The ads for Mel Gibson’s new thriller, “Payback,” invite you to “root for the bad guy.”
Of course, when you actually watch the movie, Gibson’s ruthless character, Porter, isn’t that bad compared to the other nasty folks onscreen. Likewise, Gibson in person comes across as a down-to-earth guy with whom you’d happily share a beer — even though he took what could be seen as a bad-guy role in the production of “Payback.”
As has been widely reported, Gibson was central in taking the film away from first-time director Brian Helgeland, the screenwriter of the great “L.A. Confidential” and the awful “The Postman.” Unhappy with the first cut, Gibson hired another writer and an anonymous director to redo a reported 30 percent or so of the movie.
“I can understand why it seems like a juicy piece of gossip,” Gibson, in blue jeans and matching denim jacket, said while in town earlier this month. “There was erroneous reportage that Brian got fired and all this kind of stuff, which is completely not the case. He was not fired. There were changes required from the studio and from the producers — and I’m one of the producers; it’s my production company.
“Of course, you’re always trying to make something better. We engaged Brian and asked him if he would think about some changes and some reshoots. He opted not to do those because he felt it was compromising his artistic integrity, which is fine. He can’t go there if he really believes that, and he did.
“But as a responsible producer, if you want to do what’s best for the film, you do it. He stepped aside and let a few rewrites happen, which we then asked him if he would direct, and he said, `No, I can’t do that either,’ so this other guy directed them, and we slapped it all together; he (Helgeland) saw the film and left his name on it.”
What changed, Gibson acknowledged, was much of the final third of the film. In the grand tradition of Gibson being tortured on screen, a scene was added in which Porter gets his toes smashed one by one by a sledgehammer. Also, in the first version, a baddie shoots a dog that goes directly to pooch heaven.
“We let the dog live,” Gibson said, which isn’t the case for most of the movie’s humans. “It’s no big deal. That’s (Helgeland’s) film, the grittiness of it, the humor of it, the texture of it.”
Helgeland declined to comment for this story.
“Payback,” a loose remake of John Boorman’s taut 1967 thriller “Point Blank” (both are based on the Richard Stark novel “The Hunter”) continues Gibson’s run of intrigue movies since he donned a kilt in 1995’s Oscar-winning “Braveheart”: “Ransom,” “Conspiracy Theory,” “Lethal Weapon 4.”
“I’m not a fan of action per se,” the actor said. “I think kineticism in film is wonderful. I love the movement of it. It’s coming at you, or it’s flying across the screen or there’s a lot of physical jeopardy involved — I think these are always good cinematic elements. They don’t mean a heck of a lot if you don’t have a good foundation from which to spring from.”
Gibson considers “Payback” more of a tongue-in-cheek twist on such low-tech, gritty ’70s thrillers as “Charley Varrick” and “Dirty Harry” than part of the current can-you-top-this spate of action blockbusters.
“I don’t think you’re going to accomplish much with more tricks,” he said. “They had the Bond syndrome, where every time you’d just wait to see what new gadgets they were going to pull out and how they could make it different: Well, this time he’s falling from a plane with a pair of skis on and a parachute, or one of them has a parachute and they have to fight in the air. That kind of stuff bores the hell out of me, quite frankly, and I think this (movie) is not particularly laden with state-of-the-art action beats.”
Still, some moviegoers miss Gibson as the serious dramatic actor of films such as “The Year of Living Dangerously” and “Gallipoli.”
“The physicality of doing this, for me, it’s an easy way to get in, so I suppose I’m using it like a crutch,” Gibson admitted. “But there are other requirements that have to happen. Hey, I’m up for anything. I’m doing a film with Wim Wenders next, which is really bizarre.”
That film, “The Million-Dollar Hotel,” was co-written by Bono from U2 and is populated by “a gallery of grotesques” who Gibson said are all mentally, spiritually or physically handicapped, including the FBI agent he plays.
“His particular handicap is he has a strange brace on, which makes him very stiff,” Gibson said. “My back story — if you’ll pardon the expression `back story’ — is that his brother, a head and an arm and a shoulder, were growing out of his back, and he had to have them removed at birth.”
Gibson also is planning to star in a Revolutionary War epic to be directed by Roland Emmerich (“Godzilla,” “Independence Day”) and written by Robert Rodat (“Saving Private Ryan”). No, the script doesn’t call for him to paint his face red, white and blue.
Meanwhile, Gibson said he’s still looking for a movie to direct as his follow-up to “Braveheart,” for which he won the Best Director Oscar.
“The biggest problem is to actually find something that you want to live with for two years, because it’s a big hunk out of your life,” he said, noting that he’s not aiming to top “Braveheart.” “I’m trying to get away from that a little bit so that I can just lose the baggage and just come out fresh and simple.”
Gibson’s laid-back aura is a marked contrast to the intensity of some of his characters, particularly Porter, whose unwavering mission in “Payback” is to retrieve $70,000 owed to him. And what’s the most ruthless Gibson has ever been in chasing down money he’s been owed?
“Hmm,” he pondered. “I don’t think I ever have — which is really bad; there’s a lot of people walking around with my money. Actually, I would say the most ruthless I’ve ever been is auditing the film studio on residuals and stuff. They never offer it voluntarily. You must always audit, and there’s always something there.”
He added that he winds up auditing studios on just about every one of his films. “It’s just part of the practice,” he said. “And that’s not even ruthless. It’s just mundane, humdrum, `all right, it’s five years, time to do an audit.’ ” And everyone says, `Oh, sorry,’ and then they just cough it up.”
Which is Gibson more likely to do, another `Lethal Weapon’ or a `Mad Max’ movie?
“Oh, God,” he groaned. “The more likely would be a `Mad Max’ movie because I haven’t seen (director George Miller) for so long. The `Lethal Weapon’ thing, man, it’s getting whiskers on it. It’s a little wrinkled and creaky.”
And who would Gibson want to play if he were in a movie about Clinton’s impeachment trial?
“For a real stretch, Vernon Jordan,” he responded, smiling. “He’s got style. This guy’s going to come off smelling like a rose.”
GIBSON GIVES CHICAGO 4 STARS
`Payback” was shot in Chicago in the summer and fall of 1997, and Gibson has fond memories of filming here.
“It’s the friendliest place I think I’ve ever worked. Every other person says, `Come on home. We’ll cook you some dinner.’ . . .
“It was a very easy place to film. People were incredibly tolerant of the film crews. And I know you get a lot of film crews here, so that means either one of two things: Either nobody’s ever burned anyone here, which I doubt very much, or that people are gracious enough to understand that this is a new bunch of people and they’ll give them a fresh start, because, man, New York is totally wasted. You put a camera on a street corner there, and there’s people hitting you and spitting on you and telling you to get the hell out of their way.”
His stay in Chicago gave him the chance to meet several relatives on his father’s side.
“My dad is from Waukegan, and he has cousins and family members here, and it was really good to meet them,” Gibson recalled. “They’re really nice people. They’re smart people, man; they’re all lawyers and doctors and stuff.”
