Something amazing happened.

It was five years ago, and 15 since “Braveheart” had first appeared around the world. We were showing the movie on the big screen of a Texas movie theater to benefit the Austin Film Festival. It had been a long while since I sat in the darkness with an audience to experience “Braveheart” in its original form.

I was not unfamiliar with the experience. I wrote the screenplay. Ten years before I’d begun the writing, I had come across a statue of William Wallace, and the feelings I’d had at that initial collision of my imagination with the Scottish legends had ricocheted around my soul until I was ready to put fingers to a keyboard and see what flowed out.

In writing it, I found my own voice, and learned to listen to it.

We writers can spout a lot of self-righteous bunk about the creative process, mostly to try to glorify ourselves. But it’s easy to say that “Braveheart” was special for me. It launched my career in movies. In writing it, I found my own voice, and learned to listen to it. I also found another voice, one much greater than my own.

After the movie came out and caused a stir, I knew I couldn’t dwell on it. I understood, somewhere in that same soul place where the seeds of the story had first taken root and grown into something that stretched the boundaries of my life, that I had to move on.

So I wrote other stories, and became a director myself, and turned my eyes to the future, and paid attention to new seeds.

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Then I found myself in Texas, sitting in the dark and gazing at the screen, just like everyone else. I watched the movie as if I hadn’t written it, as though I’d never seen it before. And it moved me to my core.

Randall Wallace
Randall Wallace

I’d been moved while writing it, of course. I can still feel the tingle of the goosebumps that leapt down my spine when young Murron gave Wallace a thistle at his father’s grave, and again when he gives it back to her, having treasured it his whole life. I still feel the surge of adrenalin when the Scots stood on the battlefield at Stirling and faced the English charge. I still marvel at the surprise I felt myself when Wallace, with the axe dropping toward his neck, turns in the last moment of his life to look for his friends and sees her with them. I can still see the moment when the whole story had told itself to me. I knew I must call it something, and typed “Braveheart” in the center of a title page.

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So I took this overwhelming impact of the story, so many years later, to be a personal matter. That wasn’t what was amazing. The amazing part happened when I was to conduct a question-and-answer session when the movie was over.

I moved the stage, and said how honored I was to be there, and that I’d be happy to answer any questions from the audience. A young woman on the front row stood up. I would find out later that she was only 19. She was a toddler when the movie had first come out.

“Mr. Wallace,” she said, “I don’t have a question, I just want to tell you something. My fiancé died six months ago. And before he died he told me he wanted me to watch “Braveheart” so I would know the way that he loved me.”

I think that’s when “Living the Braveheart Life” began. I never wanted to tell a Hollywood story, and still don’t. The book, which was released Sept. 8, isn’t about how the movie business works — or doesn’t.

But what that young woman told me was something I couldn’t ignore. What is it about “Braveheart” that makes so many men say it’s their favorite movie? What is it that makes women say, “I want to be loved that way?”

How can all of us — today, right now — turn our lives in the direction of overpowering love, courage, and faith? I wanted to answer those questions for myself. And I wanted to answer them for that young woman.

And I wanted to answer them for the sake of that young man who told her — and me, indirectly — that “Braveheart” is a story about love, and about life everlasting.