Posted on 03/07/2005 6:03:45 PM PST by wagglebee
Mel Gibson says he cut scenes from his soon-to-be-re-released blockbuster film, "Passion of the Christ," to tone down the violence that earned it an R rating and kept some people from seeing it.
Gibson said he received "truckloads of cards and letters” when the original film was released.
"What came up again and again was that a lot of people were turned away because of the brutality in the film and were afraid to watch," he told Raymond Arroyo on EWTN’s "World Over Live" Friday night.
"So I thought if I softened it up a bit, I could have a wider audience. Essentially it’s the same film, but what I’ve done is to excise some of the aspects of it,” he explained. "The trick was to excise or imply some of the aspects of it that were pretty much in your face, without actually showing them."
Gibson said he edited the film by reducing its length by about five or six minutes.
Gibson said among the changes he made was the scene showing the crowning of Christ with the crown of thorns.
"You see it, but it’s farther away," he said, adding that viewers no longer see the nails being driven into Christ’s hands.
Despite the changes, Gibson said, "it still works." Gibson spoke about his recent visit to meet Sister Lucia, the Fatima visionary, as first revealed by NewsMax.com in January. [See: Mel Gibson's Secret Meeting With Fatima Visionary]
Calling her "incredibly childlike," Gibson described her convent as "pretty austere and spartan."
Noting that he believes that the full contents of the famed Third Secret have not been revealed, he said, "I still don’t think we got all it," but said he did not raise the subject with her.
"You can’t go in there and say, 'So, what’s the Third Secret?'" he explained. "But I still want to know."
Sister Lucia passed away last month, renewing interest in the subject of her visions of the Virgin Mary. London's Daily Mail reported this weekend that Gibson is considering a movie about Fatima.
Commenting on the recent Oscar awards ceremonies, where Hollywood turned its back on "The Passion," Gibson said that he made none of the usual Hollywood moves to promote his film.
"The whole notion of these awards ceremonies is ludicrous. ... It’s really a marketing exercise."
The awards ceremonies, he added, are "a celebration of mediocrity."
"My film is not right wing or political, but they made it so," he said.
He noted that he was delighted that his film won the People’s Choice award.
As for the Oscar, Gibson said: "I didn’t expect one. I knew exactly what was going to happen. I didn’t try to market the film. People are spending 15 or 20 million dollars to market their films. That’s a lot of money for a little gold statue." Gibson also revealed that he will be going back to acting in a couple of upcoming films.
My feelings exactly. I'm a cradle Catholic and went through years of CCD and church-going without learning anything about Fatima (or Lourdes or Guadalupe). Now, public miracles aren't the meat and potatoes of our faith, but they're not trivial either, and they should play an important part in catechesis in our materialistic age that rejects the miraculous.
Who should I believe, you or the thousands of witnesses? Since you weren't there, I'll go with the witnesses.
At the same time the vast crowd saw a true miracle. The black clouds parted, and the sun became visible, looking like a dull grey disc that could be looked at directly quite easily. In O Seculo Avelino de Almeida would adopt a very different tone from his earlier satirical article on Fatima:"...one could see the immense multitude turn towards the sun, which appeared free from clouds and at its zenith. It looked like a plaque of dull silver and it was possible to look at it without the least discomfort. It might have been an eclipse which was taking place. But at that moment a great shout went up and one could hear the spectators nearest at hand shouting: "A miracle! A miracle!" Before the astonished eyes of the crowd, whose aspect was Biblical as they stood bareheaded, eagerly searching the sky, the sun trembled, made sudden incredible movements outside all cosmic laws - the sun "danced" according to the typical expression of the people. ..."People then began to ask each other what they had seen. The great majority admitted to having seen the trembling and dancing of the sun; others affirmed that they saw the face of the Blessed Virgin; others, again, swore that the sun whirled on itself like a giant Catherine wheel and that it lowered itself to the earth as if to burn it with its rays. Some said they saw it change colours successively. ..."
Other witnesses too, such as Maria Carreira, testified to the terrifying nature of the solar miracle: "It turned everything different colours, yellow, blue, white, and it shook and trembled; it seemed like a wheel of fire which was going to fall on the people. They cried out: 'We shall all be killed, we shall all be killed!' ... At last the sun stopped moving and we all breathed a sigh of relief. We were still alive and the miracle which the children had foretold had taken place."
Other people witnessed the solar miracle from a distance thus ruling out the possibility of any type of collective hallucination. A final intriguing, and important, point was that the heat of the sun, as it descended on the people, also had the effect of drying their clothes and the ground, so that they went from being completely soaked to being dry in about ten minutes.
(Note the photograph of the crowd looking skyward)
That's debatable, since the movie grossed $600k+ worldwide. Considering also that the dialog was in Hebrew, Latin and Aramaic, one can safely conclude that Mel was not motivated by financial considerations. One can also argue, as I do, that Mel's editing of the original is motivated primarily by a desire to make "The Passion" accessible to a larger audience.
Yeah, they still do them. But now they are called
The Mutual Admiration Society Awards, or MASA. Their slogan is "say yes to Masa.
Interest in MASA started out slowly, and then, of course, it began to taper off.
It's all been well documented in interviews he's done. He was raised Catholic. He bottomed out personally in the early 90's with his battle w/ alcohol. While cleaning up his act, he meditated on The Stations of The Cross, and the rest is history.
(p.s. he was religious even during the "war movies." Guess you didn't see the message behind them.)
A Google search on the subject will give you more information.
I heard it was shelved for the time being. Is it back on??
BUMP..very well stated.
"Mel Gibson Blasts Oscars, Plans Fatima Bomb"
If he spends 30 million to make it, and 20 million to market it, the worst he would do is quadruple his dough.
No, he said in the interview that "This year," the awards were "a celebration of mediocrity."
Thanks brigada!
And what's wrong with opening it up to another audience, especially when he was getting feedback from "truckloads" of letters, cards, ect...saying that some didn't take their family members to see it because of the violence?
He didn't do it in the first place, because he wanted to depict it as it was. Not sanitize it, as many others in the past did.
The movie's for everyone. He wanted everyone to see it. So if there was another way for him to introduce it to those who didn't see it the first time, why not cater to what was asked of him?
I fail to see your point on "it's all about the money." The judgement on that is between he and God. Not we who sit back in the rafters and can only speculate, usually without all of the facts.
And if it were, so what? He'll put it back into his company, charity, or whatever he choses. He's making a living. That's a problem?
.
Great Catch of the Heart, M-w-H.
PaX-TV's 'The Making of the -PASSION-' TV Special Interviewee was...
-PASSION-/-WE WERE SOLDIERS- Co-Producer STEPHAN McVEETY
The film will need a Malachi Martin character. Mel should offer a preview screening to Catholic freepers!
I do not recall Gibson saying he was doing a Fatima movie.
I do recall Aroyou's look when he announced the St. Petersburg, FL's Bishop's anouncement of "All sides should step back and reconsider,blah, blah, blah", in the Terri Schiavo case.
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