Thistle do nicely

Interview, May, 1995 by Graham Fuller

This month's Braveheart, directed by and starring Mel Gibson as the Scottish warrior-patriot Sir William Wallace (ca. 1270-1305), is a thundering battering ram of a movie. In their girth and clangor, Gibson's battle scenes rank alongside those in Laurence Olivier's Henry V (1944) and Anthony Mann's El Cid (1961), although Braveheart outflanks both in the authenticity of its goriness. Whether or not it will dent the box office returns of Rob Roy, the smaller but more persuasively romantic of the spring's adventure films about Caledonian freedom fighters resisting English political (and sexual) suzerainty, remains to be seen. The probable winner will be the Scottish Tourist Board, anticipating a boffo summer in the Highlands as a result of these two flicks.

Thanks to Randall Wallace's first-rate screenplay, Gibson's purportedly $70 million epic is as strong on late-thirteenth-century statecraft as it is on medieval warfare, despite some far-fetched intrigues involving the despotic English king Edward Longshanks (Patrick McGoohan) and his pro-Wallace, French daughter-in-law (Sophie Marceau). For all his twinkly modernity, Gibson is at his best here as the widowed, wilding guerrilla - and he hacks it as a storyteller, too.

GRAHAM FULLER; How closely did you stick to the historical truth about Wallace?

MEL GIBSON: I think we stuck to it in broad strokes. In most history books he's a footnote, so there's not a wealth of accurate information about him; the facts are sketchy. We used what was available and verifiable historically, but apart from that we used a lot of the legend, which is preferable, because if you stick too closely to the truth, you can restrict how good a story you tell. We were inspired by the long, fifteenth-century romance written in rhyming couplets by Henry the Minstrel, or "Blind Harry," who evidently had a strong bias against the English. The story of Wallace comes across as epic in that poem and it's somehow much more filmic than any history or biography: The situations he sets up are dramatic ones. Whether they're accurate or not is another question.

GF: Did Randall Wallace, the writer of Braveheart, draw on Blind Harry when he wrote the script?

MG: He took from that. You have to fill in the gaps a little bit. Even a historian like Andrew Fisher, who prides himself on being very dry and sticking to the facts, not slipping into romantic legend, does some hypothesizing in his book William Wallace, which I really like because he doesn't hedge or bullshit. And I think he joins the dots intelligently, without presuming too much, and lends some credence to some of the legendary aspects of the poem, although he doesn't commit himself totally.

GF: Did you look at The Scottish Chiefs, Jane Porter's novel about Wallace, with those vivid stylized Illustrations by N. C. Wyeth?

MG: I've got a copy of it at home, and I did look at it, yeah, but it really gets into flights of fancy, doesn't it? It wasn't a specific influence. The Wallace we show is much more primitive. We went for a thirteenth-century reality. Grungy, you know, dirt under the fingernails, kind of funky. Wallace and his men are more like the Vikings or the Picts or the Celts. And I've also gone further back in time and used woad.

GF: Would Wallace's men actually have painted themselves blue before going into battle?

MG: In Scotland and Ireland, where we shot the film, the clans get up these reenactments of battles, and when I saw them they were all painted in woad, so I decided to borrow from that. It's feasible that their ancestors could have painted themselves up like that, but they probably didn't. [laughs]

GF: You took some Inspiration from the dress of American Indians?

MG: Yes, but some of that actually originated in Scotland. One of the things we found out was that the buckskins worn by Indians and guys like Davey Crockett were first worn by Highlanders. The Scotch-Irish who settled places like Tennessee brought their dress innovations to the frontiers, and the Indians adopted them.

GF: That prompts the question, did you shoot Braveheart like a Western?

MG: To the extent that we used low angles and various camera speeds to get really dynamic images. I wanted to make a film that was kinetic, in which the camera is continuously moving on cranes and tracks. There are times when it doesn't move, and it's a blessed relief, let me tell you. It's a very physical action piece, as well as political and romantic. I tried to make a quintessential epic.

GF: What kind of man did you fled Wallace to be while you were playing him?

MG: Wallace was a creature of opposites. The thing that impressed me the most about him was that apparently he did all he did with no desire for the kind of self-aggrandizement that accompanies a lot of people's motives. I firmly believe he did it all for his country. He wasn't trying to be the king or the big wheel. He just wanted to be free.

That's on the good side. He was, however, a real bastard, particularly in battle. After defeating Cressingham at the Battle of Stirling Bridge, for example, he skinned him and turned his skin into a belt. That's a savage for you, right? But he wasn't afraid to wade in with his men, right on the front line. He cared about them, and they would follow him into hell because of that.