Some people said that in telling the 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. There probably were historical inaccuracies - quite a few. But maybe there weren't, who's to say, because there was very little history about the man. It wasn't necessarily authentic. In some of the stuff I read about him, he wasn't as nice as he was on film. We romanticised it a bit, but that's the language of film - you have to make it cinematically acceptable. Actually, he was a monster - he always smelled of smoke because he was always burning people's villages down. He was like what the Vikings called a 'berserker'. But we kind of shifted the balance a bit because somebody's got to be the good guy and somebody the bad guy, and every story has its own point of view. That was our bias. - On Braveheart (1995).
