Wednesday, 20 December 2006

Mel Gibson: Getting arrested was good

Actor feels he learnt a valuable lesson

Despite his box-office success with his latest film Apocalypto, Mel Gibson says he is most thankful for the lessons he learned after his fall from grace last summer.

"I got a skinful and mouthed off which is not coming from a good place, but I'm moving on from that," the actor-filmmaker, 50, tells the entertainment news Web site Dark Horizons.

He now looks upon the experience of his no-contest plea for DUI and the exposure of his anti-Semitic drunken rant "as a gift to me, because it's made me really sort of scratch my head and focus on a couple of things that I needed to."

After making a public apology, Gibson reportedly attended rehab, and says the whole ordeal is "working out real positive."

Gibson considers his slip, which provoked worldwide criticism, one of the pitfalls of being human. "Everybody goofs, everybody screws up and I tell ya, if you ask everybody in the world to raise their hand if they never said something vicious, something that they regretted or something stupid, there wouldn't be many people that wouldn't be able to raise their hands," he says.