Once, it was just another cow paddock at Bringelly on Sydney's south-western outskirts. But on a sweltering spring day, it's an ashen battlefield, littered with bomb craters, charred trees, debris and swirling smoke. On the set of the war drama Hacksaw Ridge, dozens of crew, actors and extras – many swiping at flies – are preparing to shoot a scene that takes place during the Battle of Okinawa as the Allies land on that Japanese island towards the end of World War II.
Amid the carnage that cost more than 80,000 lives was a story of quiet heroism. The film's subject, conscientious objector Desmond Doss, was an American army medic who refused to carry a gun, saved 75 wounded soldiers under Japanese fire, and won the Medal of Honour – the American Victoria Cross.
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Mel Gibson: getting papped is 'annoying'
Turning 60, winning 'golden boys' and the paparazzi's long lenses invading his privacy. Mel Gibson in conversation with Garry Maddox at the Sydney Film Festival.
Through the smoke being pumped from a car driving around and around a newly created hill, Sam Worthington sweeps past dressed as an American solider. Nearby, another instantly familiar figure emerges from a tent: bearded, intense, a little heavier than we're used to. He's wearing an untucked dark shirt and a floppy hat. Mel Gibson is back in town. More than three decades after he left to become one of Hollywood's biggest stars, the two-time Oscar-winning actor-director is in Sydney shooting a movie. It's his first as a director since the Mayan epic Apocalypto a decade ago. And it follows years of controversy that have seen him shunned by Hollywood.
Some filmmakers direct quietly near the camera or a bank of monitors. Mel Gibson is not one of them. Out on the battlefield, he talks enthusiastically to two actors, grabbing a rifle to show how he'd like it to be held, then stumbling down the hill at the pace he wants for the shot. Then he's down, rolling in the dirt. Although it looks from a distance like he's showing an actor how to fall, he later admits he just slipped. "You never trip as much as when you're directing because your attention is always somewhere else," he says. "So I'm constantly tripping and falling."
![Mel Gibson at the Cannes Film Festival this year.](/web/20160814014544im_/http://www.smh.com.au/content/dam/images/g/q/o/9/0/8/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gqiz5l.png/1470968078623.jpg)
Associate producer Zak Mechanic says Gibson is unusually animated for a director: "You see him start to move with the actor. He's kind of acting it out himself. Then he gets excited and he runs to the set and talks to the actors. He's out there constantly."
While it's hard to believe of the former "sexiest man alive", the so-called "dish from Down Under" as he was cringingly dubbed in the 1980s, Gibson turned 60 this year. Two of his adult sons have joined him on the movie: Milo, 25, is playing a soldier and Christian, 34, is a camera operator. Andrew Garfield, the boyish English actor from The Social Network and The Amazing Spider-Man, will be on set later. He plays Doss, and the scene will have him lowered down a ridge on a stretcher via a flying fox. The movie – which is mostly being shot at Bringelly, Sydney's Fox Studios and Doss's home town in Virginia – also stars Hugo Weaving, Rachel Griffiths, Teresa Palmer, Vince Vaughn and Richard Roxburgh.
The impressive cast reflects Gibson's standing as a director of powerful, emotional, graphically told stories. His last three movies, the Scottish epic Braveheart (1995), religious drama The Passion of the Christ (2004) and Apocalypto (2006), have collectively grossed $US940 million and won five Oscars from 16 nominations.
But the fact Gibson is shooting a medium-budget Australian-American movie that was pitched to him by producer Bill Mechanic, rather than one of many projects he has developed himself, shows that rebuilding a tattered career takes time. At the height of his Hollywood success, Gibson was seen as a devoted husband and father, a churchgoer with old-fashioned – you could say very conservative – social and political views. But a series of drunken outbursts have seen him portrayed as a racist, sexist, homophobic anti-Semite.
![(Clockwise from top left) Gibson in his 1979 breakthrough role as Max Rockatansky in <em>Mad Max</em>; in 1981’s ...](/web/20160814014544im_/http://www.smh.com.au/content/dam/images/g/q/o/h/c/d/image.related.articleLeadNarrow.300x0.gqiz5l.png/1470968078623.jpg)
When lunch is called, Gibson heads to a sparsely furnished trailer to talk about his comeback. Close up, he still scrubs up pretty decently: tanned face, blue eyes, grey-flecked hair and a whitish beard that would look the part in either a bikie gang or Amish congregation.
He loves the idea of a war hero who was prepared to sacrifice his life for others. "This guy was for real," he says. "He would not touch a weapon no matter what. But he went into the thick of places where nobody else would go, which is kind of unbelievable. I think he's a hero for our times."
![(Clockwise from top left) Gibson in 1995’s <em>Braveheart,</em> for which he won two Oscars; in 2000’s <em>The ...](/web/20160814014544im_/http://www.smh.com.au/content/dam/images/g/q/o/h/c/j/image.related.articleLeadNarrow.300x0.gqiz5l.png/1470968078623.jpg)
Gibson has a lot riding on Hacksaw Ridge. He wants the chance to be a serious filmmaker again. He needs to show those in Hollywood who have quietly boycotted him that he is no longer a volatile commodity. That he is back in town in another sense, too. But will it work?
Everyone has an opinion about Mel Gibson. Over the decades, millions of words have been written about him. His looks and charisma. The movies that have collectively grossed $US3.6 billion. His Catholicism. His practical jokes. His struggles with alcohol. His wealth, estimated at $US850 million before his divorce in 2011. His latter-day troubles.
“You get barking mad in your 50s, then you settle down… I don’t want to go back.”
Mel Gibson
I met him briefly when he was a young actor with an edgy energy, and startling good looks, in the early 1980s. It was a chance to see how fame worked even early on in his career. Walking into a party with him, the gravity in the room suddenly shifted. Everyone was quickly aware, even if they were too cool to show it, that Mel Gibson had arrived.
I wasn't sure what to expect now, other than a man riven with contradictions. Maybe he would be angry at those who had shunned him for more than a decade. Certainly guarded about his private life, as he always has been.
Sketching a truthful portrait of him at 60 isn't easy – like many stars, he has publicists whose mantra is "no personal questions" – but he seems open and genuine as I interview him three times over a period of eight months. While definitely wary about reigniting past controversies, he is, as unlikely as it sounds, surprisingly humble, which could be what happens when your darkest moments are exposed to the world. (Gibson admits to years of Alcoholics Anonymous involvement, so it could be the 12-step program's requirement for a "searching and fearless moral inventory" that's behind this humility.)
"I've had to do that stuff, otherwise you don't survive," he says, referring to his struggle to overcome a drinking problem. They call it the spiritual path for the psychopath. They say there's only three options: you go insane, you die or you quit. That's the harsh reality. I'm an old hand at that."
During the interviews he is a good storyteller and, at times, funny. On the decrepitude that comes with ageing, for instance: "Geez, the aching joints," he says. "Oh my god. I get up at five or six in the morning and – owww – I'm crawling across the floor like a duck-shot dog trying to get to the shower … I feel I'm pretty physical, so that's good, but I have aches, pains, bad back, the whole deal. But you've just got to ignore it, right? We're all going one way." But every now and then there are flashes of fury or hurt that belie his claim that he has developed "a hide like a rhinoceros" and "the arrows bounce off now".
Initially reserved while talking in that trailer on the Hacksaw Ridge set, Gibson warms up during an "In Conversation" session I host at the Sydney Film Festival in June, centring on his latest acting role in French director Jean-François Richet's enjoyably grungy thriller Blood Father. While his publicists do their best to avoid those personal questions at a subsequent sit-down for Good Weekend – it wound up early and was unexpectedly filmed by two cameras in front of 10 crew and publicists – he answered everything I asked with what seemed to me like honesty.
After his American family moved to Australia from New York state when he was 12, Mel Gibson grew up on Sydney's North Shore. He attended St Leo's Catholic College in Wahroonga, then the National Institute of Dramatic Art (NIDA), alongside such actors as Judy Davis, Steve Bisley and Debra Lawrance.
His first big break came when, after driving a friend to audition for director George Miller, he was invited back to try out himself. "I walked in the room and George was in there," he says. "He said, 'Tell me a joke', so I told him a joke. He said, 'Can you drive?' I said, 'Yeah'. Basically that was it."
Gibson says he had no idea this low-budget action film, 1979's Mad Max, would be successful, let alone launch both his and Miller's careers. "Film? I didn't know film," he says. "But you just jump in the driver's seat. You do your level best to try and understand the medium. And everybody was fledgling at that point … George was a doctor … everybody was clutching in the dark but they had a basic idea that had a good foundation based in legend, myth and storytelling."
Gibson enjoyed Mad Max: Fury Road, last year's fourth instalment, calling it "visually spectacular and marvellously edited". He says he has no regrets about being replaced as Max by Tom Hardy: "I thought about the physical agony, being swung around on some fishing pole."
After acting solidly on stage and in more films, including the landmark Mad Max 2, Gibson's agent, the late Bill Shanahan, urged him to head to Los Angeles. "I said, 'I don't want to go over there,' " he says. " 'They're just going to tell us to FO.' But he kept nagging at me, so I went over and we did the rounds. Most people looked at us curiously, like, 'Who are you?' They more or less told us to move on." While there had been the odd Australian star in Hollywood before – notably Errol Flynn, Rod Taylor and Peter Finch – it was rare then for Australian actors to try their luck in LA.
But when Paramount bought and then screened Peter Weir's 1981 classic Gallipoli – in which Gibson starred – he says "all the people I'd seen who were dismissive, all of a sudden wanted to call". As a fresh, edgy talent in Hollywood, he followed up another masterful Weir film, The Year of Living Dangerously (1982), with The River (1984), The Bounty (1984), Mrs Soffel (1984) and, back in Australia, Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome (1985). After a spell on his cattle property in Victoria, he returned to LA to shoot the buddy comedy Lethal Weapon (1987). It was a hit, and Gibson discovered, at 31, what it was like to be very, very famous.
"It's fun for a while and then the novelty wears off rather quickly," he says. "You've lost a very precious thing and that's your anonymity. That's part of it; now I get that. But you don't sign the deal that says you have no more rights. You don't sign a piece of paper that says people can say anything they want about you – in public – and there's nothing legally you can do about it. You get all kinds of stuff. It's a bit of a rude awakening." Other Australian stars, like Hugh Jackman, Geoffrey Rush and Cate Blanchett, seem to share that view while being better able to appreciate the upside and handle the downside of fame.
With accountant Bruce Davey, Gibson formed Icon Productions to star in Hamlet in 1990. Within five years, he was directing films as well. First The Man Without a Face (1993). Then Braveheart (1995), which he also produced with Davey. With stirring emotion and violent battle scenes, the epic that had Gibson playing Scottish hero William Wallace was a triumph, taking $US210 million at the global box office and winning five Oscars, including two for Gibson: best picture and director.
"Nobody wanted to do it," he says. "They thought, 'Oh, costume drama, they're out', so it was rejected. But I was riding pretty high at the time so I had some grace, I guess, from two studios. They were both a little funny about it but they thought, 'We'll keep this guy in because we maybe want to work with him down the line', so they gave me some slack. We went to work and it was exhausting; an 18-hour day for five months, seven days a week. By the time I was finished, I was like, 'Put me in a straitjacket.' I couldn't even converse. I thought, 'I'll never do that again.' I was a youngster at that point" – he was 39 – "but I got old on that film."
As well as three Lethal Weapon sequels, Gibson continued starring in generally successful commercial films. Among them were Tequila Sunrise (1998), Air America (1990), Forever Young (1992), Maverick (1994), voice roles in Pocahontas (1995) and Chicken Run (2000), Ransom (1996), Conspiracy Theory (1997), The Patriot (2000), What Women Want (2000) and Signs (2002). Icon was also backing more adventurous projects such as Wim Wenders' The Million Dollar Hotel and, back in Australia, two movies without Gibson: Dad and Dave: On Our Selection and The Magic Pudding.
But the film Gibson decided to direct and co-write after Braveheart seemed like sheer madness: a biblical drama with graphic violence and dialogue largely in Aramaic. Yet The Passion of the Christ, released in 2004, was nothing short of a phenomenon. It was attacked by Jewish leaders as anti-Semitic, but at a cost of $US30 million, funded entirely by Icon, it grossed a remarkable $US611 million. "It turned into a real slugfest, while I was making it and afterwards," he says. "I was surprised at the amount of controversy that it stirred up. Seriously surprised. I mean, Jesus, it used to be in every hotel room in the world, the Gideon Bible, and the story didn't differ from what's in there."
However high he was riding after The Passion of the Christ – Forbes estimated he made $US185 million in the 2005 financial year – Gibson soon found Hollywood turning against him. Those offended by the movie felt justified when he launched into an anti-
Semitic tirade while being arrested for drink driving in LA in 2006. Even after apologising for his "vitriolic and harmful words", agent Ari Emanuel urged Hollywood to shun Gibson, and many quietly did. I interviewed a well-known Hollywood director around this time who, once the tape recorder was switched off, launched into a furious tirade about Gibson's anti-Semitism.
Gibson has since said his Australian wife of 26 years, Robyn, asked him to move out of the family home the day after the arrest, leading to a period of depression and loneliness as his career spiralled downwards. In 2010 came more vitriolic words in leaked audio tapes of an outburst against his then girlfriend, Russian pianist Oksana Grigorieva, the mother of his youngest child, Lucia. He was dropped by his Hollywood agent William Morris Endeavor. Later, he pleaded no contest to a misdemeanour spousal battery charge without admitting guilt.
A once-private life had become very public. He could have fought back publicly with his side of the story or given an Oprah-style interview, seeking sympathy and forgiveness. But he's not one for tearful public confessions.
"I've never treated anyone badly or in a discriminatory way based on their gender, race, religion or sexuality – period," Gibson told website Deadline Hollywood in a rare interview in 2011. "I don't blame people for thinking that though, from the garbage they heard on those leaked tapes, which have been edited. You have to put it in the proper context of being in an irrationally, heated discussion at the height of a breakdown, trying to get out of a really unhealthy relationship."
There was more, too. In a call for Gibson to be accepted back into Hollywood in 2014, the journalist-turned-friend who penned that earlier interview, Allison Hope Weiner, wrote that "during his breakup with Grigorieva, he'd gone through a terrible emotional breakdown and struggled to get healthy, gain joint custody of his infant daughter and deal with the fallout from the publication of those awful tapes". She wrote he was "an alcoholic whose 2006 outburst was captured after he fell off the wagon"; that as well as meeting Jewish leaders who had criticised The Passion of the Christ, Gibson had "quietly donated millions to charitable Jewish causes"; that he had "helped Britney Spears when she hit bottom" and "tried to save Whitney Houston from the drug abuse that ultimately killed her"; that during the assault case one investigator said "they had enormous problems with the credibility" of Grigorieva and there was evidence of extortion.
Other friends have rallied to his cause. Accepting a lifetime achievement award five years ago, Robert Downey jnr said how grateful he was to his Air America co-star for helping him get sober and casting him when no one else would, calling on Hollywood to forgive him.
Jodie Foster has also pledged her support. A friend since they appeared in Maverick, she cast him as a depressed alcoholic who can only communicate through a handpuppet in comic drama The Beaver, which flopped in 2011. "He's certainly not sexist, he's certainly not racist," Foster told The New York Times in April. "I know the guy I know, somebody who's really emotional, who I can have long, long conversations with, who's trustworthy, who shows up for me."
Bill Mechanic, a former chief executive of 20th Century Fox Filmed Entertainment and Hacksaw Ridge producer, says Gibson is different from how he is often portrayed. "If you spend time with him, he is a good guy," Mechanic says. "Like many people, he's a person with flaws. As opposed to most people, he knows his own flaws and I don't think he likes them and is always trying to remedy them."
Mainstream acting jobs dried up – just The Beaver, Get The Gringo (2012), Machete Kills (2013), The Expendables 3 (2014) and now Blood Father in six years – but Gibson says he has been busy. "I write a lot – or co-write – stories and plots," he says. "And there's the day-to-day child rearing. I have a little one [Lucia is now 6]. And several big ones … and grandkids and all that sort of stuff. But mostly I focus on stories and how to tell them in a way that's hopefully original."
Gibson enjoys the time he spends with his adult children (daughter Hannah and sons Edward, Christian, William, Louis, Milo and Thomas) and says the good news is they still like him. "As a parent, everybody screws up," he says. "There's no such thing as a perfect parent and it's so easy to mess up. But hopefully I've screwed up less than most."
While getting on with life – his new partner is 25-year-old budding screenwriter Rosalind Ross – he is still living down his indiscretions. When two state ministers announced the NSW Government had landed the Hacksaw Ridge shoot last year, Gibson made a short, nervous speech of thanks. As he left the podium, a TV reporter called after him, "Why should the state government give money to racists?" Gibson kept walking.
His new film, Blood Father, has echoes of his own life. It's about a grizzled survivor of hard times, an ex-con living in a trailer park and going to AA meetings, who gets a shot at redemption when his estranged teenage daughter needs protection from drug dealers.
Gibson might prefer protection from the paparazzi. It's clear their attentions upset him. "If you're out in the street, I guess you've got it coming," he says. "But when you're in your domicile and the long lens comes into your yard or tries to get through your window, I don't know if that's legal. I don't think it is, but it happens all the time. It's kind of a scary thing because people can accuse you of assault or something like that when you haven't done it."
He was cleared of shoving a newspaper photographer outside a Sydney cinema last year. "Luckily there was a witness and CCTV cameras that said I didn't do it," he says. "The cops didn't charge me but you never get an apology from these people who write damaging articles and it's annoying." How does he come to terms with incidents like that? "You don't," he says. "You just outlive it. There are some graves I will piss on." Pause. "They don't even have to be dead."
Gibson is just as candid about turning 60. "You get a little pre-show around about 58, 59 for 60," he says. "The realisation hit that the third act had begun. I don't know where it's going to take me. My father [Hutton, who now lives in the US] is 98, so he's had a long third act. I don't know if I want a long third act but I'd like a full one. I enjoy working. I really love it. I hope my mind stays attuned."
For an actor who once did a 60-metre jump off a building for a stunt – "I don't like heights but I was shamed into it" – ageing has brought a certain creakiness. He has found adult stem cell treatment in South America – often considered experimental – beneficial for both himself and his father. "I had my shoulder done," he says. "It's a miracle." But, as his face attests, he doesn't go in for cosmetic work. "I don't want the dimple on my chin to be my navel," he says. "You see some people getting touched up. It starts to get weird. Just let it go."
With age, Gibson recognises the need to move on from your worries. "You do become more relaxed about things. Women have menopause. Men go through the same thing. It's an andropause kind of thing. You get barking mad in your 50s and then you settle down. I don't want to go back to the early 50s." Finding peace – barking mad or not – is a subject Gibson returns to later. "The answer's not in a bottle," he says reflectively. "It's not in a prescription med or any of that sort of stuff. Some people need to use that stuff. I don't. But it's a higher thing. You have to get some kind of philosophical, spiritual level to deal with the knocks."
Despite what seemed like a highly successful career and family life up to that point, turning 50 just a few months before his drink-driving arrest forced Gibson to reflect on his life. "You look back at the whole thing and think, 'What did I do?' " he says. "There's a sense it's more than half over, the whole drama. Your tiny little drama on the planet. You're like a speck. You're like an atom in the scheme of things, really. But we tend to make it all a little too important. That's part of it. It's the ego, isn't it?"
A pressing question for Gibson now is whether he feels his troubles are behind him. Whether the storm is over. "Hey, we've all got troubles, all the time, every day, in some form or another," he says. "That's life. It's how you deal with them. You can't let them get to you too much. I have a sense of ease, I think, which is good. Because you've got to be good to yourself, right? If you're not good to yourself, it's not going to radiate onto anyone else."
With Hacksaw Ridge having its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival in September and a new acting gig as the founding editor of the Oxford English Dictionary in The Professor and the Madman, he has other movies he wants to direct now, including a sequel to The Passion of the Christ and a Jacobean tragedy set in 15th-century Italy. But will Hollywood finally forgive Mel Gibson for his sins? Could the quiet blacklisting by studios, agencies and many former colleagues be finished?
"I don't think about it too much," he says. "What is, is. It's getting on with your life, doing the things you want to do and telling stories and being allowed to do what you're good at. That's important to me."
Blood Father opens on September 1. Hacksaw Ridge opens on November 3.