I wrote my book Heaven and Mel because I feel I’ve been used as a pawn in Mel Gibson’s attempt to protect himself against continuing charges that he is anti-Semitic.
I don’t believe he ever had any intention of making a film about one of the most glorious moments in Jewish history: the story of the Maccabees. I think he used my reputation as a protective umbrella. I had been awarded the Emanuel Foundation’s Lifetime Achievement Award for writings about the Holocaust in Hungary and I had written two films condemning anti-Semitism (Betrayed and Music Box). I had even done a fundraiser for the Anti-Defamation League in Los Angeles.
I put my heart and soul into my screenplay about the Maccabees for deeply personal reasons. My father, whom I loved, was accused by the Justice Department in the early ’90s of war-crime activities in Hungary in the ’30s and ’40s. I believed that writing a powerful film about the Maccabees would ease the burdens of my father’s sins.
My heart was broken when Mel Gibson cynically never even responded after I sent him my script.
I had learned by then, working closely with him, very personally, that his anti-Semitism was at his core, inherited from his father, a Holocaust denier. Mel loved his father, too, and stayed loyal to his father’s abhorrent beliefs. I turned my back on my father and his beliefs: my loyalty is to the 6 million dead.
Mel’s hatred of Jews, I discovered, is so deep that he views the story of the Maccabees, the inspiration for Hanukkah, as a “prefiguration” of Jesus Christ. I devoutly believe in Jesus Christ, but he has nothing to do with the Maccabees—a Jewish story, not a Christian one.
I hoped against hope as I wrote my script that its power and sense of triumph would overcome Mel’s hatred. But I realize now how foolish I was. I put the dunce cap on my own head.
As Mel said to me, he wanted to make a movie that would “convert the Jews to Christianity.” The script I wrote for him had nothing to do with Christianity. It had to do with the oppression and persecution of Jews, with echoes to the Nazis and to the present day.
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In the course of our work together, I saw a side of Mel that frightened me. I saw a truly ugly, terrifying, and violent explosion at his house in Costa Rica that caused my wife to sob and my 15-year-old son, Nick, to take a butcher knife from the kitchen and sleep with it under his pillow.
While Mel and I worked, he often spoke about killing his ex-girlfriend, Oksana Grigorieva, and he told my teenage son a graphic, sexual snuff-film fantasy about stabbing her to death.
The sordid violence of his threats, combined with the physical violence of two explosions I witnessed, is the other reason I wrote my book.
I came to the conclusion that Mel Gibson needs immediate psychiatric treatment and medication, or someone will get hurt: probably Mel, but possibly Oksana, or an innocent Jewish person who wanders into his field of vision.
My book isn’t a hatchet job. I lean over backward to be fair to the man, but I saw sides of him that most people never see ... and everything I saw is in my book. It is a tell-all, but a tell-all on different levels. It is about fathers and sons, God and the Devil, sexual obsession, and guilt. I think that, finally, it’s about values and choices.
While I was working with Mel Gibson, I saw many crucifixes and guns around his house. That twisted juxtaposition—crucifixes and guns—troubles me.
Since my issues with him became public, I have received viciously anti-Semitic hate mail (I am not Jewish) and death threats from his supporters. I have asked our local police department to take extra measures to protect my family’s safety.