Mel Gibson Says There's a Large Chunk of 'Braveheart' Audiences Haven't See…

It’s been a long time since Mel Gibson directed a movie, but the release of his fifth feature, Hacksaw Ridge, is just around the corner. In the lead up to the occasion, he’s been doing press promoting the new war drama, and while doing so he’s been discussing some of his previous efforts behind the camera. Collider asked Gibson about his 1995 classic Braveheart, for instance, and got him to talk about the hour-worth of material left on the cutting room floor.  

“I have it on tape somewhere,” he says of the initial assembly edit, which was three hours and 45 minutes. “We did excise the right stuff.”

From that rough cut, Gibson and editor Steven Rosenblum pared it down by half an hour and couldn’t figure out what else to do. Ultimately they got a studio note on what was wrong, they cut out more and also moved one scene to the end, and it was finished and released at just under three hours with credits. As it is, the medieval biopic went on to win five Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director, and Rosenblum was nominated, as well.  

[embedded content]

“People have mentioned it’s a big deal,” Gibson tells Collider about the idea of releasing the deleted scenes or an extended cut. “If somebody — Fox? — wants to finance that, go ahead. If they want to dig up the footage, I’ll slap it back together. And then we’ll get Steve Rosenblum … I think he’d be up for it.”

He says it’d be like the Redux re-release version of Apocalypse Now, which he says he learned a lot from even while believing the original cut is the best. “That to me was interesting,” he says. “Coppola took the right scenes out, [but] I got to see what they were. And I understood completely why he removed them.” 

Watch the whole Collider video interview on the Braveheart footage below. 

Highlight on New Movie Released DVD

 and 

Source link