Randall Wallace Braveheart (1995)
Randall Wallace wrote the Braveheart screenplay on speculation, sold it after years of circulation, and was Oscar-nominated for it at the 68th Academy Awards. He is no relation to William Wallace, but the screenplay began with a question he asked a tour guide outside Edinburgh Castle in 1983 — who is this man?
Born in Tennessee, raised on Blind Harry's Wallace
Randall Wallace was born in Jackson, Tennessee in 1949 and grew up in Lynchburg, Virginia. He studied religion at Duke University with the intention of becoming a minister, then changed direction toward writing and screenwriting. He wrote television in the 1980s, including episodes of Knight Rider and MacGyver, before the Edinburgh research trip that produced Braveheart.
The primary written source for the screenplay was Blind Harry's The Wallace, a fifteenth-century epic poem written roughly 170 years after the events it described. The poem is the document that gives the film both its mythic scale and its largest historical liberties — the prima nocte plotline, the Wallace-Isabella romance, the framing of Bruce's father as a leper, and the visor-lift at Falkirk are all either invented or sharply reshaped from the poem rather than from the historical record (see Wallace and the Real History).
"Blind Harry's Wallace is a poem, not a history. I read it as a poem. The film is faithful to the poem, not to the chronicles. The chronicles tell a different story." — Randall Wallace, Vanity Fair (2020)
The Edinburgh research trip
Wallace has told the story of the trip in several interviews. He had traveled to Edinburgh in 1983 with his wife. The tour guide outside Edinburgh Castle pointed at the two statues at the entrance and named them: Robert the Bruce and William Wallace. Randall Wallace asked who Wallace had been; the guide, surprised that an American with the same name did not know, gave the short version. Wallace went home and started reading.
"I felt this strange responsibility — like, the man has my name and I don't know who he is. I started in the libraries and I ended in the National Library of Scotland." — Randall Wallace, Vanity Fair (2020)
The screenplay went through several drafts in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It circulated under various producer attachments before Alan Ladd Jr. and Mel Gibson took it up in 1993.
What he kept and what he invented
The screenplay's most consequential structural inventions, beyond what Blind Harry already provided, are: the framing of Murron's killing as an Inciting Incident tied directly to a private wedding the audience has just watched (the historical Wallace's wife Marion Braidfute — if she existed at all — does not appear in the chronicles, only in Blind Harry); the dispatch of Princess Isabelle as Longshanks's parley envoy (Isabella was nine years old in France in 1305 — see Isabella as Film Fiction); the visor-lift at Falkirk (Bruce was not present at Falkirk historically — see The Falkirk Visor-Lift); and the framing of the leper father as the articulator of noble realpolitik against Wallace's heart-is-free inheritance from Malcolm.
After Braveheart
Wallace wrote Pearl Harbor (2001), We Were Soldiers (2002, which he also directed), The Man in the Iron Mask (1998, which he also directed), Secretariat (2010, which he also directed), and Heaven Is for Real (2014, which he also directed). The directorial career has been lower-key than his screenwriting, but the films share a thematic spine: the public ordeal that tests faith. The connection back to Braveheart's post-midpoint approach — spend the body publicly, refuse the plea, choose the word — is direct.
"Every script I have written is a variation on the same question: what does a person do when there is no longer a way out, and what does that decision say about who they are." — Randall Wallace, The Christian Post (2014, archived)