On this episode of Our American Stories, Braveheart continues to capture the hearts of moviegoers around the world. The film was nominated for ten Academy Awards and won five. Writer/director Randall Wallace (Braveheart, We Were Soldiers, The Man in the Iron Mask, Heaven Is for Real, Pearl Harbor, and more) shares the story of his journey that began in rural Tennessee—and led him to become one of the bravest men in Hollywood.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:10):
This is Lee Habib and this is our American Stories,
the show where America is the star and the American people.
Randall Wallace has written and or directed movies We All
Know and Love, Braveheart, We Were Soldiers, Secretariat, Man in
the Iron Mask, Pearl Harbor, Heavan Is for Real, and More.
(00:31):
He's the author of seven novels, and he also wrote
the lyrics from Mansions of the Lord, written for We
Were Soldiers, and performed as the recessional for President Ronald
Reagan's national funeral. He also has a one man show,
The Brave Heart of Creativity, which you can find at
Wallace Entertainment dot com. Here's Randall Wallace with his own story.
Speaker 2 (00:55):
Music has always been the voice of God to me,
not the voice of intellectual understanding. But it feels to
me that music is the language of God, that it
speaks directly to your soul.
Speaker 3 (01:15):
It comes and from your soul.
Speaker 2 (01:17):
Real music does not intellectual intervals and notes and music theory,
but the joy in it. And I just wanted to
play music when I was a boy. I got my
first guitar when I was twelve and started playing songs
like Elvis and Jerry Lee Lewis and those heroes of Memphis,
(01:43):
and went to college and wrote a song and started
playing it for people and in coffee shops, and people
liked it, and I made a record and had a
local hit, and about that time, Chris Christofferson came to Duke,
and Chris Kristofferson epitomize it did then and still does
(02:09):
to me a kind of artist like I related to.
Whenever I've been faced with a difficult decision, I do
all the things I guess everyone else does of trying
to weigh the pros and cons, but that never really
seems to be how the decision happens. I seem to
(02:33):
have a sense from the get go of what I'm
going to end up doing. I'm looking for ways to
understand what I'm going to do. A friend of mine
who's a psychotherapist, said, I don't think we really think
with our brains. I think we use our brains to
rationalize our emotions. And there's a lot of truth in that.
For me, Well, I wanted so badly to pursue a
(02:56):
career in music, and I would look for people who
epitomized the kind of person I wanted to be. Chris
Christofferson was an airborne ranger. He was a Golden Gloves boxer.
He was a Rhodes scholar, and he wrote songs unlike
anybody else that were just bringing the songs that I love.
(03:18):
So I thought, well, what did he do? And hear
this Rhodes scholar? He didn't go to New York or LA.
He went to Nashville, and I thought, well, maybe I
should consider Nashville, even though I didn't really see myself
as a country writer. So he came to do a
concert at my school, and I guess I could thank
my father for this. And I've just never been afraid
(03:41):
to talk to a stranger, and I waited for a
respectful moment. I was backstage before his concert and I
saw him talking with a few people and just kind
of casual, laughing talking, and I walked up and said
excuse me, and he turned around, looked me right in
the eye, said hey man, how you doing? And we
(04:02):
shook hands and I said, I really don't want to
bother you, but I just want to ask you a question.
He said sure, and I said, I'm a singer songwriter
and I love to write songs. And I had a
little local hit here on a record that I made,
and I'm not sure what to do. My parents really
want me to go to law school or med school,
and I'm having a struggle. And I just love your thoughts,
(04:27):
and he went, you got to go to Nashville, Man,
You've got to go.
Speaker 3 (04:31):
You've got to go.
Speaker 2 (04:35):
I love to tell this story because here's a life strategy.
A stranger who doesn't know you at all and has
never heard your music and is drunk tells you to
do something, and you go, absolutely, Man, sign me up.
That's where I'm going. So I can't blame him or
(04:57):
credit him too much. But I've run in to him
three different times since then, and though that was a
long time ago, decades ago, and each time I've thanked
him and told him who I was.
Speaker 3 (05:10):
But he was so gracious and grateful when he heard
his thing. That's great.
Speaker 2 (05:16):
That's so great, And that's been a joy to me
to to in some ways get to pay him back.
I was in Nashville in the early nineteen seventies and
(05:37):
I had gotten a job at a theme park there
called opry Land, USA, and I had auditioned with a
comedy country song that I had written because I didn't
have a lot of sort of straight country material, and
they'd given me a job as manager of animal shows
and managed the Animal Opry which was a live show
(06:02):
in which trained barnyard animals played musical instruments. Had a
pig named Pigerachi who played the piano, and a duck
named bert Baquack that played the drum. It was a
great show. I loved this show. Eight thousand people a
day we'd see this show. And I was working there
eighty hours a week at Opryland. But I was also
(06:25):
writing songs and doing my best to write country songs.
And I got signed at Tree Music, which was a
fabulous company, the largest BMI company at that time.
Speaker 1 (06:37):
And you're listening to Randall Wallace tell the story of
his own life. He spent so much of his life
telling the stories of other people's lives. This time it's
Randall on himself, starting out as a young musician growing
up in the Tennessee area Memphis, and then spending a
part of his young life in Nashville at the suggestion
(06:58):
of a drunk songwriter wo we admired named Chris Christofferson,
who knew nothing about Randall's musical proclivities or the styles
or tastes of Randall Wallace's related to what kind of
music he'd actually like to write. And there he finds
himself in Nashville running the Animal Opry at Opryland, and
of course, while they're landing a gig with one of
(07:20):
the best publishing houses in Nashville. When we come back,
more of Randall Wallace's story here on our American Stories.
This is Lee Habib, host of our American Stories. Every
day we set out to tell the stories of Americans
past and present, from small towns to big cities, and
from all walks of life doing extraordinary things. But we
(07:42):
truly can't do this show without you. Our shows are
free to listen to, but they're not free to make.
If you love what you hear, go to our American
Stories dot com and make a donation to keep the
stories coming. That's our American Stories dot Com. And we
(08:09):
continue with our American Stories and the story of Randall
Wallace as told by Randall himself. He's written and directed
many of the movies we know and love. Braveheart, We
Were Soldiers, Secretariat, Pearl Harbor, a Man in the Iron Mask,
Hevan is for Real, He's the author of seven novels
and also a terrific musician and songwriter. He wrote the
lyrics to Mansions of the Lord, one of my favorites.
(08:32):
Let's pick up where we last left off.
Speaker 2 (08:35):
I was working there eighty hours a week at Opryland,
but I was also writing songs and doing my best
to write country songs. And I got signed at Tree Music,
which was a fabulous company, the largest BMI company at
that time, and there were great songwriters there like Bobby
(08:55):
Braddock and John Hyatt and others, and they wrote absolutely
brilliant songs. I wrote songs that I felt were really good,
and they apparently thought my songs were good, but they
didn't fit kind of in the country category. And a
sort of country music legend named Wesley Rose sat down
(09:18):
with me one day and listened to my song and said,
these are really good songs, but do you like country music?
And I said, well, I respect country music and I
love it, but it's not quite my thing. And he said,
don't sell your soul for a few pennies. Find the
thing you love to do the most. And it's interesting
(09:40):
that that echoed something that I had been told by
my pastor of the church that I grew up in.
When I decided to major in religion at school, my
pastor said to me, do you feel the calling to
be a pastor? And I said, honestly, I don't, but
I know it's the greatest calling that anyone could have.
(10:02):
And he said, no, you're wrong. The greatest calling anyone
can have is the one God.
Speaker 3 (10:06):
Has for you.
Speaker 2 (10:08):
And that bit of sharing from him allowed me to
leave seminary, to leave school and head off to Nashville.
I wanted to be like Beethoven, nothing but music all
day long, every day. But what you find is Jordan
Peterson talks about you find your limits, that you can't
(10:30):
do that all the time.
Speaker 3 (10:32):
You need people.
Speaker 2 (10:33):
You need conversation, you need encounters, you need disagreement, You
need the grinding points where soul is created. You need
those things. And I got really dark. I went through
fourteen days without a patch of sunshine. So I told
my best friends, I need you to help me pack
(10:55):
up my place, but I've got to get out of here.
I was really depressed and drove to California alone. Kept
writing songs but wasn't really getting anywhere. And I started
dating a woman that I ultimately would marry, And on
her coffee table was a stack of pages that were
(11:18):
bound in an interesting way, and I said, what's this
and she said, it's a screenplay written by my father
and he had been a prisoner of war in World
War two and written an incredible story. And I picked
it up and began to read it, and I loved
the format instantly because it was clear, and it was powerful,
(11:41):
and it was unpretentious. You could only show the reader
what you could see a character do and what you
could hear the character say. You didn't have to go
into explaining and expounding all of your literary references. You
didn't have to show your er audition, just what does
(12:02):
the character do?
Speaker 3 (12:03):
What does he say?
Speaker 2 (12:05):
And from the first line of doing it, I thought
this is my medium because all the training that I
had in writing songs enabled me to write lyrics, because
every syllable is valuable, and I wrote dialogue in a
lyrical way. I wrote it with a kind of musical
(12:27):
and dare I say poetic rhythm to it, because it
was music that led me into screenwriting. But also the
music was not divorced from the experience of screenwriting or
or later on, and directing that a movie is like
(12:48):
a symphony. It's a whole piece in it. It has
its quiet parts, and it builds and it repeats in
it and in innerwaves. And I know that nothing that
we do gets wasted. All things work together for good
if you love God. And I don't mean as a reward.
(13:11):
I mean you love what is ultimate and significant in
real and you keep loving that, and that makes everything
you've done, in everything you're doing, have its place, have
its value that you can draw from. I was in
Los Angeles and was writing novels now and screenplays, writing
(13:37):
screenplays based on my novels, and novels based on my screenplays,
and I would go to the gym a lot and
work out. And one day I was in a gym
in Studio City, California, near where I lived, and a
guy was next to me helping a friend who was
really out of shape. But this one guy, who was
(13:59):
in really great shape was was talking the friend through it,
and I thought, well, that's a that's a great guy
to do that for his buddy. And the guy in
good shape was was telling stories about Elvis Presley, and
I sort of chimed in and said, my father saw
(14:20):
Elvis Presley seeing at a supermarket opening in Memphis, and
the guy went really and we started talking and we
just talked about working out, and I was working out
a lot, and he said something about me being in
good shape, and he said, do you run any And
(14:40):
I go I not for a long time. I ran
in college, but I haven't run. And well, I'm in
a running group. Why don't you come run with us
on Saturday mornings early at six o'clock. And I went, great, okay,
super I had very few friends. I was an isolated
kind of mode. And he introduced him, said I'm Mike
Post and I said, I'm Rando.
Speaker 3 (15:00):
Wait what Mike? Who Mike Post?
Speaker 2 (15:03):
And I go the music Mike Posts because I knew
he had had had a hit with Classical Gas and
I knew some of his other competes. I mean, Mike
Post is a musical genius. And he said, yeah, yeah,
that's me, and I started. I went with his running
group and was running, oh for a couple of years
(15:25):
with him. And Mike said, what are you doing to get.
Speaker 3 (15:29):
Your career going?
Speaker 2 (15:30):
I said, I'm all I know to do is write
stories and sort of show them when I can, and
he went, well, I worked for Steve Cannell, and I
think Cannell would really like you. You're you're kind of his
kind of guy and well man. Steve Cannell was then
king of television. A Team was his biggest but hunter
(15:52):
all sorts of shows, and Mike said, give me a minute,
I'm gonna get back to you. So he talked with
Steve about me, and Steve said, I'll hear about him
if I'm supposed to hear about him, I don't want
to read any of his work. So Mike came back
and said, I want you to write a spec script
for every episode that Canill has. And he had six
(16:13):
different shows on television, so he was telling me, write
six different shows for which you will not be paid,
but just write six episodes and you're going to demonstrate
how willing you are to work. And I did that,
and Steve didn't read any of them. But Mike was
not going to give up. And Steve was doing a
(16:36):
show called JJ Starbuck about a country guy, and I
wrote Steve a letter and I said, I know everyone
and his brother is trying to get in to see you.
I just want to tell you a story about why
I would be the guy to work on this show.
Speaker 1 (16:55):
And you're listening to screenwriter, director, author and musician Randall
Wallace share his story his journey from Nashville and the
East Coast to the West and how he just knocked
around for a bit and had some really great breaks
and to be able to bump into a guy like
Mike Post, a legend in the business, and then make
(17:17):
his way into this really difficult business to crack into,
which is TV production with a monster talent like Stephen
Kennell is just an opportunity of a lifetime. And also
bumping into that thing called a screenplay sitting on the
desk of his future bride's place, reading it, seeing it
and knowing that the screenplay was the medium for him,
(17:40):
and also that insight that he stumbled upon from his
pastor the greatest calling anyone can have is the calling
God has for you. When we come back more of
Randall Wallace's story here on our American Stories, and we
(18:08):
returned to our American stories and to Randall Wallace telling
us his own story. He's written and directed many of
the movies we know. In Love, Braveheart, we were Soldiers' Secretariat.
Have It is for real. He's the author of seven
novels and also a terrific musician and songwriter. He wrote
the lyrics to Mansions of the Lord, one of my
favorite songs. Let's return to Randall Wallace with the story
(18:31):
of how he went from songwriting to working for Stephen Kennell,
one of the great TV producers of the nineteen eighties
and nineties.
Speaker 2 (18:40):
During the depression, my grandfather started a country store and
he built a store out of woody salvaged and he
didn't have enough money to buy the stock that he
needed to sell in the store, and the only place
that paid cash in the town was an ice factory
where they would freeze huge blocks of ice and men
(19:02):
would sling them onto wagons so that the farms without
electricity could keep their milk and their meat cold. And
my grandfather went to work on that crew, and the
first day, the foreman came up to him and said, listen,
I want to let you know that I cuss at
the men to get them to work. And if I
(19:22):
call you a son of a don't pay me no mind.
It don't mean nothing by it's just the way I am.
And my grandfather said, I understand completely, and I just
want you to know that if you do happen to
call me a son of a did I hit you
in the face with a claw hammer, don't pay me
no mind. I don't mean nothing by it's just the
way I am. Those are my people, Those are the
(19:44):
people that I know. I think I could write.
Speaker 3 (19:46):
Your show for you.
Speaker 2 (19:50):
I got a call not from Steve, but from one
of his producers saying, Okay, we're going to give you
a shot. And I wrote the script and the next
day Steve came in and said, I want you to
be on staff. And the next script I wrote, they
made me a story editor. And the next script I wrote,
they made me a producer. So Steve became my mentor.
(20:15):
And one of his greatest qualities, other than being incredibly talented,
I mean a genius, but he had a quality of
he loved what he did. He never lost enthusiasm for
anything that he did. Steve died of melanoma. The day
(20:36):
he died, he still got out of bed to map
out a story, a new story that he wanted to write.
He loved what he did, and he loved sharing it,
and he loved teaching it.
Speaker 3 (20:47):
He was.
Speaker 2 (20:49):
A powerful mentor in my life. But none of that
would have ever happened without Mike Post. I was on
quite a trajector in television. I went from a freelancer
to being a producer in a really short time, maybe
(21:11):
six months or so. And I also realized that I
had to have ambitions beyond.
Speaker 3 (21:21):
Just the television world.
Speaker 2 (21:23):
And I don't mean in any sense to demean that world.
Television is incredibly lucrative, it's incredibly influential. But I also
felt that I didn't want to be a cog in
a big wheel, and that I always would be if
I was grinding out episodic television and I was writing
(21:49):
feature scripts, and I was writing novels and still writing
songs and trying to look outside the world that I
was in. I realized there was kind of a glass
ceiling for me there. And I remember packing up my
office and I had gone from having no money at
(22:09):
all to having a really good income and I quit.
And I remember going down to pack up my office
and my son Andrew was then only seven years old
or something, and I took him down on the Sunday
to clean out my office with me, and we're packing up,
and I was knotted up.
Speaker 3 (22:32):
I was I knew I was facing like total unknown.
Speaker 2 (22:37):
And Andrew said, Daddy, how are we going to eat?
And it was quite a moment, and just the two
of us in that office and with all my stuff
packed into boxes, and I sat down in the chair,
put him in my lap, and I said, son, that's
(22:58):
a really good question.
Speaker 3 (22:59):
And this is a really scary time.
Speaker 2 (23:02):
And I've been working for the last four years to
make mister Cannell wealthier man and make him better known,
and to make us some money. And now what I'm
going to try to do, and I am gonna do
is make us more money and let us have a reputation,
(23:24):
to let us stand on our own. And it's gonna
be scary, and that's what we're going to do. And
he went got it okay, And his courage, his love
and his trust to me was profoundly important to me.
Speaker 3 (23:39):
So cut too.
Speaker 2 (23:41):
It's a year or so later and I can't even
get an appointment. I can't get a pitch meeting because
the business was treating me like, well, you were Steve
Candell's protege, you were only ascendancy. Now you're out of
that company. You must have screwed up some way. We
don't even want to.
Speaker 3 (23:59):
Talk to you.
Speaker 2 (24:00):
That was literally the way it was. And there were
I think people from Steve's company who had maybe poisoned
the well for me a little bit. And I know
Steve hadn't. He was too good a man and too
proud a man to talk down on my abilities. But
I think, you know, there's just that kind of front
runner bandwagon mentality in Hollywood.
Speaker 3 (24:23):
I was so tense.
Speaker 2 (24:25):
I couldn't eat, I couldn't sleep, and I certainly couldn't write.
And I felt that I was going to put my
sons through the same thing that I had gone through
when my father had a breakdown. And I got on
my knees, which was the only place I had to go,
and I said a prayer, and the prayer was what
(24:45):
really concerns me now that my primary responsibility is my
son's And maybe they'll become better men if they don't
live in a big house in California with a swimming
pool and tennis courts and fancy cars in the driveway.
(25:05):
Maybe they'll learn more if they live in a house,
even when without indoor plumbing, the way my sister and
I lived when our father lost his way.
Speaker 3 (25:13):
But if that's what God wants. If that's best for.
Speaker 2 (25:18):
My sons, then please bring that on and help me
bear it. But if I go down in this fight,
let me go down not worshiping Hollywood, but standing up
with my flag flying, fighting for what I believe. And
I stood up and I went back to my desk.
And without that moment, that would have never written. They
(25:41):
may take our lives, They'll never take our freedom.
Speaker 1 (25:46):
What will you do without freedom?
Speaker 4 (25:50):
Will you'll fight? I guess that no, we will run
and we will live.
Speaker 2 (26:01):
I fight and you may die, Run and you'll love.
Speaker 3 (26:07):
At least a while.
Speaker 4 (26:10):
I'm dying in your pads many years from now.
Speaker 5 (26:14):
Would you be willing to trade all the days from
this day.
Speaker 4 (26:19):
To that for one chance, just one chance, to come
back here and tell our enemies that.
Speaker 2 (26:26):
They may take our lives, but they'll never take me.
Speaker 4 (26:31):
Oh pray.
Speaker 1 (26:34):
And you've been listening to Randall Wallace share with us
a very personal story about in the End where some
of the language for Brave Heart came from, and a
lot of it had to do with his own existential struggles,
with his own life, with risk taking, with fear, and
that prayer he prayed for his son was a simple
one that we've all prayed. Maybe Lord, your plan for
them is to have less, not more, and for us
(26:58):
to be true to you and not to our own calling.
And Randall had this fervent prayer and outcomes that scene
from Braveheart. And that's what you were just listening to
Mel Gibson's epic speech as William Wallace. When we come back,
more of the remarkable life story of Randall Wallace, to
connection between creativity and courage, love and fear, and so
(27:19):
much more here on our American stories, and we continue
with our American stories and with Randall Wallace. Let's pick
(27:42):
up where he last left off.
Speaker 2 (27:45):
I said a prayer, and the prayer was, if I
go down in this fight, let me go down, not
worshiping Hollywood, but standing up with my flag flying, fighting
for what I believe. And I stood up and I
went back to my desk. And without that moment, I
would have never written every man dies, not every man
(28:08):
really lives?
Speaker 4 (28:13):
Who died will beautiful?
Speaker 3 (28:15):
Every man dies, everyone already lives. I'd never have written freedom.
Speaker 5 (28:27):
Uh, it can all end right now, just say it,
cry oud, Let's see.
Speaker 4 (28:46):
Monday, just see let's see.
Speaker 3 (28:52):
Yah.
Speaker 4 (28:53):
H yes, Jesus.
Speaker 5 (28:58):
The President, which is to say, A whall.
Speaker 4 (29:07):
Free never written that.
Speaker 2 (29:18):
And I had to be in that moment. God had
to put me in that moment to mold me into
this new direction. I say in my book Living the
Brave Art Life, it's more powerful to believe than to know,
because we never fully know anything. So science. You listen
(29:41):
to a great scientist and said that the whole notion
of science is we think this, and this seems to
explain everything for now, but there's all this stuff that
we don't know. We were having a negotiation my wife
and I about having children, and she said, look, I
(30:04):
am really not eager to have them, but I know
you want to. So if you get me pregnant, you've
got to agree to take me to Europe. And I
went done, and we got pregnant. We went to Europe
and we were in London. I said, you know, I
would love to be able to tell we knew we're
(30:24):
going to have a son. I'd love to be able
to tell him some part of my ancestry, like you know,
all of yours back hundreds and hundreds of years.
Speaker 3 (30:33):
And I hear there.
Speaker 2 (30:34):
Are Wallace Is in Scotland, let's go up there and
poke around a little. And she went, sure, why not, adventure,
Let's go to Scotland. She was four months pregnant. We
went to Edinburgh. We walked into Edinburgh Castle and as
we walked into the castle, my eye fell on a
statue on one side of the castle and it's William Wallace.
Speaker 3 (30:55):
And there's the name Wallace. And I went Wallace And.
Speaker 2 (31:00):
The other side was Bruce, Robert the Bruce. And I
grabbed a member of the Black Watch guard there, tough
little guy on a kilt, and said, who is this Wallace?
Speaker 3 (31:13):
And he said.
Speaker 2 (31:13):
It's William Wallace, as I it's Hiro, and I went,
greatest hero, honey, greatest hero. And I knew about Robert
the Bruce from a Robert Burns poem of Scott's which
have with Wallace bled, And that was how I knew
that there must be Wallace is in Scotland. And I said,
(31:35):
was William Wallace an ally of Robert the Bruce in
fighting the English? And this guard said, well, no one
will ever know for sure, which, of course are magic
words to a writer? What our legends say more magic
words to a writer, that Robert the Bruce may have
(31:56):
been one of those who betrayed William Wallace into the
hands of the English to clear the way for himself
to become the king. Now I knew none of that history,
but it was as if I had heard that Saint
Peter and Judas were the same person. In that instant,
(32:17):
the tumblers all tripped into my head, and I thought,
how does Robert the Bruce be someone who could do
such a terrible thing, betray the hero of his country,
but he becomes the country's greatest, most courageous king. How
does that happen? What if there was something so noble
(32:41):
in the life and death of William Wallace that that's
what transformed Robert the Bruce.
Speaker 3 (32:47):
I knew in that.
Speaker 2 (32:48):
Moment it was an incredible story that I wanted to write,
and I didn't feel I was yet ready to. For
one thing, I had a baby on the way and
I had to find a way to feed him. So
I went into television and focused on television first. But
in television I gained the skills and didn't know when
(33:11):
the time would come until that moment when I got
on my knees to say the prayer of I'm not
going to worship Hollywood. I'm going to stand up and
fight for to write the kind of movie I want
my sons to see. And that's what William Wallace means
to me. And people will say, oh, well, you're not
a relative, and I go, you can't prove that. And
(33:31):
I can't prove that I am, but you can't prove
that I'm not. I had a meeting with Mel Gibson
once when we were doing Braveheart, and Mel was the
biggest star in the world and I was a completely
unknown screenwriter. Hollywood was starting to hear about me because
(33:53):
suddenly this script that they had never seen was getting made.
But Mel and I were at dinner, just the two
of us in London, and he was talking about a
role that he was thinking to cast, and I was
questioning the casting choice a bit. He said something absolutely
(34:15):
stunning to me. He said, Look, the truth is writers write,
director's direct actors act from their essence as a human being.
Speaker 3 (34:25):
He said, this script is you. It is right out
of your soul. It is you.
Speaker 2 (34:30):
He said, I'm going to bring everything I have to
directing it. A few years ago, I did a charity
screening of Braveheart in Austin, Texas, and at the end
of the movie, I was in a theater, a small theater.
Into the movie, I walked up on the stage to
(34:52):
do a question and answer with the audience, and the
first person who stood up was a nineteen year old
woman on the front row. And she stood up and said,
mister Wallace, I don't have a question. I just want
to tell you something. My fiance died six months ago,
and before he died he told me he wanted me
(35:13):
to watch Braveheart so I would understand the way he
loved me. It took me a couple of minutes to
compose myself enough to speak. After that, it confirmed for
me what I always have said, that it's not war
stories that I write. It's that until you find who
(35:36):
in your life you would give your life for, you're
not really alive yet.
Speaker 3 (35:41):
That's when you know. I think Mark Twain said something.
Speaker 2 (35:45):
Like the man who is fully ready to die is
the one who is living. He said it better than that,
but that's the thought. And I think kind of animal
instinct for survivor is powerful, but it's not particularly.
Speaker 3 (36:05):
Admirable in that it's just an errand it is what
it is.
Speaker 2 (36:10):
It exists in everything from I guess from ants to angels.
Speaker 3 (36:17):
But the notion.
Speaker 2 (36:20):
Of finding something that you put above yourself is where
I think you really for me.
Speaker 3 (36:28):
It's where I begin to find actual meaning.
Speaker 2 (36:34):
I'm living for someone else, but to me, faith has
to do with standing in awe and in accepting that
there is a God and it's not me, and that
I try to listen to what God has to say.
Speaker 3 (36:55):
That's where I find the most meaning.
Speaker 1 (37:00):
And a terrific job on the production and editing by
our own Greg Hangler, and a special thanks to Randall
Wallace for sharing his story with us. Is one man
show The Braveheart of Creativity is touring the country. To
find out where it's playing or find out how to
bring it to your town, go to Wallace Entertainment dot com.
I love what he said about his movies, particularly the
(37:21):
war movies. It's not war stories. I write their love stories.
Until you find who in your life you would give
your life for, you're not really alive. He also talked
about putting things above himself, that that's when you find
real meaning in your life. And of course faith is
(37:41):
such a big part of Randall's life. Standing in awe
that there is a God, and it's not me Randall
Wallace's story here on our American story.
This is Lee Habib and this is our American Stories,
the show where America is the star and the American people.
Randall Wallace has written and or directed movies We All
Know and Love, Braveheart, We Were Soldiers, Secretariat, Man in
the Iron Mask, Pearl Harbor, Heavan Is for Real, and More.
(00:31):
He's the author of seven novels, and he also wrote
the lyrics from Mansions of the Lord, written for We
Were Soldiers, and performed as the recessional for President Ronald
Reagan's national funeral. He also has a one man show,
The Brave Heart of Creativity, which you can find at
Wallace Entertainment dot com. Here's Randall Wallace with his own story.
Speaker 2 (00:55):
Music has always been the voice of God to me,
not the voice of intellectual understanding. But it feels to
me that music is the language of God, that it
speaks directly to your soul.
Speaker 3 (01:15):
It comes and from your soul.
Speaker 2 (01:17):
Real music does not intellectual intervals and notes and music theory,
but the joy in it. And I just wanted to
play music when I was a boy. I got my
first guitar when I was twelve and started playing songs
like Elvis and Jerry Lee Lewis and those heroes of Memphis,
(01:43):
and went to college and wrote a song and started
playing it for people and in coffee shops, and people
liked it, and I made a record and had a
local hit, and about that time, Chris Christofferson came to Duke,
and Chris Kristofferson epitomize it did then and still does
(02:09):
to me a kind of artist like I related to.
Whenever I've been faced with a difficult decision, I do
all the things I guess everyone else does of trying
to weigh the pros and cons, but that never really
seems to be how the decision happens. I seem to
(02:33):
have a sense from the get go of what I'm
going to end up doing. I'm looking for ways to
understand what I'm going to do. A friend of mine
who's a psychotherapist, said, I don't think we really think
with our brains. I think we use our brains to
rationalize our emotions. And there's a lot of truth in that.
For me, Well, I wanted so badly to pursue a
(02:56):
career in music, and I would look for people who
epitomized the kind of person I wanted to be. Chris
Christofferson was an airborne ranger. He was a Golden Gloves boxer.
He was a Rhodes scholar, and he wrote songs unlike
anybody else that were just bringing the songs that I love.
(03:18):
So I thought, well, what did he do? And hear
this Rhodes scholar? He didn't go to New York or LA.
He went to Nashville, and I thought, well, maybe I
should consider Nashville, even though I didn't really see myself
as a country writer. So he came to do a
concert at my school, and I guess I could thank
my father for this. And I've just never been afraid
(03:41):
to talk to a stranger, and I waited for a
respectful moment. I was backstage before his concert and I
saw him talking with a few people and just kind
of casual, laughing talking, and I walked up and said
excuse me, and he turned around, looked me right in
the eye, said hey man, how you doing? And we
(04:02):
shook hands and I said, I really don't want to
bother you, but I just want to ask you a question.
He said sure, and I said, I'm a singer songwriter
and I love to write songs. And I had a
little local hit here on a record that I made,
and I'm not sure what to do. My parents really
want me to go to law school or med school,
and I'm having a struggle. And I just love your thoughts,
(04:27):
and he went, you got to go to Nashville, Man,
You've got to go.
Speaker 3 (04:31):
You've got to go.
Speaker 2 (04:35):
I love to tell this story because here's a life strategy.
A stranger who doesn't know you at all and has
never heard your music and is drunk tells you to
do something, and you go, absolutely, Man, sign me up.
That's where I'm going. So I can't blame him or
(04:57):
credit him too much. But I've run in to him
three different times since then, and though that was a
long time ago, decades ago, and each time I've thanked
him and told him who I was.
Speaker 3 (05:10):
But he was so gracious and grateful when he heard
his thing. That's great.
Speaker 2 (05:16):
That's so great, And that's been a joy to me
to to in some ways get to pay him back.
I was in Nashville in the early nineteen seventies and
(05:37):
I had gotten a job at a theme park there
called opry Land, USA, and I had auditioned with a
comedy country song that I had written because I didn't
have a lot of sort of straight country material, and
they'd given me a job as manager of animal shows
and managed the Animal Opry which was a live show
(06:02):
in which trained barnyard animals played musical instruments. Had a
pig named Pigerachi who played the piano, and a duck
named bert Baquack that played the drum. It was a
great show. I loved this show. Eight thousand people a
day we'd see this show. And I was working there
eighty hours a week at Opryland. But I was also
(06:25):
writing songs and doing my best to write country songs.
And I got signed at Tree Music, which was a
fabulous company, the largest BMI company at that time.
Speaker 1 (06:37):
And you're listening to Randall Wallace tell the story of
his own life. He spent so much of his life
telling the stories of other people's lives. This time it's
Randall on himself, starting out as a young musician growing
up in the Tennessee area Memphis, and then spending a
part of his young life in Nashville at the suggestion
(06:58):
of a drunk songwriter wo we admired named Chris Christofferson,
who knew nothing about Randall's musical proclivities or the styles
or tastes of Randall Wallace's related to what kind of
music he'd actually like to write. And there he finds
himself in Nashville running the Animal Opry at Opryland, and
of course, while they're landing a gig with one of
(07:20):
the best publishing houses in Nashville. When we come back,
more of Randall Wallace's story here on our American Stories.
This is Lee Habib, host of our American Stories. Every
day we set out to tell the stories of Americans
past and present, from small towns to big cities, and
from all walks of life doing extraordinary things. But we
(07:42):
truly can't do this show without you. Our shows are
free to listen to, but they're not free to make.
If you love what you hear, go to our American
Stories dot com and make a donation to keep the
stories coming. That's our American Stories dot Com. And we
(08:09):
continue with our American Stories and the story of Randall
Wallace as told by Randall himself. He's written and directed
many of the movies we know and love. Braveheart, We
Were Soldiers, Secretariat, Pearl Harbor, a Man in the Iron Mask,
Hevan is for Real, He's the author of seven novels
and also a terrific musician and songwriter. He wrote the
lyrics to Mansions of the Lord, one of my favorites.
(08:32):
Let's pick up where we last left off.
Speaker 2 (08:35):
I was working there eighty hours a week at Opryland,
but I was also writing songs and doing my best
to write country songs. And I got signed at Tree Music,
which was a fabulous company, the largest BMI company at
that time, and there were great songwriters there like Bobby
(08:55):
Braddock and John Hyatt and others, and they wrote absolutely
brilliant songs. I wrote songs that I felt were really good,
and they apparently thought my songs were good, but they
didn't fit kind of in the country category. And a
sort of country music legend named Wesley Rose sat down
(09:18):
with me one day and listened to my song and said,
these are really good songs, but do you like country music?
And I said, well, I respect country music and I
love it, but it's not quite my thing. And he said,
don't sell your soul for a few pennies. Find the
thing you love to do the most. And it's interesting
(09:40):
that that echoed something that I had been told by
my pastor of the church that I grew up in.
When I decided to major in religion at school, my
pastor said to me, do you feel the calling to
be a pastor? And I said, honestly, I don't, but
I know it's the greatest calling that anyone could have.
(10:02):
And he said, no, you're wrong. The greatest calling anyone
can have is the one God.
Speaker 3 (10:06):
Has for you.
Speaker 2 (10:08):
And that bit of sharing from him allowed me to
leave seminary, to leave school and head off to Nashville.
I wanted to be like Beethoven, nothing but music all
day long, every day. But what you find is Jordan
Peterson talks about you find your limits, that you can't
(10:30):
do that all the time.
Speaker 3 (10:32):
You need people.
Speaker 2 (10:33):
You need conversation, you need encounters, you need disagreement, You
need the grinding points where soul is created. You need
those things. And I got really dark. I went through
fourteen days without a patch of sunshine. So I told
my best friends, I need you to help me pack
(10:55):
up my place, but I've got to get out of here.
I was really depressed and drove to California alone. Kept
writing songs but wasn't really getting anywhere. And I started
dating a woman that I ultimately would marry, And on
her coffee table was a stack of pages that were
(11:18):
bound in an interesting way, and I said, what's this
and she said, it's a screenplay written by my father
and he had been a prisoner of war in World
War two and written an incredible story. And I picked
it up and began to read it, and I loved
the format instantly because it was clear, and it was powerful,
(11:41):
and it was unpretentious. You could only show the reader
what you could see a character do and what you
could hear the character say. You didn't have to go
into explaining and expounding all of your literary references. You
didn't have to show your er audition, just what does
(12:02):
the character do?
Speaker 3 (12:03):
What does he say?
Speaker 2 (12:05):
And from the first line of doing it, I thought
this is my medium because all the training that I
had in writing songs enabled me to write lyrics, because
every syllable is valuable, and I wrote dialogue in a
lyrical way. I wrote it with a kind of musical
(12:27):
and dare I say poetic rhythm to it, because it
was music that led me into screenwriting. But also the
music was not divorced from the experience of screenwriting or
or later on, and directing that a movie is like
(12:48):
a symphony. It's a whole piece in it. It has
its quiet parts, and it builds and it repeats in
it and in innerwaves. And I know that nothing that
we do gets wasted. All things work together for good
if you love God. And I don't mean as a reward.
(13:11):
I mean you love what is ultimate and significant in
real and you keep loving that, and that makes everything
you've done, in everything you're doing, have its place, have
its value that you can draw from. I was in
Los Angeles and was writing novels now and screenplays, writing
(13:37):
screenplays based on my novels, and novels based on my screenplays,
and I would go to the gym a lot and
work out. And one day I was in a gym
in Studio City, California, near where I lived, and a
guy was next to me helping a friend who was
really out of shape. But this one guy, who was
(13:59):
in really great shape was was talking the friend through it,
and I thought, well, that's a that's a great guy
to do that for his buddy. And the guy in
good shape was was telling stories about Elvis Presley, and
I sort of chimed in and said, my father saw
(14:20):
Elvis Presley seeing at a supermarket opening in Memphis, and
the guy went really and we started talking and we
just talked about working out, and I was working out
a lot, and he said something about me being in
good shape, and he said, do you run any And
(14:40):
I go I not for a long time. I ran
in college, but I haven't run. And well, I'm in
a running group. Why don't you come run with us
on Saturday mornings early at six o'clock. And I went, great, okay,
super I had very few friends. I was an isolated
kind of mode. And he introduced him, said I'm Mike
Post and I said, I'm Rando.
Speaker 3 (15:00):
Wait what Mike? Who Mike Post?
Speaker 2 (15:03):
And I go the music Mike Posts because I knew
he had had had a hit with Classical Gas and
I knew some of his other competes. I mean, Mike
Post is a musical genius. And he said, yeah, yeah,
that's me, and I started. I went with his running
group and was running, oh for a couple of years
(15:25):
with him. And Mike said, what are you doing to get.
Speaker 3 (15:29):
Your career going?
Speaker 2 (15:30):
I said, I'm all I know to do is write
stories and sort of show them when I can, and
he went, well, I worked for Steve Cannell, and I
think Cannell would really like you. You're you're kind of his
kind of guy and well man. Steve Cannell was then
king of television. A Team was his biggest but hunter
(15:52):
all sorts of shows, and Mike said, give me a minute,
I'm gonna get back to you. So he talked with
Steve about me, and Steve said, I'll hear about him
if I'm supposed to hear about him, I don't want
to read any of his work. So Mike came back
and said, I want you to write a spec script
for every episode that Canill has. And he had six
(16:13):
different shows on television, so he was telling me, write
six different shows for which you will not be paid,
but just write six episodes and you're going to demonstrate
how willing you are to work. And I did that,
and Steve didn't read any of them. But Mike was
not going to give up. And Steve was doing a
(16:36):
show called JJ Starbuck about a country guy, and I
wrote Steve a letter and I said, I know everyone
and his brother is trying to get in to see you.
I just want to tell you a story about why
I would be the guy to work on this show.
Speaker 1 (16:55):
And you're listening to screenwriter, director, author and musician Randall
Wallace share his story his journey from Nashville and the
East Coast to the West and how he just knocked
around for a bit and had some really great breaks
and to be able to bump into a guy like
Mike Post, a legend in the business, and then make
(17:17):
his way into this really difficult business to crack into,
which is TV production with a monster talent like Stephen
Kennell is just an opportunity of a lifetime. And also
bumping into that thing called a screenplay sitting on the
desk of his future bride's place, reading it, seeing it
and knowing that the screenplay was the medium for him,
(17:40):
and also that insight that he stumbled upon from his
pastor the greatest calling anyone can have is the calling
God has for you. When we come back more of
Randall Wallace's story here on our American Stories, and we
(18:08):
returned to our American stories and to Randall Wallace telling
us his own story. He's written and directed many of
the movies we know. In Love, Braveheart, we were Soldiers' Secretariat.
Have It is for real. He's the author of seven
novels and also a terrific musician and songwriter. He wrote
the lyrics to Mansions of the Lord, one of my
favorite songs. Let's return to Randall Wallace with the story
(18:31):
of how he went from songwriting to working for Stephen Kennell,
one of the great TV producers of the nineteen eighties
and nineties.
Speaker 2 (18:40):
During the depression, my grandfather started a country store and
he built a store out of woody salvaged and he
didn't have enough money to buy the stock that he
needed to sell in the store, and the only place
that paid cash in the town was an ice factory
where they would freeze huge blocks of ice and men
(19:02):
would sling them onto wagons so that the farms without
electricity could keep their milk and their meat cold. And
my grandfather went to work on that crew, and the
first day, the foreman came up to him and said, listen,
I want to let you know that I cuss at
the men to get them to work. And if I
(19:22):
call you a son of a don't pay me no mind.
It don't mean nothing by it's just the way I am.
And my grandfather said, I understand completely, and I just
want you to know that if you do happen to
call me a son of a did I hit you
in the face with a claw hammer, don't pay me
no mind. I don't mean nothing by it's just the
way I am. Those are my people, Those are the
(19:44):
people that I know. I think I could write.
Speaker 3 (19:46):
Your show for you.
Speaker 2 (19:50):
I got a call not from Steve, but from one
of his producers saying, Okay, we're going to give you
a shot. And I wrote the script and the next
day Steve came in and said, I want you to
be on staff. And the next script I wrote, they
made me a story editor. And the next script I wrote,
they made me a producer. So Steve became my mentor.
(20:15):
And one of his greatest qualities, other than being incredibly talented,
I mean a genius, but he had a quality of
he loved what he did. He never lost enthusiasm for
anything that he did. Steve died of melanoma. The day
(20:36):
he died, he still got out of bed to map
out a story, a new story that he wanted to write.
He loved what he did, and he loved sharing it,
and he loved teaching it.
Speaker 3 (20:47):
He was.
Speaker 2 (20:49):
A powerful mentor in my life. But none of that
would have ever happened without Mike Post. I was on
quite a trajector in television. I went from a freelancer
to being a producer in a really short time, maybe
(21:11):
six months or so. And I also realized that I
had to have ambitions beyond.
Speaker 3 (21:21):
Just the television world.
Speaker 2 (21:23):
And I don't mean in any sense to demean that world.
Television is incredibly lucrative, it's incredibly influential. But I also
felt that I didn't want to be a cog in
a big wheel, and that I always would be if
I was grinding out episodic television and I was writing
(21:49):
feature scripts, and I was writing novels and still writing
songs and trying to look outside the world that I
was in. I realized there was kind of a glass
ceiling for me there. And I remember packing up my
office and I had gone from having no money at
(22:09):
all to having a really good income and I quit.
And I remember going down to pack up my office
and my son Andrew was then only seven years old
or something, and I took him down on the Sunday
to clean out my office with me, and we're packing up,
and I was knotted up.
Speaker 3 (22:32):
I was I knew I was facing like total unknown.
Speaker 2 (22:37):
And Andrew said, Daddy, how are we going to eat?
And it was quite a moment, and just the two
of us in that office and with all my stuff
packed into boxes, and I sat down in the chair,
put him in my lap, and I said, son, that's
(22:58):
a really good question.
Speaker 3 (22:59):
And this is a really scary time.
Speaker 2 (23:02):
And I've been working for the last four years to
make mister Cannell wealthier man and make him better known,
and to make us some money. And now what I'm
going to try to do, and I am gonna do
is make us more money and let us have a reputation,
(23:24):
to let us stand on our own. And it's gonna
be scary, and that's what we're going to do. And
he went got it okay, And his courage, his love
and his trust to me was profoundly important to me.
Speaker 3 (23:39):
So cut too.
Speaker 2 (23:41):
It's a year or so later and I can't even
get an appointment. I can't get a pitch meeting because
the business was treating me like, well, you were Steve
Candell's protege, you were only ascendancy. Now you're out of
that company. You must have screwed up some way. We
don't even want to.
Speaker 3 (23:59):
Talk to you.
Speaker 2 (24:00):
That was literally the way it was. And there were
I think people from Steve's company who had maybe poisoned
the well for me a little bit. And I know
Steve hadn't. He was too good a man and too
proud a man to talk down on my abilities. But
I think, you know, there's just that kind of front
runner bandwagon mentality in Hollywood.
Speaker 3 (24:23):
I was so tense.
Speaker 2 (24:25):
I couldn't eat, I couldn't sleep, and I certainly couldn't write.
And I felt that I was going to put my
sons through the same thing that I had gone through
when my father had a breakdown. And I got on
my knees, which was the only place I had to go,
and I said a prayer, and the prayer was what
(24:45):
really concerns me now that my primary responsibility is my
son's And maybe they'll become better men if they don't
live in a big house in California with a swimming
pool and tennis courts and fancy cars in the driveway.
(25:05):
Maybe they'll learn more if they live in a house,
even when without indoor plumbing, the way my sister and
I lived when our father lost his way.
Speaker 3 (25:13):
But if that's what God wants. If that's best for.
Speaker 2 (25:18):
My sons, then please bring that on and help me
bear it. But if I go down in this fight,
let me go down not worshiping Hollywood, but standing up
with my flag flying, fighting for what I believe. And
I stood up and I went back to my desk.
And without that moment, that would have never written. They
(25:41):
may take our lives, They'll never take our freedom.
Speaker 1 (25:46):
What will you do without freedom?
Speaker 4 (25:50):
Will you'll fight? I guess that no, we will run
and we will live.
Speaker 2 (26:01):
I fight and you may die, Run and you'll love.
Speaker 3 (26:07):
At least a while.
Speaker 4 (26:10):
I'm dying in your pads many years from now.
Speaker 5 (26:14):
Would you be willing to trade all the days from
this day.
Speaker 4 (26:19):
To that for one chance, just one chance, to come
back here and tell our enemies that.
Speaker 2 (26:26):
They may take our lives, but they'll never take me.
Speaker 4 (26:31):
Oh pray.
Speaker 1 (26:34):
And you've been listening to Randall Wallace share with us
a very personal story about in the End where some
of the language for Brave Heart came from, and a
lot of it had to do with his own existential struggles,
with his own life, with risk taking, with fear, and
that prayer he prayed for his son was a simple
one that we've all prayed. Maybe Lord, your plan for
them is to have less, not more, and for us
(26:58):
to be true to you and not to our own calling.
And Randall had this fervent prayer and outcomes that scene
from Braveheart. And that's what you were just listening to
Mel Gibson's epic speech as William Wallace. When we come back,
more of the remarkable life story of Randall Wallace, to
connection between creativity and courage, love and fear, and so
(27:19):
much more here on our American stories, and we continue
with our American stories and with Randall Wallace. Let's pick
(27:42):
up where he last left off.
Speaker 2 (27:45):
I said a prayer, and the prayer was, if I
go down in this fight, let me go down, not
worshiping Hollywood, but standing up with my flag flying, fighting
for what I believe. And I stood up and I
went back to my desk. And without that moment, I
would have never written every man dies, not every man
(28:08):
really lives?
Speaker 4 (28:13):
Who died will beautiful?
Speaker 3 (28:15):
Every man dies, everyone already lives. I'd never have written freedom.
Speaker 5 (28:27):
Uh, it can all end right now, just say it,
cry oud, Let's see.
Speaker 4 (28:46):
Monday, just see let's see.
Speaker 3 (28:52):
Yah.
Speaker 4 (28:53):
H yes, Jesus.
Speaker 5 (28:58):
The President, which is to say, A whall.
Speaker 4 (29:07):
Free never written that.
Speaker 2 (29:18):
And I had to be in that moment. God had
to put me in that moment to mold me into
this new direction. I say in my book Living the
Brave Art Life, it's more powerful to believe than to know,
because we never fully know anything. So science. You listen
(29:41):
to a great scientist and said that the whole notion
of science is we think this, and this seems to
explain everything for now, but there's all this stuff that
we don't know. We were having a negotiation my wife
and I about having children, and she said, look, I
(30:04):
am really not eager to have them, but I know
you want to. So if you get me pregnant, you've
got to agree to take me to Europe. And I
went done, and we got pregnant. We went to Europe
and we were in London. I said, you know, I
would love to be able to tell we knew we're
(30:24):
going to have a son. I'd love to be able
to tell him some part of my ancestry, like you know,
all of yours back hundreds and hundreds of years.
Speaker 3 (30:33):
And I hear there.
Speaker 2 (30:34):
Are Wallace Is in Scotland, let's go up there and
poke around a little. And she went, sure, why not, adventure,
Let's go to Scotland. She was four months pregnant. We
went to Edinburgh. We walked into Edinburgh Castle and as
we walked into the castle, my eye fell on a
statue on one side of the castle and it's William Wallace.
Speaker 3 (30:55):
And there's the name Wallace. And I went Wallace And.
Speaker 2 (31:00):
The other side was Bruce, Robert the Bruce. And I
grabbed a member of the Black Watch guard there, tough
little guy on a kilt, and said, who is this Wallace?
Speaker 3 (31:13):
And he said.
Speaker 2 (31:13):
It's William Wallace, as I it's Hiro, and I went,
greatest hero, honey, greatest hero. And I knew about Robert
the Bruce from a Robert Burns poem of Scott's which
have with Wallace bled, And that was how I knew
that there must be Wallace is in Scotland. And I said,
(31:35):
was William Wallace an ally of Robert the Bruce in
fighting the English? And this guard said, well, no one
will ever know for sure, which, of course are magic
words to a writer? What our legends say more magic
words to a writer, that Robert the Bruce may have
(31:56):
been one of those who betrayed William Wallace into the
hands of the English to clear the way for himself
to become the king. Now I knew none of that history,
but it was as if I had heard that Saint
Peter and Judas were the same person. In that instant,
(32:17):
the tumblers all tripped into my head, and I thought,
how does Robert the Bruce be someone who could do
such a terrible thing, betray the hero of his country,
but he becomes the country's greatest, most courageous king. How
does that happen? What if there was something so noble
(32:41):
in the life and death of William Wallace that that's
what transformed Robert the Bruce.
Speaker 3 (32:47):
I knew in that.
Speaker 2 (32:48):
Moment it was an incredible story that I wanted to write,
and I didn't feel I was yet ready to. For
one thing, I had a baby on the way and
I had to find a way to feed him. So
I went into television and focused on television first. But
in television I gained the skills and didn't know when
(33:11):
the time would come until that moment when I got
on my knees to say the prayer of I'm not
going to worship Hollywood. I'm going to stand up and
fight for to write the kind of movie I want
my sons to see. And that's what William Wallace means
to me. And people will say, oh, well, you're not
a relative, and I go, you can't prove that. And
(33:31):
I can't prove that I am, but you can't prove
that I'm not. I had a meeting with Mel Gibson
once when we were doing Braveheart, and Mel was the
biggest star in the world and I was a completely
unknown screenwriter. Hollywood was starting to hear about me because
(33:53):
suddenly this script that they had never seen was getting made.
But Mel and I were at dinner, just the two
of us in London, and he was talking about a
role that he was thinking to cast, and I was
questioning the casting choice a bit. He said something absolutely
(34:15):
stunning to me. He said, Look, the truth is writers write,
director's direct actors act from their essence as a human being.
Speaker 3 (34:25):
He said, this script is you. It is right out
of your soul. It is you.
Speaker 2 (34:30):
He said, I'm going to bring everything I have to
directing it. A few years ago, I did a charity
screening of Braveheart in Austin, Texas, and at the end
of the movie, I was in a theater, a small theater.
Into the movie, I walked up on the stage to
(34:52):
do a question and answer with the audience, and the
first person who stood up was a nineteen year old
woman on the front row. And she stood up and said,
mister Wallace, I don't have a question. I just want
to tell you something. My fiance died six months ago,
and before he died he told me he wanted me
(35:13):
to watch Braveheart so I would understand the way he
loved me. It took me a couple of minutes to
compose myself enough to speak. After that, it confirmed for
me what I always have said, that it's not war
stories that I write. It's that until you find who
(35:36):
in your life you would give your life for, you're
not really alive yet.
Speaker 3 (35:41):
That's when you know. I think Mark Twain said something.
Speaker 2 (35:45):
Like the man who is fully ready to die is
the one who is living. He said it better than that,
but that's the thought. And I think kind of animal
instinct for survivor is powerful, but it's not particularly.
Speaker 3 (36:05):
Admirable in that it's just an errand it is what
it is.
Speaker 2 (36:10):
It exists in everything from I guess from ants to angels.
Speaker 3 (36:17):
But the notion.
Speaker 2 (36:20):
Of finding something that you put above yourself is where
I think you really for me.
Speaker 3 (36:28):
It's where I begin to find actual meaning.
Speaker 2 (36:34):
I'm living for someone else, but to me, faith has
to do with standing in awe and in accepting that
there is a God and it's not me, and that
I try to listen to what God has to say.
Speaker 3 (36:55):
That's where I find the most meaning.
Speaker 1 (37:00):
And a terrific job on the production and editing by
our own Greg Hangler, and a special thanks to Randall
Wallace for sharing his story with us. Is one man
show The Braveheart of Creativity is touring the country. To
find out where it's playing or find out how to
bring it to your town, go to Wallace Entertainment dot com.
I love what he said about his movies, particularly the
(37:21):
war movies. It's not war stories. I write their love stories.
Until you find who in your life you would give
your life for, you're not really alive. He also talked
about putting things above himself, that that's when you find
real meaning in your life. And of course faith is
(37:41):
such a big part of Randall's life. Standing in awe
that there is a God, and it's not me Randall
Wallace's story here on our American story.
Host
Lee Habeeb
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