The “lying bastard” Mel Gibson kicked off their own directorial debut: “It’s no big deal”
It’s never easy being a first-time director, especially when you’re working with someone like Mel Gibson, back when he was still an A-list superstar, not to mention a two-time Academy Award-winning filmmaker.
After all, when you haven’t helmed a feature, and the first time you do comes with someone who has an Oscar apiece for directing and producing, is backing your first film through their company, and also plays the lead role, it’s unlikely that the behind-the-camera novice would be the most powerful person on set.
Sure enough, the first-timer wasn’t the most powerful person on set. They weren’t even on the set for the duration, with Gibson using his muscle to effectively exile them from their own production and bring in his handpicked choice of writers, and a replacement, to steer the picture across the finish line in a vision more reflective of his than the guy who’d penned the script in the first place.
In his first produced screenplay after winning an Oscar for LA Confidential, Brian Helgeland teamed with Lethal Weapon duo Gibson and Richard Donner for the 1997 thriller, Conspiracy Theory. When the actor heard that it had been written with him in mind to play the lead role, he didn’t necessarily believe it, but he enjoyed the experience enough that he signed up for a rapid-fire reunion.
“He said he had written it for me. I had my doubts,” he offered. “They usually like to flatter you on these matters. Yes, OK, they lie. Anyway, this lying bastard sent me the script. And before I knew it, I kind of liked it. I found it really intriguing, very well-written. And he’s a very clever guy, so much that I’m actually doing a picture with him. But he wrote, now, he’s going to direct. I think he’s good.”
That movie was 1999’s Payback, a loose adaptation of Richard Stark’s novel, The Hunter, which starred Gibson as a thief left for dead and betrayed by his wife and partner. A modern noir, the hard-boiled story finds him recuperating before setting out on a quest for vengeance, seeking the money he’s owed from the job that almost cost him his life.
Helgeland’s name remained as writer and director, but it wasn’t his film. The ominous ‘creative differences’ reared their head, which saw Gibson push the filmmaker out, have the script rewritten, enlist hairstylist Paul Abascal to oversee reshoots so as not to breach the ‘Eastwood Rule’ while still being able to ghost-direct, and cast Kris Kristofferson as a villain who wasn’t in the original cut. “It’s no big deal,” he claimed. “That’s film, the grittiness of it, the humour, the texture of it.”
“There were changes required from the studio and from the producers, and I’m one of the producers; it’s my production company,” he told the Sun Sentinel. “We engaged Brian and asked him if he would think about some changes and some reshoots. He opted not to do those because he felt it was compromising his artistic integrity, which is fine. He can’t go there if he really believes that, and he did.”
That’s an awfully polite way of telling someone to fuck off, especially coming from Mel Gibson. Payback was a hit, as most of his ’90s movies were, and it wouldn’t be until almost a decade later that the world got to see Helgeland’s vision when Straight Up: The Director’s Cut was released. In the cruellest twist of irony, it’s much better.
