Production History (Braveheart) Braveheart (1995)
Randall Wallace's Edinburgh research trip
The screenplay began in Edinburgh in 1983, when the screenwriter Randall Wallace — no relation to William, but a southerner with Scottish-named ancestors — visited the city and was directed by a guide to the statues outside Edinburgh Castle. He asked who the figures were; the guide said Robert the Bruce and William Wallace, and Wallace asked who Wallace had been. The screenplay began as the answer to that question.
"I asked the guide, 'Who is this guy?' And he looked at me — I was an American with the same last name — and he said, 'You don't know who William Wallace is?' I felt I had to find out." — Randall Wallace, Vanity Fair (2020)
Wallace's primary written source was Blind Harry's fifteenth-century epic The Wallace, written roughly 170 years after the events it described. The poem is the document that hands the film both its mythic scale and its historical liberties.
How Mel Gibson came to direct
Wallace's script circulated in Hollywood for several years and was, at one point, attached to other directors. Mel Gibson read the script in 1993 with the intention of starring only; producer Alan Ladd Jr. and others convinced him to direct as well, with the understanding that the studio would only finance the production at scale if Gibson took both jobs. The Man Without a Face (1993), Gibson's directorial debut, had received respectful notices the year before. (See Mel Gibson.) (wikipedia)
"I was supposed to do other things at that time, and I was going to direct something else. I'd just done The Man Without a Face, and I read this script and went, this is the most amazing thing I've ever read. I have to be involved in this." — Mel Gibson, Cinephilia & Beyond (date n.d.)
Paramount and Twentieth Century Fox split the financing — Paramount taking U.S. rights, Fox taking international — to manage a budget that ran from an initial $50 million toward roughly $72 million by the end of post.
Shooting Scotland and Ireland
Principal photography began in June 1994 in Scotland — at Glen Nevis, in the Highlands, and at Fort William — and moved in mid-shoot to Ireland, where the Irish Defence Forces supplied roughly 1,600 reservists as battle extras. The arrangement gave Gibson the bodies he needed for Stirling and Falkirk; the trade was that the Irish reservists, in costume, played both English and Scottish soldiers depending on which side needed bulking out on a given day.
"We had something like sixteen hundred members of the Irish Defence Forces. They were brilliant. We had them charging one direction in the morning and the other direction in the afternoon, depending on which army we were short of." — Mel Gibson, Empire interview, archived (1995)
The Battle of Stirling was filmed at the Curragh Plain in County Kildare — flat ground that the screenplay's omission of the historical bridge made possible (see The Stirling Bridge Without a Bridge). The Falkirk sequence was filmed nearby on the Curragh and at Ballymore Eustace. The Highlands provided the village of Lanark, the Wallace farm exteriors, and the cottage where the secret wedding takes place.
The shoot ran approximately 105 days. John Toll (in Braveheart) shot the film on Panavision anamorphic with a palette of muted greens, slate grays, and Highland blues, occasionally lit by torch and candle (the wedding glade, the Tower cell). His work on Legends of the Fall the previous year had already established him as the era's premier landscape cinematographer; he won the Best Cinematography Oscar for Braveheart and became the first DP since 1949 to win the award two years in a row.
The makeup, the blue paint, and the rating
The blue face paint Wallace applies before the Stirling speech is the film's most-quoted visual choice and its most famous historical liberty.b24 Woad-painted warriors are associated with the Picts of late antiquity, not the late thirteenth century; the choice is symbolic, not period-accurate. The Best Makeup Oscar that year went to Peter Frampton, Paul Pattison, and Lois Burwell, in part for the blue paint and in part for Wallace's increasingly battered face through the second hour.
The film received an R rating from the MPAA. The scaffold sequenceb39 and the killing of Hesselrigb16 are the principal scenes the ratings board flagged; Gibson made no significant cuts to secure the R.
Editorial structure and runtime
Steven Rosenblum cut the film to 178 minutes for theatrical release, which is the version that screened in 1995 and the version on most home releases since. There is no longer cut in circulation; Gibson and Rosenblum have stated that what shipped was the cut they wanted. The 178-minute runtime made Braveheart the longest Best Picture winner since Out of Africa (1985) and the second-longest of the 1990s, behind Schindler's List.
"We didn't shoot a four-hour movie. We shot the movie that's on screen. There was no scene of Wallace at Stirling Bridge cut for time — there was no scene of Wallace at Stirling Bridge." — Steven Rosenblum, American Cinema Editors (2018, archived)
Release, reception, and the Oscars
Braveheart opened May 24, 1995 in the United States. Reviews were strong but split — Roger Ebert gave the film three and a half stars; Janet Maslin in the New York Times called it "an old-fashioned bloodbath" with "a tragic grandeur"; Pauline Kael, who had retired by 1995, did not weigh in publicly. The film grossed approximately $213 million worldwide on a $72 million budget.
At the 68th Academy Awards on March 25, 1996, Braveheart won five Oscars: Best Picture, Best Director (Gibson), Best Cinematography (Toll), Best Makeup, and Best Sound Effects Editing. It was nominated for ten total. Sense and Sensibility, Apollo 13, and Babe were the principal competitors. (See Five Best Picture and the 1995 Oscars.)