Mel Gibson Twenty years ago when he was mellow

                                           June 20000  By Philip Berk

We may not know what women want, but we know what Mel wants:

A Golden Globe!

He was pretty certain he’d win this year for What Women Want, but fate intervened — he came down with the flu and didn’t attend.

Lucky for him, because George Clooney was the surprise winner.

Mel of course is no stranger to Golden Globes or Oscars for that matter — he won two for Braveheart — but it’s always nice to get them. 

Not that 2000 was such a bad year for him.

His three movies — The Patriot, Chicken Run, and What Women Want, each grossed over $100 million, which isn’t exactly chicken feed.

What Women Want, alone, has grossed over $250 million world wide, and The Patriot too was a huge success overseas.

In it he played a father of seven who refused to allow his son to fight in the Revolutionary War.

Ironically when Mel was 12, his father took the family to Australia to avoid the draft, and even more ironic Mel himself is the father of seven.

But unlike the character in The Patriot, he is not a widower; in fact he’s still married to the woman he married 20 years ago.

Theirs is a marriage of opposites. She’s a nurse, introverted and a stay at home mom; he’s the life of the party, a mix of Mad Max and (one of) the Three Stooges.

So how does he keep their marriage fresh? I asked him. 

“As you get older, you learn to do the cool stuff that she gets a kick out of, and you enjoy her enjoyment of it.”

Such as?

“For her last birthday, I got a guy in there and we got remarried in front of the children. That was kind of a cool moment. It was like a big grin on her face, and she didn’t know it was coming either.  I said, ‘Put  a nice dress on,’ and she was like. What? I said, ‘Put a nice dress on,’ and she went up upstairs. I stuck some necklace on her and said, ‘Come on down, gave her a bunch of flowers, and the guy was there with the book, and so we did it again. So it was cool and it sort of really gave us a kick too. It gave the kids a kick. They were all standing around laughing and acting stupid, but they liked it.”

In What Women Want he plays a Chauvinistic ad executive who finds out what women want by stepping in their shoes

Does he also have an answer?

“No one does. Sigmund Freud spent his entire life trying to answer that question, and he never succeeded. Of course there’s a pat answer and that is that there are as many wants as there are women. I’ve been trying to figure out for the last twenty years what one woman wants, and I’ve just started scratching the surface. The best I can come up with is, listen a little bit, and check in regularly, like ‘How you doing? ‘How you feeling? ‘I seem to sense that you’re a little quiet. Is there anything wrong?’ She’ll usually say ‘No,’ and you go, ‘Good,’ and you walk away, but you go, ‘I hate to be boring and repetitive but I  sense something is wrong. I want to know. Any thing wrong?’ ‘No.’ ‘Good. Look I know there is something bugging you, and you’ll feel much better if you come out and tell me what it is, and maybe I can help.’ ‘Yes there is something.’ That’s the pattern and you’ve got to do that. That’s very necessary.”  

Does it bother him that his wife is the one who has to stay home and take care of the kids?

“Not at all. She likes it. She has never wanted her career. She loves children and bringing them up, and she has help too. It’s not that she’s slaving away someplace. We have the means whereby she has assistance and sometimes its me assisting and sometimes it’s somebody who’s hired. Somebody’s got to bring home the bacon. I’m just glad I can provide her with the luxury of not having to go to work.”

As a Catholic, how important is religion in his life? 

“Look, I’m not Job walking around. I have just as many character flaws and weaknesses as anybody else. If I were to follow my natural inclinations, I’d probably be like some Viking. I’d probably go into convents and chop people up, but it’s just not socially acceptable, and the Karmic retribution would be a bitch. So there needs to be something higher to aspire to, something better out there.  And if there’s not, then we might as well just blow our brains out.”

Is that what he teaches his kids?

“I was raised with that idea, and I try to instill it in my children. They have to live in the real world, but they have to conquer self, which means conquer their own ego. And it’s a raging monster, the ego, it’s your biggest enemy. You try to conquer that, but you’re never going to get the whole piece because we’re imperfect and all we can do is make a little headway.”

Knowing what men want, what advice did he give his daughter?

“Look, we live in a wild world but hey, I’m not going to be around to watch all the time. One has to instill some kind of code, give them some sort of survival skill to go out in the world and do their level best to get by. And the rest is up to them. I remember she came to me when she was thirteen asking me about boys. Is it wrong to kiss them? It’s a pretty natural sort of impulse, I told her, but you got to be careful because at that age boys see things different to you. I just gave her a warning flag, and she had to take it from there.”

Is it true that his family emigrated to Australia to avoid the Vietnam War?

“That was only a part of it. There were other reasons. My dad had finished his job here, his mother was from Australia, and he wanted a new beginning somewhere else. The economy there was great. He had done a lot of reading. He’d been to war, he signed up for WWl, but he wasn’t a big fan. He felt at least if we go to Australia they won’t draft you when you’re 18; they’ll have to wait until you’re 20. So you can get a couple of more years of living out of it.”

Is that the best advice his dad ever gave him?

“I’ll tell you what my dad told me. Growing up I was a bit of a cut up and he was worried about me. He said to me, ‘Hey if you ever have to go to prison, don’t go.’ I’m like, what do you mean, Don’t go? And he said whatever you have to do, do it, but do not go to prison. And I’m like, thanks Dad. It was the weirdest advise, and to this day I laugh about it.”

He appears to be light and cheerful, but does he have a dark side?

“All of us have something, some kind of thing we’re handling, trying to get away from. It takes a lot of different forms. Some people are kleptomaniacs, they can’t help themselves. They have a sense of right and wrong, but still they do it. That’s part of the human condition. We all have dark places. Who hasn’t had a dark night of the soul? You know, the one where you want to go to sleep but you can’t. You get to those low places in your life.”

Does he have a feminine side?

“Sure we’ve all got that, but I think that’s a function of being masculine. When I was younger a Christian Brother taught me the difference between boys and girls. ‘Girls play at sex to get love. Boys play at love to get sex.’ When you’re younger that’s kind of right. Girls really just want to hold hands, but somewhere along the way something kind of happens, and the two of them come together. You take a piece from the other side and it helps.”

Is it true that he encourages his kids to handle guns? 

“Yeah, all my kids get a Uzi on their twelfth birthday.”

So it’s not true? 

“We’ve gone to the firing range and pumped a few rounds into some targets and stuff, but  we’re not a gun totin’ family. 

Is he in favor of gun control?

“That’s a difficult question. Guns are definitely abused — guns will always be in the wrong hands whether or not they are controlled, but that’s really not the crux of the issue. The right to bear arms has always been a good thing, and it’s made this country good, it’s made it what it is. But it’s also been a very bad thing because people are killing one another, and kids are going to schools and blasting their friend’s brains all over the the walls, and that’s horrible. So maybe we should ban them. It’s a tough question I need to look into it a bit more.”

As the father of seven, whose ages range from 18 months to 20, can he control the  shows they watch or the movies they see? 

“I try to to, but at a certain age they’re on their own, and hopefully they’ll understand that certain things are not healthy for them. If I tell them to do something all I can hope is they listen to me. Generally I’d say, No you’re not to go to R-rated movies, but hey, I’d let them see some R-rated movies if I thought they were appropriate. It depends on their ages and who they are. It’s a difficult question to answer. I try to protect them, and that means protect them from all sorts of things, but at a certain point, they’re going to be exposed to everything. It comes oozing through the key holes, and the best you can do is equip them with some kind of rudimentary knowledge or give them an idea of what to do when things afflict them. I don’t have the answers. I’m learning the game myself”

Is censorship the answer?

“For a while maybe, but they’re going to go out and they’re going to play up. They’re going to experiment and do things, goof off, and you’re going to find out about it because that’s the way it is. So you have to deal with it when it happens, hopefully you can head it off before it happens.  And that takes paying attention to them. As long as they know they can keep coming home —  because if they do meddle in things that are not healthy for them, the signs will be there —  eventually they come home with some kind of pain, and hopefully you’re there to help them through it,  maybe extract some kind of lesson from it. But look, I’m no shining example. I’m just trying to get by.”