Mel Gibson Talking Hollyweird

Yeah. What is it for you? The social contract. You can’t get mad. You can’t get mad. You can’t let it get you, because you have to have… You have to make a deal with everyone else, and it’s almost unspoken that you are going to be fucked over at some point by people who you may have done something nice for. And it may happen that by circumstance, or even very purposefully, that you fuck someone over. But that shouldn’t get in the way of you being able to sit down and have fun with them.

Am I on the right track? You can’t build a resentment about it. You have to still try and love those people. Yeah. Because that’s the way they’re thinking. Because it ain’t personal. No, it’s not personal. They don’t really mean to hurt you. No. Not really. I don’t quite understand… Well, I mean, there’s a lot of motivations for why it happens. Yes. Many. I mean, money will make you do stuff as well, don’t it? I mean, warn them of… Yes. Yeah. Well, whoever. Because many millions riding on a decision, it’s hard to be philosophical. Yes. Yeah, very, very hard.

Very hard to be… You know, you have to choose what level of integrity you’re coming in at. And… Okay. And I’ve often felt it. I’ve sat there, and I have felt the knife slip firmly in between my shoulder blades and tried to have it shoved through the other side through my heart. I mean, this is a bizarre place. And it doesn’t take very long, and I’m sure you’ve experienced this if you’ve stayed here for any length of time. You come in, you’re fresh from the outside, you’re off the boat, from the farm, still got shit on your shoes.

You’re in here, people are charmed by that, that you’ve still got shit on your shoes. They’re charmed by that fresh approach you bring to it, and that’s a real thing. Mm-hmm. But they’re also stroking the shit out of you, you know, licking you all over. And that’s kind of good for you, too. It’s great. But it doesn’t take very long before you realize, or before it gets to you. It’s cascading on you all the time. You can’t get away from certain attitudes, from certain modes of behavior that this town and the industry dictate.

And no matter how strong you are when you come in, off the farm, with those convictions and a certain line of attack, no matter how strong you are, you are going to be affected by this place. His whole opinion about women on film, from beginning to end, was very brief. He says, women on film, either naked or dead, both is better. And it’s like, whoa! Mm-hmm. The man has got a spiritual malady for a start, I mean. The scary thing is that I think a lot of people think that. Maybe not to that extreme.

There are people, well-meaning people, and you’ll know within 15 minutes. If this is a person you want to work with. Christopher Walken, the first time I ever did a casting session in America. Terrified me. Me, too. I mean, fucking hell. I came to meet the guy. He said, oh, he’s flying in from God knows where. Yeah, but he didn’t need a plane, right? He came in, doing all that kind of Scorsese stuff. And I said, have you had a chance to read the script? He looked at me and he said, do you like my face? And I went, yes.

And he said, well, that’s fucking great. Because if you don’t get De Niro, fuck you, I’m out of here. And he stood up and walked out. And everyone said, well, that I think was quite a good meeting. No, he came to see me on a rooftop in New York. I said, hey, can I talk to you? And he said, sure. He floated in sideways through a crowd of people. He was wearing black. And it was like one of those old vampire movies where they don’t walk, but they glide. And he was a dancer, you know, so he has very, he’s very, you know, graceful.

And he moved sideways and he just sat down in a chair next to me. And it kind of frightened me. And he’s a very smart guy. And we started talking. And I didn’t, you know, say much of anything about reading the script, nothing. I just started talking about the Middle Ages. And he began to talk tortures. And we swapped tortures because I’d read this book on torture. And I tried to recall some of the most heinous things I’d ever read in this book. And he was like, oh, and he’d try and top it. And my assistant was there and he left because he couldn’t stand it anymore.

The air had turned cold. And then he left and I wanted to leave. And because I knew that I didn’t want to work with him. And he was getting scary. And then I turned around and it was on top of the Peninsula Hotel. I turned around to avoid his steady gaze at one point. And I was looking at a building with the top of the sixes on it. So there was a huge illuminated triple six in red. And I went from that to that to that. And he started smiling. And I thought, oh, no, Chris Walken is the antichrist, you know.

And I’ll think, Walken, and you’ll resent it for a little while. Then you have to let it go. Otherwise, you’ll eat yourself alive. And I think it takes that kind of cockroach resilience to survive in this town. When I came over here, I was, oh, God, I was in my mid-twenties. The first time I really came over here. I had a whole bunch of weird paranoid suspicions about what the hell was going on. Because there was a lot of stuff I couldn’t understand. And nobody was really bothering to explain it to me. They don’t. And I formed a bunch of opinions about the town and about the people in it.

That were like, surely that couldn’t be. Because a whole place can’t be like, you know, weird town. You know, where the stranger wanders in and all the people are in the bar. And they all shut up when he looks at them. And they tell you, don’t go to the house on the hill. It’s like that. And then you go away and you think, no, I was wrong. I mean, that’s insane thinking. I’m paranoid. I imagine that stuff. That couldn’t be the reason for why so-and-so was acting like, could it? And then you find out later on the track that you were exactly on track.

With a lot of this stuff, not specifically on track, but that you could, that some of your worst nightmares were real at the time. And you think, now this is what I mean by actually starting to swim up or downstream with the rest of the salmon. You know, eventually if you stay here long enough, you’ll find yourself doing that. And you have to… There’s a way of doing it without doing it. That takes time. And it takes relaxation. Not being uncomfortable about… Not being uncomfortable. Realizing it for what it is. Projecting. Understanding what it is.

Because once you understand it, well then you’re not afraid of it anymore. So you can just walk around it, through it. And then get on with what you tried to get on with in the first place. A place like this can humiliate you. And it can either, it can humiliate you, it can be humbling. I mean, it does rip your life to pieces. If you’ll let it. And it’s always pounding at the walls. These little guys, these little heathens with no soul downstairs with horns on their head with a battering ram trying to beat your walls in.