Mr. Gibson Offers New Trivia From Braveheart (1995)
Mel Gibson has recently chin-wagged with News.com.au on that most exceedingly manly of movies, Braveheart. When Mr. Gibson speaks, it’s always good. Especially when it comes to Braveheart. Here is what he has said:
- “We shot in Scotland for the first few weeks, and those highland areas are unequalled and so distinctive and beautiful,”
- “Ireland has stuff over in the west that kind of equals that, but you’re so far out there’s nowhere to put a crew. You’d have to live in caves. So we shot up in Fort William and got all the benefits of that West Coast Scotland backdrop. But we couldn’t find a place where you could do all that battle scenes with all those horses. Ireland, of course, is very horse country. We were able to find a location, particularly for those battles, which would have been logistically impossible had we not had the Curragh, which was the firing range for the army. The barracks were literally just over the hill, and we were using the reserves as extras. So they’d walk to work; they were right there. And then right by the Curragh was a massive racetrack where you could house and stable all your animals. So everything was in one spot. That film was so logistically horrendous, but it was made far simpler by shooting in Ireland.”
- “We had the villages built in Scotland, and even during the summer there was still snow on those mountains. Then we learned afterwards that this area had the highest precipitation in Europe. We realised pretty quickly that we couldn’t stop because it’s raining. Sometimes you can’t even see the rain on film, but it’s always there. Then sometimes we enhanced the rain with the fire hoses and really went for it. We shot regardless. ‘Is the sun in or is the sun out? It’s gone behind a cloud. Well we’ll adjust it later!’ We had to do that or we’d have never done anything.”
- “I had dinner with Sean Connery one time, and Hungarian Goulash was on the menu. To hear Sean actually utter a word like ‘Goulash’ is a lesson in itself. So you just pick it up from people you’re talking to and hearing.”
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