So far, not before the eyes. Although during filming he often thought that a possibility. He had been thinking about Wallace the Scots rebel who took up his five-foot sword and led his followers in battle against the English for several years. He had once rejected ‘Braveheart' because although he liked the concept he found the script ‘too corny'. When Alan Ladd Junioor left MGM studios he was allowed to take two projects with him. ‘Braveheart' was one. Gibson contacted him with a deal. If he could direct and change the script he would do it. A merry-go-round of fianancing went on. He waived his salary (usually $10 to $12 million dollars a movie) and chucked in $15 million dollars and extra to keep the film a possibility as pre-production arrangements and haggling went on. ‘I never really lost interest in the idea --and look where it landed me,' says Gibson who is a William Wallace fanatic:' People just kneel down and pray when they hear his name. The guy was the Second Coming of Christ. He had a vision that, for someone his class, was far ahead of his time. He didn't use Machiavellian tactics. He would just keep at people and at them until they agreed.People would just follow him into hell. He was really a straight ahead dude. He was very magnetic.' Well, not always. On a historical note he points out that following the Battle of Stirling Bridge-- 30 days' filming, ten cameras, 3,000 Irish Army recruits as extras -- Wallace ‘skinned the opposing general. He skinned him and made a belt out of him.' Gibson the director is true to his hero who goes from rebel to savage to true revolutionary. He also zooms in on the hand-to-hand fighting, the crude carnage of the day. He was concerned that there were some scenes that were too gory. A test screening proved him correct when half a dozen women walked out.He has edited out some violence but said:' You don't want to gross people out but I think they have to feel what a 13th Century battle was like. It can't be a comfortable experience: horses falling, people slugging each other with blunt instruments. ‘The story's insanely heroic. And we went for the authentic look. These people lived on raw meat just about. It isn't ‘' Brigadoon''. ‘I didn't use blood bags -- there's not a lot of blood squirting. The worst thing is the ball and chain. But I'm leaving it in. ‘It's horrible. I love it.' In the scene Wallace deals with a turncoat clansman by giving him the equivalent of a Glasgow kiss with the ball and chain. ‘ It's like the horse's head in the bed in ‘' The Godfather''. It's what people remember.' What those who worked on the film recall is Gibson's superhuman energy. ‘I used to get a twisted kind of pleasure making people wonder how I kept going. You've got to have three hats on and be incredsibly physical and have the brain working all the time. ‘It was like getting your mind to will stuff to happen that normally shouldn't. To defy nature. I said I was going to shoot no matter what the weather was does and I did because I didn't have that much money and I had a huge film. Some days were absolutely freezing cold and I was wearing a dress and a sleaveless shirt, sitting on a horse while fire hoses with ice water coming out of them were aimed at me. And I had to sit there for hours and not complain and not yell and not shiver. ‘And that requires madness. That is madness.' The madness, like the Stooge games, is an act, an illusion He prefers the daft laddie image for it suits his purposes. Now, he quietly gets on with the job(s). He's had his flings -- many tequilla sunsets rather than sunrises. ‘God, my twenties were just awful.I hated them. I was really an uneasy sort of person. That's when you do all your drugs and drink and everything because you don't know what the fuck to do. ‘Cause you just don't like being in your own skin so you try and get out of it. It doesn't work.'
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