Mel Gibson names the most important movie of his career: “It’s all been working up to this”
It’s been almost two decades since Mel Gibson hit the self-destruct button on his mainstream career, which makes it increasingly easy to forget that before that point, he was one of the biggest stars in Hollywood who’d made a comfortable home for himself at the top of the A-list.
George Miller’s Mad Max trilogy, Richard Donner’s Lethal Weapon franchise, their reunions on western comedy Maverick and high-octane thriller Conspiracy Theory, voice roles in Disney’s Pocahontas and Aardman’s Chicken Run, Ron Howard’s Ransom, Roland Emmerich’s The Patriot, Nancy Meyers’ rom-com What Women Want, and M. Night Shyamalan’s Sign saw the actor earn his superstar status.
He even excelled after turning his hand to directing, with Braveheart winning him a pair of Academy Awards for ‘Best Picture’ and ‘Best Director’. These days, though, Gibson is a lot more likely to be found hovering around the bargain bin than the silver screen, with seemingly no way back for a controversial figure who brought about their own downfall.
Even before the moment that lit the touchpaper on his exile, Gibson ruffled plenty of feathers when he was putting The Passion of the Christ together. Knowing that taking on such a divisive project could potentially lead to backlash, he funded the entire production himself when no major studio was willing to offer its backing.
Of course, Gibson had the last laugh when he hoovered up a remarkable $612million at the box office, which nobody could have predicted pre-release. Apart from Gibson, perhaps, who admitted to Sight Magazine that The Passion of the Christ was the culmination of his life’s work.
“It’s all been working up to this,” he said. “It was even in the background when I’ve made other films, as if they were dry runs for this one.” Gibson hardly kept his intensely religious views to himself during his initial rise up the industry ladder, but people around him were wary of the potential downsides of a star on his level, betting big on a biblical epic that didn’t shy away from brutality and unflinching violence.
A quarter of a century after Mad Max and with his place near the summit of the industry pile as bulletproof as it was ever going to get, Gibson decided the time was finally right to bring his dream project to life. Ironically, many were of the belief The Passion of the Christ would be career suicide, only to be left eating their words when it became one of the highest-grossing R-rated movies of all time.
The career suicide did come a couple of years later, but it had nothing to do with his status as the film’s director. Instead, it was his inebriated outburst towards a member of law enforcement that shattered the public’s perception of the once-popular star, which he’s never been able to come back from.
