We figured the adventures of O.G. Riggs and Murtaugh were over, but now we know that Mel Gibson agrees. In a recent interview with Coming Soon, the Get the Gringo star has said that he thinks the original franchise is finally over, and rather humbly suggests that the biggest problem that the upcoming remake will have is finding a replacement for his co-star, Danny Glover.
“No I think the way things are going with Total Recall, they’ll just remake those somehow. Though it’s really tough to replace Danny. He was so amazing in those things. It was a good gig for us. It worked. But we knew it would,” Gibson told interviewer Paul Fischer.
As for his viking epic Berzerker, Coming Soon was able to wrangle a longboat’s worth of news about the production, which is still on, still very expensive, but no longer in the original language: “I believe it’s going forward. I’ve talked to actors and stuff, and there are some good names attached who want to do it. […] Not the original language. I’d thought about that at one time but then when you consider that English comes from the middle English language, it’s not a big jump. I’ll do something that’s understandable for a modern audience. But it won’t be the English THEY’RE used to.”
But is DiCaprio still on board? “He’s pretty busy, so no,“ says Gibson.
Gibson also spoke about his controversial Judah Maccabbee movie, and his well-publicized dispute with Basic Instinct screenwriter Joe Eszterhas over the screenplay, which Gibson was very unhappy with:
“And over the course of 14 months did you not think I told him what the story was? Give him my images? Give him my ideas and dialogue? You should see the books written on the subject. So I’m steeped in that stuff from the Seleucid Empire, and the relationship with Israel at the time, amazing history. So my best ideas I put in front of him, hoping that he took some of those, but he squandered them and alluded to them in his so called screenplay which I swear he must have written in three days. It’s really bad with heinous, bad, shonky, D grade dialogue. And after 18 months of waiting, from when we started talking, that’s what came in. And of course the studio also recognized it as not very good.”
Finally – seriously, just read the interview, we’re barely scratching the surface – Mel Gibson describes his climactic duel with Danny Trejo on the set of Machete Kills, which sounds eerily similar to Trejo’s fight with Steven Seagal in the original film…
“I get to have a sword fight with Machete. He has his machete and I have a samurai sword, but it’s kind of fun and it’s full of surprises, because it brings the kind of Grindhouse action thing to it, almost celebrating being gratuitous in its drive and making no apology for it and making it fun, like some twisted fairy tale.”
CraveOnline will be back with everything Mel Gibson after they finally green light Man Without a Face 2: About-Face.
