Randall Wallace
By John Meroney

He brought to life a medieval hero capable of moving modern men and women with

surprising force. Bravery, moral strength, and honor also figure in his latest move.

By Randall Wallace

The man behind Braveheart—the epic story of the thirteenth-century Scotsman who led his people against the British ("I’m William Wallace, and the rest of you will be spared. Go back to England and tell them...Scotland is free!")—is Randall Wallace, a 48-year-old American Southerner of Scots-Irish ancestry.

It was during a visit to Edinburgh Castle that Randall Wallace was first inspired to write the script that eventually became the film starring Mel Gibson. Beyond collecting the 1995 Academy Award for Best Picture, Braveheart helped ignite today’s Scottish independence movement.

Wallace’s latest project, The Man in the Iron Mask, marks his debut as a film director. Adapted by him from the classic Alexandre Dumas novel, the movie is the story of the Three Musketeers and their struggle during the days of Louis xiv to replace the French king with a nobler ruler. The picture, which stars Leonardo DiCaprio,

Jeremy Irons, John Malkovich, and Gerard Depardieu, is, like Braveheart, laced with portrayals of men who are defined by a strong moral code. And no wonder: Wallace is himself a devout Christian who draws inspiration for his work from the Bible.

TAE contributor John Meroney sat down with Wallace at the mgm/ua headquarters in Santa Monica, California.

TAE: Have you visited Scotland since you filmed Braveheart?

WALLACE: Yes. My father had never been to Scotland and we went over for the 700th anniversary of the Battle of Stirling. It so happened that on that date, the Scots had just voted to form their own parliament.

TAE: The Scottish independence movement seems to be an example of life imitating art. Does this say something about the power of film?

WALLACE: Yes, and in fact, the day we arrived, the headlines of the newspapers were, "Bravehearts Win Vote." They refer to the Scottish separatists as the "Bravehearts." It was haunting to see it in the newspaper in that way because I remember sitting in my office at home in California typing "Braveheart" in the middle of the title page.

TAE: So why aren’t you personally more outspoken about the independence movement?

WALLACE: I think to some extent it’s a violation of professional ethics when an artist or minister or someone else in the capacity of his profession gets involved with politics. I think everyone ought to be a responsible citizen and speak out as much as he wants. But for me to say, if you like what I’ve done then you should vote as I vote—that’s wrong. For a minister from the pulpit to try to tell a congregation how to vote offends me. And when I see actors use the Academy Awards as a podium for their political positions, I think that’s a violation of their relationship with the audience and their own art. I try to stay out of that. What I generally say is, I’m an American, and it’s not for me to tell the Scots what they should do.

TAE: How did you make the transition from divinity school student to Hollywood filmmaker?

WALLACE: I always loved telling stories. Southerners are born storytellers. It’s part of that Irish-Scottish thing, too. It’s also a tradition of the tent revival. Growing up, we went to church a lot. My folks were very quiet believers, but there were times when I was in church 20 or 30 hours a week. You would hear orators who could stand in a pulpit and keep an audience spellbound for an hour.

TAE: That does seem to be part of the Southern tradition.

WALLACE: Yes, but the better orators were sitting in a rocking chair at the country store. My father was a traveling salesman, so I heard it from him, too. And I always loved to write and tell stories. I was never convinced I was going to be a minister, but I knew I wanted to live my life for a purpose that was bigger than myself, and my own selfishness.

TAE: That’s a theme in The Man in the Iron Mask.

WALLACE: That’s right. John Malkovich, who plays Athos, delivers this speech that rips my heart out. He’s talking about the musketeers and says, "Once, all of us believed in serving something greater than ourselves." Aramis, who was a priest, had his faith. Porthos had a lust for life. D’Artagnan believed in devotion to duty. And Athos believed in his son. But they all had a common dream that once they would serve a king great enough for the throne.

I grew up in a place that believes that sort of thing. Tennessee is the "Volunteer State"—you ask for ten thousand and you get a hundred thousand.

TAE: Isn’t the ministry a higher calling?

WALLACE: Well, I was suspicious of the notion that I could stand in a pulpit and tell other people how they ought to believe, live, and think. I wasn’t sure about the idea of a guy who gets a salary from his church standing up in a pulpit and telling the farmer what percentage of his income he ought to give to the ministry, or how he should live his life. And I was skeptical that a twentysomething hotshot from seminary should tell some man who had a decent life trying to raise his family how he ought to live. I thought you ought to live first.

TAE: How did your time at Duke University shape your future?

WALLACE: I studied under the writer Reynolds Price, but majored in religion and considered going to the seminary. My folks had paid for my education but I felt graduate school was up to me. So I applied for a Rockefeller Fellowship. I wrote on the Rockefeller application that what I wanted to do upon ordination was to enter the military and be a chaplain.

TAE: Vietnam was raging at the time.

WALLACE: Yes, and I felt that it was a raw deal that as undergraduates we had gotten military exemption. Why shouldn’t our lives have been disrupted? And if there was ever a place where there was hell, it was with those soldiers in Vietnam. I thought that’s where I should be.

The guy doing the interview for the fellowship committee had a peace sign on his tie and said, "I’m troubled by the fact that anyone who wants to be a seminarian would go into the military because our army is basically demonic." I said, "If I become a minister, then I would intend to try to minister to the people who I think need it the most, and the fact that you may or may not agree with what our government is doing has nothing to do with what those men are doing." I couldn’t understand anyone who believed that the guys who had followed the call of their country didn’t deserve to have someone hold their hand when they were dying. They shouldn’t have somebody go there and pray for them as they’re bleeding to death?

I didn’t get the fellowship.

TAE: What did that experience say to you?

WALLACE: It said if I could write a story about soldiers, then I’m not just making an argument, I’m showing their humanity. The man who asked me that question failed to recognize the humanity of the people who were out there fighting. Braveheart is a pure sermon that I could preach from any pulpit, but more people would get the message if it were a film. It’s about whether integrity costs something and what it takes to pay the price.

TAE: You also began writing while at Duke.

WALLACE: I was writing songs when I was a student, and even started a record company. I had a couple of local hits in the little towns around Durham and in Virginia.

I didn’t want to go to New York, and L.A. was acid rock. So I went to Nashville. But I realized I wasn’t going to go far there because I wasn’t a country songwriter. So I came to California and started writing novels. I had great reviews where my work was compared to Robert Penn Warren and Charles Dickens. But my books, which I had worked on for a year or two each, sold about 2,000 copies a piece. I would have qualified for welfare on what I was making.

My wife was pregnant with our first son when I went to Scotland. We walked into Edinburgh Castle and saw a statue of William Wallace. I knew then I had come across an amazing story, but it was years before I felt I had the tools to write it.

TAE: What filmmakers do you look to for inspiration?

WALLACE: I love Clint Eastwood’s work. His westerns are accessible, charismatic, and entertaining. They’re also about a code. I love John Huston. He’s a great model for me. And The Man Who Would Be King is one of the greatest movies ever made. I love epic stories such as Spartacus and A Man for All Seasons.

My credo as a filmmaker is that I want to make the kind of movie that I want to see. All my life, I wanted to see a movie like Braveheart. So I thought, Let’s do that. The Man in the Iron Mask is exactly that kind of movie, too. What I mostly draw from for inspiration is literature. And the Bible. There would be many parallels between it and Braveheart.

TAE: You didn’t mention any of John Ford’s westerns starring John Wayne. There isn’t much moral ambiguity in those films.

WALLACE: Honestly, I don’t care for those films all that much. The movies I’m citing are different. For example, look at Eastwood. A gunfighter comes into town and shoots four other gunfighters off the fence. Now that’s morally interesting. The musketeers in The Man in the Iron Mask have a code. That’s the way I wrote and directed them. The great errors one could make with a movie like this are to make the musketeers buffoons. That’s been done often. The other is to do the "one for all, all for one" approach. But that doesn’t mean anything in human terms. When I was in seminary, I came across a phrase by Reinhold Niebuhr: The genius of Jesus of Nazareth is that He found the holy not among the monastic but among the profane.

TAE: Will we see that reflected in other Randall Wallace projects?

WALLACE: Well, I’ve written a script based on my father-in-law’s experience in World War II. He was a bombardier who was shot down over Germany and put in a prison camp for almost three years. The other guys coming into the camp were also bomber crews, and they were all under the control of the Luftwaffe. They were bombing the homes and the families of the guards.

But the ones who ran the camps weren’t SS. Most of them were Nazis, but they considered themselves the spiritual descendants of the Red Baron, and thought Hitler was a thug. At the end of the war, one of the leaders of the camp came to a pow and said, "I have been ordered to execute all of you. I think that’s an unconscionable order, but when I refuse to do it and they come to carry it out, all I’ve got to stop the SS is a bunch of guys with one eye and one arm and one leg. But you’ve got guys who are warriors. I’m not going to turn you loose as enemies of my country, but I will give you weapons if you’ll swear you’ll fight under my command. I’ll ambush the SS when they come."

Now if that’s not a hell of a story, I’ve never seen one. So I’ve grafted that with the story of Dietrich Bonhöffer, a committed Christian theologian who instead of running for Switzerland like most German theologians, decided to stay. He was hung on a meat hook at Schönberg prison for having conspired to put the bomb at Hitler’s feet.

TAE: I understand you’ve received calls from the press asking, "What’s this we hear about Randy Wallace trying to tell a story about a good Nazi?"

WALLACE: Yes, and I understand why the question comes up. With people out there saying the Holocaust didn’t happen, it’s certainly a fair inquiry. But I look at it this way: the man who says, "I was ordered to do it but I refused to do it" is the one who calls into judgment the person who says, "I did the unconscionable because I was ordered to do it." A story like this makes us confront questions such as, What is heroism? What is good and evil? That’s exciting. The guys who would take on a story like that are people such as Eastwood, Huston, and Ford. In Unforgiven, you’re looking at a man who outwardly has almost nothing to admire, but you discover he’s the one guy you do admire. We’re all sinners. Accepting that, where do we go?

TAE: You’re also working on a project about Vietnam.

WALLACE: Yes. It’s based on a book called We Were Soldiers Once...And Young. It’s about a battle of incredible courage and commitment involving the U.S. 7th Cavalry. I knew from the moment I read the prologue I was going to have to try to get involved with it. The authors say, "Hollywood has gotten the story of the Vietnam vet wrong every damn time. They have whetted the knives of twisted politics on the bones of our dead brothers." I do this instead of preach sermons.

TAE: Is there a message worthy of a sermon in The Man in the Iron Mask?

WALLACE: What drew me to the story was the image of a man locked in an iron mask. It was something so powerful and mysterious, like one of those great universal themes that resonate in Christianity: our true identity is locked away, and our faces are one thing, our hearts another.

When I read the story, I also got intrigued by the notion of people whose great glories were apparently behind them. They had to confront the issue of whether they could affirm the dreams they once had held.

TAE: How did you come across the project?

WALLACE: mgm told me they were interested in doing it, and asked me to read it. I had never read the book, and frankly found it a very difficult story to follow. As a child in Memphis I had a Classic Comic of The Man in the Iron Mask, and even then, I couldn’t really comprehend the story. I defy anyone to read the novel and then tell me what the story is. Alexandre Dumas wrote it in serialization and it was never meant to be a novel. But it’s about people having to find faith even when it seems that their glories are over. And it was a great one for me because I had just done Braveheart and everybody I knew was asking, "How do you follow that?"

TAE: Did mgm also want you to direct it?

WALLACE: I wanted to direct it, and I had wanted to direct Braveheart as well. I went to Scotland on my own money, scouted locations, and developed the whole project. One journalist wrote that Mel Gibson had decided to do the story of William Wallace, and hired me because my name was Wallace, thinking I would do a good job. Mel would never say that, but that’s the way the thing gets perceived. For me the issue was one of control. When you give a script to a director, he has to become the captain of the ship. You may have made the ship and charted its course, but when you get out on the stormy seas, there’s got to be somebody there who decides, "I know we want to get over there, but the winds are blowing that way and we’ve got to tack this way to get there."

I wanted to be the guy making those decisions on The Man in the Iron Mask. I wasn’t guaranteed that I could direct it, but I thought the best way I can go at it is to start by writing the best script possible.

TAE: Has being a Southerner worked to your disadvantage in Hollywood?

WALLACE: I certainly don’t come out of the film school or Hollywood establishment track, but who’s to say that being an outsider isn’t an advantage in this world?

I once had a conversation with a man who became my former boss. We were arguing about the quality I wanted in a show we were doing, and he said, "I would like to do it that way but they won’t get it in unwashed Nebraska." And I said, "I’m from unwashed Tennessee and when we turn on the television, we don’t say, Boy are we stupid." I knew right then I was headed for the door. (laughs)

TAE: One could make a pretty good argument that your industry has a track record of ignoring the "great unwashed" of middle America.

WALLACE: Audiences are far smarter than people in the industry often want to give them credit for. I saw Unforgiven in South Carolina, and that audience got every nuance. They just loved all the subtleties and depth. I saw it again out here in Los Angeles at the Writers Guild Theater, and most of it seemed to whistle past their ears. They just didn’t seem to get it. And I thought, Who’s really sophisticated here—those people in flip-flops and Bermuda shorts in South Carolina who get the power of the piece, or those people who hear a funny joke and turn to each other and instead of laughing say, "Now that was funny" ?

TAE: Does coming from outside the industry help you be more creative, more in touch with the audience?

WALLACE: I believe it does. I loaded trucks for summer jobs, carried mail, and put myself through seminary teaching karate. My first job out of seminary was head of animal shows at Opryland. I trained animals and shoveled out goat cages. To me that’s a badge of honor. I wouldn’t trade those experiences.

TAE: Yet Braveheart struck a chord not only with moviegoers, but also in the industry.

WALLACE: I get letters from people all over the world. Ten-year-olds write to me and say, "Braveheart is my favorite movie." They long to be told the things it tells them.

Braveheart says there is a price to be paid. What bothers me about my generation of baby boomers is this notion that there’s some easy way to get to Nirvana. The idea seems to be, Just smoke, drink, and swallow this—then you’ll feel good. As opposed to, Pay this price, bleed here. "Narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it." I didn’t make that one up. (laughs) That one’s been around a while, and the reason it has is because it resonates. It’s true.

TAE: As someone with a strong religious background, how do you feel about the way your industry often stereotypes Christians?

WALLACE: I’m no more comfortable with the shows that try to espouse religion than I am with the shows that attack it. I don’t believe in dogma. What I mean by that is if I could understand God, he wouldn’t be God. There’s a rash of stuff right now about angels, but to me the idea of angels walking around in tangible form is as ludicrous as fairy godmothers.

TAE: Do you think Hollywood discriminates against conservatives?

WALLACE: Well, I’ve been in meetings where people who I like and respect have said things like, "Don’t do business with so and so. He’s a Republican." To me, that’s like saying we ought to get together a blacklist, figure out who the conservatives are and make sure they don’t have work.

As for my own politics, I’ve voted both ways and will continue to. I voted for Jimmy Carter once, and think he’s at least as decent as anyone who ever held the White House. I’ve voted for Republicans, too. I don’t vote party.

I often find there’s a problem when people know that I come from a seminary background. I’ll get this expectation that I should support their cause or be involved. I find people who want to use that, and I despise it.

TAE: Ronald Reagan once said about sex in the movies that it was more interesting when it just showed someone’s hands putting the "Do Not Disturb" sign on the door. Leave the rest to the imagination. What’s your philosophy?

WALLACE: I don’t care for prudes any more than I care for pornographers. All I know to do is what strikes me as right. Martin Luther was really earthy, and God made sex like he made everything else. I thought the love scenes in Braveheart were beautiful. They were love scenes, not sex scenes.

TAE: Do films lose their power if they’re done in service of political ideology?

WALLACE: Yes, and it also dilutes the universality of it. The other day I walked into a deli where I regularly eat breakfast and a man said to me, "Excuse me, Mr. Wallace, but the waitress just told me you wrote Braveheart. I have to tell you that’s my favorite film of all time. I’ve seen it eight times. It moves me tremendously, and I just want to thank you for having done it." He shook my hand and walked away.

When the waitress came back I said, "Who was that?" She said, "He’s the head of the porn industry in California." I’m sitting there thinking, Prince Charles has invited us to show The Man in the Iron Mask as a royal premiere, and then this porno guy compliments me on Braveheart. Kings and rogues see the work, and it speaks to them wherever they are.

And that’s what’s so fantastic about a movie. It is the most universal artistic medium that I know of. When I left seminary, I felt guilty about leaving friends who were going to go be the pastors of small churches and comfort the suffering, hold the hands of the dying, feed the poor, and all those things ministers are supposed to do. But my friends from the seminary now say, "You have the ability to write and make films and that’s your calling."

TAE: One of the common threads in Braveheart and The Man in the Iron Mask is this unabashed depiction of strong male role models.

WALLACE: I wrote a poem in the dedication of the novel of Braveheart and one of the lines is, "To you who know the simple truth and show it near and far / It is the tales we tell ourselves that make us who we are." I see the telling of a tale as a way to give us models of who we might be.

I’m not as brave, consistent, or as strong as the characters I like to write about, but they speak to me. We say in Braveheart, "Every man dies, not every man really lives."

These two films are about another time only because it seemed the best way to tell the whole tale. I see as a great challenge conveying those values and role models in the present tense, and I hope to do that in future work.

TAE: In directing The Man in the Iron Mask, how did you get Leonardo DiCaprio into the spirit of the part of Philippe?

WALLACE: Leo is of a generation not steeped in the romantic idea that one is purified through suffering, so he had questions about the Philippe character. He believed that Philippe, having been horribly imprisoned for so long, would be catatonic, crazy. Like many his age, one of his frames of reference was The Basketball Diaries, where a young person is confronted with a loveless life, or his father has abandoned him, or his friends are suffering, so he becomes a drug addict. Leo’s generation views that as the romantic or heroic option.

But I wanted to convey to Leo that the whole theme of the story is that there is another option. There’s a tradition stretching far beyond Alexandre Dumas that you can "walk through the valley of the shadow of death" and come out a better person. That’s the approach I wanted.

Here are two identical brothers, one’s treated with idolatry and becomes a demon. The other is treated like garbage and becomes ennobled. I told Leo there are examples of this really happening, such as Nelson Mandela. He’s someone who was put into a hole for years, and emerged not as a catatonic puddle of drool, but as a man capable of leading his country. That’s the image that suddenly broke through to Leo.

TAE: Was DiCaprio originally in your mind when the studio approached you about making this film?

WALLACE: No. That was a couple of years ago, and I frankly thought that the slacker generation was just a bunch of punks. I didn’t distinguish one from the other. But I was aware that there was this handsome young actor named Leonardo DiCaprio whom everyone said had been brilliant in What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, which I hadn’t seen.

I don’t think of any actors when I’m writing. I didn’t write Braveheart with Mel Gibson in mind. The only way to write with any integrity is to make characters become alive on the page. At the time we began talking with Leo, Titanic was assumed to be the biggest disaster in the history of Hollywood.

TAE: The brilliantly prescient casting of Randall Wallace.

WALLACE: Well, I had to introduce the cast to the Prince of Wales at the royal premiere in London, and I said I had gotten a lot of congratulations about my foresight in casting a young man with this frenzy of publicity about him. But we didn’t put Leo in the movie because of the light of celebrity shining on him; we cast him because of the light of life that shines within him. That’s the truth. Casting a movie because someone’s hot at the time is the way to make a stinker.

TAE: DiCaprio seems to have a sense of optimism and innocence about him, similar to the picture itself.

WALLACE: That’s right. Leo’s not cynical. He can play a character who walks down a very dark road, but inherently there’s a goodness and faith in him that comes through.

The critics in the major cities have almost universally savaged this picture. Critics tend to like movies about cynicism. This picture is innocent. Its heart is open. But in the small towns, they’ve loved it. Audiences see it and applaud at the end. I think many critics would have been happier if the point had been, "you put a man in an iron mask and he becomes broken and hates the world like most of us hate the world." But that’s not the story I wanted to tell. That’s why Leo was a great guy to do it.