Colourful banners flutter over the road. An enormous tent rises beneath a late-summer sun. Some fellow in horned helmet and sheepskin tabard is (inexplicably) striding the grassy divisions. It’s like something from Game of Thrones. Or Mel Gibson’s Braveheart.
Gibson has travelled to the annual King John Summer Prom Festival in Trim, Co Meath, for the 30th anniversary of that legendary historical drama. It was in neighbouring fields and castles, during the first stirrings of the Celtic Tiger, that he recreated the bloody rise of the Scottish rebel William Wallace. This afternoon he will enjoy a concert of movie music before going on to a screening of the Oscar-winning film. Right now he is in a small satellite tent to speak with The Irish Times. How did they lure him here?
“It was no biggie,” he says amiably.
David O’Hara, the famously gruff Scottish actor, seems to have sealed the deal.
RM Block
“They’d done one at 20 years. They did one at 25. Then O’Hara was on the phone, saying, ‘Oh, come on!’ He insisted long and hard. He said, ‘It’s the last one they’re doing!’ I thought, okay. And I haven’t seen it for a long time.”
In a sense he is coming home. Thanks to a mum born in Longford, he has previously travelled under an Irish passport. Is that still so?
“I’ve still got the passport,” he confirms. “I come here now and then. My mother, when I was young – she educated me about the place. I think it’s just in your blood somehow. You end up coming back. I think I understand the quirky nature of the mind. Because my mother was an axe murderer.”
I’m pretty sure he’s joking about his mother being any kind of murderer. Gibson, who is what we shall call a “controversial character”, is that sort of black-belt conversationalist. Speaking in a voice that now betrays little of his teenage Australian years, he thunders through anecdotes the way juggernauts thunder around bends.
You get some sense how the younger Gibson might have talked financiers into bankrolling a film about the man, once little known outside his native land, who led the First War of Scottish Independence, in the 13th century. Legend has it that Morgan O’Sullivan, the tireless Irish producer, and Michael D Higgins, then minister for arts, culture and the Gaeltacht, lured the production across the Irish Sea.
“They were great,” Gibson says. “We were in Scotland, and the filming was going great. We got tremendous footage in Scotland – many scenes there. But we realised pretty quickly that the ground was not horse-friendly. It’s okay, but it’s pretty rocky.”
They were also short of bodies.
“So we got in touch with Michael D, and we met Morgan through that. They just welcomed us with open arms, and they made it easy for us. They were able to supply the Army Reserve as extras – because we needed 2,000 guys. And we had a racetrack right there near the Curragh. They had the barracks on the other side. These guys could walk to work. Ha ha!”
A lot of time has intervened. In 1995, Gibson was still riding the first waves of international stardom. Breakthrough had come with Mad Max II, George Miller’s Aussie automotive apocalypse, a little over a decade earlier. Peter Weir’s The Year of Living Dangerously suggested he might have currency beyond the . The first Lethal Weapon film, in 1987, confirmed his growing status. Here was a leading man of the old school.
His 21st century has been more troubled. There was much controversy around The Passion of the Christ, in 2004, but that insanely bloody retelling of Jesus’s death made a fortune. As we speak, he is working on a much-delayed two-part follow-up on the resurrection.
In 2006, detained for driving under the influence, he allegedly threw a string of anti-Semitic abuse at the arresting officer. Two apologies were issued through his publicist. There was further trouble. In 2011 he pleaded no contest to a misdemeanour charge of battering Oksana Grigorieva, his former girlfriend, in a deal that allowed him to escape jail and evade liability under civil litigation.
There’s a Tom Waits song called Big in Japan. Remember that? ‘I’m big in Japan!’ Ha ha! The first Mad Max film was huge in Japan. It was just giant
— Mel Gibson
Meanwhile, it was becoming clear that his politics were not those of famously liberal Hollywood. He and his fellow conservatives Sylvester Stallone and Jon Voight are currently serving as Donald Trump’s “special ambassadors” to Hollywood.
In 2016, Shane Black, writer of Lethal Weapon, argued that the business had turned its back on Gibson.
“I think he’s essentially been blacklisted in the industry,” Black told Business Insider. “I think people don’t want to work with him.”
How are relations with Hollywood? Has the industry welcomed him back?
“Yeaeaeah, that’s … Yeah, it’s okay. I mean, what’s Hollywood? Where is it?” Gibson says uncertainly.
Shortly after Black gave that interview, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences put six Oscar nominations in the direction of Gibson’s war flick Hacksaw Ridge. That felt like the academy reopening the door to him.
“Yeah, for Hacksaw. I was surprised by that,” he says. “But the industry’s gone through a major change. It used to be the Mecca of filmdom. Now it’s not.”
We tend to think of Gibson as being Australian. But he was born in New York and lived there until he was 12, when the family relocated to Sydney. As an acting student, he shared lead roles in Romeo and Juliet with Judy Davis. A few years later he was doing Waiting for Godot opposite Geoffrey Rush. In 1979, when he shot the first Mad Max for George Miller, did either man have any idea it would ultimately lead to huge Hollywood careers?
“No, no idea at all,” he says, laughing. “It ended up in Hollywood. There’s a Tom Waits song called Big in Japan. Remember that? ‘I’m big in Japan!’ Ha ha! The first Mad Max film was huge in Japan. It was just giant.”
When I saw it in Ireland, they had replaced Gibson’s then strongly Australian voice with that of an American actor.
“Yeah, we had some Montana cowboy doing my voice,” he says. “Dubbing is always funny. Later on they re-released it with our own voices. I think I liked it better with the dub. Ha ha! No, no one saw that coming. George was a doctor. His ambulance driver was the guy who was, like, ‘I could produce this!’ They got a few friends together who owned pharmacies and cobbled together about $300,000. It did some business. Then it got serious with the second one.”
The industry is now awash with Australian actors: Russell Crowe, Margot Robbie, Cate Blanchett – and on and on. That was not so then. Mind you, as we’ve established, Gibson is from a lot of places. He’s Irish. He’s American. He’s Australian. Does he have trouble identifying his nationality?
“Yeah, I do,” he says. “I think it’s just an imprint that we have from generations back. It’s imprinted on you. And you don’t know where it’s from. It’s that feeling like you’ve been here before. But I don’t think that’s what it is. I think we are the sum of everything that made us.”
At any rate, Braveheart confirmed Gibson as both an actor and director of note. The clattering epic was a surprise best-picture winner at the Oscars. My memory is that Ron Howard’s Apollo 13 was the favourite, but Gibson, who also took best director, saw it differently.
“I thought it was that other film that was going to scoop everything,” he says. “Ang Lee did that film … umm … Sense and Sensibility. They were doing all right everywhere. And I thought, oh, you know, it’s their year. So I was actually kind of surprised that we got it. But, you know, you could see the blood, sweat and tears in it. That was hard film-making.”
If Braveheart was an unlikely success, the triumph of The Passion of the Christ beggared belief. Spoken in Aramaic, taking in the most extreme vision of the crucifixion yet staged, the picture, which Gibson, a devout Christian, financed himself, ended up as the highest-grossing independent film of all time. It has taken him more than 20 years to follow up with The Resurrection of the Christ. Were the money men, after the success of The Passion, not baying to get on board a sequel (if we can call it that)?
“A lot of people wanted to be involved,” Gibson says. “But they would come to the table and then get cold feet. It was a much bigger production. I financed the first one myself. No one else would. And then I couldn’t even get a major distributor. I got a little distribution company. They’d done a couple of things before. They had a toothless dog, a fax machine and a phone.”
We know The Resurrection of the Christ is in two parts. We know Lionsgate is distributing. Part One arrives on March 26th, 2027 – that’s Good Friday. Part Two will be with us May 6th, 2027. (Full marks if you worked out that that is Ascension Day.) But we don’t know what the film is truly about. Jesus’s experiences in the days after the resurrection have not been much examined in popular culture.
“I don’t think it contradicts any of the Gospels,” Gibson says. “But it does juxtapose some of the stories. It’s not linear. And it’s more than one film. It talks about things that aren’t really spoken about in the Gospels. What bed was Peter hiding under? What was Matthew thinking? What was John doing? I tried to explore that.”
The first film’s success was, rightly or wrongly, attributed to Christians voting with their wallets. Does Gibson expect the new films to register beyond faith audiences?
“That’s what I’m trying to do,” he says. “What I want to do is just show them something they’ll maybe ask a bunch of questions about. Because there are things in it that are pretty, pretty out there.”
The world can consider itself warned.
