Braveheart 25 years on: ‘Seven weeks in, we thought this is going to be a turkey’
A quarter of a century after the Oscar-winning epic was released, Ed Power charts the inside story: a bossy Mel Gibson, gruelling six-day working weeks and jostling to be on camera
On a hot summer’s day in 1994, Mel Gibson stood in a field in Kildare yelling at a scrum of men in wigs and skirts. “He was screaming and shouting at us. It wasn’t appreciated,” recalls Lar Joye, one of the 1,800 Defence Forces extras which the Government had put at the service of Gibson during the making of his kilts and claymore classic Braveheart.
“As a student, I was thinking, ‘why is this guy shouting at us?’. As you get older, you see a man who must have been under huge pressure. He’d staked everything [on Braveheart]. Five o’clock in the afternoon and he’s shouting at 300 extras. In hindsight, you can understand it. There were a load of assistant directors. But he was very much in charge.”
Braveheart, a Hollywood-ised retelling of the rise and fall of 14th century Scottish rebel William Wallace, would be released in cinemas 12 months later. This May marks its 25th anniversary. The film, which Gibson both starred in and directed, was an unlikely sensation, arriving at a moment when costumed dramas were considered old hat. It would go on to sweep the Oscars and put Ireland on the map as a film-making location.
Thrilling and thunderous, Braveheart elevated Gibson, who won the Academy Award for Best Director, to Hollywood’s highest tier. It was a position he would squander several years later with his notorious anti-Semitic rant to a police officer. But at the time, Braveheart was a crowning moment for him.
And yet the possibility of Braveheart becoming an international blockbuster seemed far-fetched in the extreme as Joye and his fellow extras dragged their aching limbs around the Curragh, with Gibson, in full highland costumery, zooming around on a golf cart barking instructions through a loudhailer. The Australian was clearly feeling the heat. He’d put his reputation on the line — and all for an old-fashioned historical caper that had every chance of going belly up at the box office.
“About seven weeks in, you’d have thought this is going to be a turkey,” recalls Joye. “You are involved in the process every day. You’re tired. And you’re thinking, ‘how are they ever going to turn this around?’.”
Joye was a history postgraduate at UCD and film buff. He was in the Army Reserve (known back in the mists of history as the FCA). As part of the charm offensive to entice Gibson into shooting Braveheart in Ireland, it had been agreed that the reserve would be placed at his disposal.
Gibson, who had struggled to put together financing for Braveheart, gratefully accepted. He’d gone cap in hand around Hollywood. Most of the offers had come with strings attached. Warner Brothers, for instance, agreed to green-light Braveheart
— but only if Gibson signed up to a fourth Lethal Weapon. That was anathema to Gibson, desperate to get away from the frothy fodder with which he’d become synonymous.
Still, somehow he cobbled together the $65m budget, which needed to be stretched as far as possible. For the army reservists, that meant long days, beginning with a 5am call at the Curragh barracks where they were billeted. Occasionally, they would be bused over to Ballymore Eustace to a second set, or to Trim Castle, a stand-in for the walled city of York.
“There was a lot of charging down hills,” recalls Joye. “A lot of it was choreographed beforehand. You would have 400 or 500 extras in full costume and, behind them, other extras who would have been dressed up but not in the full costume. It was the way old Hollywood movies used to be made. They don’t do it like that anymore. Today, you’d get 100 people dressed up, take pictures and, using computers, turn them into an army.”
Braveheart was a phenomenon, earning over $200b at the box office. It is credited with reviving Scottish nationalism. It certainly gave a boost to the Irish film industry. The movie served as a showcase both for the Irish countryside and for our acting talent.
Brendan Gleeson had a breakthrough performance as Hamish, right-hand man of Gibson’s Wallace; there were turns by Peter Hanly as Prince Edward, Gerard McSorley as Cheltham and Seán McGinley as MacClannough. Decades before Game Of Thrones, Braveheart proved to the world that bearded Irishmen could romp around swearing and swinging blades with the best of them.
Still, there was criticism too. The portrayal of Prince Edward as effete, amoral and weak-minded drew charges of homophobia and would sure not pass muster today. Braveheart’s pretence to historical accuracy was meanwhile quickly debunked.
Hilariously, Gibson’s Wallace charges into battle in blue woad face paint, a practice that had died out 1,000 years before the events portrayed in Braveheart. In addition, he and
‘You would have 400 or 500 extras in full costume and, behind them, others who would have been dressed up but not in full costume’
his men wore tartan kilts, which wouldn’t catch on until 500 years AFTER the period depicted on screen. Sad to say, too, the Paddies and the Picts never joined forces against the English, as Gibson has them doing at the Battle of Falkirk (there weren’t even any Irish troops there).
Gibson was quick to point out, however, that he wasn’t filming a documentary. He had set out to make a movie that spoke to audiences at a gut level. Which it did — especially to Irish cinema-goers, many of whom couldn’t help but let out a cheer during the Falkirk sequence in which the Irish and Scottish forces meet on the field and then turn around and attack the dastardly English. It was the best sort of wish fulfilment.
Liberties were also taken with the locations. The Battle of Stirling Bridge, for instance, was shot in the Curragh — notable for lacking water or indeed bridges.
“Yes, there was a bridge involved in the Battle of Stirling Bridge. We didn’t have a bridge because that would’ve made it too puny. I wanted to do it big, so we nixed the bridge,” said Gibson in a new interview with USA Today. “I’ll admit where I may have distorted history a little bit,” Gibson added. “That’s OK. I’m in the business of cinema. I’m not an f ***** historian.”
“You got one night off, a Sunday,” recalls Joye, today Port Heritage Director at Dublin Port and previously a director of the Irish Film Archive. “In a way, that was a bonus as there weren’t any opportunities to spend money. Coming out of the recession, there weren’t many jobs. You were getting accommodation and getting paid on top of that. As a student in my 20s, it was quite good.”
Early on, there was competition among the extras to get in front of the camera. Eventually, it dawned on them that, such were the sheer number of takes, there was no way of gaming the system. Whether they appeared or not in the finished movie was a matter of serendipity.
“There was lots of jostling to be at the front and near the action where the camera was,” says Joye. “As the weeks went by, you realised that whether you were in the final shot was down to luck, you did the scenes so often. It’s grand now because you can point at anyone on the screen and say, ‘that was me’. We’re all wearing beards and wig, so who is to say it isn’t?”