From a 2009 Daily Mail interview:
“Some people said that in telling the [Braveheart] story we messed up history. It doesn’t bother me because what I’m giving you is a cinematic experience, and I think films are there first to entertain, then teach, then inspire.”
It’s always amusing watching people get heartburn over movies:
“They didn’t follow the books/comics/history!”
* The Tolkien purists really think a movie where every other scene is showing characters eating and singing would have been better than the action movies Peter Jackson did.
* Grown men said Batman v Superman “ruined their childhoods” because, for example, Batman killed (he did in the Burton movies too) and they made Lex Luthor more twitchy Mark Zuckerberg than canned business man villain.
* If the Prince of Egypt animated movie was accurate, Moses would’ve been 80 years old, and instead of it ending with him smiling holding the 10 Commandments, he’d have dropped & broken the tablets in rage watching as his brother Aaron let the Israelites have a pagan idolatry-inspired orgy around a golden calf during his brief absence.
* To Mel’s point, Braveheart would probably been more Bone Tomahawk-level brutality (that one scene, will not even bother describing here) than what we saw in Mel’s version, with people probably vomiting in the theater.
* Some of the fairy tales Disney adapted were far more disturbing than a lot of slasher movies today.
I’ll just end with this:
Gibson’s line about the primary purpose being to entertain, teach, inspire is one of the most profitable lessons I ever applied to my email & marketing – across multiple businesses – since I first heard him say it in a documentary many years ago.
Same with focusing on giving a great Experience.
Focusing on that’ll be far more profitable than fapping to metrics and so-called AI prompts.
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Ben Settle
