VENICE: “Real heroes don’t wear Spandex,” Mel Gibson told Venice Sunday as he unveiled his new World War II drama “Hacksaw Ridge,” starring Andrew Garfield of “Spiderman” fame.
The film tells the true story of Desmond Doss (played by Garfield), who enlists and is determined to save lives on the front line as a medic, but refuses to carry a gun on moral grounds.
The flick’s title comes from a battleground in Japan at the top of a towering cliff. US soldiers who climb its sheer face are met with bunkers and corpses, as well as Japanese bullets and flame-throwers.
Doss, despite being a conscientious objector, was awarded the Medal of Honor by President Harry S. Truman for single-handedly saving the lives of over 75 of his comrades during the brutal Battle of Okinawa.
While the first hour of the movie is essentially a love story between Doss and his future wife Dorothy (Teresa Palmer), the rest sees the bible-clutching medic first reviled then gradually accepted by the rest of his squadron.
“The man who refuses to touch a weapon and wants to do something much higher than something as venal as killing in a war is a very high calling,” Gibson said, adding that he did believe “just wars” exist.
He said that with the violent but essentially uplifting film he hoped to “pay homage to and honor the warrier.”
“It’s a sad fact that veterans of wars harm themselves afterwards. In Vietnam so many people were killed in the conflict but afterwards over three times as many took their own lives.”
His Academy Award-winning “Braveheart” (1995) was famed for its bloody battle scenes, but here Gibson has taken the blowing off of legs and slicing through of guts to an operatic level.
“The important thing with battle and depicting it on screen is to give the impression of chaos and confusion but to be absolutely clear what you want the audience to see,” he said.
‘Real heroes don’t wear Spandex’: Mel Gibson
‘Real heroes don’t wear Spandex’: Mel Gibson
