Mel Gibson

 In an October 2009 interview with The Daily Mail, Mel Gibson admitted that the film "Braveheart" (1995) was heavily fictitious, but claimed the changes had been made for dramatic purposes. He also admitted he had always felt he was at least a decade too old to play Wallace. However, Paramount Pictures would only finance the film if Gibson played the lead role, so he agreed.

"Some people said that in telling the story we messed up history. It doesn't bother me because what I'm giving you is a cinematic experience, and I think films are there first to entertain, then teach, then inspire. There probably were historical inaccuracies--quite a few. But maybe there weren't, who's to say, because there was very little history about the man. It wasn't necessarily authentic. In some of the stuff I read about him, he wasn't as nice as he was on film. We romanticized it a bit, but that's the language of film--you have to make it cinematically acceptable. Actually, he was a monster--he always smelled of smoke because he was always burning people's villages down. He was like what the Vikings called a 'berserker.' But we kind of shifted the balance a bit, because somebody's got to be the good guy and somebody the bad guy, and every story has its own point of view. That was our bias."

As Wallace is arriving to the battle of Stirling Bridge, one of the Scottish fighters recognizes him as Wallace, to which his buddy replies "Can't be. Not tall enough." This is a bit of an inside joke from the production team. The real William Wallace was a giant of a man, standing 6'5" tall during a time when the average man stood no more than about 5'8", and seven inches taller than Gibson at 5'10".

Gibson, a notorious jokester, directed some scenes in an Elmer Fudd voice and even yelled, "CUT!" during Murron's funeral scene by putting his arm around the actress playing her mother and hollering, "Will you put a sock in it!" This caused the actress to go from crying in character to break character and laugh. Gibson also intentionally started a false rumor that Sophie Marceau was the daughter of noted French mime Marcel Marceau.

One of the film's weary extras reportedly mistook one of Gibson's children on the set for an errand boy, and asked him to bring a cup of tea. Gibson was within earshot, and nodded and whispered to his son, "Go get it."