WHEN VETERAN producer Daniel Melnick looked over the $38 million budget for "Air America," he decided that he could afford to hire Mel Gibson.
He wanted Gibson for the role of a young pilot learning the surreal ways of secret war from a mentor - "perhaps Paul Newman or Sean Connery," Melnick thought - while working for the CIA's clandestine airline in Laos in 1969.Gibson liked the offbeat, combination "M.A.S.H."-"Catch-22"-political-thriller story, which opened last month, But he voiced a preference for the quieter role of the older flier, an expatriate with some of Humphrey Bogart's self-redeeming "Casablanca" qualities. The industry clout of the azure-eyed star is so formidable that the entire concept was reworked to accommodate him. Robert Downey Jr. got the part of the newcomer, Billy Covington. Gibson laconically explained his affinity for Gene, the senior flier, in an interview.
"I've got too many wrinkles to get away with that new-kid stuff anymore," he said. "And I've always played the part that Downey played, the guy the audience follows throughout the film. Gene is kind of a side dish, a supporting element. I think I kind of related to that guy more. Born in the U.S., he is Captain America, but he's been so long away, and has become so cynical and jaded, that he's Asian on the inside. In a way, I'm a bit like that. I was born here, moved away and became something else, a creature not of my creation."
Does Gibson, who was born in Peekskill, N.Y. but has spent most of his 34 years in Australia, think of himself as an Australian? As an American?
"Neither," he said with the confidence he has been building in his mixed identity since he was 12. "I am what I am. I'm perfectly comfortable with it. I don't feel a need to belong to a place totally, and I don't."
One of the half-dozen most "bankable" actors in the world, Gibson owns a home in Los Angeles, a necessity for three-month Hollywood working stints, but spends more time on his 800-acre ranch in the Australian state of Victoria, where he herds cattle and sheep by motorcycle.
In fact, he staged a two-year retreat to the peaceful ranch in 1984 to escape the pressures of having made four American films within a year. Drinking hard in those days, Gibson was shaken by an arrest in Canada for driving while intoxicated during the filming of "Mrs. Soffel," and needed time to change his habits.
He returned to make his biggest box-office hit to that point, "Lethal Weapon," and has remained in such demand that when his wife, Robyn, gave birth to their sixth child, and fifth son, Milo, in December, "I heard him get born over the phone," Gibson said. The actor was on "Air America" location in the jungles of northern Thailand at the time. Now, again after doing four movies in 12 months, Gibson is wearily headed for another timeout, this one for "10 months to a year."
"The ranch helps, I think," Gibson said in an accent just perceptibly Australian. Wearing a light blue sport jacket, white T-shirt, faded jeans and scuffed boots, he was splayed nearly flat on a hotel sofa while a procession of journalists flown in by Tri-Star Pictures from around the world streamed through to see him. "There's such a thing as too much. Like now. Just a little too much."
What started the current rush of Gibson vehicles was "Lethal Weapon 2," surpassing the original to become the second most popular film of the "Batman" summer of 1989.
"Bird On a Wire," an action-comedy with Goldie Hawn in which Gibson also does some fancy piloting to outwit mobsters chasing the pair, was a substantial hit, if not quite a blockbuster, earlier this summer. "Air America" came last month and later this year, Gibson will be seen doing Shakespeare. He is the Danish prince in Franco Zeffirelli's $30 million version of "Hamlet."
Since his U.S. breakthrough with "The Road Warrior" in 1982, the first sequel to his 1979 Australian break, "Mad Max," Gibson has had better commercial luck as a vulnerable action-adventure hunk than as a dramatic leading man in "The River" and "Mrs. Soffel" or in the hybrid romance "Tequila Sunrise."
Still, as his gamble with "Hamlet" illustrates, he refuses to limit himself to muscular, sex-symbol parts.
Indeed, Gibson, whom Melnick described as "the most unpretentious movie star I've ever known," is almost embarrassed by the heartthrob image.
"I don't quite know what to think of that," he said. "No, it's not annoying. I wonder if it's a bit of a myth, actually." He laughed nervously. "I mean, they say that (the sex symbol stuff) about everyone, don't they?" Gibson was chewing gum furiously, a substitute for the cigarettes he gave up - except for "the odd sly one" - to strengthen his voice for "Hamlet."
Classically trained at Australia's National Institute of Dramatic Art and still an occasional stage performer Down Under, Gibson felt unable to turn down Zeffirelli's invitation to make Shakespearean verse accessible to a vast, youthful new audience.
Even before Gibson moved to egalitarian Australia as a boy, he came by his undemanding manner and his easy humor as the sixth of 11 children of Hutton Gibson, a devoutly Catholic brakeman for the New York Central Railroad who was also a singer, author, computer programmer and champion on TV's "Jeopardy!".
In a large family, said Gibson, smiling, "You realize pretty soon that the Earth and the world don't revolve around you. You are special, but there are limits - ha! ha! - to how special you are."
That's why he and the former Robyn Moore, a nurse whom he married in 1980, have all those kids, including 7-year-old twins.
"It's a good thing for a kid to have a lot of peers, you know? Although they just about murder each other. The boys are always clobbering one another with some blunt instrument."
Gibson's father relocated his brood to Australia, his opera-singer mother's homeland, from upstate Mount Vision, N.Y., in 1968, fearing that his older sons would soon be drafted to fight in Vietnam.
When his sister, without telling him, submitted an application in his name to the university-level National Institute of Dramatic Art after his graduation from a strict Catholic high school, Gibson decided to go through with the required audition, and impressed the teachers. While still a student, he got a first movie role, winning critical praise as a mutton-headed surfer in a 1977 beach movie seen only in Australia, "Summer City."
On graduation, Gibson joined the State Theater Company of South Australia, playing small parts in "Oedipus Rex" and other classical and modern works. Not long after, the director George Miller gave Gibson the title role as the embittered Max Rocktansky, avenging leader of a futuristic special police unit in "Mad Max."
Next, opposite Piper Laurie, he won the first of his two Oscar-equivalent Australian Film Awards as a retarded handyman in "Tim."
"Mad Max" did much better in Europe and Asia than in the United States. Not until 1981, in the Peter Weir-directed World War I epic "Gallipoli," did Gibson begin attracting serious attention.
His equally good-looking young co-star, Mark Lee, never took off.