Christmas and New Year films
II1Puring the next two weeks, more than 40 of the biggest
an
d best films will be showing on ITV and Channel Four,
icluding the blockbuster 'Raiders of the Lost Ark' on Christmas IllDay pages 14 and 15). Here, David James Smith looks at I some(see of them. For a full list of films, turn to pages 47 and 81.
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P• ng you in e pictures children live in Sydney. Work keeps him moving between there and Los Angeles. It may be too early to tell, but there are strong signs of a purposeful streak that will keep him apart from the nonsense of stardom. 'I don't have many illusions about myself,' he says. 'I have ambitions, but I try to keep them down to a purer level than just stardom in films. Why does anyone want to be a star? In itself it isn't enough for me.' Gibson was born, not in Australia, but Peekskill, New York State, US of A. He was the sixth of 11 children. 'My father was a brakeman on the Penn Central Railway. He worked his backside off to support us all - up to 16 hours a day.' The family emigrated to Australia when Reluctant sex symbol Mel Gibson (inset) is the star of `Gallipoli': ITV, 2 Jan.
Gibson was 12, after his father won a sizeable settlement after an accident at work. In addition, he did not want his sons to fight in Vietnam. Settled there, Gibson considered acting as a career, but did not take it too seriously. It wasn't some sort of burning desire in me. I'd always had a romantic thing about being an actor, wishing I was Humphrey Bogart and so on, but I didn't give it much thought. Journalism was a possibility, insurance another. I wanted to cover all my options. Then I auditioned at drama school in Sydney. They liked me, and said, "come on". So I did.' His first big role was the lead in Mad Max (1979). The old scar, the broken nose, loaned itself perfectly to the part. He has since made one sequel, and is just completing a second. He has yet to star in a flop - The Year of Living Dangerously (1982) and The Bounty (1984) received critical and popular acclaim. The business of being a romantic hero does not exactly excite Gibson. 'I don't think I'm handsome, and I don't know what it is I do up there to create that effect. I don't even like to think about it. It would be like killing the goose that laid the golden
Kim
T
he telegraph operator must have been puzzled, not merely by the fact that a big London film company was sending telegrams to a 15-year-old at boarding school in southern India, but also by the succinct two word message: 'Congratulations, Kim.' This to a boy named Ravi Sheth? The cable held no mysteries for Ravi, who swiftly dispatched a telegram of his own, to his family in Bombay: 'I am Kim.' Kim was, and is, the title role in the London company's television film, based on the Rudyard Kipling story of the same name. Thus, this brief flurry of telegrams signalled the end of a long search by the film company. For Ravi, it signalled the beginning of a great schoolboy adventure as the star performer in a major film, to be shown on ITV on Boxing Day. In Kipling's story, Kim is a young street urchin searching for the truth about his background, not knowing if he is British or Indian, or perhaps a mixture of both. At the end of his quest, he decides for himself, 'I am Kim: Some months before filming, producer David Conroy decided, quite rightly, that he had to cast a boy from India. 'No one else would
succeed mentally or physically, in the sense of being able to cope with conditions out there. Most of all, we would not be able to fool the audience.' To reflect the uncertainty of Kim's background, the filmmakers hoped to find a young actor of mixed race parentage. They travelled to and fro across India, seeing more than 1000 boys, only to decide that none were quite right. We didn't know which way to turn,' says director John Davies. 'Then we were told there was one school we could still visit. But it would be a day and a half s journey, and there were just four candidates there. It didn't really seem an awfully continued overpage •
He is 'K im' - Ravi Sheth, 15, plays the title role in the film of the same name: ITV, Boxing Day.
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