I came home to raise crops and, God willing, a family.
So you want me to marry you, then?
I love you.
Scotland...
My land.
Sons of Scotland! I am William Wallace!
He's quite a heroic character.
He's completely uncompromising, which is why he's so extraordinary,
and why there's a 90 meters monument still standing in Scotland.
This one will fight forever.
It's a wonderful story and I hope people understand
how important it was to this man to fight for what he believed in.
You tell your king William Wallace will not be ruled.
- Peace is made in such ways. - Slaves are made in such ways!
It's an epic film. It really is life and death, and darkness and the light.
Action!
With a picture of this scope, to be in front of the camera and behind it, it's ambitious.
I must admit, I burned a few brain cells!
This is gonna be a picnic!
The driving force behind this is his passion for the project, and it comes from the feet up.
I think this film has compassion.
And I think that comes from Mel's heart. Really!
They may take our lives
but they'll never take our freedom!
Let's get our original positions, please.
Here we go. Roll!
- Sound speed! - Action!
I want this Wallace's heart on a plate!
Shift nervously from foot to foot.
Is he gonna send you? Look up to your commanding officer.
Eyeball him! What's going on?
What are you waiting for? Lead them!
I never was conscious of a point when I wanted to be an actor or a director.
It just kind of happened.
I was a real film nut in the '60s when I was growing up.
I was mainly acquainted with film through television.
I liked the big ones. I liked The Big Country. You know, that western?
I liked Double Indemnity with Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck.
Romantic films.
We did it so we could be together, but it's pulling us apart.
- What are you talking about? - You don't care whether we see each other.
Shut up, baby.
But at the same time I liked Spartacus. The huge, epic films.
These films were great films. Great films.
You can still watch 'em and get the same buzz off 'em.
And it was the epic films that really inspired me to do Braveheart.
This is a little piece of cinema history.
Rarely do you see this many people in the shot.
The script was given to me on an acting basis, of course, but...
I felt like I had to tell the story
cos I kept reworking scenes in my head.
So that's a fairly good indication that you should probably direct it,
if you're building the images and sequences in your head.
I am William Wallace!
You've come to fight as free men... and free men you are!
The script was a very haunting piece of work.
It wasn't predictable.
And... just the sheer size of it.
And it's just a funny corner of history that I'd never heard of before.
It's based on a character called William Wallace,
who did exist in the 13th century in Scotland.
He was a commoner. He was also a patriot.
He was actually successful in defeating the English.
Wallace was truly interested in liberty
and loved his country, and he really just wanted to be free
and wanted freedom for his fellows.
But at the same time he was kind of a savage.
At the Battle of Stirling,
he skinned the commanding officer on the other side and turned him into a belt.
Probably a matching handbag and shoes, too!
So this is the dichotomy of the man.
If we join, we can win. If we win,
we'll have what none of us have ever had before:
a country of our own.
My wife and I were in Edinburgh, and we walked into the castle there
and saw the statue of William Wallace.
I thought, this is a famous Wallace, and I'd never heard of him.
And I asked one of the guards there who he was.
He said "He's our greatest hero."
And I began to read about him.
But the actual facts of William Wallace's life,
as established by historians, are minuscule.
It's kind of sketchy and you have to fill in.
But luckily there's also a lot of legend around the character.
William Wallace is seven feet tall.
- Wallace killed 50 men. - 100 men...
And if he were here, he'd consume the English with fireballs from his eyes
and lightning from his arse.
I am William Wallace!
Those legends gave me a window into who the man truly was,
how he had felt about his country,
who he had loved, how he had loved.
I'm playing Murron, who is the woman who William Wallace falls in love with.
It starts in the marketplace where they've noticed each other again.
It's a love-at-first-sight thing!
And there's a link there from an early age.
They knew each other when they were kids
and they had this kind of a spiritual bond early on.
When he came back, he came back for her, and it was all meant to be.
I love you. Always have.
She represented his desire to live in peace.
He didn't wanna go and fight and kill and suffer.
He would have liked to have lived in peace, to have raised a family,
and she was the thing that propelled him.
He carried her with him always, whatever he did, wherever he went.
I will love you my whole life. You and no other.
Catherine McCormack hadn't done much before, just a small film,
and I just kind of got a vibe off her.
I just liked her. She's a very likable person.
She's beautiful. The character needed to be beautiful.
She's a good actress. And she seemed just right for that part.
Action!
The first day was very tense. I was "Oh, my God!"
"Big budget! Huge budget! What do I do?!"
And working with Mel, I thought "Oh, no, big superstar."
But he's just the nicest guy, really down-to-earth.
Cut!
I find, when I'm doing a scene with him, I don't get so much direction.
We sort of feel things through a lot more.
He's great for ad-libbing and just letting you run with the script.
It's a very human story about real people.
Those are real characters on the page,
and it was my job to strive to make those characters even more real.
So I was casting this thing for months!
And I didn't read anyone. People read people and I don't think that's any use.
So I just used to sit down and talk to them for 15 minutes.
And you can tell.
The trouble with Scotland
is that it's full of Scots.
Patrick McGoohan is a very intelligent actor who I admired as a kid.
I used to watch Danger Man and The Prisoner on television. He conceived these things.
So I was really flattered when he agreed to do this.
- The archers are ready, sire. - Not the archers.
Arrows cost money. Use up the Irish. The dead cost nothing.
Patrick plays Longshanks, which is the nickname for King Edward I.
He was one of England's most ruthless leaders
and he was not very fond of William Wallace.
Bring me Wallace! Alive if possible.
Dead... just as good.
Longshanks spent most of his reign procuring Scotland
and getting that within his realm so that he had control of it.
He did subdue Scotland, so he should make you feel like a subject.
Patrick has the capacity to do that.
His performance as Longshanks is very sinister.
Wallace has already killed the magistrate and taken control of the town.
Action!
A film of this size, with the responsibilities of acting and the pressure of directing...
it's a very demanding task. It obviously puts a lot more pressure on Mel.
It's an absolute passion for him.
He has his own point of view - a very strong point of view.
What's wrong with having a couple of poles sliding through the shot?
It's totally absorbing, so that you live, eat, breathe, sleep this story... and the telling of it.
The cavalry's behind you. Start running everywhere. Entourage, take off.
It's like being dropped in the middle of an ocean
and you look around and there's only water, but you figure there's gotta be land...
I think I'll go that way, and it's just one stroke at a time.
I had to get up earlier than everyone cos I had to get dolled up
and ready for the task ahead.
I was just hopping in front of the camera, doing it as best I could.
Popping off, looking at it. Then I might do another one for safety, then get the hell off.
Oh, man, that's a good one!
Because I was so focused on the storytelling, and all other aspects of the whole thing,
it brought a lot of relaxation to it, because I didn't have the energy left to be tense with.
Scotland was very rainy. It rained almost constantly.
Not the real teeming kind of rain,
but the kind of rain that always drizzles and never stops.
They had chosen to do the filming up near Inverness.
When the filming began, they discovered that it was one of the rainiest places
- in fact, the rainiest spot - in all of Europe.
It's all a question of conditioning.
We just decided to shoot. I said, you can't worry about the weather, you gotta go for it.
You'd never get it done if you stopped every time it rained. So we just shot it.
I gotta get used to it, anyway. Let's do it!
Well, it was miserable. We had to do take after take after take... after take.
40B, take 1!
Action!
- Cut, cut, cut! - Hold it!
Hold it!
- Cut! - Take three!
Obviously the horse doesn't want to stay here.
Hold it!
They were calling me and saying the conditions were miserable.
"It looks absolutely gorgeous, but every step is an effort."
Our noble saviours have arrived!
I think it helped creatively in the film.
The mud got all over everyone's clothes and on their faces.
That created a look that we would not have had if the weather didn't design it for us.
It's primitive. There's dirt under their fingernails - it's as it would have been.
The 13th century, I'm sure, had a high mortality rate.
And anybody that managed to survive was of really hardy, strong stuff.
If the plague didn't get 'em, or if they weren't eaten by leprosy or some horrible thing.
If you lived past the age of 30, you were a superman.
I shall offer a truce
and buy him off.
Whom do I send?
I am the Princess of Wales.
She meets him because the King organised a meeting to make a compromise for peace.
They come from two different worlds.
She's a princess, he's a poor Scottish man.
But... somewhere she realised that they're very similar
and she feels with him... not lonely any more.
Longshanks selected the bride for his son, Edward II.
He picked this beautiful woman who is brought to London
to meet a man that she didn't know, who didn't know her.
And there was truly nothing between the two of them.
It's her big day because she's getting married
and we realise during the scene that her husband doesn't love her
and he probably loves someone else.
This someone else is just behind my back and he's a young man.
It doesn't matter if it's a man or a woman. The fact is that she's not loved.
I found that relationship fascinating.
Mel captured it in absolute beauty, with looks.
You're doing great, but I think it's the last one when you look up here.
In their wedding, there's no dialogue at all.
It's shot with just looks.
But he absolutely captured the separation of these two people,
and the tragedy of two people brought together
and expected to love each other when there was nothing between them.
Action!
Sophie has been in films since she was a kid.
She's very experienced and a big star in France, so she knows her way around a set.
And she knows what to do in front of the camera.
Now, Sophie, peek out.
She's regal. She's literally like a statue, a living statue. She's very statuesque...
and I think comes off great in the film.
Cut!
Mel's a good director of actors because he's a really good, excellent actor.
That's my supposed sphere of expertise
so I try and make it as comfortable for them as I can.
If they're comfortable they'll be more relaxed, and so you'll get better things from them.
The best way to access any of the stuff is to have fun with it
and the rest will follow. You just can't take it seriously.
He's a grand lad. Good sense of humour. A bit of devilment in him, certainly.
He's just good fun.
You're there, there's thousands of people all around,
and you're the guy responsible for all this budget, all these people.
It's all on your shoulders, so you might as well not get worried about it
because you're gonna get yourself into a knot.
You have achieved more than anyone ever dreamed.
Fighting these odds, it looks like rage.
I'm Robert the Bruce in this film.
He's the head of the nobles
whom William Wallace comes to visit
to basically try to get them on their side, to unite the country to beat the English.
There's no telling who'll be next.
It's an interesting character because he's a lost soul.
- Maybe you. - He wavers...
Maybe me.
He's constantly drawn to the darker aspects of compromise and wealth
and preserving the castles and the lands which he has,
along with all the other wealthy people there.
217P, take 1.
Unite us.
Unite us!
He did fight for the English.
The nobility was famous for just switching sides. Whatever worked for them, they'd do it.
There was no sense of that unity that Wallace had.
They changed sides like people change their underpants.
Those men, who bled the ground red at Falkirk,
they fought for William Wallace, and he fights for something that I've never had.
And I took it from him when I betrayed him
and I saw it in his face on the battlefield.
The dynamic between William Wallace and Robert the Bruce
is one of the most exciting aspects to the whole story.
In fact, it may be, in some ways, the true heart of the picture
because William Wallace would rather shed every drop of his blood than yield an inch.
But Robert the Bruce was more like I think most of us are.
He was a man who wanted to do the right thing
but also tried to face the realities of life
and make the necessary compromises.
If you make enemies on both sides of the border, you'll end up dead.
We all will. It's a question of how and why.
Action!
One thing I knew I wanted to do with this picture
was to make it so that it moved all the time.
I watched all the battle films I could lay my hands on
to see the territory that had been covered before and try to take it further,
and really get the feel of what it must be like in a 13th-century battle... get the smell of it.
Your friends are being hacked to pieces.
They're getting war picks slammed into their helmets and their brains are falling out!
You have to execute it like a battle.
A lot of people sat round a table and we planned these battles out,
did storyboards.
We knew that, once we got in there, we were gonna have to rely a lot on preplanning.
So, be absolutely still
and look straight ahead at what you've got to do and what might be coming at you.
We recognised early that the secret of this
was going to be getting some sort of disciplined assistance.
We needed 1600 disciplined extras, and the only place you'll find them is in the army.
We're using the FCA here in Ireland, which is their volunteer force,
so we're blessed by using disciplined troops.
We drew up a document known now as "The Battle Plan",
which is an interlocking tent system to accommodate 1400 men,
where they come in in the morning in fatigues,
go through the system and come out at the other end as Scots.
We were fortunate to have the reserve army. They were divided into companies of 50.
It was an incredible system. In the wardrobe tent, they put on their battle gear.
Then they moved down to make-up.
Get your sunscreen on, then get your dirt on. Let's go!
We put war paint on 'em and they'd smear themselves with dirt
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 next door!
Finally, we'd march 'em down to the armoury
where we had thousands of battle toys to pick from.
Come on, guys, it's not a shop. Just pick one up and go.
There were some days when there were over 2,000 people involved
with but one purpose, with but one vision.
It's kinda cool
to have all those people working for that one shot.
There's a thousand bare asses.
That must be a Guinness Record - the most bare asses on screen in one shot.
I don't think I've ever seen that before, and that is accurate.
The Scots used to lift their kilts and flash the other side.
It used to freak the other side out.
No point resisting. You're outnumbered and trapped.
Now, where's Wallace?
The military brilliance and innovative spirit of William Wallace
is one thing that certainly comes through in the film.
He was inventive. He was a genius of military strategy.
He was an instinctive battlefield commander
and it's fascinating to look at a man who was able to pick up a sword
and stand his ground on the battlefield.
Our cavalry will ride them down like grass.
Hold!
Wallace was the first person to really stand up against these horse charges
with the use of the shiltrum, which is like a lot of sharpened wooden stakes.
They could group together and have a porcupine skin so nobody could gain access.
They didn't have bullets. They had to get in and stick you with something.
Can we have some more sticks here? Some more shiltrums?
It's just looking a little light.
The violence of battle has gotta be re-created.
To do that without hurting anybody,
that's the trick and that's what we're about right now.
We're trying to re-create a stunt which we're not allowed to do any more.
It somersaults the horse and throws the person off.
There are certain things that you shouldn't - and can't - do with animals any more.
I got together with Mic Rodgers and said, let's make mechanical horses.
We don't wanna hurt any real horses.
We make ones that look real, and do hideous things to them.
They're basically foam, but they have a metal structure inside,
so they weigh about 110 kilos apiece.
We go through a test period where we make sure the horse is working right
because you don't wanna do this again and again. You wanna do it once and walk away.
Get ready to shoot!
The track is now live, so keep off the track.
This shot here, it's expensive.
These horses cost $100,000.
The track costs about $40,000.
The time involved, 30 stunt guys.
We're trying to put nine horses, three of them mechanical... crashed at one time.
Here we go... and roll!
It's great. I don't think anyone's ever done that before.
And action!
If you can spot 'em, you can have ten bucks.
That's only you I'm talking to.
Action!
For the battles, the hand-to-hand choreography must be planned and blocked.
Bang! Bang! Crack!
It was interesting because they used primitive weaponry.
The axe... yours for the axing.
Quite impressive... just a big chopper.
That's some piece of work!
Deep, deep injuries.
Mainly impact implements... The hammer.
The common or garden mallet.
There's the chain with the ball.
Ball and chain.
Just a 360° impact instrument.
I invented this myself.
It's just to wear over the forearm as a protection from things that fly up.
I said "While you're at it, stick some arrowheads in it,
so I can jag people with it."
That's where my imagination's at.
Cut it!
We got some great toys now that people from the past didn't have.
Kubrick, when he did Spartacus, didn't have toys like this.
You load the arrow machines up with rubber arrows
and it's like a bank of mortars all lined up on the back of a truck,
hook up to an air cylinder, pull the plug and it goes...
Everything just goes...
Wallace was a man of the people. He had a real vision for what the country could be.
His men loved him. They'd follow him into hell.
Are you ready for a war?
Stand by... ready...
and action!
We spent six weeks in that Battle of Stirling. There's about eight cameras.
You get out there, throw those cameras around and go for it.
The haunting thing for me out here on these fields of Ireland right now
is that, when I look at Mel Gibson, I think "This is precisely what it felt like
on the day of the battle."
And I think, when we see Mel Gibson on the screen, we're gonna see William Wallace.
I love it. I can't really work on something unless I'm enthusiastic and proud of it.
It's very satisfying to be able to tell a story
and tell it the way you wanna tell it.
It's nice to know that you could create this thing.
The good news is that all that hard labour paid off.
I think that Mel's made a terrific film. It's a wonderful story.
I can't believe no one's written a story about this man before, because he's so passionate.
I think it's important that people know about this man.
I hope that they can't talk at the end of it.
I hope that they're so moved and so inspired by it.
That's all.
That they've watched this great story and they've found something in themselves.