Leading from the front

With a three month film shoot a mammoth task for anyone occupying a single role, let alone the three roles Gibson was performing as director, producer and actor, there would have been a lot of sympathy among the crew had their star been less than enthusastic as the weeks rolled on, but this was not the case.

John Toll can’t help but extol praise on the multi-hyphenate. “We were constantly amazed by Mel’s ability to just keep going and do what a great job he did.

“I mean he truly was a morale booster to the crew, because we were watching him do three jobs, doing all of them incredibly well and we were just trying to keep up with him basically.”

“He was leading the charge and everybody was really running hard to keep with him and that's another reason the movie is as good as it is. 

“Everybody gave their absolute best, because we had a great example of how it should be done.”

Gibson is quick to pass the focus onto his crew. “Neither of us could keep up with David Tomlin though.  The guy was amazing and he used to drive you crazy because he was like an old drill sergeant.”

He was a British first AD and he’d been in the gig for like fifty years and he had the Guinness World Book of Records for like the most extras ever in a scene.  He decided to turn the cameras on a religious holiday in India for Gandhi.  And they had like three hundred thousand people.

He was funny and really energetic and he used to drive you crazy because just the salt of his experience over the years was like, he’d be right about stuff.

So you’d have to admit, ‘Goddammit that guy is right about that’. That film would still be shooting if it didn't have the organizational skills that this guy brought to the table. 

Toll agrees. “He’d be able to look at the storyboards and say, well you’d need three hundred people for the background of that shot and eight hundred for this shot and he was always right,

“And he’d always have them there when we showed up to shoot it, which saved us an enormous amount of time.  It actually allowed us to stay on schedule and actually make the movie.”

Gibson may not have been displaying mental signs of exhaustion, but his body was certainly showing the effects.

“I lost like fifteen pounds during the production, and I was eating everything in sight. We had these guys that used to feed us, I'm talking about piles of food every day at lunch time.

And I used to eat a plate of food that I swear to God was like everything they could get on the plate, and I would shovel it down in no time.

“It was the weather, because although it was shot in the summer it was still very cold and wet and rainy.

“I really enjoyed it, it’s a beautiful place to work, I mean just beautiful and it was perfect for anamorphic frame; those hills, that mountain, just the right height.

“You looked through the camera and it was just magic.”

“But we decided early on that it was like, it didn't matter whether it rained or shined or anything, we were just going to keep shooting. Which we did and (John Toll) still got an Oscar.”

Battling the elements and trying to keep thousands of cast and crew motivated, many shoots would have buckled, but the adverse weather would prove to have a major effect on the production.

Next: Weathering the storm