Mel's rescue mission

He's happier talking about his film, even when forced to defend it. Apocalypto tells the story of a peaceful tribe attacked by their warlike neighbours, the menfolk seized to serve as human sacrifices to the gods. At heart it's a powerful, even poetic portrait of a lost civilisation.

On the surface, though, it's an orgy of violence. A jaguar rips a man's face off his skull, a child is dashed against a tree, a heart is yanked from a living torso and some critics have questioned the necessity of the unremitting depiction of heads lopped off, limbs hacked and throats slit.

Gibson is unrepentant. "A 14- or 15-year-old boy can go and see this film and really get off on the breakneck action and thrill-ride and mythic storytelling of it. And if a 50-year-old pseudointellectual wants to extrapolate something deeper, I hope that's there, too.

"First, I hope to entertain, second to educate and third lift the audience to a higher plane. If you can do those three things, then you're cooking."

But he seems to be trying to outdo himself in gore every time he directs. There were the brutal battle scenes and the culminating torture and evisceration of William Wallace in Braveheart; the endless scourging of Jim Caviezel's Jesus in The Passion of the Christ; and now this. "I don't think it is as violent as Braveheart," Gibson ripostes. "I think I was merciful. I mean in Braveheart there was that scene at the end where the guy's entrails were ripped out. You don't really see anything in this one."

Audiences may beg to differ. You might not see the Mayan high priest plunging his hand into a man's chest, but you see the heart that emerges in his hand and the head that is hacked off. "I am telling you it is less violent than Braveheart," he repeats. "I could have really gone to town when that kid gets it in the throat but you saw it from about 80 yards away."

And he has a novel explanation for the reasons people have focused on the film's brutality - one that portrays himself as a misunderstood artist.

"Everybody likes to beat up on me for the violence but I think people think it's more violent because I fool them into caring for the characters," he says, eyes brooking no argument. "When it matters, when they give a shit, it seems more violent. When you're watching Jean-Claude whatever his name is, you don't give a shit. If you watch Texas Chainsaw Massacre Part 4, you don't care about the pimply teenager on the meathook because you don't know who he is."

He cites the film's popularity with Latin American communities, who have seized on a film showing aspects of their culture and who - like the religious audience he tapped into with The Passion - are typically dismissed or ignored by Hollywood.

"They've already found the movie," he says. "They see that it's their culture and that it's something that may not have been looked at before. Look, the idea was conceived here [in America] by me but it's really a Mexican-made film because all the crew and manpower came from down there."

He even puts in a plea for his film - and this stretches the credulity - as an instrument for healing racial tensions. "My hope is that people walk in to Apocalypto and identify completely and utterly and feel sympathy and empathy with those people with the brown skin and identify with them totally. I think that experience brings different cultures together if they can have those feelings."

Gibson clearly views himself as a lone wolf, an outsider, and he is not entirely unjustified in this.

Born in New York in 1956, the sixth of 11 children, he was named after the Church of St Mel in Clonmel, Tipperary, his Irish mother's hometown. After his father won the American quiz show Jeopardy, though, his family relocated to Australia when he was 12, in the middle of the Vietnam War, in 1968.

Mel went to an all-boys Catholic school, then on to the National Institute of Dramatic Art in Sydney. After a brief period on stage, he was cast as the lead in George Miller's Australian road movie Mad Max, in 1979, when he was just 23. Other movies followed - Gallipoli, and the schmaltzfest Tim with Piper Laurie - before he won his first big Hollywood role in The Year of Living Dangerously in 1983.

By then, he had already been married for three years to Robyn, a dental nurse from Adelaide. They are still together and have six sons and one daughter. The apparent durability of his marriage has always marked Gibson out as unusual in the movie world: photographs apparently showing him canoodling with other women never resulted in a scandal to match that which greeted his recent drunken rant, and Gibson declines to comment on claims made by 29-year-old Australian painter Carmel Sloanes in the News of the World that she is Gibson's illegitimate child.

His devout faith also sets him apart from his peers: he reportedly has a private chapel in the grounds of his Malibu home, where he attends Mass every day.

A regular on "sexiest stars" lists of the Eighties and Nineties, Gibson seemed as the years went by increasingly uncomfortable with the matinee idol roles that made his name and his fortune - the Lethal Weapon series, the Mad Max sequels, Maverick and Ransom.

Although he spoofed his image memorably in What Women Want and aged graciously in The Patriot, serious dramatic recognition eluded him. His Hamlet for Franco Zeffirelli in 1990, and his bid for art-house cred in Wim Wenders's Million Dollar Hotel in 2000, were not well-received. Today, he says he is bored with acting.

"I've got a lot of baggage," he says. "Being in movies is counter-productive and seems kind of wrong. I've been in too many movies and if I'm in something, people would say: 'There's that guy that was in that other movie.' Maybe I'll do it one of these days if I really get interested, but it would have to be a really boring day."

Back in 1995, he initially turned down the role of William Wallace in Braveheart, believing himself too old. But when the producers agreed to let him direct as well as star, he saw a way of capitalising on the modest success of The Man Without a Face, his 1993 directorial debut. With the emphasis firmly on "capital".

Braveheart won him two Oscars, and the film's massive profits enabled him to set up his own unique production company-Icon Entertainment, which finances his films and distributes them in the UK and Australia. This makes him arguably the only Hollywood star not beholden to the Hollywood system, enabling him to plough his own furrow.

It has also made him fabulously rich. Even after Disney takes its chunk for distributing Apocalypto in the US, the lion's share of profits will revert to Gibson, as they did from What Women Want and The Passion. Everyone thought he was mad to make The Passion, remember, and moreover to make it in ancient Aramaic. But the $25 million of his own money he put into it (equivalent to his record fee for The Patriot, incidentally) came back roughly 25-fold.

"It means I will continue to do what I do," he says with a smile when I ask what the company means to him. "I don't have to depend on a whole lot of other people. I can just do it." He says this with an utter absence of self-doubt, and you can see why the director's chair suits Gibson. A measure of megalomania is handy when helming a movie, and essential for a visionary who can get films such as The Passion and Apocalypto made against the odds.

But it's a flawed vision. The same unshakeable self-belief preserves him from too close an acquaintance with the ugliness of his run-in with the law .

Apocalypto opens 5 January.