of a guy once.”
His delivery is deadpan. He looks away. Is it a joke?
“No, it’s not a joke,” Gibson insists.”He really did do that. He did it to the commanding officer of the British at Stirling. He flayed him and turned him into a belt, a scabbard or something, which is interesting for a guy who could speak five languages.
“He is right out there. He had a pretty big range. Yes, he is like a saint. He had that aura. Sort of like Thomas More. It tells you what heights the human spirit can ascend to.”
Gibson, 39, enjoyed playing Wallace. “It gets under your skin. More so than just being in . It’s the whole idea of telling the story and having to explore it as fully as I did, even right down to the battles–actual occurrences and borrowing from battles I’d read about. The battles aren’t blow-by-blow historically accurate. Stirling was actually Stirling Bridge, but I took the bridge out because it just didn’t do for me what I wanted it to do on the screen. But the results were the same.
“He had, like, 2,000 guys and they had 10,000 guys and he beat them. That happens. All you have to do is read the Book of Maccabees or something like that. He has no guys and he just goes out there and wins with heart and with faith.”
Gibson’s version of Wallace’s ragtag revolutionaries has them flashing the enemy–lifting up their kilts, fore and aft, like medieval can-can dancers.
“They used to do that,” Gibson says. “That’s recorded. They used to go out there and flash the other side. And more. They used to take it all off and fight naked. Paint themselves blue and go for it. Scary.”
Filming “Braveheart” was a massive undertaking that involved almost three months of preparation and five months of filming on location in Scotland and Ireland, where 1,700 of the Irish Army’s reserve forces acted as the infantry, archery and cavalry divisions of Scottish and English armies, along with volunteers from all over Ireland.
The combat is hand-to-hand and bloody. In a scene where Wallace exacts revenge on a clansman who betrays him, Wallace smashes his face with a ball attached to a chain.
Gibson dismisses concerns about violence. “Thirteenth Century battles could not have been a picnic. There’s nothing I can show you that wasn’t actually worse on the day.
“When we got together the film was obviously longer. You had to be very judicious in your choice of what you show and what you don’t, and we were, because I didn’t want it to be gratuitous. But yet push the envelope as far as the reality of what happens in a confrontation. So I don’t think it’s gratuitous or excessive.”
All of the film is not bloody, of course. There is also intrigue with the French-born princess of Wales (French actress Sophie Marceau), and romance. Wallace falls in love and in a secret ceremony marries Murron (newcomer Catherine McCormack), a woman from his home village, Lanark.
When Gibson is told that the couple’s nude but very sensitive wedding-night scene is reminiscent of Michael Corleone’s first night with his Sicilian bride in “The Godfather,” he seems flattered but brushes aside any specter of conscious influence.
“I just had a specific image of what I wanted,” he says. “I wanted to do it simply, not graphically. I didn’t want them lying down and thrusting away. I wanted it to be pretty to look at and as romantic as possible. So it has nice lighting and you can see their breath and the water. It was very simply shot.”
He grins and speaks as an actor rather than a director. “It was freezing. Freezing.”
Wearing a kilt, however, was not one of his problems on the set. “It was really comfortable,” he says. “Kilts originally were just blankets that people wrapped around them. The colors were influenced by the different plant dyes from the area you came from so they were like camouflage.
“There’s all sorts of belts and leather thongs to tie up on the shoulder, so you could run and dive and flip and it wouldn’t come off . They’re pretty warm, lot of hot air under them. Well, they’re warm unless you get a really extreme northerly blowing up the Khyber. Then you’re cold.”
“Braveheart” is not Gibson’s first outing as a director. His directorial debut was 1993’s “The Man Without a Face,” a quietly affecting story about a troubled adolescent boy and his relationship with the disfigured man (Gibson) who tutors him in a picturesque Maine village.
This followed his starring role in 1990 in Franco Zeffirelli’s “Hamlet,” the first film to be produced by Gibson’s production company, Icon Productions. His version of the tormented prince brought him the William Shakespeare Award from the Folger Theater in Washington, D.C.
Icon also produced “Forever Young” and “Maverick,” with Gibson starring in both.
Though he often is associated in the public mind with Australia and has a touch of Down Under in his voice, Gibson actually is an American. He was born in upstate New York. His father, whose mother was an Australian opera singer, moved the family to Australia when Gibson was 12. He graduated from the National Institute of Dramatic Arts at the University of South Wales in Sydney in 1977.
He acted on stage for a while and then broke into movies with a role as a 19-year-old surfer in the low-budget film “Summer City,” apparently forgettable for all but Gibson’s magnetic presence on the screen.
Soon after, Gibson was catapulted into international fame when the Australian director George Miller cast him in the futuristic “Mad Max” and then its two sequels. He also won two best actor awards from the Australian Film Institute for his roles as a handicapped young man in “Tim” and as a soldier in Peter Weir’s World War I drama “Gallipoli.” Weir and Gibson teamed up again for “The Year of Living Dangerously,” in which Gibson played an Aussie broadcast journalist during a perilous time in Indonesia.
After that he turned down several movies in order to take the part of Biff, the older son of Willy Loman, in the classic “Death of a Salesman” at the Nimrod Theatre in Sydney, and he continued to tread the boards between film roles.
In 1984 “The River,” the story of a farm couple battling the odds, marked Gibson’s American film debut, and he went on to make a variety of films here including “The Bounty,” “Tequila Sunrise,” “Bird On a Wire” and the immensely popular “Lethal Weapon” series.
This season in addition to “Braveheart” Gibson is involved in “Pocahontas,” Disney’s 33rd full-length animated feature, about the adventures of the American Indian heroine and Captain John Smith. Gibson is the voice of Smith.
He says it was “an interesting imagination exercise because they tell you, `He’s climbing a tree now, make it sound like he’s climbing a tree.’ “
Gibson also does a little singing as John Smith. Is he a good singer?
“Ah, I’m good in the shower. Really good. I wish they’d record in the shower. But it’s OK. I wouldn’t try to make a living at it. I can almost carry a tune and where I fall down, they can just twist a knob and bring the tone up or something. It’s amazing. They can make you sound like you’re on key.”
He pauses. “My grandmother used to sing for a living, and she was on tour and married a businessman from Waukegan. My grandfather and all his brothers all grew up there–and my Dad.
After a beat, he adds dryly, “They all died of tuberculosis. The weather’s not too good here.”
Gibson says he doesn’t know what he’ll be doing next, although his production company is “developing a lot of stuff. Different kinds of things, too. Political satire, politically incorrect satire.”
But he is very certain that he wants to do more directing.
“I like it. I really like it. I feel good doing it and I think I know what I’m doing. So why not?”
