How This Actor Made the Leap to Working Behind the Camera
By Movieguide® Contributor
Actor/director Mel Gibson is a risk taker — from the move from Australia to “cutthroat” Los Angeles to working behind the camera in smaller projects like THE MAN WITHOUT A FACE to the epic BRAVEHEART.
Gibson recently sat down with I CAN ONLY IMAGINE director Andrew Irwin to reveal the impetus behind those risks.
“LA’s an interesting place, because, I mean, if you’re here and you’re working here and you’re trying to make it here, it’s hard,” Gibson told Erwin on “The Storytellers” podcast.
“There’s a lot of cutthroat aspects to it. And that’s okay, that’s the beast that is, and if you recognize it for what it is and, you know, just feed it enough to keep it off your back, but not actually take it home, I think…you’ll do all right,” he went on to say.
After his success in Australia with movies like MAD MAX and MAD MAX 2, he was given a “shot” to make movies in America. The move paid off, and he went on to star in hit movies like the LETHAL WEAPON series and RANSOM.
READ MORE: MEL GIBSON SAYS ACTING CAREER ‘WAS ALMOST BY ACCIDENT’
The New York native was able to learn the moviemaking process throughout his years in front of the camera, where he eventually felt comfortable in the director’s chair.
“I had always hung around the hub of filming and asked a lot of questions…I was saying, ‘What’s that for?’ ‘Why are you using that lens?’ ‘What’s this?’ ‘What’s that?’ ‘How come we’re shooting that?’” THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST director recalled. “And so I was asking a bunch of questions and storing it somewhere in a box that I wasn’t even aware I was storing.”
The 69-year-old’s movie directorial debut was the coming-of-age story THE MAN WITHOUT A FACE where he was able to put his “toe in the water with something not too risky.”
Two years later Gibson would release BRAVEHEART where he won an Oscar for Best Picture and Movieguide®’s Best Movie for Mature Audiences in 1996. The director said that he was able to take on the massive project because of the team behind him.
“Well, there’s a lot of people on this. There was, like, some days there were like 3000 people,” Gibson said. “I mean, everybody’s in costume, and it’s like, ‘What do we do now? And you go, ‘Okay, I better act like I know what I’m doing.’”
“I was fortunate that I had a very good team to help me, sort of like with a logistical nightmare that it was,” he said.
Gibson is in the works for the sequel to THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST, called THE RESURRECTION OF THE CHRIST.
“When we wrote it — I’ve never read anything like it. My brother [Donal Gibson] and I and [screenwriter Randall Wallace] all sort of congregated on this, so there’s some good heads put together, but there’s some crazy stuff,” Gibson said.
Filming is planned to start in 2026, with no exact dates yet, he revealed on “The Joe Rogan Experience” podcast
“I don’t have a start date, I just have to begin pre-production and see what happens, and it’s just gonna roll in its own time,” he said. “It’s taking its own time. I thought it was late. I thought I was taking too long, but it’s probably just right. It’s when it’s supposed to be.”
READ MORE: JIM CAVIEZEL SAYS MEL GIBSON’S SEQUEL TO THE PASSION WILL BE “THE BIGGEST FILM EVER MADE”
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