The Prayer That Led to One of America's Most Beloved Movies, ‘Braveheart'

It doesn't happen often. At the 2011 National Prayer Breakfast in Washington, the keynote speaker wasn't a pastor, politician or a head of state. It was an acclaimed Hollywood screenwriter and director, Randall Wallace.

Wallace wrote or directed some great American films, from Secretariat to The Man in the Iron Mask to the American war classic We Were Soldiers, which he wrote and directed.

But the movie he'll most be remembered for was the 1995 classic Braveheart, which he wrote, and which would go on to win five Oscars, including Best Picture. The film stirred the hearts of millions when it was released and still does today as it plays in near constant rotation on cable and streaming channels.

But this great American movie didn't have a probable start. Indeed, it was birthed by a prayer. A prayer prayed not as a writer pleading for inspiration, but prayed out of desperation.

Wallace started by talking about his early life growing up in Lynchburg, Virgina. And then came two powerful stories that shaped his life: one about a tough patch-what Christian's call a "valley" story-in his father's life. And one in his own.

“My father was a salesman who loved his customers, and he won promotion after promotion until one day, the company he had worked for 20 years, a family-owned business, was sold to group of investors who knew nothing about the business,” he said. “They believed the way to increase profits was to fire all the old guys and hire younger ones who were cheaper. And my father was one of the old ones. He was 38 years old. He had never been fired from anything. He was the best and the brightest man I ever knew. And he came apart.”

Wallace was just getting started. As great storytellers can do, he turned the massive banquet hall an intimate setting.

“While he was in the hospital, my sister and I were farmed out to relatives,” he said. “At one point we lived in a house that had no indoor plumbing. When I told my father about that, he said, ‘Rich people have a canopy over their beds. I guess we’ve got a canopy under our arms (audience laughs). That’s when I knew my daddy would be all right. The last sale he made for the company that fired him was for $90,000. That was in 1961. The first sale he made when he came out of the hospital was for 90 cents. He worked 100 hours a week. He crawled his way back to tremendous success. God bless America. God bless my daddy.”

Then Wallace talked about his own life, starting with his journey up the entertainment mountain.

“[My dad] told me I could go to college anywhere I wanted and I chose the most expensive place possible,” he said. “He was so proud. But when I graduated, I didn’t want to be a doctor or a lawyer. I wanted to be a writer. I wanted to tell the kind of story that would let a young man know who his ancestors were. And who he might be. The kind of story that would keep a child alive through a lonely night.”

His first job was humbling. And a funny job in retrospect, as many humbling experiences can be if we let them.

“My first job was in Nashville, working at a theme park, managing a show that featured live animals who played musical instruments.” he said. “I had a piano-playing pig named ‘Pigaracci’ and a drum-playing duck named ‘Bert Backquack.’ You can imagine how proud my parents were (laughs).”

But Wallace kept writing. And working. He moved to Los Angeles and landed a job at one of the top TV production studios in the city. Wallace married, had two beautiful sons, and remodeled an old house that would become his family home. Things were going better than he could have dreamed-until they didn't.

“Then the Writers Guild went out on strike,” he said. “And that caused the thriving company that I was working for to void my contract. And the strike went on forever. And when it was over, I had no savings and no job and nobody would return my phone calls. And one day, I was sitting at my desk, and I was staring at nothing. I had a knot in my stomach. And I looked down at my hands, and they were trembling. And I realized I was breaking down like my father had. And I was afraid that I was betraying my father. And my greatest fear of all was that I was going to let down my sons.”

The room got even quieter as Wallace continued his testimony. His confessional.

“So I got down on my knees, I had nowhere else to go,” he said. “And I prayed a simple prayer. I said, ‘Lord, what I really care about right now, what really matters to me are those boys. And maybe they don’t need to grow up in a great big house with a swimming pool and a lot of bathrooms. Maybe they need to grow up in a little house with one bathroom or no bathrooms at all. Maybe they need to see what a man does when he gets knocked down the way my father showed me. And if that’s what’s best for them, then I pray you let me take it. But I pray if I go down in this fight that I’m not doing it on my knees to someone else but standing up with my flag flying.' And I got up and I wrote the words that led to Braveheart.”

The audience gasped. There was no applause-it would have seemed odd, the moment was so real. So profound.

Wallace then turned from the personal to the eternal, and the story of Jesus' crucifixion.

“If we took a freeze frame of Golgotha on the day that Jesus was crucified and asked someone unfamiliar with the story to guess who was the victor in that scene, they’d be unlikely to say the one hanging on the cross in the middle,” he said. “It was from that cross that Jesus cried, ‘My God, why have you forsaken me?' And that cry does not amaze me. What does amaze me is that while one of the thieves crucified next to Jesus mocked him, the other acknowledged the justice of his punishment and asked Jesus for help. And in the agonies of crucifixion, Jesus was able to say, ‘Today you’ll be with me in paradise.' It seems to me that Jesus’ response to that thief was not just the answer to that thief’s prayer at the moment, it was the answer to every prayer that thief never prayed. If God is God at all, God hears our prayers whether we pray them or not. So why pray at all? Well for me, it’s not because God needs to know my prayers. It’s because I do.”

Moments later, Wallace finished his thoughts on the importance of prayer.

“I’m not a theologian. I’m not looking for logic,” he said. “I’m only trying to understand my experience that prayer matters. Does it change the mind of God? I don’t know. All I can tell you is that it changes me.”

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