Mel Gibson

Mel Gibson: The Filmmaker Who Detonated Himself

In 2004 a film spoken entirely in Aramaic, Latin and Hebrew, financed personally by its director because no studio would touch it, took $611.9 million worldwide and became the highest-grossing R-rated picture ever released. Two years before that, its director had been among the most bankable movie stars alive. Two years after it, he was arrested on Pacific Coast Highway and told the arresting officer that Jews were "responsible for all the wars in the world." All of that is Mel Gibson, and no honest account gets to keep one half and discard the other.

Peekskill to Sydney

Mel Colm-Cille Gerard Gibson was the sixth of eleven children born to Hutton Gibson, a writer, and Anne Patricia Reilly. His paternal grandmother was the Australian-born opera contralto Eva Mylott. When he was twelve the family moved to Sydney, funded by a $145,000 injury settlement his father won against the New York Central Railroad and motivated in part by keeping his eldest brother out of the Vietnam draft. He attended St Leo's Catholic College at Wahroonga, considered the priesthood and journalism, and was enrolled at Sydney's National Institute of Dramatic Art by his sister. He graduated in 1977; the institute's productions, where he played Romeo opposite Judy Davis and Titania in an experimental *Midsummer Night's Dream*, are credited with curing an extreme shyness.

Max, Gallipoli, Riggs

He was paid $400 for *Summer City* (1977) and $9,000 for George Miller's *Mad Max* (1979), which made him a national sensation. He won Australian Film Institute best actor awards for *Tim* and then for Peter Weir's *Gallipoli* (1981), which drew from Vincent Canby of *The New York Times* the line: "If this film doesn't make an international star of Mr. Gibson, then nothing will." A year later Canby wrote that Gibson "recalls the young Steve McQueen … whatever [star quality] is, Mr. Gibson has it." *Mad Max 2* was his first major American hit; *Beyond Thunderdome* brought his first million-dollar cheque. Then *Lethal Weapon* (1987) and three sequels turned him into the definitive Hollywood action lead of his era. Sean Connery suggested he play the next James Bond; Gibson declined, reportedly fearing typecasting.

Hamlet and Icon

In 1989 he formed Icon Productions with Bruce Davey, principally to make Franco Zeffirelli's *Hamlet* (1990) — an action star inserting himself among Ian Holm, Alan Bates and Paul Scofield. Scofield's assessment survives as the most interesting thing anyone in the theatre said about him: "Not the sort of actor you'd think would make an ideal Hamlet, but he had enormous integrity and intelligence." The commercial peak followed anyway: *Ransom* (1996), *Payback* (1999), a record $25 million for *The Patriot* (2000), *What Women Want* (2000), and *Signs* (2002), the highest-grossing film of his acting career.

Braveheart

His directorial debut was *The Man Without a Face* (1993). Two years later he produced, directed and starred in *Braveheart*, and won the Academy Awards for Best Picture and Best Director — only the sixth actor-turned-filmmaker to take the directing prize — along with the Golden Globe. The Battle of Stirling Bridge sequence is routinely cited among the best-directed battle scenes ever filmed, and the picture is credited with reviving the historical epic. It also drew criticism from GLAAD for its portrayal of the Prince of Wales as an effeminate homosexual, a charge Gibson dismissed by arguing the character's fate reflected a "psychopath" king rather than his sexuality.

The Passion and Apocalypto

*The Passion of the Christ* (2004) was, by any commercial logic, unreleasable: a subtitled two-hour scourging in dead languages, self-funded. It took $370.8 million in the United States alone and three Academy Award nominations. The Anti-Defamation League accused Gibson of antisemitism over the depiction of Caiaphas and the Sanhedrin; Katha Pollitt wrote in *The Nation* that he had "violated just about every precept" of the U.S. bishops' 1988 criteria for portraying Jews in Passion plays. Gibson told Diane Sawyer in 2006 that he felt his "human rights were violated" by the response. *Apocalypto* (2006) repeated the formula in Yucatec Maya with a cast of Native American descent, and he framed it as a warning: "People think that modern man is so enlightened, but we're susceptible to the same forces."

The Wreckage

On 28 July 2006 he was arrested in Malibu for drink-driving with an open container. According to *Vanity Fair* he first told the officer "My life is over. I'm fucked. Robyn's going to leave me" — an outburst the magazine read as an attempt at suicide by cop — before the antisemitic tirade recorded in the arrest report. He pleaded no contest, apologised, and confirmed the accuracy of the quotations to Diane Sawyer. In July 2010, recordings of phone calls with Oksana Grigorieva surfaced containing a racist threat and a threat to burn down her house; William Morris Endeavor dropped him the same day. In March 2011 he pleaded no contest to misdemeanour battery and later settled with Grigorieva. He was removed from *The Hangover Part II* after cast and crew objected. His divorce from Robyn Moore, finalised in December 2011 without a prenuptial agreement, reportedly cost more than $400 million.

The return began when Robert Downey Jr. used a 2011 American Cinematheque speech to urge the industry to give him another chance. *Hacksaw Ridge* (2016), about the conscientious objector Desmond Doss, premiered at Venice, took $164 million on a quarter of that, and earned six Academy Award nominations including Best Director. In January 2025 Donald Trump named him a "Special Ambassador to Hollywood" alongside Jon Voight and Sylvester Stallone; that same month his Malibu house burned in the Palisades Fire.

Why Mel Is Called a Genius

The defensible claim concerns direction, not acting, and it is narrow and real. Gibson has an exceptional gift for staging physical suffering and mass violence with legible geography and religious weight — Stirling Bridge, the flagellation, the Okinawa escarpment — and an almost reckless commercial nerve for material every studio judged unsellable. He financed a subtitled Aramaic Passion himself and made it the highest-grossing R-rated film in history; he followed it with a chase picture in Yucatec Maya; he then made a pacifist war film that the Academy nominated six times. In November 2016 the critic Matt Zoller Seitz called him "the pre-eminent religious filmmaker in the United States," which is probably the fairest description available. The Academy gave him Best Director in 1996 and nominated him again twenty years later. Paul Scofield, of all people, vouched for his intelligence.

The counter-case is not merely biographical. The bigotry critics found in his conduct has been located inside the work as well — by the ADL on *The Passion*, by GLAAD on *Braveheart* — which makes the usual separation of art and artist harder here than it is elsewhere. His directorial output is tiny: six features in thirty-two years. His acting range was always narrower than his charisma, which is why Canby reached for Steve McQueen rather than for Olivier. And "genius" is a word that does a great deal of laundering work in this particular case. He is a formidable director of violence with a coherent, punishing theology, and a man who said what he said in 2006 and 2010.

Legacy

Films he starred in or directed have taken more than $2.5 billion in the United States alone. He remade the action hero in the 1980s, then rebuilt the religious epic almost single-handedly, then destroyed his own standing twice and was readmitted anyway. The most durable thing he leaves may be the demonstration that the industry's moral limits are negotiable when a filmmaker can still open a picture.

Achievements

• Academy Award for Best Director — 1996
• Academy Award for Best Picture — 1996
• Honorary Officer of the Order of Australia — 1997
• Golden Globe Award for Best Director — 1996
• Worked as film producer, film actor and film director