Mel Gibson: Mel's Moves

Q: Have you wanted to work with Peter Weir again?

A: We talked about doing Fearless, but unfortunately I was in something I couldn't extract myself from. I'd love to work with him again. I learned a lot from him and he doesn't even know it. The things you learn from those first people you work with when you're very young and impressionable, it sticks.

Q: How did you come to Hollywood?

A: After The Road Warrior my agent suggested I come over here and make films. I did and I worked in mediocre fare, films that had possibilities, but I just didn't have the maturity to help much. The people I was working with were all good and competent and I got to experiment, with minimal to moderate success.

Q: The Bounty was one of your early films. How did you feel about that one?

A: Tony Hopkins was great in that, he saved that picture. It was a kind of fresh look at Captain Bligh, and I think of all the renditions of who Bligh was, his was probably the closest. His Bligh was stubborn and didn't suffer fools, but he was brilliant and just had a lot of bad luck.

Q: When you took that role, wasn't the director going to be David Lean?

A: He'd been working on it awhile with the writer Robert Bolt. Lean went off and Bolt had a stroke. I think the main problem with that film was that it tried to be a fresh look at the dynamic of the mutiny situation, but didn't go far enough. In the old version, Captain Bligh was the bad guy and Fletcher Christian was the good guy But really Fletcher Christian was a social climber and an opportunist. They should have made him the bad guy, which indeed he was. He ended up setting all these people adrift to die, without any real justification. Maybe he'd gone island crazy. They should have painted it that way. But they wanted to exonerate Captain Bligh while still having the dynamic where the guy was mutinying for the good of the crew. It didn't quite work.

Q: What about Gillian Armstrong's Mrs. Soffel, in which you costarred with Diane Keaton?

A: Just OK.

Q: The original Lethal Weapon is what made you a huge star in the U.S. What about that script interested you?

A: At that time, there was this plethora of films about muscle-bound dudes who were two-dimensional. They saved the world, but they weren't real at all. Lethal Weapon is about a person who's been through war, who assassinates people for a living and is on a police force. What does all that do to him? The guy's suicidal. I hadn't seen that.

Q: When you make your decisions, do you go from the gut or rely on the counsel of certain people?

A: It's always interesting to hear certain opinions I value, but basically I just go with my own gut.

Q: Do family issues weigh into your decisions on what film to do?

A: Oh, absolutely. Years ago I had this offer to go and make Mountains of the Moon in Kenya with Bob Rafelson. I liked the story. I'd read about Richard Francis Burton, the explorer. But if you've got kids, you don't just go off and live in Africa for six months.

Q: Other movies you've spoken about that didn't work out so well--would they include Bird On a Wire?

A: Yeah, well [laughs hard, but uncomfortably] I don't remember.

Q: Air America was rumored to be one of those terrific Hollywood scripts, but it never seemed to get off the runway as a picture.

A: It was a good script, and it didn't translate on-screen at all. I don't really know why. I have theories, but I don't want to besmirch anybody. I remember watching it and thinking, "Whoah, that wasn't too good." Sometimes it's just not gonna pay off.

Q: How do you feel now about Tequila Sunrise?

A: That was cool. I liked that a lot. I thought what Bob Towne did with the script on that was really good. It was mysterious, atmospheric and tantalizing.

Q: You must see the best scripts, with few fingerprints on them.

A: Yes, I do see all the scripts, but not necessarily without fingerprints.

Q: Have you ever wanted to pass on a script but then had your mind changed?

A: Yeah, Ransom. I'd read it and thought, "This is a great premise, but it's not really flying for me at all." Then Ron Howard called and said, "You know, I kind of like the premise." I said, "Me too," and I went in and talked with him and Brian Grazer. They did a quick rewrite and I read it again and thought, "Wow," It still wasn't there, though, and I still wouldn't have done it on the script alone. But I thought, shit, this guy Ron knows what he's doing, and he's invited me to sit down at a table to shoot the breeze and see if we can't get it to happen. So I just committed right there.

Q: What did you guys change?

A: We gave the character flaws, made him guilty of bribing union officials, stuff like that. That made his dilemma more painful and real, and I thought, OK, now he's not so squeaky clean.

Q: Ransom is a difficult film for a parent to watch, don't you think?

A: I knew it wouldn't be a comfortable thing. As I've said, for me being comfortable isn't all that interesting.

Q: Speaking of which, weren't you supposed to shave your head to play the twisted investigator in your new film for Wim Wenders, The Million Dollar Hotel? Did you chicken out?

A: [Laughs] I was all ready to go, but they didn't want me to do it. He's weird enough without that. And the bald thing has been done. Everybody's been bald. The other thing is, white guys don't look good bald.

Q: How did studio executives receive the idea of your playing a guy with half his face disfigured beyond recognition back in your directing debut, The Man Without a Face?

A: I guess I was naive because I didn't think it would be a problem, which it was. If it had cost a lot of money, they would have said no.

Q: Was part of your motivation to play that character a desire to escape being the guy with the face?

A: "The guy with the face"? Well, I tried to get somebody else to do it and they wouldn't let me, so I did it. Maybe there was some of that working subconsciously. Maybe it was a fantasy for me, that it would be cool to hide under a bag here and try to make it fly.

Q: You wanted someone else to star in Braveheart, too. Who?

A: I didn't know. Actually, I did, but I'm not telling you. The person I wanted wasn't big enough at that time, and the studio wouldn't accept him.

Q: What's the situation with Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, which you want to direct, but which Warner Bros. would only make if you replaced yourself with Tom Cruise or Brad Pitt?

A: I'm not doing it after all, because I can't get who I want to do it and I'm not starring in it. It's murder. You age five years doing both. It's a good script, but it's also prohibitively expensive. We'll see what the future brings.

Q: Would you ever step out of acting and just stick to directing?

A: Oh, yeah, God yes. I like directing much better. It's more fun, that's all there is to it. It's essentially the same job, which is storytelling, but you have more control over the way you want to tell the story, It's a high. I love it.

Q: It seems if there was ever a role you were taking a risk with it was Hamlet. The easiest way for an actor to get his teeth kicked in is to do Shakespeare in a high-profile way, and Hamlet was the first film your company produced.

A: That film was a baptism by fire. A more difficult thing to get off the ground I don't think you could pick, and we weren't trying to pick something difficult. There were a lot of problems behind the scenes. Once you become the producer, things can become a nightmare. I'd say it came out all right. It was really accessible, and short. We didn't jam the whole three or four hours down their throats. It wasn't as complex as other Hamlets but made up for that in clarity. Cinematically, I think it almost worked. Ultimately, Hamlet was OK, but a disappointment. I didn't have the depth. I don't think I had a grasp on the insanity and stuff, I was in my early 30s. But you can't get away with being much older than I was then.

Q: You seem to not care that much about criticism.

A: Well, you're not going to please everyone and critics by nature rend to be a little jaded. It must be very difficult to have to keep churning out critical assessments of artistic endeavors and really try to be fair. I think it would be an awful job and they must get sick and tired of it.

Q: You seem to be the most popular guy on this set. Has it been difficult to be the producer, imposing your will when things aren't going right?

A: Sometimes, You have to make decisions, and, no matter what you do, you're going to shit on somebody. You have to make hard choices and they're hard on other people. Your responsibility is to the production, even if you hurt people in the process. And it always comes down to that.

Q: Was there one example that stands out?

A: Payback is the primary example.

Q: You ended up parting company with the film's writer and director, Brian Helgeland, and making radical changes without him.

A: It was tough, and every opportunity was given for the film to be done by him. He didn't seem to want that. Ultimately, the responsibility was to the production. There were hard choices there.

Q: What prompted you to do your next film, What Women Want, in which you play s chauvinist who can suddenly read women's minds after an accident?

A: I wanted to do a comedy and it seemed funnier than a lot of things. And I really liked Nancy Meyers, the writer and director, and Helen Hunt, my costar.

Q: You're known for pranking your costars, like surprising former Halloween scream queen Jamie Lee Curtis by showing up at her door with a knife and a hockey mask on Forever Young, and giving a freeze-dried rat to Julia Roberts on Conspiracy Theory. Have you topped yourself on The Patriot?

A: Nah. I decided it's getting old.

Q: You've decided to mature?

A: I think so. Or I'm just getting slower.

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Michael Fleming also interviews Wolfgang Petersen in this issue of Movieline.

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