Tetragrammaton with Rick Rubin - Randall Wallace

Episode Date: August 27, 2025

Randall Wallace is a screenwriter, director, and producer. He is best known for writing the screenplay of "Braveheart", later making his directorial debut with "The Man in the Iron Mask", and going on to direct "We Were Soldiers", "Secretariat", and "Heaven Is for Real". Braveheart became a critically and commercially successful film, winning multiple Academy Awards and earning Wallace a nomination for Best Original Screenplay. He is the author of Living the Braveheart Life, part-autobiography and part-masterclass, in which he shares the personal journey behind writing Braveheart and explores the life lessons and archetypes within the story that continue to inspire audiences.  ------ Thank you to the sponsors that fuel our podcast and our team: Squarespace https://squarespace.com/tetra Use code 'TETRA' ------ LMNT Electrolytes https://drinklmnt.com/tetra Use code 'TETRA' ------ Athletic Nicotine https://www.athleticnicotine.com/tetra Use code 'TETRA' ------ Sign up to receive Tetragrammaton Transmissions https://www.tetragrammaton.com/join-newsletter

Tetrogrammitan Tetracket. My wife, her mother was from a deeply Her mother was from a deeply Mormon family, and her father was Irish Catholic and war hero. And when they decided to get married, both sides of the family refused to go to the wedding unless the other person would convert. So neither one of them ever went, you know, back to church again. It was like, okay, then we're done with y'all. If that's how y'all are going to be, we're done.

But she, because of her Mormon ancestors, knew her heritage. And I didn't know any of mine. I had heard that the name Wallace came from Scotland, but that was it. And a cousin of mine had been in the Army and had visited Scotland, and he had come back with it. He said, there were Wallace that's in Scotland. So my wife was a dancer, an amazing dancer, and she didn't really want to have children, which we hadn't had that discussion, but I really wanted to. to have children. So we're trying to work that out. And she loved to travel. And she said in her

very sort of Irish way, okay, if you get me pregnant, you've got to take me to Europe. If you'll agree to do that. And we were like really poor. I mean, we didn't have any money. So I go, done. We'll figure out a way. Get pregnant. She's four months pregnant. We go to London. and we're just planning to, you know, go around Europe. And I said, well, you know, while we're here, Scotland's not that far away. Maybe we could run up to Scotland, and I could see, because I had it in the back of my mind, I'd like to know. So we go up to Edinburgh, and we walk into Edinburgh Castle, and there, at the entrance, our statues. And one is Robert de Bruce.

And I knew of Robert the Bruce, because I loved history, and I knew he was Scotland's greatest king. and the other one's Wallace Wallace That's my name That's my name And there's a little guy there Remember of the Black Watch And he looks like he's about 5 foot 4

And he's got on a kilt And it looks just tough as pine knot And I say, excuse me This Wallace Who is this Wallace? And he goes, Oh, is our greatest hero And I go, greatest hero

And I'm elbow on the pregnant wife Greatest Hero So, honey. Greatest hero. And so then, so then I go. Well, I know Robert de Bruce fought the English was William Wallace an ally of his in fighting English. And this guy goes, no one will ever know for sure, which of course for a writer is the magic words. But our legends say that Robert the Bruce may have been one of the conspirators who betrayed

William Wallace into the hands of the English to clear the way for himself to become the king. Wow. And Rick, exactly. That's all you needed to hear. That was lightning bolt. I went, that might be the biggest story I've ever heard because it was like being told, what if there was something so noble, powerful in the way William Wallace lived and died that it transformed Robert the Bruce from being someone who would betray the country's greatest hero into becoming the country's greatest king. And I thought that's like hearing St. Peter and Judas were the same person, which in a sense is St. Peter's story.

But what if you go from the worst that you can imagine to being transformed? and I've always been fascinated about what's the moment of transformation? When someone quits hating, when someone stops doing something that's self-destructive, what happened at that moment where the tide turned? So this was an amazing thing, but I've got a baby on the way, and I'm really struggling for money. And I also didn't feel like I was ready to write it yet. It was 10 years before I sat down to do it.

Now, get back to Virginia on the way. Did you start doing research right away from that moment? No. I'll tell you a spooky story with this. I looked in the Encyclopedia of Britannica, and it said there are no reliable, really historical records about William Wallace, other than we have an idea that he lived, we have an idea that he died. But what we do know is that his stories have inspired his people for centuries.

enough for there to be the statue next to the greatest king. Exactly. So clearly there's something. Yes, exactly. But was he like written out of history? You know, there certainly was an aspect of this of when you get disemboweled and drawn and quartered and your pieces are sent to the four corners of the kingdom and say, don't be like this guy.

There's a suppression of his history. And I've met people that say they're descendants of William Wallace. I fully believe I am, and I'll tell you why in a moment, but nobody could prove they are because he was an outlaw. His children would have been killed too. So if you were a child of his, you would have kept that quiet. Understood. So I looked up what I could, but there was really nothing to find about him.

So cut to 10 years later, I started to work for Steve Cannell. Steve Cannell created the Rockford Files and Beretta, a lot of great TV shows. Yes, yeah. What was it like in those days of television? Well, Cannell was amazing, Rick. I met him through Mike Post, who's probably the most successful television composer of all time. Because Mike did all of Cannell shows. He did Steve Botchco shows.

I think he does Law and Order and all those. I mean, just his body of work is really amazing. How did you know Post? Okay, this is the greatest story. When people say, you know, how do you go from a kind of a frustrated, broken, emotionally and financially broken singer-songwriter who packs up all the stuff he owns in Nashville and into a Toyota and drives here knowing nobody? And how do you end up in the movie business? It's like, okay. So I always worked out a lot because it made me feel.

Yeah. Endorphins. Yes. And I felt that I was growing rather than declining. And that was crucial for me. When I was in Nashville, I was working maybe 100 hours a week at this place called Opryland. And I really loved it. And that was one of the reason I spent so many. But when I got signed at Tree Music, which is a big BMI publisher in those days, then I had a songwriting contract. I would get up at 4.30 every morning and write a song every day. So I had that routine sort of thing going on. Do a lot of songwriters that you know work that way? I don't think they get up early necessarily,

but in Nashville there is a big thing like Tom T. Hall said, you've got to write a song every day. And I've heard stories from, I mean, of course, you know McCartney directly. I know guys that know him, but they'll say if he sits down to piano to write, he'll write four or five songs before he stands up. They won't be all finished. He does a thing. And I love it in your book.

You talk about the difference between my song could be better and my song, my song isn't any good. Or there's two different ways of looking. Absolutely. I wanted to develop that discipline and that point of view of I had to plunge in and if it was a bad idea, get the bad ideas out of the way. but you don't know if it's a bad idea until you let it go. Absolutely. So I just wanted to get the movement going. And that always worked for me.

People would say, you know, what do you do when you have writers block? And I go, I don't know, I've never had it. Never had it. Because I've always given myself permission to look at what I've done and say, that's going to lead me somewhere. But to get there, it's like a sailboat to me. Unless it's moving, you can't steer it. Yeah.

You're just drifting. So I always wanted to be moving. So I had a time where my income was just doubling every year, and my career in TV was really taking off. And the kind of discipline that I had to get up early in the morning, get it done. There are tight deadlines in TV writing? Yeah. TV is the thing that I admire about it, and yet the liability in it,

is that Tuesday comes every seven days. and you're running in front of a train. So you have to do it as well as you can do it in the time rather than as well as you can do it. Like in features, you kind of get to say... Yeah, it's ready when it's ready. But in TV, it's ready when it's Tuesday. That's exactly it.

Yeah. That's exactly. And so... And were there many writers working on the same shows? How did it work? Tell me the structure. They would have a team of riders, but the teams were really small.

And you end up with kind of... Like you have a team of horses, eight horses there. There's one or two of them that are pulling all the weight. There's one guiding it, and there's probably one of them that's doing the main pulling. And the others are just kind of along for the ride. There's a lot of that in TV. And Cantill recognize that, you know, my attitude was, I may not be the fastest, but if you give me the ball, I will score a touchdown or I will die.

That's just, that was, and also there's kind of, there's an exuberance about, like a guy like Cannell, he wrote them himself. And Cannell was dyslexic, profoundly dyslexic. So when he was in school, he was at the bottom of every single class. And one of my sons is dyslexic. As a thing, the most stunningly brilliant creator of stories, they just spin out like breathing. And Cattle was like that too. But then he found he just, he loved writing.

And Steve and I lit up with each other. And I got promoted really fast. He said it was the fastest he'd ever promoted anybody. But I went from like walking in the door to executive producer in less than a year. Wow. And I was suddenly making a lot of money. Then there was a writer strike.

And it went on and on. I had just, because I had a long-term contract with Cannell, which guaranteed me a really solid income for the next several years. And I was his protege. He had many protégés, by the way, but they called me his fair-haired goy. Because, you know, I was like, Steve was a jock, and, you know, I was, you know, this southern guy, and so we enjoyed each other. So the writer strike goes on and on. I had just bought a new home, and because I had a contract that I thought made me secure, and I had been really frugal with my savings, but I spent my savings to remodel the house

because it was like, one time, we're going to make this for the boys to grow up in. And the strike goes on and on, and all my savings are gone. Wow. And I got sideways with Steve, you know, as a mentor. protégé thing, if the protege starts to spin upward some, like I had my first novels were being published and Steve wanted novels. And I was also, I had made a feature deal to write a feature screenplay, which nothing ever came of that, but I had made the, because I was always kind of looking down the line. And Steve and I got sideways a bit, and the strike

ended and Steve's company was starting to unravel so you think it was based on the strike did that impact that company I think it was a combination of things the strike did not help but in a certain way strikes helped Steve because he was so facile the last several months I worked for Steve the two of us together in eight weeks did six hours of television which was just unheard of writing them all, producing them all, editing them, the whole thing was like, and it's just the two of us. So that's the thing when you get into that crunch time, you don't have time to be developing other writers or have them write a script that may not come in and rewriting it is harder than just doing it yourself the first time.

That's why it's just a ton of pressure in TV. In any case, the strike ended and Steve's company started to, unravel and they weren't offering me a contract and I decided I would leave and I went down I was packing up my office and my son Andrew were packing up my office and he says daddy how are we going to eat and the weird thing is that I was wondering that yeah and I said down and put him in my lap and said well son I spent the last several years doing really well making money and making Mr. Cannell more money and making him more famous, but nobody knows us. And what I'm going to try to do is make us more money and let people know who I am.

And he went, great, sounds good. Popped off my lap, but I was knotted up, right? And I got to the point that I couldn't write. Wow. Not that I didn't know what I wanted to write, but my hands were shaken and my stomach was nodded and I couldn't eat. And I got down on my knees, and I said a prayer. When my father had his breakdown, I was the same age as my sons were.

And so what I prayed was, what matters to me right now is my sons. Yeah. And I know my wife's going to be okay. She's smart. She's tough. I'll be okay no matter what I can. I can be a janitor, honestly. My pride is not such that I couldn't get something out of that.

But I don't want them to see me come apart. Maybe they don't need to grow up in this house in Encino with five bedrooms and a tennis court and swimming pool and German cars in the driveway. Maybe they'll be better men if they live in a little house with no end or plumbing. And if that's what you want for them, then please, bring that on and help me bear it. But if I go down in this fight, let me go down with my flag flying,

not on my knees to Hollywood, not worshipping what they tell me they want. Let me do the story that I want my sons to see. And I stood up and walked back without any more shaking without any more knots and sit down and that led directly to brave home. And did you sell everything and move to a small house? No, I was able to get through,

I was able to hang on just by our fingernails. It worked out. Until I had a big script sale with a story called Love and Honor, and then Braveheart. And so suddenly it's like, you know, I was doing the stories like I wanted to do. So you have the idea for Braveheart on a trip to Scotland, and now 10 years later, what happens next with Braveheart?

So I started by, I think you'll love this. I'm deep into your book, by the way. I know that this is like right in line with what you're thinking. I've written multiple drafts of Braveheart without having any historical research at all. And none seems to exist. Even Winston Churchill wrote about William Wallace, but he said the same thing as the encyclopedia

that his legends... We don't really know. We don't really know. So I write this story. And I don't know if they have... glass in the windows or glass hasn't been a gun or if they're using crossbows or long bows I don't care if I was on a battlefield outnumbered what would I need to hear from the leader to make me stay and that's how I was writing the story and I knew about Robert

the Bruce and I'm imagining the back and forth and all of those things so in other words I wrote the why of the story and the why told me the how So I'm about eight drafts into this, and I just thought, well, maybe it's time if I looked up some of these facts to know. So I go to the library, and they have in those days the Dewey Decimal System, the card catalog is still, you know, functioning. And I find three books on William Wallace, and they're all at UCLA. And two of them are commentaries, but one of them purports to be. like a diary of somebody who is with William Wallace. So there's this kid coming to the house

who goes to UCLA, comes on his motorcycle with a backpack and a kickboard and swimming implements in his backpack and his great kid. And I said to him, hey, would you mind going by the UCLA library and, you know, I've got the numbers? And he comes back the next Tuesday

and he says, well, I got the two, but I don't think they're going to be, you know, much help. They're in Latin and they're like... But there's this other one, and it's in what's called deep storage. It's like a bin of books that have never been checked out, and they're slated for destruction. So they put them in deep storage, and then nobody asked for them in the next five years or something.

They're just destroyed. So he said, this one is in that, and they can't find it easily. They have to dig through the whole bin to find it, but I put in the request in him. So a couple weeks later, he comes in and he's got this book. Rick, I should have brought it today. This book is 270 years old.

I mean, at Duke, and I'm sure at UCLA, if they think it's a valuable book, there's a rare book room, and you go in and you put on white gloves, and you can, but he's got in his backpack and the thing. It's 270 years old. And they were going to destroy it. They were going to destroy it. Yeah. It's in rhyming Scott's verse.

because a guy named Blind Harry, who was not blind. He was the Rick Flair of Scotland, isn't it? He would go through the Highlands and recite this epic poem. And it was like 200 pages of rhyming Scottish couplets. And it tells the story of William Locke. And that's how they remembered it. That's how he remembered it through the rhyme. And it has this really elaborate foreword of about 30 pages.

But the pages are like ash. So I read this thing, and it's got incidents that are in my screenplay. Amazing. The thing where William Wallace encounters a guy on the battlefield and he tears his helmet off to kill him and sees it's Robert de Bruce, that was in my screenplay, and that was in this blind-haired thing. And I'm like, okay, this is... This has gotten really spooky.

All right. It just confirmed for me that I was on the right path. It also made me feel that I was a descendant, even though I know this is all. You can say it's superstitious stuff, of course, but cut to we're filming Braveheart. We're on the field, filming the Battle of Sterling, and there's an EPK, you know, promotional crew there. And they, the writer is just like furniture. But they go, hey, did you do some research? You know, they were asking me the trip on.

And I said, well, you know, there wasn't really much research to do. But I mentioned this book. Cut to two years later, the movie's about to come out. And they say, you know, we'll put together our final press kit for this. And you tell the story about this old book. Could we come to your house and film you reading it? So I'd go, sure. And so I get the book.

I go up to this restaurant on Ventura Boulevard where I like to have lunch and write and make notes and think. And I open the book thinking, I'll find which passage I want to read to them. At the start of the actual text of the story, like after the preface, it talks about William Wallace and this man named Hamilton and Mr. Blair, who was supposedly William Wallace's personal chaplain. the body of the story starts and there's a handwritten inscription and I'm sitting there and I hadn't ever read this inscription because I was so in awe of the book

and the inscription says this book is the gift of Lindsay Dove to the Tuttle's London May 1795 and I look at that and I go

it's 1995 it's 200 hundred years to the year, May 24th, the day the movie opens. Wow. What? So much of today's life happens on the web. Squarespace is your home base for building your dream presence in an online world. Designing a website is easy, using one of Squarespace's best-in-class templates.

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Well, I skipped that part. I write the script. I give it to Rebecca Pollock, married to Hutch, Parker, Becky. and Becky is Sydney's, Sidney Pollack's daughter, and she got her dad's brilliance. I had written this story, Love and Honor, which is about the American Revolution, and a young cavalryman is sent to the Russia of Catherine the Great to save the American Revolution. So it's an epic, romantic adventure. And Becky had tried to buy it, and her company hadn't had the money,

but she had put in to Dave Wordshaftor, it was my agent then. I went his next two scripts sight unseen, and we didn't even negotiate that deal. It was for minimum, by the way, but if anybody believes in me that much, I mean, I haven't known anybody would buy anything, so great. So I go into Becky, and she said, what do you want to write? And I said, well, there's this guy named William Wallace, and he ends up, like disemboweled and beheaded, but here's what he did.

Rick, I don't think it took five minutes. And she goes, my God, go right that. It's really the strangest thing to jump head. A president of a studio called me after he saw Braveheart and he said, man, this is the greatest movie I've ever seen. Now, don't start thinking you know everything. And I said, thank you for saying that

With all due respect, if I had come into your office three years ago and said, I've got a story about a guy that runs around the Scottish Highlands in a kilt, and the end he gets disemboweled and quartered and beheaded, in the end of the movie, would you have thrown me out of your office? And he goes, yeah, I go, what lesson am I supposed to draw from that? Yeah. I mean, it's an honest question. Who am I supposed to listen to?

Yeah. So Becky became a big champion. And when I turned in the draft, I left out Robert the Bruce of my first draft because the script was going really long. So I thought, well, he's not really the main character. And Becky read the script and went, I love, love, love this. And she spent like 30 minutes telling me what she loved. Then she said, you know, you'd mention this guy, Robert de Bruce, and maybe you ought to think about putting that in. In the gentlest part. And I couldn't wait to get back and get to work as opposed to the people that go, okay, it's good. Now, here are all the things wrong. And you spend an hour telling you what's wrong in two seconds saying they like it. You don't believe them. Becky was the opposite. So I had Robert

Bruce back end of the story, gave it to her, she called and said, strangest things happening. When we put out a script for all the executives to read, their assistants read it first and they're in kind of a big kind of bullpen area and they're all sitting there crying all of them said I've never seen anything like it and we think we've got something here and he said do you want to play William Wallace and I say the only one I can think of is Mel Gibson because he's based on what he had the masculinity and the edge and the vulnerability the legitimate what did you seen him in that was the example. Lethal weapon was amazing in that.

He had this wild, crazy, like, almost fun streak. And he had this tortured vulnerability, like, I don't know if I can go on. And he really played those things with enormous depth. And then he had played Hamlet, and then he had done a movie called Man Without a Face. so those things showed me that he had ambitions beyond just being the current action movie guy so we send it to him we don't hear we don't hear and then my agent calls me and says are you sitting down and I go no he goes well you might want to sit down Mel Gibson wants to have breakfast with you tomorrow morning oh okay now it's not

that I wasn't excited, but I've met enough stars from music and other things. When I was at Opryland in Nashville, I met a bunch of country music stars, and they're people. But I also know the valence that exists when you're around a person who could just buy a notion, you know, just saying, you know, I've always liked Vikings or something. And then you launched $30 million of development because every studio is trying to put, together a movie to get this guy and how people start to try to say what does he want and try to say what they think he wants rather than what they believe yeah so i walked around the neighborhood and i prayed sincerely please don't let me kiss his ass yeah i mean those were the

words yeah because i'll have no value to myself and no value to anybody no value to him yeah so we walk in and we sit down at the four seasons and uh we're sitting there It's Mel, it's his partner, it's the chairman of the studio, it's Becky, and it's me, and Mel. And he's read the script. He's read the script. And he breaks the ice by saying, so William Wallace, Randall Wallace, are you guys related? That was the opening. And I go, well, it's sort of like saying, you know, something causes cancer.

You can't prove it, you know. And I go, I can't prove I am, but nobody can prove I'm not. And he kind of laughed. Rick, in like two minutes, I'm like a tent revivalist, and I'm leaning across the table, and I'm pounding on it with my fist. And I go, listen, here's how it is, the bottom line. Every movie has an underlying message. Whether it wants to or not, it has a message.

And the message of most movies is the guy with the biggest biceps, and the cutest dimples and the greenest money and the gluest eyes, he gets the girl. That's what most movies say. This movie says, if you're faithful to your heart, even if they cut it out of your chest, you prevail. That's the movie I want to make. That's the movie I want my sons to see.

You want to make that movie, you need to say yes. You don't want to make that movie, you need to say no. And everybody at the table kind of sat back like, but Mel lean forward and it's like this dude's in and nobody says

anything else it's like well I guess we better get back to the office and everybody's like that and they all get and we're standing outside in the parking lot

and nobody's looking at me and nobody's talking to me and I get my car comes and driving away my cell phone rings and my agents what the hell did you say and I start

well Somebody had to talk. And he goes, no, no. The chairman of the studio, Alan Ladd, just called me and said, I want to double Randy Wallace's deal. And I want to make the next movie that he writes for us. He directs. That's incredible.

Just from that first meeting. From that meeting. So the two scripts that I did for them, that studio, were Braveheart and Man in the Iron Mask. Wow. And I did them both for scale. It's like minimum. But the next script I wrote, Pearl Heart.

Arbor set a record for an original script sale, so you know how the, it's weird. What you're getting paid is not like specifically tied to the thing. So Mel, I knew he was, but he wouldn't say yes. And it went on and on a month after month, and he didn't say yes. So I said, okay, I'm going to go to Scotland. What do you think that was about him not saying yes? He wanted to direct. Had he ever directed before?

He had directed one thing, and that was Man Without a Face, which was a tiny little movie, but he really wanted to direct this, but he didn't want to say that. So he was on the fence like, he's not saying no, but he's not saying yes, because he wanted to get to the place where he felt like he could make the argument to direct it. And, you know, the studio was wanting a big budget movie, but a big budget director. You know, can we get Ridley Scott? can we get someone like that yeah so nothing's happening and i decided okay if mel doesn't do it instead of getting 80 million dollars i might get 80 000 but i'm not going to not do this movie even if even if the battle scenes have to be just recounted over a campfire yeah i'm gonna make this movie so i go to scotland and i find the guys who are battle reenactors on uh highlander

broken noses after they yelled cut. Oh, I knew these were the guys. And I called them, the British dialtonin. And the guy's name, who is the leader of the clan Wallace, is S-E-O-R-A-S-Wallis. So I was unfamiliar with the name, so I called and said, and somebody goes, loo! And I said, may I speak with C-O-R-R-R-Wallis? And I go, who?

And I go, Cirrus Wallace? Shut us. You'd be looking for shut us. Oh, yeah, shut us. And he comes, hello. And I go, shut us, my name is Randall Wallace, and I've written a story about William Wallace. And I have a movie studio that wants to, I didn't mention Mel, a movie studio that wants to do it. And I'd like to come to Scotland and talk with you.

I thought the line had gone dead and go, hello, hello? And he goes, I can't speak. I'm standing up on the back of my fucking neck. And so I go, well, then I go, he goes, what would you like? And I said, well, I want to come and tour the highlands and take pictures. He goes, oh, I. I said, and I like to see you fight. He goes, oh, I.

And I said, well, okay, I guess I'll see you in two weeks. And he goes, ah, Randall. And I go, yeah? He says, if anybody needs to die for this to happen, it's no problem. And Rick, he wasn't kidding. Yeah, you went into the movie. I went into the movie. So I'd go to Scotland with my life.

We tour the Highlands. We filmed these guys fighting. I went and bought a Nikon camera with a bunch of lenses to learn photography, which I knew nothing about, really. And I made a slideshow. And I came back and I showed it to Alan Ladd and Becky. And Laddie goes, I want you to show this to Mel.

So I went and went to Mel's office. We sat down and I showed in the pictures and laid them all out on the thing and I told him about these crazy battle reenactors and he had long pods and he looked down at the pictures and he didn't look up at me, he just looked down at his pictures

and he went, I want to direct this. What would you think of that? And I went, I'm all in, man. Be there right there, whatever it takes. Full support. And then he calls the studio and says, I want to direct. And then was a studio open to that right away, or it took time?

They were open to that, but Mel wanted to direct and not star in, because he really wanted to establish himself as a director. I see. So he was saying, I'll direct it, but I won't star in. And they were saying, you can direct it, but you must also start. And they worked that out finally, and that, of course, I don't think it could have possibly worked out better. L-M-N-T, Element Electrolites.

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Minerals are the stuff of life. So visit drinklm-n-tie.com slash tetra. And stay salty. With Element Electrolite, L-M-N-T. What do you remember about the shoot? Were you there for the majority of the shoot? I was there for some, and there was a real time when I felt left out.

I felt like my father felt on my sister's wedding day. you know they were taking pictures and stuff and my sister there with with her new husband and my father said sort of under his breath sort of to me and sort of not he said she's got a another shoulder to cry on now and I thought it was one of the most revealing things of father's love and how you have to let your children go and all of that and I felt like man I people would come in and ask a question and I would do what and then I not your job Not my job. I was got to do it.

And we were having dinner in London just Mel and me. And this was really funny too for me, Rick, because Mel was the biggest star on earth at that point. And I was a totally unknown screenwriter. It's my first movie being made. And it was really funny because in England, people would come up to you at a table and go, oh, excuse me, Mr. Gibson, I'm so terribly sorry.

But my niece is just terribly fancy. you could you possibly give me an autograph and they would do that in Scotland a guy would come up with his wife and go hey Mel kiss my wife and the woman would grab him like and you know like it was so it's really different and we've just gotten back from Scotland and we're talking and Mel's telling me about we're trying to cast a certain role he says I've found exactly the right guy to play it's a key role I don't want to say which one because I don't say which actor but he said And I found a perfect guy. He has no idea who he is.

This guy's a terrible human being. He would go, why would you want him in the cast? And Mel said, look, Randy, and I think, Mel's super smart. And I think he could sense what I was feeling about everything. And he said, the truth is, writers write, directors direct, actors act, from their essence as a human being. And I want to cast people who are in their essence, the character I want them to play.

And he said, this script is you. It is just bold and its heart is right out there. It is you. You gave your all to it. I'm going to give my all to it in the same way. From the time that he agreed to do it until the shoot, did you have a lot of discussion with him? Did it evolve much?

or was it basically the script that he read, that's what got shot? It's really funny, Rick. It went through a journey. I'd done a lot of TV, but TV is really different from a feature. And it was so wonderful to have this experience. We sit down, and the first thing he asked me

in our first sort of story discussion was, tell me everything you wrote and took out. That's interesting. A lot of great sort of thing. Yeah. And we went through a couple of things where he was asking if it was possible for me to combine a couple of scenes. There were, for example, the scenes in which his wife appears to him in dreams were really evocative to me. And I'd put two of them, two dream sequences, actually three dream sequences, before the final thing when he sees her as he's being executed.

which to me was one of the best moments. When I wrote that, I wept. I didn't see that coming. Yeah. As the writer, you didn't see it coming. As the writer, I did not see it coming. I was like, I got to the end and I thought the axe is dropping toward his throat. I can't show the axe hit his throat.

So what do we show the audience at this point? And I thought, well, what would he look at the last moment of his life? Oh, he knows his friends would be there. So I wrote, in the last moment of his life, William Morris turns his eyes to Hamish and Stephen. And between them, she is. I hadn't seen it coming. And I'm bald. I sat at my desk and I'm bald.

And I got to jump ahead for a minute. A few years back, I was in Austin, Texas, doing a charity screening of Braveheart. And I hadn't seen it screened in a long time. And at the end of it, I stood up on stage, walked up to do a Q&A. And the first person who stood up, a 19-year-old girl, woman, and she stands up and she says, Mr. Wallace, I don't have a question. I just want to tell you something. My fiancé died six months ago.

And before he died, he told me to watch Braveheart. So I would understand the way he loved me. So like, okay. It probably took me five minutes before I could talk again. And just that sense of, I knew that for me it was, it was all of that. And I believed that it was that for Mel too, but you don't know. You don't know as you go through the thing and there are some ideas that feel out of place and there's some that feel like they're extending it.

So there's a process, I think. I think it would be fair to say for Mel if I think of the times when I've had a script that's come to me and maybe I'm rewriting but that I'm directing is you've got to take it all apart and put it back together again. And the fact that you've taken it all apart doesn't mean it's a different thing when you put it back together. But in the end, it's probably more verbatim

than anything I've ever done, including the things I've directed myself. Do you think that by taking things apart, you get to understand them better? I don't know because there's a way of understanding is not the knowledge of every detail. Like when you're directing or when you're writing, what's the story about?

So every decision is in service to the bigger goal? That's what I think, yes. Now, having said that, the paradox is you find one twist in something that illuminates all these other things. Like when I'm starting to write a story, I'm just looking for any place where I find fire. I'm just writing a scene until a character says something I didn't, I never said before. Yeah. Surprises me with what they do. And all of a sudden, like, I'm, well, how is it that this character that I'm,

writing just surprised me and said something I didn't see. Or Muran appears at William Wallace's death. Where did that come from? Now, he's inherent and all these other things. Yes and no. I didn't see it coming. Yeah. You'd think I would have seen it. If anyone would have seen it. If anyone would have seen it. Yeah. You mentioned writing in a restaurant earlier. Is that a common practice yeah tell me about it so there are many different seasons in a day of writing i like to get up early and and get pages done like when i'm doing that and i've kind of started the day out that way and it's a very isolated way of working i like to go to a restaurant and sit with hard copy Usually, in the morning, I'm working with a keyboard, but I like to have the pages in front of me and either make notes, free form, and I'll write fragments.

In that context, just having fragments is good. A few lines of dialogue here or there, something else happens. It's kind of unspooling in my head, and I'm just writing down what. is popping into my head and I think it has to do with there being other people in the space or what is it about it that's different than writing at home I don't feel so lonely well a teacher that my son who's the dyslexic one really lit up when he found the right teachers and they would tell him you got to take breaks it's like you're part of the dyslexia is that your mind is going so fast it's like somebody who stutters they're trying to get so much out it's it's locking up at the bottleneck so be sure you get up and walk around and so at a restaurant that process happens

automatically and somebody comes up and says want some more iced tea how you doing see people i don't like it when it's when people are coming up pitching me story ideas and things like that then i then i start looking for other places have you ever written anything based on someone else pitching you? Actually, I just this morning sold a project that happened because my youngest son was playing baseball, coach pitch baseball. So it was a little beyond T-ball, but very young, maybe seven years old or something. And I was kind of dissatisfied with the whole program they were in, and I heard these kids laughing as they were playing. And I looked down at their coach was this big, strong guy throwing the ball to him, the kids were just cracking them.

Just, they were doing great and they were laughing and having this. And I walked up to him and said, dude, I introduced myself as I'm Randy, I want you to be the coach of my son next year. And then I got a call from him like a week later. He said, can we have coffee? And I thought that he wanted to talk about me being the assistant coach or something, you know, and he had an idea about this football. He had played for the San Francisco 49ers and Bill Walsh.

And when he first started to tell me, I thought, oh, no. I just thought I was going to have a friend and have a buddy and baseball coach and stuff like that. And he was pitching me a movie idea. But then I got it up, I went, dang, that is a really good idea. And then I ended up writing it. and we just sold it. That's great. How is writing a novel different

than writing a script? It's fascinating for me, really. A novel is consumed within the mind of the reader. And in a certain way, that makes it a more intimate thing than any other art form I really know.

And you only have the words to convey the story. Whereas with with a screenplay. I actually find the screenplay is a more natural process for me. It's like when I started Braveheart, David

Lean said a movie is really like three or four movie moments and all the rest is just stringing them together. Well, you know, that's kind of true and kind of not. But I knew I wanted to have a scene on the battlefield

when the Scots are outnumbered and they're all about to run. And William Wallace comes in and says something. Yeah. And I know what it was he was going to say. Yeah. But that structure... Do you remember writing what he was going to say?

Oh, yeah. Tell me about that. Well, I write toward an emotion. There's analysis, certainly. If you're used to the structure of songs, and you go, well, I've got the verse and I've got the chorus and, well, I need to repeat, you know, the verse with different lyrics. And chorus will be the same.

And now we need a middle eight. And, you know, you've got that kind of... of structure in your head. And I knew there would be a situation of, we don't know who this guy is. Why are we going to listen to you? And that they're about to mutiny. And what would make me stay? You know, what do I most want to know? And I was informed really by two specific moments. One was just that I'd never really seen in anything else, which was like all the rest of you can run. I will not run.

I will stay here. Where'd that idea come from? That's a really cool idea. Honestly, Rick, I don't know if it's the Jesus story struck me as being true. even if you don't understand who I am or what I'm doing even if I sometimes don't understand who I am or what I'm doing this is what I'm going to do that to me went that's true and there are things that I've had plenty of

experience in my life when I'm going to this isn't me and I'm going to walk away a job a relationship whatever it is like it's painful it's hard but you go but the other things to go this is where I will stand as long as I it's commitment it's commitment it's commitment

and I've thought well I was fed that with my mother's milk but also if there are things that I was fed from birth that I looked at and go that's not for me or that's not who I am

and others when this is who I am so I was stirred up by the thing, the stories of people who have drawn a line somewhere in the sand and said, this is the hill off I'll fight on. And I wanted William Wallace to get to there. I had seen this St. Crispin's Day speech in Shakespeare when he sort of says men, generations from now will think themselves beggars because they didn't get to be here on this day, how glorious this is. There was another thing in C.S. Lewis when the lion that he writes about in Lion, The Witch in the Wardrobe, and the Chronicles of Narnia stories, and he's hemmed up in a cave with a bear

and a unicorn of the only ones left of all the people that have followed him, and they're the last three survivors, and this massive army of tell marines they're called, and the story are there to kill him, but it's a cave because it's tight, like Thermopylae. They can't get out of them, and the lion, the bear, and the unicorn are just killing, you know, droves. So they send in a messenger and they say, we don't want the bear and the unicorn. We just want the lion. Now, we'll let you guys live.

We'll put chains on the bear and he'll dance in the circus and we'll cut the horn off the unicorn and he'll pull a cart for the rest of his life. But you get to live, but you've got to give us the lion. And the lion looks at his friends and says, what are you going to do? And they say, of all the deaths we could have chosen, this is the one. beautiful that's great you know that's like i i want to be like they may take our lives they'll never take our freedom and i mean and that's where like i say every man dies not every man really lives came from too because i thought well why ride in and put yourself in the hands of

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Nicotine is an addictive chemical. How are writing and directing different jobs? The big thing is that writing is the most solitary, intimate thing you can do, and directing is all about getting other people all to move in the same way. And directing is profoundly connecting with other art. who are themselves vulnerable and afraid at times, whether they are actors, composers, set directors.

So everybody on the set has an artistic spirit. And I want to both be artistically moving in the right direction, but also directing the entire experience. My cinematographer, Dean Simler, he was director of photography for Dances with Wolves, and he's an Aussie, and I never met an Aussie I didn't like. I mean, I never met one that I didn't like. And Dean is like really artistic and really gritty.

And he said that George Martin taught him that there's a circle of grace around the camera, and you want to preserve that at all cost. When you're there in that space, that's the crucible. And I feel that the director more than anyone else has to set the tone. for that. It's fun, but it's like, this is sacred space. And of course, that doesn't mean that it's not dancing and joy. I've heard that Quentin Tarantino loves to play music loudly as they're setting up shots because he loves music so much and he wants to, and I love that. I've never been on one of his sets, but I love that and I love doing that with versions of that

with my group. But that to me is the essential difference is that you're creating everything that you can see alone onto the page and when you are directing, you've got to get everybody all pulling together. When you're writing, do you picture it?

I'm seeing it. You're seeing it. I'm in the same. Do you fear the words? Yeah. I'm in the scene myself. Are you playing a character in the scene? Every character.

Gabriel Byrne was on a talk show right before Man in the Iron Mask, and I think it was Jay Leno and said, why did you choose this movie? And Gabe said, well, I love the script, and I think it's because Randall saw himself as every character, including the queen. Just a real Irishman's wit, right? But he was right. It's like you've got to stand in the position of every character. Would you say in some way everything you write is biographical? Yes.

But I think you're also discovering, I think whatever rings in you, like that beautiful hummingbird guitar, when I was writing in Nashville, some of the old Nashville hands had this belief that a guitar had certain songs in it. And when you'd gotten them out, you needed to give it to someone else. They might find some songs in it where you weren't going to. And my thought about that was it has a certain poetry in it. And when you hear, you hear an open e-cord on that guitar that would sound different from some other guitar.

Yes. And that triggers. For sure. You go to a different place. For sure. And I think that... Like you hear different overtones and different harmonics from any instrument. Yes.

And that can inspire different ways to play with it. Yeah. The smell of it. Yeah. Whether the strings are a little bit corroded or they're new and shiny, both of them have a different magic tool. Yeah. Place has an effect as well. Absolutely.

You know, I got to work at Abbey Road. and you walk in Abbey Road and you know the Beatles recorded there so it changes your feeling yes it gets very serious when you're there because you're getting to be in this place Rick the last three days of filming we were soldiers my father came out for the filming when we were on our way back from Scotland when I'd seen the William Wallace story stopped off to visit my parents and my father took me on a drive and said, this writing thing isn't working out for you, and you've got a son-in-the-way

and you need to man up and get mature and do something to feed your family. Having said that, nobody was prouder of me than my dad. He came out for the last three days of him, and they were the happiest days of his life. He was 78 years old. He was retired as a salesman, but he went around and met everybody on the set.

And he went back to Virginia, and he had a heart attack. And they did open heart surgery and he got pneumonia. And I got the phone call to turn off the machines. And my dad had at least made the decision doable because he had said, you know, don't ever keep me alive by artificial means. But when the doctor said he's not going to get better this way,

and we make that call and I go straight to the airport and get on a plane and land in Atlanta and change planes, and I'm in the air. When the pilot comes on and says there's been an incident at the World Trade Center and all traffic has been ordered, it was 9-11. Wow. So I didn't make it to my father's bedside before we got. So we finally get the rest of the family out when they lift the travel bands and we have his funeral when I get back to L.A. And we're doing the, I go back to work right away because that's what he would want me to do.

So we're doing the sound effects of the movie and the background voices, just the general chatter. And this Vietnamese guy who had played an enemy soldier was doing Vietnamese voices in this thing, this kind of sweetening, we call it. And he comes up to me on a break. And this is my first day back after my father's funeral. He says, in this broken English, he says, Mr. Randall, I'm so sorry about your father. And I say, well, thank you. Let's get back to work.

because I don't want to get emotion up. And he goes, I'm so sorry. He goes, let's just get back to the way. He goes, no, listen to me. And what? And he says, the last day on the set, your father came up and talked to me. And your father said to me, where's your father?

And I said, well, my father died in Vietnam. And your father said to me, then I'll be your father. Wow. Yeah. So I, you know, go on. Now, generally, when I tell the story, I say that I tell the guy, well, if you think you're in line for an inheritance, you got another. But of course, I didn't say that. I just hard to say that to get over the emotion. But a few days later, my editor said, this is why

you could never talk to anybody on the set. Oh, that's right. That's right. It's so funny. It's exactly what you didn't want. I mean, it's a beautiful story, and you'll have a forever but there is work to do yes and i was not going to get much done after that no it's a disaster so my editor says to me a few days later we need a requiem hymn for the end of the movie and my composer nick glennysmith had written this beautiful score so we took a little piece of it and i picked up a legal pad and in five minutes wrote three verses and never changed a word and we recorded that at abbey road we recorded this at what's it called mansions of the lord how great let's listen to it and yeah

our broken broken brothers let us bring to the mansions of the Lord no more be no more being no more fight. No press feeling through the night.

Just if I am grace, eternal life. in the mansions of the Lord. Where no mothers cry and no children's queen, we to stand and guard, all the angels speak. Oh, do the angels make? Oh, do the angels make me think

the last church of our Lord? Beautiful. So George Harrison died the night before we recorded that. So when we walked into the studio, then Abby Road, the whole way was covered in flowers and candles. Wow. So for me, it's the hymn, you know, to my dad, but to everyone else. And we had just the music first, and I'm all, I'm all choked up.

I'm thinking it's just me, but Nick had invited this German composer, friend. And when that final swell, this guy stood up, and I heard him whisper, my God. I thought, maybe it's not just me. So we had London session singers and then went to West Point and recorded the West Point. And like half a dozen of the people that sang on that died in combat in Iraq. Like the West Point Glee Club is not for you to get out of. They carried Ronald Reagan's body from the National Cathedral

singing that song. Do you know how that came to be? I don't. I own the copyright. So I got a call saying Nancy Reagan would like your permission to use Mansions of the Lord. Absolutely. And I was away at a speaking engagement

in Chicago, and somebody said to Reagan Funnel is on now, and I, you know, ran to a TV, and they had, they had a handle, and like Beethoven and Bach. And you. And, yeah, yeah. I called Nick Glennie said, Nick, and he said, you know, and Nick's English. And he goes, well, you know, boy, it's something of an honor, but all the others are dead. Yeah, but we're not, you know. So it was an experience for me of you never know what will happen in all of the times of getting up at 4.30 in the morning and just writing, just grinding through and grinding.

And it was that discipline. I did spend a time in Nashville where I quit my job, saved my money. I slept on the floor. I did nothing all day long except writing, studying music theory, practicing guitar, practicing singing, practicing piano, back and put all, and I just went crazy. I absolutely went nuts. I was so depressed at the end of that. So like Jordan Peterson says, you find out what's too much. You find out that you need other people. You need to get up and walk around. You need to get out. How important is music and movies? I think it's the most important single element. Really? I do. I do. In fact, I think you could tell a whole story with just images and music. Now, of course, Disney, I think, tried that in Fantasia a bit, like without a given narrative.

It was more about the beauty of the images rather than the emotional story. When I was a kid, my dad was always looking for a deal, and he bought a stereo, and he bought a, with it, a collection, like the great works of music and the 1812 overture was there and I would turn that thing on I mean I'm talking I was eight years old or something just full blast and just standing there and listen to it and move my arms and like I was directing it but but you can feel the battle and the rise and fall and the surge of all that and you turn the music off in a movie and it is absolutely dead not nearly the same how did you decide to make a Vietnam movie how did you come to it when Gravehart happened it was kind of like getting shot out of a cannon.

This friend of mine had told me it was trying to help me get started in my career. He was a TV guy, but he said, Randy, look, I know you're frustrated and you look at other people and you go, I think I'm writing better scripts than I'm reading from other people. And he said, it's kind of like those ball machines. If you go to a batting cage and a ball's in that rack and it just moves down just a little bit of his time. But then it hits those spinning wheels, and now you're going 90 miles an hour. And he said, I think that's going to be that way for you. Well, I'm sitting at home, and I get a phone call from an executive at Warner Brothers

who says, I nearly got fired over your movie. I know, why? Well, because Mel, he has an office at our studio, and we're supposed to be feeding him material and getting him to do his movies at our studio. and Braveheart wasn't on our radar screen. And it wasn't their fault. They had never seen it or heard of it and just had gone through Becky's company,

which is MGM at the time, and then it went to Paramount. I'm sitting there and I get this phone call and they say, Kevin Costner has now read Braveheart and says he wishes you would send it to him and he wants to talk to you. And can you fly over to Hawaii?

he was shooting Waterworld. And I said, boy, I wish my father were here to hear this. I would love to fly to Hawaii to help Kevin, but I've got to fly to London to help Mel. I'm like, man, I got me. I guess I'm in the movie business now. And they said, that's fine, that's fine. When you get back, we'll fly you to Hawaii.

So this is before Braveheart even came out. Came out, that's right. It was in production at that point. So I'm going to fly to Hawaii. I go to a bookstore to get some books to read on the plane. And there was a cover, God, We Were Soldiers Once and Young. And the title was so poetic and beautiful. That grabbed me.

And it was a young lieutenant with a fixed bayonet, in Vietnam, which was really rare. I have a fixed bayonet when you got an M-16. It seems like an ancient device. Yes, yeah. that combination of, like, up close and personal, as we would say, where the metal meets the meat. Wow. Like, man, I got to read this.

So I pick up the book. I have it in my bag. On the plane, I start reading it. The preface says, Hollywood has gotten the story of the Vietnam veteran wrong every damn time quitting the knives of twisted politics on the bones of our dead brothers. Wow. That's a book for you. I get off the plane, I go to a pay phone, and I called my agent and I said,

somebody has got to own the movie rights to this. You tell them, I'll kill a relative to write this story. And he goes, I'll get back to you. Two days later, he calls and says, they won't sell the movie rights. They're afraid that if they sell them, that they'll give them to somebody that will hone their twisted politics on the bond of it. They will not sell them. So I said, find a number. So I call the guy.

I didn't get General Moore. I got Joe Galloway, the journalist. And I said, look, you've never heard of me. I've written a story called Braveheart. I'm going to send you the script. You read that, and if you like it, call me. If you don't, no harm, no foul. Two days later, they call me.

Let's talk. And I go, do you believe in heroes? Did you read what I said? And so I said, look, I have the juice right now, the heat to, call a studio and say buy this for me and we'll make it but if we do that they will be in control no matter what they say they'll own it if you let me buy it with my own money i will pay you less than they would pay you up front but i'll make you a deal that in success you'll make more money than you ever would have made with them and the control

they can trust you they can't trust them exactly I said, if you don't like what I do, you'll know who to come shoot. Yeah, yeah. And they went deal. Yeah. And then from that day on, they were just right in my corner. So. When Braveheart came out, how was it received?

Funny thing, Braveheart did in a day when a movie might open at $30 or $40 million, it opened to like $8 or maybe $12. Well, it didn't explode. Uh-uh. And mainly because of its running time. How was the press reaction to it? The initial reaction was they lumped it as an action movie. They treated it like it was lethal weapon seven or something.

Yeah, which it's not. And it was reviewed in Time or Newsweek, one of them had a review. They lumped it in with like Die Hard 2 under the heading. It's Summer, let the mayhem begin. but it was then the audience reaction that started to cause, then the reviewers were going, no, you need to take a look at this movie. It has substance, but its initial thing was,

so it's just hacking and stuff like that. And how long did it take to really get gone? So they released it, and it was out for about three weeks, and the studio pulled the release. They pulled it off the market. Why is that? Because they felt that it wasn't getting

the traction that it ought to have. They knew from the audience reactions and their own reactions that, you know, people were sitting outside the theaters discussing it and women were gathered and, like, I want a man like that. But it wasn't building an audience. They pulled it off and what happened. And they came out again with it. They thought, okay, we're at the wrong time.

It's not a summer movie. It's a winter movie. It's a more thoughtful. So they came out again right around Thanksgiving. So how many months between the three weeks and then coming back out? Well, from the end of May till Thanksgiving, so... I never heard of that happening before. Is that a common practice?

No, not common. And they brought it out again in the winter, and it... So they re-released the movie? Released it the second time, and it did okay again. You know, one of the problems was, say you've got a thousand theaters, and you've got a two-hour movie, then you can have four showings of... or even five a day, but with a three-hour movie, then you're really getting two a day.

I see. So we're only getting half the return. I see. For the same amount of time. Same amount of time. Yeah, same number of days, only half as many screenings because the movie's twice as long. Exactly.

I understand. Exactly. So it's tricky on the box office because it looks like you're doing half as good for the same number of people going to see the movie. That's right. Yeah. Exactly right.

Yeah, I understand. And the word of mouth was just phenomenal, but they weren't, it wasn't reflecting in the number screens and the box office that we're getting. So they came out with it a second time in the winter of 95. And then when it got all the nominations for awards, they released it again, the third time. So the total. I've never heard of anything like this before. True story. Yeah, that's wild.

The domestic box office was for Braveheart. Yeah. Was around 50 or 60. It was not. The international was massive, like 300 or something. Wow. So how did it go from mediocre theatrical success to being such a culturally significant movie? And how did that happen?

My take on it is, and of course I'm biased, but is that it was the, the depth of its penetration into people watching, it wasn't like, I like this movie. It wasn't even like I love this movie. It was like this. I feel this movie. How did Mel feel about it all? He had given so much.

I once met a woman that, I think it was Clint Eastwood's first wife. They had long since divorced, but I asked her about Clint's process and things like that. And she said, when he's directed and acted, that for the first month or so, when he comes home, he can barely speak, he's just so depleted. Too much. And Mel had just, he had given all of that. But I think he felt the wave of reaction happening. people were calling like Ridley Scott you know people like that that you you know you look up to and it's going hey man this is a great movie and I think he was starting to feel that but we all were

thinking the box office would be way bigger than we were seeing so far so it took a while to get going and and then it won best picture oh yeah yeah one best picture that's amazing yeah amazing Amazing story. And then the DVD, they were massive. Yeah. Do you write for a particular audience? Yeah, actually I do. So I had an Uncle Lawton.

They called him Uncle Toad, but he was a big, strong, handsome, intense guy. A lot of people were afraid of him, but he had just enormously soft heart. And I remember when I was in school, And the first week I was at college and I was getting to go to college when my parents had always dreamed of having an education but hadn't been able to have one. So their dream was to save their money so my sister and I could go to college. And the first week I'm there, this guy in orientation, said your education is going to separate you from all the people back home.

You know, they won't have the sophistication. They want to have the, and I remember thinking, what kind of education is that? You mean, maybe they don't use bigger words than they need to use. Maybe they don't make references to German philosophical theology, but that doesn't mean they don't know more. It didn't mean they're not, and I'm going to write for them. For everybody. Yeah, that's right.

It's for everybody. Yeah. How would you describe the part of you that's unchanging, that's always been there since childhood. There's a way in which I feel I'm exactly the same person. I look out at the world and think I look to the world the way I've always been. Like when I look in a mirror and go, well, you're older than my mother was an extraordinarily beautiful woman. And one of my cousins told me that when my father first took her to a Wallace family reunion and she was maybe 19, he said, I saw your mother and I said, that's the most beautiful woman I've

ever seen. And it was really funny because my mother was really uncomfortable with being attractive. There'd been a family scandal where all the shame had been brought in the family by her grandmother had her father out of wedlock. And she was shunned from the moment of her pregnancy reveal she never went into to public again. So now my mother comes along and she's just this extraordinary beauty and just wants to hide it in any way she can. We'll suppress it. You're not supposed to be magnetic and attractive, certainly not erotic. Those things are out of a question.

That was in the water in which I swam, and I was never even aware of it, how puritanical my upbringing was. But even in that context, that was still me. The artist's part of, this is who I am, I'm not like anybody else, I'm not going to have other people decide who I am for me. When I met Steve Cannell, he became my first mentor in writing. he said you don't let them grade your paper yeah are you always writing would you say yeah yeah I don't think I'm never not writing if I always have multiple pins because they're like ammo I got I got friends in Mississippi that carry always carry a couple of weapons and several clips of ammo and I go you know isn't out like a lot of burden do you write longhand

Is that how you write? Sometimes. I've got the pen so I can write on napkins. That's the greatest. It just happens when you're out in the world. Yeah. It's like you got to get this down. I got to get this.

And then with my phone, I use the voice memos. When you get something, would it be a line or will it be a story idea? What would be some of the things you might note down? It's generally a situation, a scene, and that scene implies that A scene implies a whole story. And once I start with a scene, thinking about that, you know, like one of those sci-fi movies for the plants that eat the house. It just comes up and goes in that direction.

Would you say everything you've written started with a scene? Or is there a concept before a scene? There's a concept, but the concept for me is emotional. So when I was a kid, growing up in church, we really sang. It was huge. Music was a bigger part than the sermons were. And I remember my childhood was both the just grittiest tent revival and real kind of high church, not like episcopal, you know, hoi-toity high church, not to dump on Episcopalian.

But we were informal, but we had stained glass windows in the church and an organ, and when we would be singing Bach and Beethoven and Handel, and the organ would be as loud as it could go, and the bass was just roaring, and you could feel it in your chest. And everybody in the church is standing up singing, joyful, joyful, we adore thee, which is Beethoven's melody. Man, and I would go, this is the feeling I will. want in this movie, for example.

Like, I'm always trying to get to that kind of... Ecstatic. Exactly the word. Ecstasy. You want to be singing well, but your voice is blended with so many others. It's not your voice. It's not about you. That was union with God to me.

And that's the feeling that I'm looking for in a movie when I've had moments when I was praying. And I realized in the prayer that I, had not written the words that the prayer that was in me was the deepest part of my soul expressing itself but it became a very like simple was a question but not like asking for something like what do you want me to do as a father and air came into me in genesis one one the whole like when God breathes into its spirit and breath are the same word. And that happened to me without me thinking about it.

I hadn't thought of that concept in like 30 years, but I had a, like, God had breathed into me. It's one of the scariest and most ecstatic, kind of like, I never did heroin. But when I've heard the descriptions of it, people say, well, you do it, you understand why people throw their lives away to get that again. And they can never get that again. This is an out of body, or this isn't bigger than me, is a divine experience. Was it scary? In a way, it was scary and in a way it wasn't. It was like I've become fascinated with angels, the concept of angels.

And the first thing they say is, don't be afraid. And that implies to me that meeting them is frightening, you know, your first experiences. And I've had those moments, and this may be more times in my life when I felt like I was in the presence of something divine. Now, it's not unlike holding your baby for the first time or for a thousandth time and smelling their breath. and feeling their warmth. And I feel then I'm in the presence of the divine. When I'm feeling real love, that is divinity to me. But this is like something has connected me to the power of God.

And you better take that really seriously. It's like I want this, but I don't feel like I can stay in this moment. Yeah. That's, it's a mystery. Do you remember the four times? Oh, yeah. Tell me. Okay.

First time was I was about a year into divorce. And I thought it was just the most devastating personal failure. I'd had other experiences when I was 11 years old. My father had a nervous breakdown. And my father was the best man I ever knew. So it always smelled like old spice. always had a crisp shirt on a botany 500 suit. His Oldsmobile was perfect, you know,

and he knew the names of the guys that swept the floors as well as the name of the president. He was that guy, and he loved everybody. And he had a nervous breakdown, and that was terrifying. Do you know why he had a nervous breakdown? Yeah, at least my narrative of it. His father had died before he was born.

And his mother was a widow, I think, before she even knew she was going to be a mother. Wow. Yeah. That's wild. Yes. My father was born eight, like eight months and a week after his father died.

His father got typhoid fever. Wow. The medical practice of the time killed him. Wow. They gave him Ipecac to make him vomit. And he got so dehydrated, they had to stop. And he began to improve. And they said he's improved.

enough to resume the treatment, and they killed them, which says to me a lot about what we think we know in any field. I don't care, science, religion, or anything. So my father grew up very much on his own, and in the Depression, started working full-time when he was 14, and he was so good at being a salesman because he could just connect with anybody. If we had my father here today. They could send him to, you know, like Osama bin Laden, and they would call up and say, we're sorry. Yeah, we're done. Yeah. We're, we're, okay, it's fine. Just send Thurman over. We're all good. You know, I mean, he was, he was really amazing. Yeah. And his confidence was just impeccable. But he worked for a company called Curtis Candy Company, which was a, they made baby

Ruth's and Butterfingers. And he just rose and rose and that. And then the company got sold, to some sort of flippers, Harvard Business School guys that, okay, well, we'll increase the profitability by firing all the old guys. My father was 38. And it was making more money

than most everybody else was because he was great salesman. Well, we'll replace him with a salary guy. Well, blah, blah, blah. And he had never been fired from anything. And he just destroyed him. I was with him, actually. The last sale he made for Curtis

in 1961 was for $90,000, which was a tractor-trailer truckload of candy. The next sale he made was for 90 cents. But he ended up rebuilding and becoming extremely successful. How old were you at that time? Eleven. Yeah. But I didn't have the personal guilt about my guilt then was I need to be the man of the family. I've tried to analyze this. of my recent experience with feeling the responsibilities like my friend buddy that said to me, you know, a relationship's two people. You can't take 100% of the responsibility, but I did. And my marriage had fallen apart. I would wake up every morning and pray to just get through the day without coming apart. And at the end of the day, if I, you know, I always got through

the day and and I would think well I actually got to have faith today in courage and I wouldn't have had to have it if it went for these challenges to that so I was going through that and I I was at a gathering of guys that were discussing a book and I was talking with the guy who had written the book quoted Braveheart seven times but he said in the book William Wallace said this and William Wallace said that so I went up to him afterwards and said hey dude I'm really flattered that you quote, but William Wallace never said any of that. But you never

mentioned me. I mean, I pointed it out to it. But he had given me some fabulous advice in that time. I said to him that in his book he asserted that it's

a man's duty to rescue the woman if she is depressed or whatever else she is, that it's a man's duty to rescue her, and I had said to him, well, I'm divorced, and what I took from your book was that I was even more condemnation of my failure, because I should have, and he stopped, and said, if you took that, I'm really sorry, because, like, if you look in the Bible,

King David is the greatest warrior in the Bible, but there are passages where David is hiding. He's maneuvering. He's making alliances like, a soldier only knows to attack, but a warrior knows some hills can't be taken by frontal assault, and you have to... So you're saying King David was more like Rick Flair? Nobody was like Rick Flair. David was good, but he was no Rick Flair.

Oh, man. yeah okay so you're telling me the four the four experiences yeah so so that night he he had said in his lecture if you want to do something scary go home get on your knees and ask god to tell you what he thinks of you and then listen now i've never heard anybody suggest something like that and i've never thought of god as like the oracle of delphi but uh i thought i would do it. And I went home and I got down on my knees by myself. And I thought, well, before I ask God that question, I'll warm up and say, what do you want me to do about Andrew, who is my oldest son? And he was about to go off to college. And immediately I got an answer. And Rick, the answer,

it's not that I heard it with my ears, but it was crystal clear. Trust him. And it was so clear unpowerful, I started to argue with it. And really, I mean, it's like, it's ridiculous. That's really funny. And I'm sitting there on my knee, it's going, what do you mean? Trust it. And nobody trusts his son. And it's like, nobody has a more trustworthy son and I trust him more than anybody.

And I don't know, what do you mean? And then I thought, well, I sure am arguing. So I better pause for a moment. And then I thought, I don't trust him because everything I say to him is he's getting ready to go off to college is, now remember, now watch out for her. Now, you know, you know, be really good if you. And all those questions are saying to my son, I don't think you're ready. And what I need to say to him now is a trustee, you got it. Yeah.

And then said, what about Cullen, who was about 12? It was like, include him. Include him, include him. What do you mean? And all of these things that have been going on, it's like, well, he's the baby of the family. We don't need to, like, sit down and explain to him. Like, oh, yeah, we do. He knows more that's going on than anybody. So then I go, well, what do you think of me?

And I get, I love you. And I fall like a baby. And then I was sitting there and like, that's what God is telling me. And then it was like, so, like, God has come, but he hasn't told me what he wants me to do. And I was telling a friend who's in Opus Dei, you know, like the ultra-Catholic. And he's Italian, so as I'm describing, I'm thinking, and he's nodding his head. And I'm thinking, is he nodding because he understands the English? Because English isn't his first language.

or just like he's just nodding in sympathy or he's nodding because he understands the experience. And so I said, well, you know, I really feel like God was telling me he's got something for me to do. But he hasn't told me what it is that he wants me to do. And this guy goes, oh, he will. Like he was way down the line with having experiences like that himself. How old were you at the time of this story?

Probably 52. Okay, here's what's interesting to me. You're 52. You were raised in a religious family. You went to seminary. Yeah. Your whole life you were taught that God loves you, that God is love. And at 52, when God tells you he loves you, it makes you cry and you can't believe it.

It's interesting because it's not, it's not divergent from, anything you've heard your whole life. There's no surprise in that message. And I had never thought of that. And as you say that, I wonder, I wonder about the dynamic there. Like, what is it that, along with being told that you're loved, you know, somebody can be saying,

I love you, I love you, just like I can be saying to my son, I trust you, I trust you, but the very way I'm doing it is that I don't. And if it's, well, but what I'm really, as a parent, is I'm afraid. So I want you afraid. Be careful, those people out there are people out there that want to hurt you. And there are. I mean, there are.

When I took my middle son, Cullen, to Scotland right before he went off to college, and we wore kilts and ran around the highlands with a bunch of the battle reenactors for Braveheart, many of whom are criminals, I mean, like open criminals. And one of the things I wanted to say is, but Cullen, there are people who will want to knock your teeth out because you have teeth. These guys, that's exactly this is, now, we're with them and they would fight for us. Yes. But just, that's how they look. That's how they smell.

That's how they talk. It's how they walk. You know, and they taught him a lot of lessons in that trip. But is the spirit that you're getting, the spirit of love, the spirit. the spirit of faith or the spirit of fear or the spirit of, you know, distrust, which I suppose is the kind of fear. Or maybe it's intelligent to have it. I don't know.

But it is right. It's like I had been told, and I certainly had the experience of being loved. But I think I didn't love myself was a big part of it. I felt torn apart in divorce. actually because i felt that there was a part of me that went randy you love your family you just don't know how to fix this you even love your wife you love you love everybody involved you don't know how to is it better did you feel guilty oh yeah yeah like i just i felt inadequate i felt like i couldn't i just couldn't find a way to fix it and that if i stayed i was going to die

Wow. I mean, that's what I thought. Yeah. It's heavy. And I even had those kinds of thoughts of I'm not doing any good to anybody if I die. This won't help anybody, no matter who's mad or who's hurt or who's like, if I'm not here, that's not good. So it was dark. It was a dark time.

And sort of being reminded that just as I loved my sons, that I was. sang those prayers because I loved my sons. Then I was in that mode. And the next time was I was having a movie come out. And every time I have a movie come out, there's this enormous fear that I'm going to be crushed by whatever happens, good or bad. That's interesting.

That if it's a huge hit, then I can spiral into the wrong thing. Not like, I've never been afraid of drugs or wild women to have a certain fascination with certain things. But I've never had that as a feeling of liability that I was going to, I didn't even have taste alcohol until it's in my mid-20s. But a huge success that then makes everyone say, okay, that's what you do, do that for the rest of your life. would be artistic death for me. Yeah. And at the same time, the fear that, well, if everybody hates it, then, you know...

You might not get to do it again. You may not get to do it again. And then how will I feel about myself and all those things? So I say this prayer of help me not make God out of what other people think. Beautiful. And that's... That's a good one. You please help me remember.

How did you get to that? Growing up in a real evangelical background, the Ten Commandments were big, and the very first one is you have no other gods before me and love your neighbor as yourself. That's, Jesus said that. Those are the two, really, that you focus on. Down through the years of all the various ways that I've looked into other people's understanding of God, even like friends of mine who are AA people, they go, well, one of the first things they tell you is there is a God, it's not you. And the surrender to that seemed crucial. But the

perversion of that, I thought when I first moved to California, that you could tell a lot about a place by who God is there. And my sense was, in Los Angeles, celebrity is God. It doesn't matter what you did to get your money or your fame. But if you're famous, then everybody's fascinated by you. In New York, it's money. You might have done some horrific things, but you've got a pile of money, then you're the center of attention. The South, it's more like pride and honor, which isn't better. I mean, it's not better, but it's just different. But you make those things God instead of recognizing that there's a transcendence. Yeah. And accepting that I don't have all the answers gives me the sort of humility to go this other person is worth listening to and loving so

secretariat was about to come out in the night before i got down on my knees and that's a bizarre story i just got out of the shower and i was just getting ready to get in bed but i was naked but i got down on my knees and it was as odd to be like praying naked but i was living in a place that Nobody could see my balcony, and it looked out over the ocean. And I walked out and thought, I'm going to pray outside. And instead of, like, lowering my head, I'm going to look up at the stars. And I walked out, and I spread my arms, and I started to say the prayer. And suddenly it just went, there it was again.

And then I went, ah, this is God telling me, not in like a big, bigger than a specific, bigger than go to Memphis and, you know, too, at this street corner. It wasn't that. It was a bigger thing that words couldn't even hold. And that was God. And as soon as that thought went, then it happened again, twice and the same, like, and then it happened again. Wow. And then it happened again recently.

I have a window stained glass that I had made after I had the, you know, adventure with my hand. I was, the doctor was going to amputate my right hand. And I got to keep my hand and involved in that whole thing was a dream. I'd gone to sleep thinking they were going to cut my hand off the next morning. And I had this dream of the Wallace family crest, which is a hand holding a sword cock to strike, a knight, you know, and under this pro-libertate, which is speak Latin for freedom, right? But in my dream, I dreamed I was the night, and instead of holding a sword,

it was a finger pointed toward heaven, and that was where they were going to begin. It was that finger they were going to start cutting off. And I woke up and went, God's not going to take my hand. And they rolled me in the next morning and put me under, and when I came out, my sons were grinning.

Look, just like you do right now, my sons were smiling. And my hand was still there. Yeah. And so I decided, well, I'm going to, I went and bought a Bosendorfer piano. So I'm going to play piano every day instead of squeezing a rubber ball. Yeah. And I'm going to get so that I can just dig in and play Beethoven and do those like it.

So every day I, every day I play, but I had this stained glass window made. And in the middle is the Celtic cross that's over my parents' grave. I try to pray for gratitude. because, you know, there's all that thing that you go, well, please watch over my sons, please watch over this person, please help this person heal or me. But I don't want that to be my last thought of the day. I want my last thought of the day to be thank you for all of the great things. In the morning, I'll pray for what.

Here's what I hope and help me find my way, what I can do to help these things happen. There's a church in Rome that was a... pagan temple. When they converted to Christianity, they adapted some of their culture, and they didn't pray hunched over with their hands together. They prayed with their arms open, out wide. And I had begun to pray that way and found that I felt more vulnerable and more open. It's very beautiful. Beautiful idea. And so I was on my knees, but like that. Hands wide. Beautiful.

And I had like a vision of this terrifying being. I was in heaven on my knees in front of the throne of God. But this being was between me. I couldn't see beyond him. And it was surrounded by like warrior angels. And this guy felt like he was the king of the warrior angels. And he looked at it. I know this sounds like.

That's wild. Probably, I've never done mushrooms. No, I never know. Sounds psychedelics. Psychedelics, but it really was like, there was so much, like, sober clarity to it. There was no intoxication feeling of this, and he looked at me, and he did a motion with his hand, and this thing shot out, like a bolt of plasma lightning, about a foot long, it felt like. And I didn't see this with my eyes, right? I saw this between my ears, but that thing hit me, and I felt.

it hit me. I physically felt it hit me in the chest, this thing. And I know this sounds like wild ranting. I'm from Tennessee, okay? I go to Cracker Barrel. It's my favorite place. What do you think that was about? I think it was being told two things. It was you have a mission and you've got to do it. But again, like not what it's going to be, but there was an identity piece of it. Like, you have been knighted by the angels. And now, that's the most, as that comes out of my mouth, I haven't said this to anybody. Yeah. It sounds like the most grandiose head up my butt thing that a person could say, but it felt like that.

That was the experience. That was the experience. And I honestly do feel that everybody has that, that bolt of life that we are given, and it's our mission. And our mission isn't like limited by, you know, go to the mailbox and drop in a quarter or something. It's a bigger thing like be alive, be fully alive. Tetragramatin is a podcast. Tetragramatin is a website. Tetragrammatin is a whole world of knowledge.

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