Braveheart

Audival's romance collection has something to satisfy every side of you.

When it comes to what kind of romance you're into, you don't have to choose just one.

Fancy a dallions with a duke, or maybe a steamy billionaire.

You could find a book boyfriend in the city and another one tearing it up on the hockey field.

And if nothing on this earth satisfies, you can always find love in another realm.

Discover modern rom-coms from authors like Lily Chu and Allie Hazelwood, the latest romanticy series from Sarah J.

Maas and Rebecca Yaros, plus regency favorites like like Bridgerton and Outlander.

And of course, all the really steamy stuff.

Your first great love story is free when you sign up for a free 30-day trial at audible.com slash wondery.

That's audible.com/slash wondery.

And action.

Hello, dear listeners, and welcome back to another episode of What Went Wrong, your favorite podcast full stop that just so happens to be about movies and how it is nearly impossible to make them, let alone a good one.

Let alone the rising haze geography of Scotland's greatest warrior.

I can take our lives, but I'll never take our freedom.

Oh, boy.

I am excited for this just relentlessly specific, attentive to historical detail dad movie.

Lizzie, as always, I am Chris Winterbauer, joined by my co-host, Lizzie Bassett.

Lizzie, what do you have in store for us today?

Braveheart, Chris.

Braveheart.

Oh, boy.

Yeah, Braveheart.

This year marked the 30th anniversary of our dear Braveheart.

Of course, the story of William Wallace, or is it?

We'll find out.

And I don't know if you had this experience.

I saw this movie so many times as a kid, and I got a very specific idea of what it was like in my head.

And boy, was I surprised upon re-watching it.

So we'll get to that in a minute.

But Chris, what was your initial experience with Braveheart?

And what was it again upon watching it for the podcast?

Yeah, so I also saw Braveheart a number of times.

I was born in 89.

This movie came out when I was six, so I did not see it initially, but I think I saw it by the time I was 10 or 11.

Your parents didn't want to let you watch multiple limbs being lopped off that.

No, it was 40 years.

It was

fairly graphic.

Yeah.

I loved it in part because it was, I was allowed to see it, you know, as a kid.

There's boobs.

There's more penises, but there are boobs and lots of butts.

And what I still think is a very funny sight gag.

It is.

It makes me laugh every time.

It's even funnier when you learn a little bit more about it.

We'll get to it.

I'm excited.

I really loved this movie as a kid until I saw Gladiator, and then I just thought Gladiator was the better version of the same movie, more or less.

I have two distinct opinions, I guess, about this movie.

And let's get this out of the way.

I'm going to try to separate Mel Gibson, the person, from Mel Gibson, the actor, and the director.

Mel Gibson, the person, it seems like a very troubled individual who has said and done some pretty heinous things and maybe in the throes of an alcohol problem.

And Lizzie, you can probably guide us through some of that.

But

for this moment, I'm going to separate, note that, and separate that for a second.

So I was a big Mel Gibson fan as a kid, Lethal Weapon, Mad Max.

I remain, I still think he's a really, really talented director overall.

I think Apocalypto is a really accomplished movie.

And so with Braveheart, on the one hand, as a giant

kind of

empty calorie, but really entertaining, big budget, yes, epic sword movie.

I think this movie works really well.

There's a lot I really like about it.

I think it's shot beautifully.

It hits a lot of easy notes that are really fun to digest, and the bagpipes are always rousing.

We're going to talk about those, too.

Right.

And on the other hand, it feels like such a relentless haziography and candidly, retelling of William Wallace in almost a Christ-like, like a vengeful Jesus sort of way,

that there I found that those two experiences were a bit at odds when I was re-watching it.

On the one hand, I really enjoyed it.

I could appreciate a lot of the craftsmanship.

I do think there are some fantastic performances in this movie and just great, great sets and great locations and stunt work.

And at the same time, it's so simplistic with the way that it presents this story that I couldn't really take it seriously at the end of the day.

Yes.

Either.

Just my opinion.

I know this movie is very beloved by many people.

And I had a history, I was telling you, Lizzie, I had a history teacher in high school who hated Gladiator and this movie in particular because they were so historically.

Well, Gladiator is fun, but my teacher said there were some historical inaccuracies.

Lizzie, I am excited to learn if those were accurate or not.

I'm not going to spoil them now.

You spoil them for me when we get there.

I will.

But I'll just say, there is one line in this movie, Lizzie, and that I thought

it opened the movie up very briefly to what could have been maybe a more interesting or more shaded or nuanced version of the movie.

And it's when Robert the Bruce's, is it his father who has leprosy?

Yeah, it's his father.

Says, uncompromising men are easy to admire.

He has courage, so does a dog.

But it is exactly the ability to compromise that makes a man noble.

I think that's actually a really interesting idea.

And it complicates William Wallace's no-holds-barred, you know, uncompromising approach and asks, is this realistic?

Is it what's best for the people?

Right.

And in that, there's that one moment where it tips toward something a little more interesting.

And then it goes to the cartoonish villainy of Edward throwing his son's gay lover out the window, which we'll get to, I'm sure.

But my point is, on the one hand, as spectacle, I really appreciated the movie.

And as thoughtful historical examination, I thought it was ridiculous and a little silly.

Yeah, I agree with all of that.

I think that's a very good assessment.

I think we're going to have a bit of a hard time separating Mel Gibson the person

from this movie for a couple of reasons.

That's not to say that you can't enjoy this movie.

I think you absolutely can if that is something that you choose to do.

I agree.

I think he's a very talented director, but I will tell you, researching this made me maybe angrier than

most other things that we have covered, and we will get into why.

All right.

I will quote my friend Cerillia when she said that Braveheart both sucks and rules.

And I think that that is the most apt description of this movie.

It does in many ways.

It sucks.

Like it's ridiculous.

It's so cartoonish.

Everybody is, you know, just, well, most people are just eating up the scenery in this, Mel Gibson included.

And at the same time, yeah, it totally rules.

Like, it's very fun.

It is long as hell, but you are not bored at any point.

Again, look, Mel Gibson is a really good director.

We'll just, you know what?

We're just, we're going to get into it because he is

a lot of things.

So my experience was similar to you, Chris.

I remembered watching this very young.

Again, as with most of my movie experience as a kid, I think my mom really liked this movie.

My dad really liked this movie.

So we did watch it.

And I remember thinking thinking it was like, so

good.

Like in my head, this was at the same level as like Last of the Mohicans.

It's nowhere near that league.

Like in terms of like Gladiator, Last of the Mohicans, some of these like big historical epics of the kind of late 90s, early 2000s, it is completely in a different camp.

I just had no idea how sort of overblown and cartoonish this movie is.

I think on purpose, very much on purpose, which like that I do respect about it.

They're not really trying to hide that.

But to say that this is a historical epic honestly is generous, which we will get into as we discuss this.

And I also think it's interesting you mentioned that one line about Robert the Bruce's father speaking to Robert the Bruce, because I actually think Of all the characters in the movie, the most interesting one in many ways is Robert the Bruce.

And he actually was the character that screenwriter Randall Wallace was more familiar with going into this.

And he was sort of the impetus for why he wanted to tell this story.

I think it's interesting he chose to tell it about William Wallace and not about Robert the Bruce, but we will get there.

So here are the basics: as always: Braveheart was directed by Mel Gibson.

It was written by Randall Wallace.

It was released May 24th, 1995.

It starred Mel Gibson, Sophie Marceau, Catherine McCormick, Patrick McGooen, of course, as Longshanks, Angus McFadyan as Robert the Bruce, Brian Cox in a short appearance as our guy, his uncle.

Didn't exist.

Anyway, Brendan Gleason as Hamish, Peter Hanley as Prince Edward, Tommy Flanagan, and many, many more, including, I don't know if you noticed, but Peter Mullen.

Peter Mullen, yeah, as

one of the young soldiers.

And I do want to call out David O'Hara as Stephen, the Irishman, the crazy Irishman.

I love him.

I'm so sorry.

I forgot that.

He's fantastic.

He steals this movie.

I think he's wonderful.

I think he gives arguably the

best performance of the whole film.

100% he does.

And I will say this: as I was watching it, I'm so sorry I forgot to mention him in the cast.

He honestly, he should have been William Wallace because William Wallace was fucking nuts.

And that energy that he has, like that genuinely crazy, it's my island energy.

Like that is what you needed for this to work.

He's fantastic.

He is so good.

God, I love him.

My lord says, I'm going to make it.

It doesn't look good for you.

It's so good.

So good.

So funny.

Yeah, he does absolutely steal this movie.

I think he's wonderful.

And of course, also wonderful in the departed.

He's a fantastic character actor.

So it is produced by Icon Entertainment.

Of course, that's Mel Gibson's production company.

And the Ladd Company.

Alan Ladd Jr.

is back.

The IMDb log line is: Scottish warrior William Wallace leads his countrymen in a rebellion to free his homeland from the tyranny of King Edward I of England.

Yeah.

That is it.

And also, Chris, how about the tagline this time?

The story of a man with a free soul and with the courage to follow it.

Okay.

The story of Braveheart begins not with William Wallace, but as we said, with Randall Wallace.

Now, before he was a screenwriter and eventually director, he's actually directed quite a few movies, some of which were decently successful.

Randall Wallace was a young, aspiring singer-songwriter who had just moved to LA from Nashville.

In the early 80s, he began writing short stories, novels, and screenplays, but in 1983, he took a trip to Scotland to get in touch with his heritage, and at Edinburgh Castle, he came across a statue.

Guarding the drawbridge entrance to the castle are two statues, actually.

One of Robert the Bruce, the legendary Scottish king who Wallace had long been obsessed with, and one of a man named William Wallace.

Now, seeing his name on a statue was pretty cool, so he asked a guard, who is this man?

To which the guard said, this is our greatest hero.

I'm going to apologize in advance for the accents.

We're not going to stop because Mel Gibson didn't.

So Randall thought to himself, here I was, an American named Wallace, hungry for history, especially the stories of heroes and rebellions and the fight to be free.

Here I was and I had never heard of William Wallace.

How could this be?

How could the story of Scotland's greatest hero remain untold and unknown to someone like me?

So he kept asking some more questions, Chris.

Were Wallace and Bruce allies in fighting the English?

He asked.

No one will ever know for sure, the guard said.

But our legends say that Bruce may have been one of those who betrayed William Wallace to clear the way for him to become king himself.

Cue a million Scottish light bulbs going off in Randall's head because he began to wonder, quote, what if there was something in the life and death of William Wallace that had the power to transform Robert the Bruce from a plotting, cowardly betrayer to the greatest king in the country's history?

I think this is exactly the moment that you highlighted, Chris.

So he heads back to Hollywood and spends the next decade not turning this into a movie.

Instead, he spent years working under legendary TV producer Stephen J.

Cannell, Think the A-Team, 21 Jump Street, and he also wrote and created some TV series of his own.

By the end of the 80s, though, he decided it was time to tell the story of William Wallace, so he got to work on the screenplay.

Now, obviously, the old adage is, write what you know.

But Randall didn't know shit about William Wallace, and it turns out neither did most people.

Most of what we know about William Wallace comes from an epic poem called The Wallace, written by a minstrel named Blind Harry.

Oh, I got it.

Yeah, I thought it was Harry the Blind for some reason.

Yeah, that's one one.

That was the first fact of my English teacher was this whole thing's based on a poem that was written by a blind man like 200 years after William Wallace lived.

It is 150 years after William Wallace was already extremely dead.

Yes.

All right, so one point for history teachers so far.

One point for history teacher, yes.

Got it.

Now, Blind Harry says that his work was based on

Blind Harry says that his work was based on a, Chris is losing it, was based on a lost biography that one of Wallace's childhood buddies had written, but no one's ever seen this.

And the evidence of

Harry.

Unless it was written in braille.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

No one's ever seen it.

The evidence of it is very shaky at best.

This is very Joseph Smith of him.

This is very, the seeing stones are in the hat.

You can't see them, only I can.

The Wallace is clearly filled with some larger-than-life tales and exaggerations about William Wallace, as well as its own historical inaccuracies.

This makes sense.

As you said, it was written more than a century after he died and was most likely written specifically to elevate Wallace to the status of folk hero and symbol of Scottish independence.

It was intended to drive patriotism and it worked.

So, faced with a folk hero of legend with very few proven, undeniable facts, Randall Wallace said, I was freed from the notion that research into such facts, which are, in fact, a historian's own perception of what is significant,

is required to yield a true story.

I decided to tell the story that was true for me.

Wow.

Okay, Randall.

That is a slippery sentence, my friend.

Indeed.

I love how he's like, you know, that what historians perceive to be one set of facts are really just opinions.

Uh-huh.

You were going to get a lot of this is my truth over the course

of this episode.

By the way, most of these quotes from Randall Wallace that I will be reading come from a book that he wrote about the experience of making Braveheart called Living the Braveheart Life, Finding the Courage to Follow Your Heart.

So before we go any further, I would like to take a moment to talk about what we do definitely know about the real William Wallace.

Now, Braveheart opens with a line of VO read by Angus McFadden, who plays Robert the Bruce, and he says, I shall tell you of William Wallace.

Historians from England will say I am a liar, but history is written by those who have hanged heroes.

Now, here's the thing, Chris.

Historians from everywhere will say you're a liar because Braveheart is, as you've probably figured out, one of the most historically inaccurate movies ever made.

Lizzie.

Yes.

Is it true that Braveheart was not

associated, that name was not associated with William Wallace?

Yes, it is, and we will get there.

Braveheart pulls mostly from The Wallace, that poem, which accounts for some of its inaccuracies, but it also just makes its own shit up whenever it feels like it.

Now, Chris, I thought, well, I'll just read this poem for myself.

And then I opened it up and it's in Middle English.

Which is basically German.

Basically, if you're not familiar with Middle English, an easy reference point is the prologue to the Canterbury Tales, which if you open that, you're going to be like, nope.

Which I spent a whole semester trying to understand in college.

Didn't get through it.

I did read a summary.

of the Wallace, and that was hard enough.

Based on that summary, though, it does seem like the poem contains a decent amount of Wallace cross-dressing to evade the English, which it seems that Gibson and Randall have conveniently left left out.

And I would just like to say, bring it back.

Why not?

So let's talk really briefly about the real Willie Dubbs.

He was born around 1270 AD, either in Ayrshire or Renfrewshire in Scotland.

He was born into a gentry land-owning family, Chris.

None of this primitive hut covered in mud nonsense.

He was not a commoner.

So he wasn't a caveman, as they presented them.

Now,

the Scots are mud-dwelling cave people

in this movie.

They present them.

David made such a good point, which is that they live next to a river.

Why would you be that dirty when you live next to a river?

They're cover blowout.

With hallways with a blowout, a backlit, lion-like mane blowout.

A really, really dried-out blowout.

I mean, look, they're doing a shorthand for class differences.

I totally get it.

They want to express that there are, you know, Robert the Bruce.

He comes from money within Scotland.

He has a vested interest.

He's therefore, you know, suspicious and has ties to England and King Edward.

That's all true.

The Scottish nobility did, you know, they were very entangled with England.

I think what we'll get to is like this movie uses every single possible shorthand to communicate the story.

And so as a result, everything is just kind of easy calories.

I think that is spot on.

I think it's something to keep in mind when we do talk about some of the caricatures and portrayal in this movie.

I don't think it singles them out.

I think it does it across the board for better or for worse.

For everybody.

For everybody, but we will get there.

Everybody's simplistic in this movie.

Yes, I agree.

Well, Robert the Bruce, actually, he's not.

Like you said, he's the most interesting character.

And to some extent, also Sophie Marceau's character, Princess Isabella.

Yeah, she's actually given something to do, unlike any of the other women.

Unlike anyone else, yeah, in this, basically.

So.

Around 1290, Scotland faced a succession crisis.

So the Scottish nobility asked King Edward I, Longshanks, who, by the way, he had that name because he was six foot two in 1290, which is horrifying.

Everybody was like four foot 11 at that point.

Long Legs was Longshanks.

Yeah.

They asked him to help them pick a new king.

So Longshanks picked a guy named John Balliol, but he also decided to start asserting dominance over Scotland and generally was just a giant bag of dicks demanding soldiers and taxes from the Scots to pay for his war with France.

Now, speaking of France, though Braveheart depicts Edward II's marriage to Isabella of France as happening in tandem with Wallace's campaign, they didn't marry until three years after Wallace's death and she was 12 years old.

However, there may be the tiniest grain of truth to the way Braveheart depicts Edward II's relationship with, in the film, Philip, in reality named Piers Gaveston.

It seems very likely they were romantically involved, and Gaveston's eventual exile and execution at the hands of some rival nobles, notably not Longshanks, throwing him out of a window, we will talk about that, did cause trouble for Edward's reign.

His second, maybe boyfriend or just very, very close confidant, really caused problems.

And Isabella eventually ditched him, turned against him, took over as regent, and also probably kind of had him killed.

Show me that movie.

So

we're going to talk about it because the depiction of Edward II in this movie is something that I think understandably made a lot of people very upset.

But I do want to hold that.

All I want to say is that he did not pull the idea of him being in love with a man out of nowhere.

Guys, if we have learned one thing during this podcast, it's that working faster does not mean you're going to make something better.

I think the entire VFX team on CATS would certainly agree.

But there is an exception to this unwritten rule.

If you're hiring, you can find candidates fast who are also extremely qualified for your job.

Just use ZipRecruiter.

And right now, you can try ZipRecruiter for free at ziprecruiter.com/slash www.

Quit playing the waiting game.

Use ZipRecruiter's advanced resume database to proactively find and connect with qualified candidates in minutes.

Want to meet a potential star?

Unlock their contact info instantly.

Not loving what you're seeing?

320,000 new resumes are added monthly.

You will never run out of candidates, just like we will never run out of disastrous movies to cover on this podcast.

Experience hiring speed and quality with ZipRecruiter.

Four out of five employers who post on ZipRecruiter get a quality candidate within the first day.

And if you go to ziprecruiter.com/slash www right now you can try it for free again that's ziprecruiter.com slash www zip recruiter the smartest way to hire this podcast is brought to you by squarespace your favorite all-in-one website platform designed to help you stand out and succeed online that's helped your favorite podcast full stop stand out and succeed online when we were starting this podcast we knew we needed help and one of the first places we turned was squarespace we needed to build a website where we could sell our merch allow our fans to reach out to us, and easily update our homepage to show folks what movies were coming each week, week after week.

That means that it had to be simple and easy to use because even though we know how movies are made, I have no idea how the internet works.

And Squarespace keeps everything all in one.

We got our domain through Squarespace.

We use their SEO tools to make sure that people find us online.

And as podcasts are slowly just becoming television, Squarespace allows us to showcase video content through our Squarespace site whenever we decide to make that leap.

So head to squarespace.com slash wrong for a free trial.

And when you're ready to launch, use offer code wrong to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain.

Go to squarespace.com slash wrong using domain code wrong to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain.

By May of 1297, Longshank's campaign to seize control in Scotland was very well underway.

And it's around this time that William Wallace killed the English sheriff of the town of Landlark, which this is the first time we see him go ham on the English.

Now, in the movie, that's because his wife was murdered.

But according to leading Scottish historian Fiona Watson, William Wallace may have been an outlaw who killed the sheriff because of a personal vendetta, but in the name of a Scottish rebellion.

Regardless of intention, which we just don't know, People were really pissed at the English and started rallying around Wallace.

Now, another fact check.

There is not much evidence that Wallace had a wife, let alone that she was murdered by the English.

A wife does appear in a revised version of the poem that came out about 200 plus years, I believe, after the first edition of the poem.

Also, she has multiple names, one of which is Marian, none of which are Murin, which is what appears in the film, but I think they chose that in order to not have it sound close to Maid Marian of Robin Hood.

Yeah.

Right.

Another fact check, Chris.

According to medieval historian Albrecht Classen and many other historians, prima noctus, the law they reference in this, okay, Chris is holding up his hands.

This teacher told him this too,

which it supposedly gave these feudal lords the right to sleep with a Scottish woman on the first night of her marriage, you know, as a way for them to breed the Scots out is what they say in this.

Almost certainly never existed, never happened, maybe did not happen at all, period, across other cultures as well.

That was the one I'd forgotten that my history teacher had mentioned to us.

And

really briefly, I was just looking through Mel Gibson's filmography, but also a lot of movies from the 90s.

And there's this term.

I love the term.

I don't like the practice.

It's called, have you ever heard of Fridging the Bride?

No.

It's where you, it's where you kill the love interest or the wife to motivate the hero.

Oh, it's every 90s movie, yeah.

Exactly.

Yeah, exactly, right?

Just kill that wife right away.

Yeah.

And it's, it's like speed running empathy for your audience and your hero.

And it happens a lot with Mo Gibson.

So like you have something like Mad Max, Lethal Weapon in his backstory, Lethal Weapon 2.

It happens in the movie.

Payback, Signs, he's got the dead wife.

The Patriot, he's got the dead wife.

It's like a really easy shorthand to get the audience to understand the motivation of a character, right?

Yes.

And one of the issues I had, again, watching this the second time, just my opinion, but I was like, could we not come up with something more interesting interesting and more

complicated or accurate or realistic than just all of our women are being raped and murdered and therefore we must go to war you know what I'm saying it just felt like it was this one like we have to go to this one violating extreme and every Englishman is a is like a dirty rapist you know pig and they all deserve and again it it It's easy.

It gives you that rah-rah feeling of, yes, they're justified and it definitely gets your blood going, but it's kind of a cheap trick

is my problem with it.

Yeah, I agree.

And I think while it does get you on board very quickly, obviously, because it's horrible, the other problem is it makes the Scottish nobility make zero sense and it makes them look like crazy people.

Because why would you not be trying to drive these people out if they are literally coming in and raping all of the women on the first night of their wedding?

Like, it doesn't make any sense.

And that's because it probably didn't happen.

Most likely it was a myth that was

spread purposely to portray the British as more barbaric.

I think to sort of portray history as more barbaric than it was versus then even just trying to portray the English that way.

So September of 1297, Wallace had joined forces with Andrew Moray, Scottish leader of the Northern Rebels, who is notably completely omitted from the film, even though he was Wallace's right-hand man.

And they defeated the English in a total upset at the Battle of Sterling Bridge.

Now, Chris, do you remember any big battles that happened on a real skinny little bridge?

I remember a big field.

Okay, great.

We'll come back to that.

Now, next comes the Battle of Falkirk, which Wallace loses.

And by the way, that is where they actually use the Chiltron formation, which is the giant spiky pikes that they hold up.

And again, they lost.

So he escapes to France, eventually comes back to Scotland years later, is captured, declared a traitor to Longshanks, hung, drawn, and quartered.

According to Michael Brown, a historian at the University of St.

Andrews, Wallace is remembered as, quote, the disinterested patriotic hero whose only concern was the liberty and protection of his fellow Scots.

And by 1328, Scotland, led by Robert the Bruce, secured formal independence from England.

And this is, of course, not depicted in Braveheart because he was extra dead at that point.

Now,

this wouldn't be a what went wrong episode without an appearance by the one and only Alan Ladd Jr.

So here he is.

Welcome back, Alan.

Laddie.

Laddie.

Ladd received a screenplay of Braveheart when he was the CEO of MGM.

This was following the collapse of his own production company, the Ladd Company.

Now, Chris, what can you tell our audience briefly about Alan Ladd Jr.

up to this point?

If you remember, obviously, you covered him on the Star Wars episode.

So I think one of the best ways to think about him, Maverick producer who

was willing to take risks on both projects and filmmakers that other studios were not willing to do.

And so an obvious example was George Lucas's Star Wars, which,

as the story goes, was roundly rejected around town.

And Alan Ladd Jr.

at 20th Century Fox at the time took the risk on that film that nobody else was willing to.

Yes.

And he's, you know, he's a Hollywood.

guy through and through.

And then when he was with the Ladd company, he was instrumental in a number of other films that were also often very risky.

Blade Runner is a big one that comes comes to mind, which was a flop.

But obviously, it became a classic over time.

I think the thing to know about Alan Ladd Jr.

is that he had incredibly good instincts about who to trust and what material to throw his weight behind.

So.

In the early 90s, MGM defaulted on a loan and the French bank Credit Lyonnais took control, dismissing Ladd.

Now, he received about $10 million and was allowed to choose two projects that he could take with him.

He chose the Brady Bunch movie and Braveheart.

Later in 1993, Alan Ladd Jr.

revived the Ladd company with backing from Paramount Pictures.

So with the Braveheart script in hand, Laddie set up a breakfast meeting at the Four Seasons between major movie star Mel Gibson and Paramount studio head Sherry Lansing, who we have also talked about a bunch.

And she was very eager to persuade Gibson to join the project as they're starting to kind of pull the team together for this.

We've covered her a whole bunch.

She was the first female to head a major Hollywood studio.

She She is really amazing, and I think also someone who has very good instincts about what to back and who to trust.

Now, Lansing and Ladd were eager for Gibson to join Braveheart as an actor.

They were not considering him to direct this initially at all, which makes sense.

He had one directing credit under his belt at this point for 1993's The Man Without a Face, which he also produced under his at that point still very new company icon.

And that's a very intimate, small,

like low-budget, you know, we are focused on the actor's movie.

Now, Gibson thought the script for Braveheart was, quote, a bit over the top, but everything that seemed like a script device turned out to have a basis in history.

It did not.

But

he didn't read beyond that.

But as Gibson kept thinking about Braveheart, he realized he didn't want to star in it.

He wanted to direct it.

Quote, the script was given to me on an acting basis, of course, but I felt like I had to tell a story all of a sudden because I kept reworking scenes in my head.

That's a fairly good indication that you should probably direct it if you're building the images and sequences in your head.

Fair enough.

Fair enough.

So, Chris, here we are.

Let's take a moment to talk about Mad Mel, since this is unbelievably the first time we are covering a movie with him in it.

That's true.

Yep.

Fasten your seatbelts.

So, in 1956, Mel Gibson was born on January 3rd in Peekskill, New York.

He was the sixth of 11 children.

Wow.

His father, Hutton Gibson, was a railway brakeman conspiracy theorist.

He once called Vatican II, which is the effort to slightly update Catholicism by the Vatican in the 60s, a quote, Masonic plot backed by the Jews.

And as you may have guessed by that statement, traditionalist Catholic with some rather extreme views.

He's like very anti-the Pope.

He thinks the Pope is too liberal.

He thinks the Pope is too Jewish.

Yes, the Pope is too liberal.

He's too Jewish.

He's also too gay.

And yes, yeah.

It's this guy.

So Hutton had considered priesthood and even enrolled in a seminary before dropping out and instead went to work for the railroad.

Now, this career was cut short when an accident left him unable to work.

Hutton sat around watching game shows when a light bulb went off.

Why not go on one?

So he went on Jeopardy and he absolutely crushed it.

He was undefeated and got invited back for a champions game.

Interesting.

So he used the winnings from from Jeopardy, along with a large settlement from the railway company, to move his family to Australia in 1968 when Gibson was 12 years old.

By the way, this was mostly to avoid Gibson's older brother being drafted into the Vietnam War, which Hutton was vehemently against.

The war, to be clear, not the draft.

Can I mention something briefly?

Because it's really interesting.

I was reading an article recently about how it's often portrayed that people who are susceptible to conspiracy theories are in some way,

let's just say, slower, for example.

But this article was making that actually very intelligent people are often the ones who

have bigger blind spots.

They have very specific areas of expertise that may allow them to go on to something like Jeopardy.

And then they look for the same sort of patterns in other areas of life.

That's it.

That's exactly what it is.

And so, obviously, this Hutton sounds like he was very smart.

He sounds very intelligent.

And yet, he looks at the papacy and cannot see it's simply a very big bureaucracy and instead sees the fingers of some

Masonic cabal backed by the Jews behind it.

Yes.

I think when I think of people who believe in conspiracy theories, I think it is all it is, is trying to find a pattern in the chaos.

And I think you are right that frequently it is smarter people who are susceptible to this because they are I think they recognize that chaos potentially on a level that people who maybe are not as intelligent might not be able to, but the difference is that they are not able to process it or be comfortable with it.

And the only way that they can is they have to say, no, it's happening for a reason.

So, lest you think that Hutton was just a charming, jeopardy-winning conspiracy theorist railway brakeman, he was also physically abusive to his children on at least one occasion, according to a CNN special on Mel Gibson, grabbing Mel and one of his brothers and slamming their heads together because he was fed up with them.

I don't know if this was a frequent occurrence that was mentioned in this.

As a teen, Mel Gibson followed in his father's footsteps by considering priesthood and then not following through on it.

Instead, his sister secretly submitted him to Australia's top acting school, National Institute of Dramatic Arts.

He got in and he attended.

He briefly lived with Jeffrey Rush in the late 70s while they co-starred in Waiting for Godot, Waiting for Godot, sorry, I always forget.

Jeffrey Rush of Pirates of the Caribbean.

Yes, coming up next.

He got a few small roles in low-budget film productions, and he also, Chris, got into more and more trouble.

Now, part of this was, you know, growing up in Australia as an American, I think he got a lot of shit for that.

And also growing up in what sounds like a pretty tumultuous household, you know, he did take out a lot of his frustrations with physical violence.

At one point, apparently getting into a bar brawl right before an audition.

And according to writer Lawrence Grobel, who interviewed him for Playboy, getting beaten up so badly, his eye was basically falling out of his head.

Jesus.

Now, Mel took an important learning from this experience, telling Grobel,

I'm never going to let that happen again.

If I ever get a chance to punch a guy, I'm going to make sure I punch him enough.

Now, in this same interview, which we are going to talk about again in this episode because it was published right after Braveheart came out, he referred to his former female business partner as the C-word, said men and women are not equal, referred to a new world order, and much, much more.

That's

so I knew eventually Mr.

Gibson had some very strange views that were revealed through, let's say, drunken voicemails or interactions with police.

I did not know that some of this stuff had come out this early.

Chris, this is why I'm mad.

It is readily available from day one, day one, long before that interview as well.

So he then landed the lead role in George Miller's Mad Max, of course, in 1979, which set a Guinness World Record for the most profitable film.

We talked about this a little bit when we covered Fury Road.

Though it was the sequel Road Warrior that really broke him out in Hollywood.

Now, in the early 80s, he married dental nurse Robin Moore.

He starred in the World War I drama Gallipoli, and then he moved to Hollywood to pursue his film career.

In 1983, he got a DUI and was briefly banned from driving in Canada because it was so bad.

He also starred opposite Anthony Hopkins in The Bounty, which we will certainly cover.

The follow-up to Mutiny on the Bounty,

which I think it may be the third adaptation of that story.

I was looking it up a little bit for Pirates.

There's a lot of different versions of that.

All of which were so troubled.

Yeah, don't make that again.

It doesn't seem to go well.

But during that production, he actually got into another bar brawl so bad they couldn't film one side of his face for a week.

Jeez, Louise.

The nickname Mad Mel started to stick.

But in 1985, he was voted People Magazine's first sexiest man alive.

In 1987, he starred in Lethal Weapon, of course, which is written by Shane Black, directed by, we just talked about him, Richard Donner.

The film launched, obviously, the buddy cop action franchise.

It was a massive success.

But Richard Donner said Gibson apparently drank a six-pack before work, but that it never affected his performance.

The character is written so effectively for him, whether intentional or not, it is that exact...

combustible,

bad boy, extremely charismatic, but ultimately dangerous personality.

That's why his character, I mean, he's he really, he's great in those movies.

He is great.

Look, he's a good actor.

I don't think Braveheart is his finest performance.

I have really enjoyed him and some other things.

I actually really, I really like Conspiracy Theory, interestingly enough, with him.

I do too.

I think it's a really good movie.

It is a good movie.

However, Donner, like Anthony Hopkins before, did express concern over Gibson's behavior.

According again to Lawrence Grobel, Donner felt there was, quote, an undercurrent in Mel that could be very dangerous and very volatile.

Now, around this time, Gibson obviously established himself as a top box office straw.

He starred in Hamlet as the title role in 1990, which is a bit of a slog.

That was the first film produced by his production company, Icon, which he co-founded with his longtime producing partner, Bruce Davy.

Now, Gibson clearly understood very early on that he needed to be working behind the camera in order to truly take control of his career.

He also had about six children at this point, and they would travel everywhere with him like a little army.

In 1993, Chris, Mel Gibson made a series of unquestionably homophobic comments to the Spanish newspaper El Pais.

He claimed they were taken out of context.

I can promise you there is no context in which these comments are not homophobic.

I'm not going to read them because I know we have some younger folks who listen to this podcast and they're explicit.

This got the attention of Glad, who spoke out against him, but it didn't matter because in 1993 he made his directorial debut with The Man Without a Face, in which he also starred.

By the mid-90s, he was absolutely Hollywood's golden boy, as well as being box office gold.

But again, to your point, Chris, his true colors continued to peek through.

In 2010, Winona Ryder told the following story to GQ.

Quote, I remember like 15 years ago, so right around 1995, I was at one of those big Hollywood parties and he was really drunk, he being Mel Gibson.

I was with my friend who's gay.

He made a really horrible gay joke and somehow it came up that I was Jewish.

He said something about oven Dodgers, but I didn't get it.

I'd never heard it before.

It was just this weird, weird moment.

I was like, he's anti-Semitic and he's homophobic.

No one believed me.

By the way, I think she mentioned this again at some point.

And, you know, his team was like, this never happened.

He reached out to her to discuss it.

He never apologized to her.

And she had a really great quote where she was like, listen, I believe in redemption.

I know he's wrestling with demons.

I am not one of them.

This happened.

But, Chris, there were at least a couple of roles that did elude him that he really wanted but didn't get.

One of them was Oscar Schindler in Schindler's list.

Really?

Indeed.

And I would just like to point out his father was a Holocaust denier.

I will just quote him directly.

According to Hutton Gibson, the Holocaust was, quote, maybe not all fiction, but most of it is.

Well, first of all, obviously, the Holocaust obviously happened.

So let's just make sure we button that up before we move on.

That's so, I mean, it seems like, like most people in Hollywood, obviously, Mr.

Gibson was probably willing to

suspend his disbelief for certain roles.

And my guess is whether or not he thought the Holocaust was real, he knew it was...

a great Oscar bait role and that he'd be working with Steven Spielberg.

And I'm wondering if that's his motivation, you you know, at this point.

And he may not be a Holocaust denier.

We have, I have no idea.

His father obviously was.

Yeah, I mean, when he was asked about this comment later on from his father, he refused to outright,

basically, his response was, That's my dad.

I'm not going to talk about my dad.

So, do with that what you will.

All right.

After that lead-up, and this is why I said it may be a bit difficult to separate Mel Gibson, the man, from Braveheart, because all of this was public public knowledge prior to Braveheart.

Let's go back to Braveheart.

Though he expressed interest in directing, he was not the first choice.

Apparently the job was offered to Terry Gilliam, who was also trying to make a version of A Tale of Two Cities starring Mel Gibson.

So Gilliam actually turned down Braveheart in order to try and make A Tale of Two Cities.

But the joke's on poor Terry Gilliam because Mel Gibson got the job he wanted when Terry Gilliam turned down Braveheart as director and he dropped out of A Tale of Two Cities, which then fell apart and became one in a long list of Terry Gilliam movies that never made it to the screen.

And if you guys are unfamiliar, Terry Gilliam was one of the founding members of Monty Python.

Yes.

And he would go on to become a very celebrated director, primarily for his creativity and use of practical effects in a lot of great 80s films,

Brazil, Time Bandits.

We discussed his career briefly in our coverage of The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, and we definitely will need to get to The Adventures of Baron Munchhausen, a film that it was revealed by actress and Canadian director Sarah Polly, who was a child actor in that film, was quite dangerous.

And it does not seem that Mr.

Gilliam was prioritizing the safety of his performers, notably a child performer.

Summer is here, and that means we are getting out of the house.

Splash pads, the beach, the zoo, we are carting our kids everywhere, which means I don't have time for grocery shopping and cooking.

So I am making sure that my family is getting fresh and and healthy meals with the number one meal kit, as voted by USA Today's readers, HelloFresh.

HelloFresh makes it easy to fit quick, home-cooked meals into our schedule every week by curating delicious recipes right to our door, like panko-crusted chimichuri baramundi or sun-dried tomatoed grilled cheese sandos.

But I'm really excited to talk about the new HelloFresh ready-made meals.

These are chef-crafted and ready in just three minutes.

Every HelloFresh meal uses high-quality ingredients, including seasonal, fresh produce, and proteins that travel from the farm to your tabletop.

Choose from over 60 recipes every week.

Make your summer enjoyable and delicious by signing up for HelloFresh at hellofresh.com/slash wrong10 FM and get 10 free meals with a free item for life.

That's hellofresh.com/slash wrong10 FM for 10 free meals and a free item in every box.

HelloFresh.com/slash wrong10 FM.

One per box with an active subscription.

Free meals are applied as a discount on the first box.

New subscribers only varies by plan.

So, from the very beginning, it sounds like Paramount was only interested in Gibson directing if he also starred as William Wallace.

Again, this makes sense.

This is a huge, huge project to put in his hands.

He had not directed something at this scale before.

But that didn't stop Gibson from looking at other stars like Brad Pitt and Jason Patrick to play the lead.

It sounds like he really didn't want to do it, which again, I understand.

This is a massive undertaking.

I think he is smart enough to know it's going to be really hard to be in front of the camera and behind the camera on this.

And I think he wanted to focus on directing at this point.

And hadn't Brad Pitt just done Legends of the Fall?

Yes, he had, which we're going to talk about.

Gibson also felt that at 38, he was too old to play William Wallace, who would have been in his late 20s during most of the events depicted in the film.

Although he did die in his mid-30s.

So it's not unbelievable that he would be this age.

No, but he looks

older than Brendan Gleason in this movie.

Yeah, so that is noticeable.

It feels like 35 years have passed, not 20 years.

You know what I mean?

When he returns to his village, but yeah.

But Sherry Lansing and Paramount put their foot down and said the only way this gets made with Paramount's backing is if he stars as William Wallace.

So Gibson relented.

So Braveheart was ready to roll as a co-production between, again, Gibson's Icon Productions and Alan Ladd Jr.'s very recently re-established the Ladd Company.

And they estimated their initial budget to be around $65 to $70 million.

That seems pretty low to me for what they're trying to do.

So here's what I'd say.

For reference,

I understand why that sounds low relative to the films that would come shortly after Braveheart, like Saving Private Ryan, but Dances with Wolves, for example, was $22 million.

Last of the Mohicans was $40 million.

That was a few years prior.

Okay, so this is not as low.

So maybe 60 to 70 sounds reasonable.

Yeah, for what they're trying to do, I think so.

So they got 20th Century Fox to agree to come on board and fund two-thirds of that budget in exchange for the international distribution rights.

Wow.

Now, Gibson was counting on Paramount to come through with the remaining third, which seems reasonable given how this whole thing started.

Especially if Paramount's going to get domestic rights.

Yeah, it seems like a weird.

For only a third of the budget.

That seems like a good deal for Paramount.

I know.

It seems like a weird deal to me.

I'm not entirely sure, but I did look for a bunch of different sources on this and it kept saying two-thirds.

Maybe they're thinking he's a Scottish folkloric hero, a European hero.

There's maybe more Emel Gibson is an international star.

There might be more worldwide appeal to this story.

Who knows?

I don't know.

It seems like a strange deal to me as well.

I did look into this.

That's what I kept seeing.

No, I believe it.

But much to Gibson's chagrin, when he met with Paramount's head of business affairs, Bill Bernstein, they were only offering $15 million and asking for 25% of ticket sales as a distribution fee.

Now, Gibson described his reaction as, quote, a little over the top.

He said he had just turned down three jobs to take this, which, by the way, was probably true.

He was very in demand.

And he was just, you know, a bit upset, Chris.

However, agent Jeff Berg remembers it a little differently.

Gibson, quote, grabbed a large glass ashtray and threw it through the wall.

He threw the ashtray through the wall.

Okay, hold on.

Here's why I don't believe this story.

I watched Mel Gibson throw a rock in this movie.

He couldn't throw a baseball 40 feet.

Mel Gibson cannot throw.

I'm sorry.

Well, he can throw ashtrays through the water.

Apparently, obviously, don't throw ashtrays through walls.

That seems a bit unnecessary.

I don't know.

Maybe we all should be throwing ashtrays through walls because the negotiation tactic worked.

Paramount responded by coming back a week later with a satisfactory offer.

Gibson deferred his acting and directing salaries of $15 million and $2.5 million, respectively, and they were off to the races.

Well, okay, so he made the concession.

He deferred his acting and his directing fees.

I mean, there we go.

It's not because of the ashtray.

He thinks it's because of the ashtray.

So intimidated by the task.

Intimidated by the task ahead of him, Gibson spoke with frequent what went wrong protagonist/slash antagonist Kevin Costner.

He was so impressed by Dances with Wolves and wanted to know how Costner had done it.

By the way, now that you mentioned the budget, I am too.

Dances with Wolves is a remarkable accomplishment.

It is.

I think more so than this.

Yes.

Costner replied, quote, There's only one way to go, man.

Big.

So that's exactly what Gibson set out to do.

By the way, Costner's in prep on Water World at this point.

Yeah.

So let's talk about the casting.

If you think about it, while there are some major stars in Braveheart, like Brendan Gleason and Brian Cox, they were not big stars at the time.

In fact, Gibson really only went after two huge names while casting.

One wound up in the movie, and that is Sophie Marceau.

While this was her English language debut, she was a huge star in France who had been working since she was a teenager.

And the other was someone he pursued for the role of Longshanks.

Chris, any guesses?

He's Scottish.

Sean Connery.

Sean Connery.

I was wondering if Connery was approached for this movie because I had just watched Train Spotting, and there's this running gag where they keep talking about Sean Connery as James Bond throughout the movie.

And I kept thinking, he's got to be the most famous Scott in Hollywood at this point in time.

You know, Ewan McGregor hadn't broken out yet.

There's this great generation of Scottish actors actually that were about to break out, I feel like, with train spotting, and they hadn't yet.

So, Sean Connery could not do Braveheart because of a scheduling conflict.

And honestly, thank God, he would never have been anywhere near as bitchy as Patrick McGooen is, who, of course, is who we get.

Patrick McGoohan is great.

He is such a jerk in this, and he delivers, some of his line deliveries are like laugh out loud, funny, which I think.

So arch.

You do need.

Yeah.

He very much, it's not dissimilar, although it is not as extreme.

It's not dissimilar to Alan Rickman and ironically, the Kevin Costner Robin Hood Prince of Thieves as the sheriff of Nottingham.

Yeah, I agree.

Patrick McGooon, also who was considered initially for James Bond.

Well, yes, Chris, he actually turned down James Bond because as a devout Catholic, he felt that the glamorization of womanizing and drinking went against his beliefs, to which I say, had he met Mel Gibson?

Maybe not.

Now, Gibson filled out the rest of the cast with actors like Gleason and Angus McFadden, who had been working for years without a big break.

And he chose British actress Catherine McCormick, who only had one small film role prior to this, for his wife, Murin.

Interestingly, she had a pretty bad experience on her first film, Loaded, directed by Anna Campion, saying she felt like she really needed to be coddled.

Sounds like did not get along with that director, but she had nothing but good things to say about Mel Gibson, at least in the DVD commentary.

There is another interview with her where she refers to having worked with male directors who have no clue how to handle women, but that is widely suspected to be about Tony Scott, not Gibson.

However, she doesn't specify, so I don't know.

And for the record, I can see why he would be a very exciting director to work with as an actor.

He's got that kind of manic excitement.

He is an actor.

I think he understands where they're coming from.

That being said, I don't think people should work with him.

Let's keep going.

While casting, Gibson had stopped by the editing room for Legends of the Fall to scope out some actors.

I think probably Brad Pitt.

But it was cinematographer John Toll who caught his eye.

So he brought him on board Braveheart next.

Maybe the best decision he made in

this movie looks so good.

And John Toll would go on to do The Thin Red Line, for example.

And he has one of the most naturalistic approaches to cinematography.

And his color palettes are so good in an era that I think could feel a little overlit or, you know, over contrasty.

This movie looks amazing.

It does.

There's another reason for that, which we're going to get to as well.

So, of hearing about the project, Toll said, quote, I thought it couldn't be very complicated if he was directing and acting in it.

And then they sent me the script about two hours before I met Mel.

Legends of the Fall had some limited battle scenes, so I understood how complicated they could get.

And I was reading this script thinking, they can't be serious.

But they were very, very much serious.

In June of 1994, principal photography began at Fort William in Scotland, but Chris, it didn't stay there long.

They shot out what they could in Scotland, including some of the early skirmishes and establishing shots of the highlands.

But when it came to the bigger battle sequences, like the Battle of Sterling Bridge, Mel Gibson wanted wide, open, flat fields.

And I don't think the Highlands have too many of those.

It's a notoriously rugged, mountainous terrain, which is probably why the actual Battle of Sterling took place on a tiny ass bridge.

It was also quite expensive to actually shoot in Scotland.

Had they stayed, it would have put them way over their estimated budget.

Now, again, Chris, he is moving this because he wants wide open grassland for these battle sequences, a topography that does not exist in the area that this actually took place.

But that's neither here nor there.

So, Chris, it turns out the majority of Braveheart was not shot in Scotland, but in Ireland.

Couple of reasons.

Tax incentives.

Obviously, that made it substantially cheaper to shoot.

And it seems that that actually influenced a lot of major films to start shooting in Ireland, including Saving Private Ryan.

Location.

As I said, Gibson wanted big sweeping battle sequences across pretty flat plains, and they don't have those.

They also got easy access to Ireland's Ardmore studios.

In exchange for being able to film at major Irish landmarks like Trim Castle, they had to agree to hire Irish extras.

And boy, did they ever.

Chris, where do you think they found 1,500-plus scruffy young men with fighting experience and a willingness to do both frontal and rear nudity?

Hooligans?

The Irish Army Reserves.

Oh, there we go.

The Irish government decided to kill two birds with one stone because their Army Reserves were required to put in a few weeks of military drills every year.

So Ireland said, yeah, go ahead and do those drills as 13th century Scotsmen.

And also English and Irish, they played everyone.

Here is Mel Gibson talking about how they got 1,500 men ready to shoot these battle sequences.

But it was an incredible system.

They'd start in the wardrobe tent and put on their battle gear.

Then they moved down to makeup.

Get your sunscreen on, then get your dirt on.

Then we put war paint on them and then they'd smear themselves with dirt and mud to make them look like real savages.

Rub it well in, backs of your legs, backs of your necks.

Do your ears, check the guy up next door.

Get your dirt on.

Regardless of the historical accuracy of all of these people being supposed savages, I do want to just shout out.

I did not have an appreciation for not only the talent of the wardrobe and makeup departments on these enormous feature films, films, but the logistical strengths of these departments as well.

They are running a garrison's worth of men through hair and makeup.

They had an interlocking tent system.

And the clip I just showed, Chris, was from the DVD Extras for Braveheart.

And they are literally running them through an interlocking tent system where they stop in one tent, they put on the outfits, they literally are just like walking in in their panties and they come out on the other side as 13th century Scots.

And they're doing it, by the way.

You know, these departments are given no time and no grace.

And so, if an actor slows things down because they need extra time for a take, that's understandable.

You know, if the DP needs a little more time to light, that's a little less understandable, but still understandable.

If the director needs more time, you know, you're given more grace the higher up the totem pole you are.

And so, again, just shout out to Heron Makeup and Wardrobe.

It's a very thankless job, I think.

And

this movie would be nothing without the incredible coordination of these teams.

I agree.

Now, the Irish Army Reserves were not the only Irish extras on set.

According to Wicklow Tourism, so many horses were needed that they actually reached out to horse owners from the Wicklow and Kildare areas and invited them to participate as extras with their horses.

Very smart.

So let's talk about the horses, Chris.

Mel Gibson was nearly crushed when a stunt horse reared up and fell backward, forcing him to, quote, fire the animal.

The only reason he did not get smushed to death was that his stunt double literally reached in and dragged him out of the way before that thing landed, which is terrifying.

Yeah, there's a couple moments on screen where I thought it looked like he or somebody else was either going to get crushed or had been crushed by one of these horses.

So let's talk about this, Chris.

How many horses do you think were injured in the making of Braveheart?

I mean, I wouldn't be surprised if it was upward of a dozen or two dozen horses.

The answer is zero.

Really?

So this is amazing.

You may wonder how they captured so many shots, as you said, of horses flopping around on people, Mel Gibson murdering horses, horses getting thrown over spikes.

They did some really incredible things here with practical effects.

Some of the battle horses were dummy horses that were made from steel skeletons with foam, rubber, and fur, and they put them on air jacks and tracks to have them make an undulating motion to look like they were running.

These look amazing.

I never, I picked out one fake horse, and it's the one that falls in the water when he leaps off the tower garrison.

And it's only because you know it has to be a fake horse at the end.

They did such a good job.

There's tons.

So they also built these lifelike nitrogen-powered mechanical horses, and these were mounted on tracks that could accelerate from zero to 30 miles per hour within 20 feet.

Then when they had impact, there was a piston that would activate and it would launch the stunt rider from the saddle and launch the horse over to simulate a fall.

Those reportedly cost around $100,000 to build.

They look incredible.

And the way that they shoot this is so smart because if you watch the horses that are, you know, catapulting over the pikes and the people are falling off of them, they have some people in the foreground.

And if you look carefully, there's nobody behind them.

So the horses that are continuing to move forward behind them are just running straight past the crowd.

And to that cost, you know, $100,000 each, worth every penny.

Yes.

Yes,

obviously from a moral and ethical perspective, but also you can reset and shoot it again quickly.

If a horse gets injured and I'm going to be grossly pragmatic, that's going to shut down your whole day, right?

It's going to,

you have to replace the horse, you have to replace the costume and the makeup, et cetera.

So it's, again, obviously do it from a moral and ethical perspective, but it's such a good practical decision as well.

I agree.

So you mentioned horses falling on people.

They actually built dummy horses that they could literally toss around.

And those are what you see landing on guys.

They only weighed about 150 pounds.

So you can really drop them on somebody.

They do look great.

And again, the way that it is shot is fantastic.

I'm really, I'm like, this makes me like happy right now.

It's so inventive.

This is the best part of filmmaking, right?

Is when they come up with something really creative that totally tricks you as an audience member.

It's really, really cool.

And yeah, shout out to the special effects team and the special effects supervisor, Nick Alder, on this movie, who, by the way, had previously won an Academy Award for visual effects on Alien.

Wow.

Really did an incredible, incredible job on this.

It is very funny if you watch the DVD extras, you can hear legendary stunt choreographer Simon Crane kind of talking about the horses and then doing the jumps.

And he's kind of like, ugh, I guess you can't toss horses around anymore.

So

I guess you can't.

In fact, Chris, the horses were so realistic looking that Gibson had to send behind the scenes footage to Ireland's Animal Cruelty Society, which was investigating Braveheart, because it looks so good.

Yeah.

Now, remember the Battle of Sterling not on a bridge?

This shot.

We're never going to get past this.

I'm so mad.

This shot at Currah Camp, the training grounds for the Irish Defence Forces.

And this was a great location.

It's exactly what he wanted.

It is wide.

It is flat.

They also had the barracks were right there.

They had a firing range.

They had stables for the horses.

So I understand logistically it was a great place to shoot.

In In addition to this very famous bridge battle, including zero actual bridges, though, there are a couple of other major historical inaccuracies.

So let's get into them.

There is no record of William Wallace wearing blue war face paint.

The idea likely came from the Picts, an ancient tribe who stained their entire bodies blue.

They were probably, you know, several hundred, maybe even a thousand years too late for that to be happening in this.

Also, Chris, you mentioned this, but tartan kilts were not worn until many, many decades later, around the end of the 16th century.

That's a great point that my history teacher made.

Yes.

My history teacher, who I believe wore a kilt to school at one point.

Good for him.

Yeah.

With underwear.

Let's see.

Okay.

Speaking of that, Chris, according to Mel Gibson, that scene of hundreds of Scots mooning their British enemies was historically accurate.

Not a lot of evidence of that.

There is evidence of mooning in medieval times, though.

So maybe.

And there's some evidence that claims that the English actually may have mooned the Scots to insult them.

So again, who knows?

I don't mind if it's not true.

I don't care if it's fine.

It's very funny.

It's a great moment.

I want to be clear.

I don't necessarily care about a ton of the historical inaccuracies in this, except when it presents them as fact.

Something like that is sort of like license that I can be okay with.

But anyway, it's when it's supposed to be on a bridge and it's on a field.

That hedgehog formation of the soldiers with long spears spears was not used at the Battle of Sterling again, because how would they do that on a bridge?

It was used at the Battle of Falkirk, which also the Scots lost.

So I don't know if that was as successful as it was portrayed.

Many of the weapons are also not accurate, including the sword that Gibson carries.

Even the score Chris by James Horner most prominently features Irish bagpipes, not Highland pipes, which Piper Eric Rigler says he still gets shit for.

They're called Illin pipes, by the way.

When asked about why Horner did this, he said Horner knew exactly what he was doing and he wanted the instrument that would blend better with the orchestra.

Yeah.

I think the score for this movie is gorgeous.

Again, I get it.

It gets your blood pumping.

It really works, again, as a shorthand to get you into the story.

And again, any one of these decisions, I don't have a problem with necessarily.

It's the cumulative effect that starts to feel like...

We're really painting by numbers here, aren't we?

No, we really don't care.

All right.

And they really don't care, Chris.

And you know what?

They were honest about that, at least.

That's fair.

And also, the title.

Braveheart is actually said to be a name given to Robert the Bruce when his right-hand man threw his actual heart into battle and screeched out, lead on, Braveheart.

When speaking about these historical inaccuracies, Gibson told USA Today,

yes, there was a bridge involved in the Battle of Sterling Bridge.

We didn't have a bridge because that would have made it too puny.

I wanted to do it big, so we nixed the bridge.

I'll admit where I may have distorted history a little bit.

That's okay.

I'm in the business of cinema.

I'm not a fucking historian.

Honestly, it's the Ridley Scott approach, I feel like, you know, with Napoleon, for example, more recently.

And as long as you own it, I think it's fine.

He does own it.

He basically said, I don't care.

I don't care about what's true.

It's my true truth.

Him and Randall Wallace do not care.

He did build a working battery gram, which is pretty cool when they filmed the Siege of York.

And also, Paul Newman visited the set during that scene.

He ran a nearby camp for children with cancer, and the Braveheart cast had actually gone to visit them.

And he was coming over to say thank you.

And he stuck around to watch that.

Mel Gibson was understandably very excited to have Paul Newman there.

Now,

what's one thing you may have noticed about this movie, specifically about the weather?

It's very wet.

There you go.

It's never not raining, and they're always outside.

So here's a little bit more from the DVD commentary.

They had chosen to do the filming up near Inverness and when the filming began they discovered that it was one of the rainiest places in fact the rainiest spot in all of Europe

We just decided to shoot.

I just said you can't worry about the weather.

You just got to go for it.

Otherwise you'd never get it done if you stopped every time it rained.

And so we just shot it.

I got to get used to it anyway.

Let's do it.

You know what?

Credit to Mel Gibson for just being like, whatever.

I don't care.

We just got to keep moving.

I think it's one of the reasons the movie looks so good.

It's so atmospheric as a result.

You have mist in every shot, which gives you a wonderful sense of depth and mystery as the background fades away into nothing.

It's beautiful.

It's really a fantastic look.

Not only was this uncomfortable, it also did prove problematic for some of the cameras.

If you notice, there are some out-of-focus shots that do still make it into the final cut.

Doesn't bother me, still looks great.

Yes, I've noticed the one early on with Audegile Brian Cox.

There's an angle up on him.

There's a couple of Sophie Murceau later.

And they're obviously shooting film at this time, so you're not getting real-time digital display.

Yeah, and it's mostly not controlled rain.

It is real rain, which is very hard to shoot around.

It did cause continuity issues because on the few occasions where it wasn't raining, they had to literally bring in fire hoses to make it look like it was, which I feel like you can tell because there are a couple shots when all of a sudden it's just like,

yeah, the rain changes from like a very fine mist to like a very thick torrential downpour.

But when Sherry Lansing visited the set and found herself stomping through feet of mud, her reaction was, do you understand how great this is?

John Toll would later credit the rain for his Oscar win, saying, quote, it brought so much to the film.

The fact that we were able to shoot in that weather, and especially for this story, it would not have been the same movie if it had been bright and sunny every day.

The photography would not have looked the same.

He did, however, comment that it was difficult to have Gibson both in front of and behind the camera, and Gibson referred to himself as behaving like, quote, the Antichrist.

Didn't find a lot more information on that.

I will say the cast and crew from this movie seemed to be pretty complimentary about him.

I think they all were willing to acknowledge that he's doing two massive jobs, so he was very stressed out.

I do have to imagine that Braveheart's infamous continuity errors stem from the fact that he was torn between these two jobs.

My favorite, I don't know if you noticed this, but it's in the Battle of Sterling when he is charging forward.

And it switches between the sword and the axe.

He starts with an axe, I think.

Then all of a sudden he has a sword.

Then he has nothing.

Then he has an axe.

And you know what?

Good on him for just being like, whatever.

We're cutting together what we have.

You don't notice, you know, and I.

Well, you notice, but you don't care.

The opening scene, the opening battle of Gladiator is a great example where the weather changes nine times.

It's snowing, it's raining, it's backlit, it's sun, but the emotional through line of that sequence is so propulsive and the sequence is so kinetic that ultimately, what are you going to do?

Now, for post-production, Gibson borrowed more talent from Legends of the Fall in the form of editor Stephen Rosenblum.

Speaking about his vision for the edit, Gibson would later say, quote, it's nothing compared to what you see now on TV with Game of Thrones, but back then it was graphic.

I wanted really quick cuts and very staccato.

I figured that's the way it is.

It just comes out of the blue and hits you in the head.

So I wanted it to be like a blunt instrument and kind of shocking.

I think they achieved that.

Although I will say, you reference Gladiator, the battles in Gladiator look and feel quite a bit more realistic, and that's only a couple years later.

This ends up looking almost like a parody of itself at certain points when they're lopping off limbs limbs and stuff.

I think it's early in the process.

Yeah, you're halfway between, you know, It's a Flesh Wound, Monty Python, and Gladiator.

To be fair, Gladiator was almost six years later.

That's true.

And I do think there were a number of advancements.

I think Braveheart does move the ball forward in a lot of ways, but I do agree.

Some of the limb chopping in particular, where it's just these clean cuts, do feel a little over the top.

Yeah, they did.

They built dummies for those, obviously.

Yeah.

And they look really good.

Great special effects work.

It's, it's not execution, it's style.

I will say, though, we keep mentioning it, but Last of the Mohicans was, I believe, before this movie.

And if you watch those battle sequences, they look way better.

But Michael Mann is like a monster for detail.

Yeah, I mean, like, that's why he is so good with the, you know, gunfight in Los Angeles.

Just saying, it looks better.

No, it's fair.

It's fair.

It's fair criticism.

For visual effects, he turned to Michael Fink and Tricia Henry Ashford, and according to Ashford, it was a very challenging job.

Quote, when Mike Fink and I sat through dailies looking at all this beautiful film shot by John Toll, we felt a tremendous amount of pressure.

We knew that if you ever thought you were looking at an effect, it would take you right out of the film.

That's probably why 75% of the effects shots in this are just amplifying the armies.

Now, as we learned in Lord of the Rings, prior to that film, digital replication of crowds and armies was not quite there yet.

So instead of creating soldiers in post, they had to film four separate wedges of the army reserves and composite them together to create the giant army you see Wallace riding his horse in front of.

It looks great, and that is an enormous accomplishment to have pulled that off.

It's really hard.

Yeah.

Michael Fink was one of the heads of USC Film School when I was there.

That's cool.

Yeah, he's a really nice guy.

I met him a couple of times.

Did an amazing job on this.

Yeah.

Very soft-spoken, very nice guy.

So Gibson's original cut of the film was three hours and 45 minutes long, and Sherry Lansing was like, Mel, my friend, you have to cut an hour.

That's insane.

So he did.

And he acknowledges that it was the right hour, but he also says there's the possibility of a truly extended cut if Fox and Paramount ever want to finance it.

I don't need it.

In order to avoid an NC 17 rating, Gibson did have to tone down the violence.

I guess maybe lop off a few,

a couple fewer legs.

In particular, though, he had to change the focus of Wallace's execution to his face instead of what they were doing to his body.

Yeah, the disemboweling that they're implying.

That's right.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Which I actually think is very effective that you don't see it, that you just see his face.

Ironically, though, Chris, that's actually one of the more accurate elements of the film.

And I wonder if the original footage included his intestines being burned in front of him.

Yeah, that was done at the time.

It's terrifying.

It sounds like he identified quite a bit with the Christ-like death of William Wallace.

Well, so I'll say two things.

I think they actually make a couple of tasteful choices on the violence when they decide not to show Murin's throat being slit, but they do show the

sheriff's throat being slit.

I thought that was an effective narrative choice.

I agree.

We don't need to see his guts getting ripped out at the end.

There is so much Christ iconography.

in this movie.

In particular, my favorite part of this movie and the part where it just kind of jumps the shark early on is when he comes back into the village after Murin has been murdered and he's on horseback and he holds his arms out in a truly Christ-like gesture, only to reveal that what he's really doing is a John McClain die-hard sword reveal out of the back to chop somebody's head.

He is battle Jesus in this.

He's battled Jesus.

And again, super entertaining, really fun.

Not really historically accurate necessarily, but very.

It should be noted that Randall Wallace is, of course, who wrote The Passion of the Christ.

Yes.

Yeah.

Now, you might think that audiences and critics would be stoked about the impending release of Braveheart, but you'd be wrong because audiences were a little tired of Highland Warrior content at this point.

Rob Roy, starring Liam Neeson, Jessica Lang, and Tim Roth, had just premiered in April of 1995 and received mixed to okay reviews from critics.

But that, coupled with the incredibly corny trailers for Braveheart, had people kind of snickering about it.

Also, it's Mel Gibson directing this.

He's never directed something on this scale.

I I can see why people were like, no way.

But on May 18th of 1995, Braveheart premiered at the Seattle International Film Festival and surprised everyone by becoming a runaway hit, both critically and commercially.

It would end up pulling in $213 million worldwide.

But not everyone was so stoked on the film.

In particular, Glad was pretty pissed off about the portrayal of Edward II in the film, and especially Longshanks tossing his lover out the window, which again never happened.

Protests of the film were held around the country.

To quote Kathy Renna, co-chairman of A Glad Local Chapter, quote, it's discouraging and disappointing that there are major studios in Hollywood still willing to peddle this kind of homophobia in films.

But it's no surprise that it's in a Mel Gibson film.

Gibson is to Hollywood what Jesse Helms is to Washington.

Helms, of course, was an extremely conservative senator who disagreed with civil rights, gay rights, abortion, laundry list.

Now, remember that Playboy interview I mentioned earlier on?

It was released in July of 1995, essentially right after Braveheart's big premiere.

In it, Gibson was asked if he would apologize to Glad.

His response was, quote, I'll apologize when hell freezes over.

They can fuck off.

He did eventually have sort of a détente hosted by Cher's son, Chas Bono, but obviously he has continued to make plenty of comments.

Now, I think the objection to the character of Edward II in this movie is interesting.

So, let's talk about it.

We mentioned at the top there is some historical context to back up the idea that he may have been gay, quite a bit of historical context.

What there isn't is historical context to back up the way that he and his lover/slash/confidant are treated in this film and also the way that they're portrayed.

I think you can definitely argue that Peter Hanley's performance is cartoonish, but at the same time, so is everyone's, so is Patrick McGooon's.

That's the thing.

It's equal opportunity caricature work across the movie.

I think I agree.

You could argue the only minority character in the film.

Right.

But

I don't read it as the filmmakers singling him out so much as them saying, we're going to paint with as broad a brush as possible with every single character in this movie.

I agree with you.

I think that Glad is responding here to Gibson's history of homophobic comments more than they are the actual portrayal in the film which again i understand because he had made them he had made them publicly and people were still working with him so i completely understand seeing this movie latching onto that and saying this was homophobic i don't necessarily know that i agree you know i i do think that throwing his lover out the window very over the top again didn't happen that guy was killed eventually but it was a political maneuver made by other barons it wasn't anything like this.

And it is done very flippantly in the film.

But yeah,

I think everyone is a cartoon with a couple of notable exceptions.

But you know what?

It didn't matter because the GLAD campaign failed to make a dent.

At the European premiere in September, which took place in Sterling Castle, even Mel Gibson couldn't believe the turnout.

Crowds lined the streets on the way to the screening.

And Chris, the accolades continued.

With Braveheart receiving 10 Oscar nominations, the most of any film that year.

Interestingly, none were in acting categories.

It walked away with five Academy Awards, including Best Director and Best Picture.

This is an interesting year.

You might say not a ton of competition, although there's a couple of really big movies that I think it is a bit surprising that it beat.

One is Sense and Sensibility, which was nominated for Best Picture.

We mentioned that in the Hulk episode.

That was Ang Li.

And the other is Apollo 13,

directed by Ron Howard, which it also beat.

And I would say both of those movies are much bigger achievements in certain ways than this was.

In some.

I think from a technical perspective, this, well.

That's what I was going to say.

I could see this, like, for example, cinematography, John Toll.

Take it a little bit.

100%.

But I agree.

Best picture, best director.

I don't know.

Directing.

Here's what I'll say.

Again, the story is very broad.

It's jingoistic.

But...

If you think about the accomplishment, he's both on camera and behind it.

This has an incredible amount of scope.

You know, they always reward war movies.

They always reward period pieces.

I don't know.

I guess I can, I'm not saying it's a better movie.

I'm just saying I can understand the perspective.

And as we know, with the Academy Awards, once movies develop a certain amount of political momentum within the industry, they become hard to stop.

And that may have happened.

Now, many saw Braveheart's Best Picture win as a vindication for Alan Ladd's excellent instincts.

As Richard Donner said, quote, there are snakes in this business, and then there's Alan Ladd.

Braveheart massively boosted tourism in Scotland also and actually helped fuel a referendum in 1997 where Scots voted for an independent parliament.

And I believe true Scottish independence has continued to be a big topic of discussion since Brexit.

Mel Gibson continued and continues to be,

I don't even want to say a controversial figure because I don't think that's accurate.

In 2004, Gibson and his co-producer Bruce Davy, who of course also worked on this, would fund the Passion of the Christ themselves through Icon Productions when no other studios would touch it.

And I'm sure this movie will get its own episode.

It became an enormous financial success, but obviously drew criticism for its anti-Semitic portrayal of Jews.

In 2006, he was arrested for a DUI in Malibu, and his anti-Semitic rant at the arresting officer was made public.

He apologized for this and blamed his battle with alcoholism, but in July of 2010, Chris audio leaked of Gibson's phone calls to his then-girlfriend and mother of his child, Oksana Grigorieva, including threats of violence and horrific racist language, including the N-word.

He had separated from his wife at that point.

But the threats of violence were not just threats.

Grigorieva said he had hit her repeatedly in an argument, breaking her front teeth while she held their infant daughter in her arms.

She went to a dentist after this, who took pictures and confirmed the damage.

Gibson eventually pled no contest to a misdemeanor battery charge to avoid jail time, but said he was only doing so for the sake of the children.

When asked by Larry King why she recorded these phone calls, Grigorieva explained that she did so because, quote, I wanted my mother to be able to prove that if I'm dead, this is who did it.

I mention all of this because in 2017, sorry, this really makes me mad.

Gibson's fifth directorial effort, Hacksaw Ridge, was nominated for six Academy Awards, including one for director Mel Gibson himself.

When asked about the then news that Gibson would potentially be helming the next installment of the Lethal Weapons franchise, actor Joshua Molina, who you'd know from the West Wing and scandal, had this to say.

It may be time to stop publishing op-eds about the power of cancel culture, because if Gibson can continue to find money and approval in Hollywood, cancel culture simply doesn't exist.

Gibson and Randall Wallace will team up again for the resurrection of the Christ, and I'm sure that'll make a bajillion bucks too, but it will not get a cent from me.

I'll end with a quote from Gibson himself.

History is very interesting to me, and I do appreciate the veracity of true history, but I don't know that history is always true.

It's written by the winners all the time.

I think what he doesn't get is that he's the winner.

He's rewriting it

and just erasing all the shit that he's done.

He does not apologize for it.

He does not really acknowledge it.

He just keeps going and we keep letting him do it.

My big takeaway from this and researching this, maybe similar to you, is I had no idea that he was as open and honest as early on as he was about his feelings on women, the LGBTQ community, Jews.

I mean, it's just, it's just there from day one.

And nobody cared.

And they still don't.

I don't think it's that nobody cared.

I think people clearly did care.

I mean, Glad obviously cared and protested the film.

That's true.

Winota Ryder spoke up.

A number of people have cared.

And

I know at the time, people, as you mentioned, didn't stop working with him.

He went on to star in a number of films and very successful ones.

2002 Signs was obviously enormous, for example.

But at a certain point, I would argue he was and has been mostly phased out of Hollywood.

And

with respect to Josh Molina and leaving aside any personal feelings I have about the idea of cancel culture, I do think Mel Gibson was effectively pushed out of mainstream Hollywood, at least in the way that he once enjoyed a privileged position.

If you look at the films he's done, you know, from Edge of Darkness, I think it was like 2010 onwards, it's basically just direct-to-video DVD fair or religiously affiliated Mark Wahlberg movies like Father Stew.

And Mark's kind of like his only friend in Hollywood, it seems.

Sure.

I think all of that is true.

However, I think the point stands that it took an awfully long time for that to start happening in terms of how long he had been active saying this stuff, being physically violent, for people to actually stop working with him.

And I also think, you know, yes, he may be getting phased out of Hollywood.

However, he's not phased out of incredibly financially successful productions.

I know you referenced some straight to DVD stuff, but he is going to come back with the resurrection of the Christ.

I am sure that's going to absolutely do gangbusters.

And

this may also be controversial to say, but I actually think the turning point at which he was truly phased, begun to be phased out of Hollywood was not the physical or verbal violence, but actually the passion of the Christ.

I think, you know, that's the first, one of the first movies that he financed entirely by himself with his own production company because nobody wanted to finance it, not because of Mel Gibson, but because of the religious material.

So all goes to say, yes.

Is he a huge name and star in mainstream Hollywood currently?

No.

Is he going to be able to keep working because plenty of people will continue to work with him?

And will plenty of people show up to see the resurrection of the Christ?

Yes, they will.

And I just think

money matters,

who you work with matters.

They always say vote with your wallet.

And to anybody who is intending to go see that movie, I would just ask that you take a moment to think about who made it.

That being said, to be fair, and if we're going to be really honest with ourselves, we will make money off of this episode.

That's right.

We will make money covering Mel Gibson's career.

And I don't think this is going to be the last movie of his that we cover.

And there are a lot of controversial people we cover.

You know, the Twilight Zone movie is one.

That's kind of the line that makes me feel really uncomfortable given what happened on that set.

And Landis is an example of someone that I really don't want to watch any more Landis movies now after I've, you know, after I learned what you told me about that movie.

My only point, I don't disagree with anything you said, Lizzie.

And I'm not trying to suggest that Hollywood had some sort of moral awakening.

I think that at the end of the day, People get pushed away when they are viewed as no longer economically viable.

That's money.

That's all it is.

I completely agree.

And I think that's true of every industry.

And I think that

Gibson, Mel Gibson, will continue to find success with audiences that feel underserved by Hollywood.

And that would be, for example, the Christian audience, which does feel, fairly or not, feels underserved by Hollywood, which led, you know, to the success, the surprise success of the first Passion of the Christ.

And even something like Hacksaw Ridge, if you look at the producers on that film, the number of production companies, that movie's financing was cobbled together, you know, internationally, basically, and shot for a very low budget for a war film in Australia.

I just, I will personally would stop short of telling somebody not to work with him or telling somebody not to watch his movies, because candidly, I just feel like a hypocrite, given that I continue to enjoy some of his movies, and I'll probably re-watch Lethal Weapon.

And for me, it becomes a bit of a slippery slope when I think of like, well, what do we do with Andrew Garfield, you know, or

Robert Downey Jr., who's called for his, you know, rehabilitation, et cetera.

Look, I'm not condemning the people who continued to work with him.

I think that they are working within a system.

I don't blame them necessarily.

I don't blame them at all.

All I'm saying is just listen to him.

Go in wide-eyed, listen to what he is saying to your face.

And if you're okay with that and you're okay with working with somebody who said that, that is your decision.

It certainly would not be mine.

But to your point, will we continue to cover Mel Gibson movies?

Yes.

Will we continue to watch them?

Yeah, I am sure that we will.

And that's okay.

And as I said at the top of this, totally fine to enjoy Braveheart.

I enjoyed Braveheart.

There's nothing wrong with that.

But I do think it's important to look at him as a complicated and I think very dark and troubled individual in Hollywood.

And just last clarification, because somebody made this comment that I do think is a good comment on our Spotify.

We offer these as our opinions, not some sort of moral absolute.

Of course.

It is just my opinion.

This is just how we feel, and it's a complicated subject.

So, Lizzie, thank you for walking us through a very complicated movie-well, a very simplistic movie, but a very complicated history,

the story of a very complicated person behind it, and a difficult one to talk about.

And I appreciate you bringing all this information to light and guiding me through why I shouldn't have told my history teacher he was wrong about Braveheart.

Clearly, he was right about Braveheart.

And I was just a dumb high school kid.

Speaking of right, Chris, what went right?

Yes, I know exactly what went right.

Aside from David O'Hara as Stephen,

I am going to give, this is a no-brainer for me, and we don't acknowledge this department enough, 100%

the special effects team on this movie.

I cannot believe what you told me about the horses.

That is amazing.

It's not even that.

They also built like incredible devices to launch the arrows the way that you see them.

Like that stuff is real.

That is not computer generated.

Everything that they did in this movie looks wonderful.

I was never taken out by any of the stunts or the effects work.

As you mentioned, some of the lopping off of limbs and heads looks a little exaggerated.

Again, that's a stylistic choice.

That is not an execution error.

So, my what went right goes to Special Effects Supervisor or Chief of Special Effects Nick Alder and the entire Special Effects team on this movie.

I think it looks amazing and it was innovative and ultimately achieved what was needed to tell the story without putting

people and animals in harm's way.

And that should be the goal.

I agree.

We also didn't get to this in the main part of the episode, but there were some rumors around the time that it was filming that there were, you know, like a bunch of injuries happening to people on the set.

Mel Gibson and others confirmed that that was not.

true.

I think there was like some minor injuries.

Somebody may have broken a nose, but that's not super uncommon when you're doing these kind of battle sequences.

No, and that's just the person Mel Gibson punched in the face.

Yeah, unrelated.

That was a bar fight.

But he did interestingly say in that same interview, he referred to like people trying to sabotage them with the fake news.

I don't know if that's true.

That's the conspiratorial thinking.

That's just dad.

That's just dad.

That's good old Hutton coming through.

What went right?

I am going to have to give it to John Toll.

I think that this movie looks beautiful.

He had a really hard job because Mel Gibson had a really hard job and Mel Gibson was his attention was very divided.

So John Toll didn't maybe get the

amount of time you would normally get with a director to discuss things.

He was having to do it very, very quickly on the fly because Mel Gibson was pulled in a million different directions.

And what he did is beautiful.

This movie looks fantastic.

Also, you know, the way that this stuff is set up and shot, Mel Gibson was not a super experienced director at this point.

He'd He'd done one feature.

He'd never done anything like this.

I think a lot of that has to go to John Toll in terms of knowing how to set this stuff up.

And again, he had some experience shooting battles previously.

I just think he did a beautiful job and he deserved every accolade he got for this.

So I will give it to him.

My speculation, and this is just speculation, is that in these instances when an actor is also directing, the cinematographer ends up taking on a decent amount of the directing load.

You know, I'm thinking of Ben Affleck in The Town or Argo, for example.

And I think that these cinematographers often have really great directorial instincts.

And I'm guessing, you know, he's a bit of an unsung hero in that respect as well.

Yeah, I think that's true.

Well, that wraps up our coverage of Braveheart.

Thank you, Lizzie.

Thank you, everybody, for listening.

And Lizzie, can you let the folks know what's coming next week?

Yeah, it's Pirates of the Caribbean.

And you know what?

I don't care what you say.

It's fun.

And I'm excited to talk about it.

I'm very excited to talk about it.

We are diving into 2003's Pirates of the Caribbean, The Curse of the Black Pearl.

And

I'm really excited.

It's a very fun story.

And we are going to also be bringing you guys a Primer, Primer.

Guys, either pronunciation is fine.

Yeah, but I'm with the angry people.

I hate Primer.

Just go ahead and give it to us.

All right, fine.

You guys

warn me down.

It's a pramer.

We're going to give you a pramer on pirates, which will be very fun.

Again, not a super historically accurate film as we're diving into.

Pirates of the Caribbean.

Who cares?

It's so much fun.

And of course, it's based on a Disney ride, and we'll give you all that history of that ride as well.

If you are interested in supporting this podcast in the meantime, there are four easy ways to do so.

You can leave us a rating or review on whatever podcaster you are listening to us on.

You can hit that subscribe button and make sure that every time a new episode drops, it automatically downloads in your feed.

You can tell a family member or friend about this show and how we try to be as historically accurate as possible, unlike Randall Wallace.

Or you can join our Patreon.

You can head to www.patreon.com slash whatwentwrong podcast to get additional bonus material.

You can join for free and get corrections, musings, additional info on films that we cover.

You can join for a dollar and vote on films that we cover in the future.

Pirates of the Caribbean was the winner of a Pirates poll.

For $5, you can get an ad-free RSS feed and sometimes some additional bonus episodes like reviews.

We just dropped one on 28 years later.

For $50, you can get a shout out just like one of these in our most offensive Scottish brigs.

I'm so sorry to Scotland.

Here we are.

And we also have to apologize to Scotland because we made, I know, this is all my fault.

I made a mistake because I'm an ignorant American in our 28 Days Later coverage and I referred to Danny Boyle as being not Scottish but British.

Of course, Scottish people are British.

What I should have said and meant to say was Danny Boyle is English, not Scottish.

All right, here we go.

To all of our Scottish listeners, our Scottish patrons, from the bottom of my brave heart, I am so sorry.

We do love you and wish we could do your accents.

And instead, instead, I'm going to do it just as good as Mel Gibson did.

Here I go.

Slip notes 9.

K.

Canaba.

Eleanor.

James McAvoy.

God, if that's who I think it is, you are Scottish.

I'm sorry.

Cameron Smith.

Suzanne Johnson.

Ben Schindelman.

Scary Carey.

The Provost family.

The O's sound like O's.

Zach Everton.

Galen and Miguel.

The broken glass kids.

David Friscolante, Adam Moffat, film it yourself, Chris Zaka, Kate Elrington, Emix Odia, Sea Grace B, Jen Mastro Marino

Straight Spanish, straight Spanish on that one,

Christopher Elner, Blaise Ambrose, Jerome Wilkinson, Roll J,

Lance Steter, Nate the Knife, Lena, Ramon Villanueva Jr., Half Grey Hound, Brittany Morris, it's getting like Arnold Schwarzenegger, Derren and Dale Conkling, Jake Killen, Matthew Jacobson, Grace Potter,

Ellen Singleton, JJ Rapido, Joshri Samant.

It's just full-blown Arnold.

Okay, I'm losing it.

You go now,

Scott Gerwin, Sadie, just Sadie, Brian Donahue, Adrian Pencoria, Chris Lale, Kathleen Olson, Brooke, Leah Bowman, Steve Winterbauer, Don Scheibel, George Kay, Rosemary Southward,

Tom Christen, Jason Frenkel, Soman Chainani, Michael McGrath, Lan Rulad, and Lydia Howes.

Freder!

I think we can all agree Lizzie's Scottish accent is much better than Mel's, and mine is

actually a pirate, Arnold Schwarzenegger pirate.

And so, thank you, everybody.

Thank you to all of our full-stop supporters.

Thank you to everybody from Scotland who listens to this show.

We hope that we have done your country and this movie justice.

And we are excited to hopefully get to something like Train Spotting, some actual, you know, Scottish, Scottish-produced films in the future.

Yeah, we will see you guys next week for Pirates of the Caribbean.

Thanks again for listening.

Bye.

Go to patreon.com/slash what went wrong podcast to support what went wrong and check out our website at whatwentwrongpod.com.

What Went Wrong is a sad boom podcast presented by Lizzie Bassett and Chris Winterbauer.

Editing and music by David Bowman.

This episode was researched by Laura Woods.