Creative licence revoked

The most obvious lines of criticism are the film’s well documented historical inaccuracies, chief among them the timeline issues and the fact that kilts weren’t invented until 400 years after Wallace died.

These complaints Gibson is well practised in handling, and he tackles them head-on.

“Some of the stuff I read about that particular character, he wasn’t as nice as we saw him on screen. “

“We romanticized it a bit but that's the language of film - you have to make it work cinematically.

“He was a monster, he always smelled of smoke because he was always burning people’s villages and stuff down. 

“And he was quite fond of going into fortresses and garrisons and places all by himself.  He was like what the Vikings used to have, they used to call them berserkers.

“He was bigger than a lot of people, in those days, if you look at the size of things, and he wasn’t that big. Everyone thought he was a giant; he was probably no bigger than I was, but for those days, that was a big guy. 

“So he had his faults.” Gibson laughs. “We shifted the balance a bit, because somebody has to be the good guy and the bad guy.

"No it doesn't bother me. It’s the way the stories are told; they always have a bias and a point of view and that was our bias. 

"What I'm doing is giving you a cinematic experience first, educational second, inspirational third. 

"If you can have all those things, then great, you’re going in with the trifecta; to entertain, to teach and to inspire, but there are few good histories on Wallace and all of them have holes that you can’t fill.

"Unless you go to a source like the poems Blind Harry, which the writer used, and take the legend, which is probably already heightened and exaggerated, and fill in the spaces. 

"Yes there were probably historical inaccuracies, quite a few, but maybe they weren’t, who’s to say. It didn't bother me too much.

"I just want to have something you can look at that's really different and throw you into a different world, a different time and have you as much as possible believe it.

"I mean you'll never wholly believe it, because you're sitting in a dark room chewing on popcorn.  But if I can take you to another world and get you lost in it and tell you a story with it, then I’ve done my job.

If Gibson has ready answers for these criticisms, it’s harder to pin him down on some of the more volatile questions the themes in Braveheart raise.

It is these questions that 15 years later almost dominate the legacy of the film, remaining long after the fanfare has died down.

Next: Courting controversy