IN BRAVEHEART MEL GIBSON PLAYS WILLIAM WALLACE, A FEROCIOUS WARRIOR OF THE 1290s WHO FOUGHT TO LIBERATE THE SCOTS AND WHOSE CHARACTER COULD MAKE HIM A REBEL ROLE MODEL FOR THE 1990s. WE TALKED TO THE AUSSIE ABOUT WHY HE WANTED TO PLAY THE LAD

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 feel 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.

GF: It's not known for certain if Wallace was married, but you use the story of his romance with Marion Bradfute, who was killed by the English sheriff in Lanark, as the jumping-off point for the rebellion.

MG: The Marion story was pan of the legend. We have Wallace waging a war of retribution for his dead bride, and that's very romantic. Whether or not it's true, something really pissed Wallace off, and he just went into Lanark and killed the whole town. Things just got bigger and bigger after that.

GF: You follow him through his triumph at Stirling Bridge, the siege of York, right up until he's hanged, drawn, and quartered. A lot of directors would have balked at the execution.

MG: I saw it as a victory. The guy overcame his enemies and himself, and he was free. He died for a cause; it's very heroic and uplifting, because he didn't die in vain. He left a legacy behind him that is still very much alive among the Scots. There's a two-hundred-foot monument to him in Stirling, and people practically bow in reverence to his name.

GF: You show Robert the Bruce effectively picking up Wallace's standard at Bannockburn.

MG: They knew one another; Bruce was, like, five years younger than Wallace and was, I think, very impressed by him.

GF: How did you go about making Wallace credible with modern audiences?

MG: I think the elements of thirteenth-century history don't necessarily alienate people, but you have to allow them access. And the way we've done that is through the characters. They're very human people with modes of expression that don't defy the ears or the minds of a modern audience; it's a nice compromise. And the way the film's shot, you can't help but get wrapped up in it, but here I might be blowing my own trumpet.

GF: You did a decent job as director on The Man Without a Face, but this film is a huge leap in size.

MG: Man Without a Face was a good stepping-off point, but it wasn't without its own set of difficulties. The main ingredient for me as a director on that film was preparation, and that's what I carried over to this one. For example, the battle scenes in Braveheart aren't strictly historically accurate, but they look much richer than if they were. We sat in a room and actually worked out the battles with a bunch of toy soldiers on a table. That way we were able to work out how to block even scene and come up with powerful images that have a semblance of truth.

GF: Is it Important for you to be taken seriously as a director?

MG: No, it's not important. Directing's just a natural progression for me. In the last twenty years, I've worked with incredible visual directors like Peter Weir and George Miller - I'd also include Richard Donner among them - and as I witnessed them, I just seemed to snap into their talent. I think I'm a good director and that the film will speak for itself.

GF: Any thoughts on Rob Roy?

MG: They're putting it out on the fast track before Braveheart, but they didn't start filming till after us, and I'm damned if I know how they can do all that postproduction and do it well in that short a time. It leads me to one conclusion, which I won't even mention. Not that I want to dump on it. I wish them all the best, but who was Rob Roy anyway? A cattle thief.

COPYRIGHT 1995 Brant Publications, Inc.
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