They Can’t Buy a Break

Mel Gibson is letting loose ungodly squealing sounds and cracking himself up.

Sitting in his trailer on a spring afternoon wearing black jeans and a tasteful plaid shirt, he is gesticulating madly with his hands, widening his eyes for effect and doubling over in simulated pain. He is describing how his laugh sounded following his emergency appendectomy, which kept him off the set of Ron Howard’s newest movie, “Ransom,” for several weeks. His scenes in the psychological thriller about a child’s kidnapping were postponed while he recuperated.

“Oh man, two days after the operation, I was sitting with my two assistants--they’re the worst practical jokers in the world,” says Gibson, looking so well-groomed for his new role it’s hard to believe “Braveheart” ever happened.

He smiles conspiratorially as he gears up for the story. “I started laughing, but I couldn’t give it a good hearty laugh, so I had to expel my mirth with another physical thing entirely that came out as this wheezing.” He illustrates with a long, loud wailing sound. “I felt like Harvey Keitel in ‘Bad Lieutenant.’ I thought I was going to burst something--I was begging them to stop. It was cruel and hilarious. They didn’t care it hurt. They wanted to hear it again.”

Though the story may seem funny now, it wasn’t so funny when the big-budget production, starring Gary Sinise, Rene Russo and Delroy Lindo, was held up for weeks beginning in mid-March without its star. The schedule was further delayed by some of the worst New York blizzards in years. As a result, the movie’s release--originally slated for summer--has jumped to November.

*

“We just kept shooting and working around Mel,” says Howard, snacking on a corn muffin in an Upper West Side diner between takes recently. “Now we’re doubling back and plugging him into scenes we shot without him.” He is worried that the trees, many of which have begun to blossom with the onset of spring, will ruin the continuity of those scenes. “Logistically, I can’t say I’ve ever had worse on a movie. It was a real reworking of the whole schedule--it was a jigsaw puzzle.”

As Tom Mullen, Gibson plays an ultra-successful Trump-like entrepreneur who goes on national television to negotiate the riskiest deal of his life: turning $2 million in ransom money into a bounty on the heads of his son’s kidnappers.

It was Mullen’s human shortcomings that appealed to Gibson. “Tom really gets the guts ripped out of him,” says Gibson, who has six children of his own. “He has all the trappings of high society. He’s got a nice apartment, a car, dough, but he’s not without blame. You don’t ascend to a position like that without at least misdemeanors along the way. It’s interesting to see how meaningless it all is. You see these characters--the husband and wife--as it’s all stripped away from them.”

Despite the long hours, difficult material and the surgery, Gibson says, the shoot has been easy compared to his grueling hours on “Braveheart.” “This experience is much lighter,” says Gibson, who put in 19-hour days on the Oscar-winning movie he directed and starred in.

Even at last month’s Academy Awards, Gibson winced with pain as he rose on more than one occasion to receive his best picture and best director Oscars--only two of the five awards his film won that night. “I was thinking, ‘Well I’ve got a chance in five--a 20% chance,” says Gibson, who has presented at the awards ceremony five times but had never before been nominated. His movie was up against Howard’s in a number of categories, including best picture. “I just figured, hey, what’s going to happen is going to happen. I did get a kick out of it, it was fun and very flattering. I decided to take the full opportunity to indulge myself for an evening.”

After making appearances at several high-profile parties, Gibson met some friends at a private hotel room and smoked cigars all night. It was so secretive, they even had an entrance password. “It was ‘swordfish,’ of course,” Gibson says sneakily. “Like the Marx Brothers.”

The day Gibson returned to work a few weeks after surgery, he was still too tender to do a big Madison Avenue showdown scene with the kidnappers. Howard used a stunt man for a portion of the scene and filmed Gibson doing non-strenuous activity. The rest will be shot at a later date.

“I had to go pretty easy,” says Gibson, who has mostly healed now. “I felt like something was going to burst out like that thing out of John Hurt’s shirt [in “Alien”]. You feel like the bottom’s going to drop out of your stomach or something if you even sneeze or cough.”

Howard, as usual, looked on the bright side. “Fortunately the characters undergo a real emotional journey in this film. Mel looked kind of haggard the first days back, which was OK. The makeup folks got a little help with that.”

After the all-American “Apollo 13,” “Ransom” is an important departure for Howard. “I don’t want to be typecast as a director the way I think I probably was as an actor,” he says with a familiar squint and some less familiar lines in his face.

As a father of four, Howard says, he knows the real fears this story plays on. “Often you just get behind a story and do the best you can casting it, and move forward,” he says. “In this instance it was really important to know who was going to be playing Tom--because I guess I identified with that role. I relate to the character’s high-visibility career, his ambition, love of family and trying to find the middle ground there, which is almost always impossible because at any given moment something always seems out of balance.”

According to co-producer Scott Rudin, Howard was slow to sign on to the project. Nonetheless, he worked on the script with Rudin and Richard Price (“Clockers”), who was hired to rewrite a script by Alexander Ignon. “Ron was the unofficial guru to it while he was finishing ‘Apollo 13.’ We developed it without a commitment from Ron, but the script kept getting better largely based on his ideas.”

The changes to the script, which is a remake of an obscure 1956 Donna Reed movie, included developing the kidnappers’ side of the story, which was left out of the first draft entirely. The plot, which is full of twists and turns, examines how such an event affects everyone involved.

Howard, who signed on only after Gibson committed to do the film, took his cues from Hitchcock and “In Cold Blood,” one of his favorite thrillers. “The movie isn’t like ‘Dog Day Afternoon,’ but that’s a film I looked at a couple of times for its realism.”

The look of the movie is as different as the subject matter for Howard, who hired Polish director of photography Piotr Sobocinski (“Red”) to create a noir-ish effect through the use of lighting and contrast. Extensive use of a Steadicam gives an urgency and flexibility of viewpoint to the story.

“Some of the decisions I made about how to shoot the movie ended up being more complicated than I had imagined,” Howard says of the quick shifts of perspective between Gibson, Russo and the kidnappers, a motley crew including Lili Taylor, Liev Schreiber, Evan Handler and former New Kid on the Block Donnie Wahlberg.

“I wanted to use camera movement to look at what happens when you get these nightmare calls. What do you notice? What do you become aware of--from the husband and wife’s perspectives? I’m trying to get that psychological side. It’s not a movie you watch at arm’s length.”

Howard has not been afraid to incorporate the actors’ ideas into the script. Lindo, who plays the FBI agent in charge of the Mullen case, created an entire history of his character. “In my research, I tried to find out what is the reality of being a black man in the FBI,” says Lindo, who recently played opposite Russo in “Get Shorty.”

“As a black person in an organization like this, and especially being in charge of such a high-profile case, I think I’m someone who really had to prove himself. Lo and behold, Richard [Price] came back with a scene where I say something to Tom about what I had to go through to be in this position. It’s small, but I really appreciated it.”

Sitting in his office on the Queens soundstage, Howard explains that the heaviness of the movie hasn’t affected the mood on the set. Practical jokes abound--mostly at the hands of Gibson and Russo. But everyone on the set, it seems, is a joker. Howard displays two Polaroids of his “Apollo 13” buddy Sinise, who in “Ransom” plays Jimmy Shaker, a tough New York cop.

“Gary wasn’t working for a few days and he sent me these,” Howard says with a chuckle. The photos of Sinise, who played Ken Mattingly in “Apollo 13” and Lt. Dan in “Forrest Gump,” reveal a goofiness he didn’t show in either of those roles. Under the big, toothy smiles in the photos, he has written “I miss you. Love, Gary.”

Howard cast Sinise in the pivotal role even though the script originally called for an older actor to play a retired police officer. “In addition to being a tremendously versatile actor, Gary’s just getting going at his movie career so he doesn’t carry baggage one way or the other.”

To prepare for the role, Sinise patrolled Bayonne, N.J., with a police officer for a night. “Their job is to look for bad guys all night long, to find scum and deceit,” says Sinise, relaxing in his trailer between takes with Louis Prima blasting on the stereo. He seems unconcerned with the fake blood that has caked on his clothing from this morning’s scene with the SWAT team. Though they didn’t find any bad guys that night, Sinise did find some motivation for his character.

“There’s a rush you get from danger. You have to get off a little bit from jerking guys around or you wouldn’t do this job. Personally, I’d rather play a cop in a movie--it’s worth a lot more money; real cops don’t get paid that much to put [themselves] on the line every day.”

During his off time, he prepares for his next project, directing Sam Shepard’s play “Buried Child,” which opens on Broadway at the end of the month.

Russo, who pairs up with Gibson for the first time since 1992’s “Lethal Weapon 3,” takes care of the almost entirely male cast, including Nick Nolte’s son, Brawley, who plays her kidnapped son, Sean.

Every afternoon around 4, she provides appetizers for everyone. “I don’t know where she comes up with it,” says Howard, who sat next to Russo in several classes at Burroughs High School in Burbank and met up a few years ago at their 20th reunion. “One day we had a tea party, sometimes she makes little sandwiches if it’s an especially tough day. Rene’s looking after us. I guess you could say she’s hosting the movie.”

Russo was amazed that Gibson continued to play even during the most difficult emotional scenes. “Mel’s style is interesting,” Russo marvels. “I have to go into work on the verge of the emotion I’m going to need. Mel comes in with nothing. In between takes of one of the toughest scenes, he was cracking jokes and I thought, ‘How am I going to get through this?’ He told me, ‘Rene, for years I tortured myself. Then I realized I’ve got to come onto the set an empty vessel. Just let it go. Empty yourself.’ ”

She found that Gibson’s technique allowed her to sustain the emotion over the many takes Howard needed to get the shot just right. “I don’t know how it happened--the emotion would just be there when I needed it.”

The work was exhausting, says Russo, who as the mother of 2 1/2-year-old Rose, could empathize with the agony her character undergoes. But playing such an emotional role was new for her. It was Howard who managed to get a painfully realistic performance from her, she says.

“Ron’s style as a director is pretty heavy,” she says. “He pushed me and pushed me--to a point where it was aggravating. One day he pushed so hard I buried my head in my hands and Mel came up behind me and said, ‘Pay your dues,’ ” she mimics in an ominous, deep voice. “I thought, ‘My God, is Ron going to push me to melodrama?’ But he didn’t. This piece needed the pure essence of pain and fear. He got me to a very pure place.”

All those years of acting paid off for Howard, who uses his ability to emote as a key to his directing style. “He has such an amazing spirit and heart,” Russo says. “And he’s a storyteller. To get you in the right frame of mind, he’d put you in place and create a scene for you. But it wasn’t the story, it was the emotion he’d convey while telling it. He has such empathy, you can see it in his eyes.”

Howard can’t help his easy nature and charm. Though he’s tried to leave “Happy Days” behind him, he’ll never quite escape it.

“He’s Richie Cunningham all the way,” Donnie Wahlberg says. “And everybody loves Richie.”