When Mel Gibson and Andrew Garfield gather to speak on their WWII film Hacksaw Ridge, each has jetted into LA from Europe, where they are making other movies. Gibson left the set of The Professor and the Madman, a movie he’s starring in with Sean Penn. Garfield was deep into developing the semi-schizophrenic character he was about to start playing in Under the Silver Lake. But it doesn’t take much time for them to snap back into Desmond Doss mode.
The moment they received a sustained standing ovation at the Venice Film Festival, Gibson and Garfield put themselves into the awards season race with Hacksaw Ridge, capping a remarkable 15-year ordeal to bring to the screen the story of the first conscientious objector to win the Medal Of Honor. That medal was pinned on Doss by President Harry Truman, for courage under fire that included pulling 75 wounded men to safety one night during a siege gone horribly wrong in the Battle of Okinawa in the waning days of WWII.
The clock started on the drama when producer David Permut brought Terry Benedict, who had befriended Doss while making a documentary about him, to Bill Mechanic’s Pandemonium offices. Benedict’s documentary took Doss and a few of his surviving platoon-mates back to Maeda Escarpment. It was the site of the bloodiest battle in the Pacific, where the army medic’s heroism stunned soldiers who labeled Doss a coward for his unwillingness to pick up a rifle—or even to fight on Saturday, which fell on the Seventh-day Adventists Sabbath day. Benedict, who had been granted feature rights by Doss and his church, brought to his meeting with Mechanic an appearance by Doss on This is Your Life that left the producer pulling out his checkbook to buy the property.
He figured there would be a short path to the screen. After all, the biggest problem was that Doss’s heroics were so extreme they had to be downplayed in the movie, simply because audiences wouldn’t have believed the full extent. That included the level of cruelty his commanding officer and fellow enlisted men displayed toward Doss as they tried to drum him out of the army on a Section Eight discharge for mental instability. But it most profoundly played out when Doss proved himself the bravest man in Japan on a day when the medic and his men were overrun by the Japanese forces, driven down from the high ridge, leaving dead and wounded soldiers behind by the score. The Japanese had designs on killing and torturing the injured, but Doss had ideas of his own. Using his faith as his guide, he dodged and evaded the enemy, and dragged his own men to a cargo net, lowering them to safe ground below with a long rope.
“At the point where Desmond is injured by a grenade, and they are pulling him out on a stretcher, what actually happened was that some other soldier was wounded, and Desmond rolled off the stretcher,” Mechanic says. “He was just blown up by a grenade, but he treats this other guy, and he is out there for another five hours, sitting there. He gets shot twice, and straps on a rifle butt as a splint. When they don’t come get him, he crawls. There were things that left us thinking, who would believe that?”
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Turns out Doss had 17 pieces of shrapnel in his body, and his arm was shattered. The key to the story was the fact that, while Doss might have used part of a rifle as a splint, he held true to his vow to never raise a weapon to kill the enemy.
How could such a heroic WWII tale remain untold on the screen for over 70 years?
It was not for lack of trying. Hal Wallis campaigned for the rights, even bringing Audie Murphy with him to persuade Doss. They were sent packing, because the last thing the humble Doss wanted was to glorify his achievements. It was only in his later years, following the death of his wife, that Doss relented to the call from his church, which felt the time had come for his story to be told.
“He didn’t want to publicize himself, didn’t really want a movie made of his life and it wasn’t until he was in his 80s that his friends convinced him that his story had to live past him,” Mechanic says. “We brought on Robert Schenkkan to write it, sold it to Walden Media, with an eye toward protecting the religious content. Not to dial it up or down, just tell the story as it was.”
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Nothing came easy, not even landing Gibson to make his first directing project in a decade. The script by Schenkkan—the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright behind The Kentucky Cycles who wrote four episodes of the WWII miniseries The Pacific—was strong, but Gibson wouldn’t bite. He turned it down, twice. Mechanic, who, while a top Fox exec, acquired the foreign rights on Braveheart that got the Best Picture winner financed, immediately thought of the filmmaker.
“I felt that Desmond was, in a way, like William Wallace, without the sword,” he says. “One was violent and the other non-violent, but they were both men prepared to die for what they believed in. I pitched the film to people as a different form on Braveheart, and sent it to Icon. They said they loved it, but it was a no. I sent it again, same thing.”
Gibson suggests that it took time for the script to rattle around his head, before the visuals changed his mind. But he was carrying the shrapnel of a series of self-inflicted public outbursts, the most serious of which came in the back of a cop car in Malibu, when a drunken Gibson spouted anti-Semitic remarks that left him persona non grata. Mechanic thinks that for whatever reason, Gibson was too preoccupied to take his overtures seriously. “I don’t think he ever really read it closely, because on the third approach, he committed in one day.”
Says Gibson: “I passed on Braveheart. I kind of liked it and thought, maybe…I don’t know. One reason or another. Then it’s like what happened [here]. The wheels start going around and you start visualizing it.”
Mark Rogers
Braveheart was initially offered to Gibson as an acting role alone. But he was looking to step up after doing the small character piece The Man Without a Face. “I started visualizing it, a lot. I would think about, how cool could this be? You’d have a shot list in your head and visualize what you wanted to see. Two years later, I’d finished a movie and someone said, ‘What do you want to do next?’” Gibson remembered Braveheart. Hacksaw Ridge reverberated the same way. “I looked at it again and I just saw it with new eyes.”
By then, Garfield, fresh off The Amazing Spider-Man, was being eyed for the lead. Even though Gibson isn’t a fan of superhero movies, he’d seen the British actor’s work in films like The Social Network, where he played Mark Zuckerberg’s estranged college pal Eduardo Saverin. The empathy that Garfield exudes more than just about any other actor of his age convinced Gibson, and he was in.
But, although Walden Media sparked to the faith-based heroism, the company set the budget very tight, and ultimately dropped out when the filmmakers could not meet the contractual requirement to make a PG-13 film. “Braveheart was 50 percent more expensive than this movie, and that was 23 years ago,” Mechanic says. “We got the budget down, but I just didn’t think there was a chance in hell this was anything less than R. Mel doesn’t have it in his being to take that script and not show it on screen. That defined who Desmond Doss was. His beliefs aren’t real until he proves it on the battlefield. Anyone could say, ‘I’m not going to pick up a weapon.’ Put yourself in a situation when you’re the only guy out there, and 1000 Japanese soldiers are coming after you, that’s when your beliefs are tested. Without that violence, to me it’s not a story.”
Mark Rogers
That meant starting from scratch, and piecing together a budget for a $40 million movie only made possible by shooting in Australia with nearly the entire cast down under—Garfield and Vince Vaughn were among the few exceptions, and while Gibson is American, he was born in Australia. It was his first movie back home in 30 years, after starting his career there with films like Gallipoli and Mad Max.
Even though Cross Creek Pictures came in for a piece, the lack of a big visual effects budget required inventiveness with the requisite explosions, with charges that could detonate practically under the noses of actors playing the soldiers. “We just didn’t have any money, and that was the single biggest obstacle,” says Mechanic. “Mic Rodgers, our stunt guy and one of the few guys we brought in from outside Australia, had done all Mel’s pictures and he brought in this technology. He’s up on the battlefield with our head stuntee, who has this camera, and Mic is demonstrating the bomb. It goes off about a foot away from him, and you see dirt, but no Mic. He was gone. The stuntee is like, ‘Holy shit, I just blew up my boss.’ It was the funniest thing, as Mic got up.”
It was this technology that made the action achievable at this budget level. “It was supplemented by digital effects, but all that stuff was real and stunt-driven,” Mechanic notes.
All the financial wizardry still left them short, as they ended with battle scenes. Mechanic says he and Gibson personally covered the costs needed to get the required shots.
Mark Rogers
Gibson stopped short of playing Doss’s father—a violent drunk who eventually would help his son in his fight against the army to be sent into battle. He said he would have played the part if no one better emerged. But putting Gibson in that role might have been a bit too on the nose, given the circumstances that kept him from behind the camera the last decade, even though he has been sober now for longer than that. He found Hugo Weaving. “The guy killed me,” Gibson says. “I thought he was great. He became the obvious choice to do that part. You get somebody like Hugo, you use that guy. I…
