Year 1982

Mel Gibson's skin is on too tight. Maybe it's the circumstances, the first in what promises to be an endless series of interviews to promote his latest film, the US/Australian coproduction of Peter's Weird "The Year of Living Dangerously" - or maybe this is just the way he's put together, all wire and sinews and shor bursts of forced laughter. Whatever the case, the 26-years-old American actor seems on the verge of an acute nervous meltdown.
The plush leather sofa, into whose inviting recesses he's sunk, is unable to hold him still for long. For one thing, his clothes are giving him trouble, the double-knit pants riding up, revealing the zippered tops of some vintage Bearle boots. He's long since tossed off his sports coat, and the way he's squirming you'd think the beige silk shirt he's wearing was made of horse hair. One of the most sought-after rising star on the international film scene - the matinee idol of Mad Max and Road Warrior, the riveting screen presence of Gallipoli - Gibson is behaving like a summer stock hopeful auditioning for a bit part in Kismet.
If it wasnīt for all this fidgeting, distracted pacing and chain smoking, Mel Gibson's unfamiliarity with the standard Hollywood tap dance might be desarming, even refreshing. As it is, I have the feeling that Gibson expected each question, no matter how innocent, to hold a barb, ready to sink into all the personal and private parts of his psyche and drag them out for everyone to see. This isn't an interview, it's a grilling, and one that reveals an often painful vulnerability.
"I love all this," he says gesturing vaguely to the bright sky and the busy entertainment enterprise grinding on outside his publicistīs Beverly Hills window. "But I don't think I'm equipped to handle it."
All this is Hollywood, a town whose glitzy ambience gives pause to an actor who made his reputation in the outback Australia film industry. "I've been asked to come here and make movies, but I think it would be too much too soon. It's a frightening prospect, really."
Frightened or not, Gibson may soon find himself having to deal with success on its own terms. Born in Peekskill, New York, in January of 1956, Gibson was one of eleven children that emigrated to Australia in 1968. Initially interested in a career as journalist, Gibson considered his early attraction to acting nothing more than a pleasant dversion for reality. Nevertheless, after graduating from high school, he applied to the National Institute of Dramatic Arts in Sydney. To his shock, he was accepted.

"The day after I graduated," he recalls, the broad vowel sounds of his Aussie accent obliterating any trace of his American roots, "I went out and auditioned for Mad Max. I didn't know what the hell I was doing, I just stepped into it and my head started to reel."
With good reason, as it turned out. Filmed on a budget of around $400,000, Mad Max - a hiperkinetic end-of-the world romp - has grossed over $100 miliion to date, making it the most successful film in Australia movie history and the feature credited with opening up global markets to Down Under product. "It was a rough trot," quips Gibson in what has to be an indigenous turn of phrase. "I'd never been in front of a camera before. It all seemed crazy to me, an absolutely insane busines."
Gibson, undoubtedly caught up in the mythc proportions of the Mad Max success story, is spinning a bit of legend here himself. The fact is he was cast in a feature film called "Summer City" while still a student at the Institute of Dramatic Arts, on-screen experience that had to come in handy when playing the grief crazed highway parolman Max in the galvanic role that catapulated him into worldwhile attention. "Summer City", just to set the record straight, is one of seven films in the Gibson portfolio, which includes the tearjerker "Tim", in which he stars as a retarded youth enamored of Piper Laurie; something called "Z Men", and a couple of oriental potboilers made in Taiwan. "I've done some really awful things," Gibson admits, pulling at his trousers and reaching for another Chesterfield. "But all things considered, I've been quite lucky. Being way down there away from everything... away from the public eye, has given me a chance to grow and develop. I think if I'd have done some of those films here I would have been stopped cold." His laugh is high-pitched, emanating from some reserve of anxiety that's causing him now to take tremendous drags of his cigarette and covulsively gulp black coffee.

"Road Warrior", last year blockbuster's sequel to "Mad Max" (originally titled Mad Max II) is a work of which even the self-effacing Gibson is proud. "Mad Max was really a technical feat," he confesses, "a triumph of editing. There was nothing I did that was as extraordinary. But by the time we did "Road Warrior", I was more knowledgable about film in general. I had learned how to use the camera, to work in that inescapable style of George's."
George is George Miller, who along with Peter Weir, Fred Schepsi, Bruce Beresford and a handful of others, is a founding member of Australia's new wage wunderkind film director's club. Citing what he calls Miller's "amazing ability to see something before he shoots it," Gibson tries to explain how, with a grand total of no more than a dozen lines as the road warrior, he was able to fashion with looks and presence such formidable menace and potent anger within the context of Miller's breakneck apocalyptic parable.
"I was in damn near every frame," he concedes, " so it became a question of accelerating to a weird, whippet speed of the film. Itīs what I call Heavy Metal acting, doing less and making more of it."
Questions of yet another "Mad Max" epic are letf hanging. "When we finished the first installment, we all swore we'd never pick up on that theme again. What George may do next, I have no idea. I woudn't presume to scope his psyche."
Psyche-scoping isn't something Gibson himsef will sit still for, either. Tentative probes into his personal life are met with more twitches and embarrassed pauses. He's been married for three years and has a two-year-old daughter. "My wife likes to stay out of my career as much as possible," he says, "and prefers that I don't discuss her either. She thinks it's rude, and I'm of the same opinion." The Gibsons make their home in Sydney, a locale he refers to as "delicious". One gets the feeling he'd like to be back right about now.
Meanwhile he's run out of smokes. There's nor even a butt in the ashtray, thanks to his disconcerting habit of reducing each cigarette to a nub of glowing coal, abandoning it only after singeing his lips. A secretary is hurriedly summoned; she offers her own pack of Vantages. Gibson takes the American brand, but transfroms them into "lung busters" by ripping off their filtered heads. The grilling resumes.