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NEWS > ENTERTAINMENT > MEL GIBSON FINALLY ADMITS BRAVEHEART WAS NOT A HISTORICAL DOCUMENT
MEL GIBSON FINALLY ADMITS BRAVEHEART WAS NOT A HISTORICAL DOCUMENT
October 28 2009
Hollywood, CA – Hollywood films have always played a little loose with the truth. Either for dramatic effect, or in order to more efficiently convey the tale, the condensing of a storyline is pretty much accepted in film. The same is often true in 
other forms of storytelling such as literature which often glosses over the more mundane aspects of a real life story in order to convey the essence of the tale more effectively. Such condensing of tales has come to be a standard despite protests from historians.
Such has been the case for 5-time ten Academy Award winning film ‘Braveheart’ which depicted the tale of renowned Scottish warrior William Wallace. Despite massive box office success and the acclaim that comes with its Oscar wins, many historians have long questioned the historical accuracy of the tale. Now Mel Gibson, the star and director of the film, has finally come clean and admitted that he and the other filmmakers did in fact take liberties with the truth. That admission, rare in Hollywood, has given new hope to historians hoping to hold the film world accountable for its mistakes. It has helped tarnish Gibson’s reputation amongst Hollywood brass just as he was recovering from his drunken tirade a few years ago.
“He wasn’t as nice as the character we saw up there on the screen. We romanticised him a bit. We shifted the balance because someone’s got to be the good guy against the bad guy; that’s the way stories are told. Wallace was a monster. He always smelt of smoke; he was always burning people’s villages down. He was like what the Vikings called ‘a berserker’,” said Gibson to the Times Online. “Our job though is to tell the best story we can, unfortunately that doesn’t always fall in line with the truth. In order to convey the essential nature of the story and the people involved sometimes we have to bend the truth a little bit. Drama has always been about the tale rather than the truth and we’ve always felt that the film captured the essence of Wallace and the times even if it ignored some of the facts a little.”
Gibson also admitted that some of the incidents were changed or ignored in order to make the film more palatable to wider range of people, which of course meant a great deal to box office take of the film.
“It really is refreshing to hear a big star like Gibson come out and say this. We have long struggled as we tried to make people understand that movies simply aren’t the truth. There are fictionalizations of real events. Now we will finally have a little more credence and not have people simply dismiss us like wet blankets,” said David Horowitz of UCLA. “This admission will finally give us credibility in the public eye and expose Hollywood for what it really is; a bunch of money hungry bottom feeders. They have exploited history for decades in order to make money and now they will finally be held to task.”
Other movies such as ‘Ben-Hur’ and ‘The Ten Commandments’ are often cited as examples of Hollywood inaccuracy in the historical realm.
“This is really a potentially devastating thing that Gibson has unleashed on the 
industry, which is particularly surprising given his precarious position. It’s very unlikely that the studios will have to go back and alter any of their existing works but it will dramatically change the way things are done in the future,” said Scrape TV Entertainment analyst Tracey Temple. “The real difficulty in accuracy is of course length. A life takes 80 years to play out and a movie only last two hours. Add into that multiple characters and you would have an almost endless movie that most people wouldn’t be able to sit through even if they wanted to. Plus you’d have all kinds of mundane events such as going to the bathroom and cooking dinner which really doesn’t sell all that well to the masses. It may be that the industry will just stay away from historically based movies altogether after this.”
Gibson made no comment when asked about the historical accuracy of his other films, ‘The Patriot’, ‘We Were Soldiers’, and ‘What Women Want’.
Samantha Dryden, Entertainment Correspondent
NEWS > ENTERTAINMENT > MEL GIBSON FINALLY ADMITS BRAVEHEART WAS NOT A HISTORICAL DOCUMENT
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