As the foundation of the Mayan civilization begins to crumble, one man's previously idyllic existence is forever changed when he is chosen as a sacrifice needed to appease the gods in director Mel Gibson's mythic, end-times adventure. The Mayan kingdom is at the absolute height of opulence and power, but leaders are convinced that unless more temples are constructed and more human sacrifices made, the crops, and ultimately the people, will suffer. Jaguar Paw (Rudy Youngblood) is a peaceful hunter from a remote forest tribe whose life is about to be changed forever. When Jaguar Paw's village is raided and he is prepared as a sacrifice that the Mayan deities have demanded, the brave young hunter is forced to navigate a horrific new world of fear and oppression. Fearlessly determined to escape his captors and save his family from a harrowing demise, Jaguar Paw prepares to risk it all in one final, desperate attempt to preserve his dying way of life. However, few who have seen the sacrificial alter of the Mayans have managed to live to see another day. Now, in order to rescue his pregnant wife and young son, Jaguar Paw will have to elude the most powerful warriors of the Mayan kingdom while using his vast knowledge of the forest to turn the tables on those who would rather see him dead than set free. Inspired by such ancient Mayan texts as the Popul Vuh, Apocalypto marks a comprehensive collaboration between director Gibson, Cambridge-educated screenwriter Farhad Safinia, and world-renowned archeologist and Mayan culture expert Dr. Richard D. Hansen -- whose services as a special consultant on the film lent the production an unprecedented degree of historical accuracy.
| | 'Apocalypto' now for Mel, Maya and historians |
Call it "The Passion of the Maya": Mel Gibson is quietly filming a movie in a Mexican jungle about the collapsed civilization.
Given Gibson's cinematic history, experts on the ancient Maya are looking forward to his upcoming epic, "Apocalypto," with a mixture of curiosity and dread. They're pleased that Hollywood will feature a period of world history still little understood but worry that once again a movie may sacrifice historical accuracy for the sake of a good story.
"A lot depends on how well they depict the Maya. It may serve as a really good springboard into a lecture," says archaeologist Lisa Lucero of New Mexico State University in Las Cruces. "Or it may be something we have to nip in the bud in that first lecture." | advertisement |  | | OAS_AD('ArticleFlex_1') |  |
Gibson wasn't available for comment, and the public relations firm for his Icon Productions declined to offer any details on the film's plot.
But according to the film's website, "Apocalypto" promises "a heart-stopping mythic action-adventure set against the turbulent end-times of the once-great Mayan civilization." The story centers on a kidnapped hero's bid to escape a mass sacrifice at one Maya center. According to another description of the plot in Time magazine's March preview, a ruler orders the mass sacrifice of hapless captives to appease the gods and avert a drought.
The only problem, and big cause for worry among archaeologists, is "the classic Maya really didn't go in for mass sacrifice," Lucero says. "That was the Aztecs." Other concerns: the modern-day Mayan Yucatec language spoken in the film is not the language of the ancient Maya, and the film's Mexican shooting locale is not the classic Maya homeland, says Penn State archaeologist David Webster.
Gibson's last production, "The Passion of the Christ," collected complaints, and compliments, from religious scholars, even as it made $370 million in North America. Most of the controversy centered on charges of anti-Semitism, but some, such as DePaul University's John Dominic Crossan, also complained about Jesus speaking Latin and details of the Crucifixion, among other questions.
Gibson's Icon Productions declined to comment on archaeologists' concerns through its Los Angeles public relations firm, Rogers & Cowan. In an interview in March with Time, Gibson said, "After what I experienced with "The Passion," I frankly don't give a flying (expletive) about much of what those critics think." He told Time he partly views the movie as a political allegory for leadership in our own era.
Gibson has consulted on the film with archaeologist Richard Hansen, head of the Mirador Basin Project in northern Guatemala, a forest reserve home to a number of Maya archaeological sites. Hansen also declined to comment, other than to say that project findings played a role in the film.
The classic Maya were one of the most developed cultures of Central America before the arrival of Columbus. The Maya practiced slash-and-burn and terrace farming, relying on corn as a staple, and repairing in the dry season to ceremonial centers holding monumental pyramids, plazas and temples.
In 1989, discoveries by Hansen and colleagues established that Maya rulers had centralized their roles far earlier than once supposed, building several massive centers with the help of commoners as early as 600 B.C. The classic Maya culture's history lasted for more than 1,000 years, ending around A.D. 850 with the collapse of the use of ceremonial centers in what are now parts of Guatemala, Honduras and Mexico.
Scholars still disagree over the extent to which war, drought or general political failure led to the collapse.
By focusing on the role of mass sacrifice, "Apocalypto" seems poised to insert its own vision into this area of scholarly disagreement, says Lucero, who this year published "Water and Ritual: The Rise and Fall of Classic Maya Rulers." The lack of signs of warfare at the sites she has studied, and many others, points more toward a political collapse of the classic Maya, she concludes. "People voted with their feet," she says, moving back into the jungle or northward in a time of drought and political upheaval, when rulers lacking water couldn't compel farmers to visit their centers.
Focusing only on certain aspects of the Maya collapse such as violence or ecological disasters may create the incorrect impression that it was a simple process or that it was caused by a single factor, says archaeologist Tomas Barrientos of Guatemala's Universidad del Valle de Guatemala, by e-mail. Other scholars are just looking forward to seeing how the movie turns out. The film is scheduled for release on Dec. 8. Heavy rains in Mexico had delayed filming this year.
"Actually I'm quite looking forward to seeing it. I think films like this are really funny, and they vastly help me with my teaching, " Webster says. For example, he says, using locations and temples in non-Maya areas of Mexico is "a little like filming the siege of Troy using Roman backdrops."
But after all, "Apocalypto" is just a movie. And students like hearing how movies get it wrong, Webster says, and enjoy learning the real story. So, "cheers to Mel for being such a juicy target." | | The Heart Of Apocalypto |
APOCALYPTO is the first major Hollywood action-adventure to be set amidst the great Mayan civilization of Mesoamerica. But just who were the Maya? Like detectives sifting through a vast mystery, today’s archeologists are trying to come up with answers to that question from the fabled pyramids, buried cities and intriguing artifacts they left behind. For though they were once the mightiest civilization in the Americas, neither wealth, nor power, nor brilliant engineering could save the Mayans from a devastating societal collapse.
The vast Maya homeland once spanned five modern countries—Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, Honduras and El Salvador—and flourished in three distinct periods: Pre-Classic Maya, Classic Maya and Post Classic Maya, all the way from 2400 B.C. to the 15th Century A.D. We know they were an advanced society who created intricate art, mastered mathematics, forged their own writing system, had a profound understanding of astronomy and were skilled farmers, artisans and architects whose urban cities flourished in the rainforest. But we also know they engaged in brutal practices, fomented war and that their complex society devolved into violence, slavery and chaos.
To learn more about who the Maya were and why their sophisticated civilization declined and disappeared, Mel Gibson, Farhad Safinia and the entire production of APOCALYPTO worked closely with several archeologists, including one of the film’s key consultants: Dr. Richard D. Hansen, a modern-day explorer who has been excavating a massive network of 26 ancient Maya cities entombed under centuries of jungle growth in Guatemala.
For Hansen, the allure of APOCALYPTO wasn’t just the film’s visceral re-creation of what it might have felt like to live in the time of the Maya—but its exploration of how such a society of such extraordinary power self-destructed. “I felt Mel Gibson was really interested in not only the reality of this civilization but the reality of the stresses that were key to its end. It’s a story that needs to be told. If a society doesn’t learn from its history, it may be forced to repeat it,” warns Hansen.
Hansen emphasized to Gibson just how accomplished Maya society had become during the Classic period. “The fascinating thing about the Maya is they were able to develop societal complexity at a new level in the Western Hemisphere,” explains Hansen. “By the Classic period, huge cities were thriving everywhere, and a series of smaller cities scattered around them were feeding and supplying these larger cities with the commodities they needed.” Indeed, part of the key to the civilization’s longevity was their agricultural success. “The Maya cities were green cities,” notes Hansen. “They had every available resource for cultivation. They were raising corn, squash, beans, cotton, cacao and a range of tropical fruits. And when you can eat, you can focus on other things like astronomy, mathematics, music, art, warfare and government.”
At the height of the civilization, the Maya were especially focused on trying to understand time and the very meaning of life. “The cycle of time became very carefully woven and engraved into their ideology, cosmology and behavior. The cycle of life and the cycle of time began to be a pattern that was observed in the natural and spiritual world,” Hansen notes.
et coupled with their early fascination with science was a belief in superstition and the influence of invisible forces. They believed the world was ruled by powerful deities who maintained order—but only if human beings behaved properly and observed the prescribed rituals and offerings. Failure to do so, or so the high priests and kings warned, would result in vengeance from the wrathful gods in the form of disease, pestilence, crop failure, drought and other natural disasters.
Powerful Mayan priests were said to be the only people who could communicate directly to the gods, and it was they who oversaw the regular offerings to the deities. These spanned from food and ceramic idols all the way to full-scale human sacrifices in the late Post Classic period. Human beings were considered the ultimate offering and were often resorted to in the hopes of appeasing the gods in times of greatest tumult. Eventually, to procure more captives for sacrificing, the Maya engaged in increased warfare.
The sacrifices themselves were rife with ritual. The victim was stripped and painted blue then draped over an altar stone. Finally, the priest would plunge a knife made of flint or obsidian directly through the chest and pull out the still-beating heart. Yet the Maya also believed that the sacrificial victims would gain something even while giving up their lives— instant entrance to Paradise. “The Maya had a devout belief in the Underworld and life after death,” says Dr. Hansen. “They believed they were here for a purpose and they had a place to go, and that they had an opportunity to resurrect, which was very deeply rooted in their ideology.”
Gibson was fascinated by this dichotomy between the light and dark sides of the Mayan culture. “In many ways they were so sophisticated, and in other ways they were so savage,” he observes. “But one of the things that’s very interesting is that they were very clear that their society was going to rise and fall. Whether it was a self-fulfilling prophecy or not, they were just dead accurate, they knew that there was a certain amount of time, a period of about 400 to 500 years, that a society could prosper before everything just falls out from under you.”
As Mayan cities grew, the political power of the royalty and the priests was also magnified. Over time, the society appears to have become more and more obsessed with conspicuous consumption, with preserving the power of the elite, controlling resources and manipulating subservient populations through awe, humiliation and fear. The rulers constantly demanded bigger, better and more. And with all this unquestioned growth for growth’s sake came a price to pay—the ultimate demise of one of the greatest civilizations the world has known.
“We find this same story in many cultures throughout the world in history, and even today, where a degeneration of the environment and a degradation of social systems can lead to wholesale stress on a society. This type of stress is what leads to catastrophic events, tragic events in human history, and we have to learn from them,” says Dr. Hansen.
There was probably not a single, definitive cause of the final Mayan collapse. Rather, scholars and archeologists cite a number of interrelated causes, including deforestation, climactic stresses such as drought and famine, increased warfare, the spread of disease, a loss of critical trade routes and popular revolt. Each of these likely contributed to the fracturing of the society.
Deforestation is of particular interest to Dr. Hansen, who explained to the filmmakers how it might have played a major role in the annihilation of the Mayan kingdoms. He discovered that in the process of creating the lime stucco cement used to build their temples, palaces, plazas and monuments, the Maya had to create fires to heat the limestone. “It took five tons of fresh, green wood to make one ton of quick lime,” notes Hansen. “I found one pyramid in El Mirador that would have required nearly 1,600 acres of every single available tree just to cover one building with lime stucco. So, how many more acres would be used for a Maya city? Epic construction was happening in a lot of different places, creating devastation on a huge scale.”
He continues: “Once the forest’s trees were gone, clay washed into the swamps rendering the organic muck that was essential for their agriculture difficult to reach. They could no longer feed large populations, and so they couldn’t maintain scientists, priests, astronomers, soldiers and all the trappings of a complex society. Peace and tranquility had vanished.” Much of this is depicted in APOCALYPTO in stark visuals, rather than through dialogue, which reveal the desiccated fields and endless construction of the Maya City, far from the green abundance of Jaguar Paw’s jungle.
Yet even though the Mayan civilization declined and then disappeared, the Mayan people did not. There remain about four million ethnic Maya living today in Mexico and Central America. The largest group is the Yucatec, who number about 300,000 in the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico. Near Chiapas, Mexico, live the Lacandon Maya, who continue to practice elements of the ancient Mayan religion and culture. Yet, ironically the Lacandon and other Maya face a modern battle against those who seek to deforest what remains of their sacred jungles. Even the jaguar, once revered as a great power among the Maya, is now endangered.
In making APOCALYPTO, Mel Gibson hoped to be unflinching in his portrait of a society heading towards its final days—but he also wanted to include another vital concept: hope. “The story of Jaguar Paw is the story of the spark of life that exists even in a culture of death,” he says. “Every ending is also a new beginning.” | | Journey Into The Jungle |
Before he set off for the jungles of Mexico, Mel Gibson had a strong vision of what he hoped to accomplish there—and it was nothing less than a time-machine effect. “I wanted the audience to feel completely a part of that time, and I didn’t want one trace of the 21st century—while at the same time, cinematically, I wanted it to have a kind of break-neck kineticism and be very up-to-the minute,” he says. “That was very difficult to do.” He knew it would require an incredibly talented, but also unusually flexible and devoted, team of craftsmen, so he assembled a crew that includes multiple veterans of epics and Oscar® winners.
To begin, the team scouted relentlessly for locations that could establish an authentic jungle atmosphere. They scoured Mexico, Guatemala and Costa Rica, but right off the bat, they faced daunting challenges. As they searched, the team was struck by just how little primary rainforest is left in the Americas. “It really smacks you between the eyes,” says Gibson. “It’s a huge shame that these forests are disappearing by the hectare by the minute. Luckily, we were ultimately able to find a very beautiful rainforest in Mexico that became our jungle.”
This thick, verdant forest with the tangled vines and towering trees so vital to the story’s action was found just outside Catemaco, Mexico. It is one of the last preserved rainforests in Mexico and is known locally simply as “La Jungla.” Meanwhile, to build the Maya City, the filmmakers settled on a vast and remote sugarcane field in Boqueron, about 45 minutes outside the city of Veracruz, where Gibson and his team would have the room to create an entire Mayan metropolis from the ground up. Using mostly regional labor, the production was especially pleased to be able to provide jobs and boost the local economies.
Next, to create APOCALYPTO’s high-octane look—in which the camera glides fluidly and at great velocity through the Mayan jungle—Gibson recruited cinematographer Dean Semler, an Oscar® winner for his work on the Native American epic “Dances With Wolves.” Gibson wanted someone who was willing to take daring visual risks and carry off the rapid-fire camera movements he had envisioned. “I need someone who could execute my ideas as well as bring their own,” he says.
After intensive discussions, Gibson and Semler decided they would shoot APOCALYPTO digitally, using Panavision’s state-of-the-art high-definition Genesis™ camera system. Though the system was brand-new, Semler felt it could give them the enhanced mobility, versatility and especially the ability to shoot in extreme weather conditions—drenching rains, searing heat and viscous mud all awaited—they would need to pull off the story.
The Genesis™ also offered other advantages. “APOCALYPTO is about a heart-pounding chase, so we wanted to emphasize speed, which can only be enhanced by some sort of strobing effect—an effect we were able to create with the Genesis™ and its 360-degree shutter capability,” explains Semler. “It proved to be phenomenal in the chase scenes, giving us images that could not have been gotten on any other camera. It’s all there, it feels real, and it has given us a whole new heightened dimension and velocity.”
Genesis™ also gave Gibson and Semler the opportunity to use natural light sources and shoot in the near-darkness of a rainforest canopy, where the ambient light often would fall to drastically low levels by late afternoon. Furthermore, nighttime scenes could be shot with incredible detail using just the light emanating from campfires around the village. “During the campfire scenes, we looked at the monitors and the whole village was illuminated. The whole place came to life—the people, the faces, the huts and trees. I couldn’t believe it,” recalls Semler. “And because we were shooting with a slower aperture, it made the flames look languid, flickering, but almost like liquid, very smooth. It was absolutely beautiful.”
Semler was especially thrilled to be able to use long lenses at night, which gave the film’s opening action sequences a kick right from the start. “Using the long lens in that opening night scene, when you see the Holcanes running towards the camera, they are very compressed, very stacked. It’s spectacular, something you couldn’t have done on film,” he says.
Often utilizing four cameras simultaneously, shooting digitally further allowed Semler to let the camera run in long, continuous takes—sometimes for up to 20 minutes at a time— which would also have been impossible on film. On top of the camera system’s versatility, it also withstood some outrageous conditions, including hurricanes, high winds and days of 120- degree heat.
Sums up Semler: “I was able to go to places as a cinematographer on this film, I’d never gone before. The creative possibilities were truly phenomenal.”
Also facing incredible creative possibilities was production designer Tom Sanders, a twotime Academy Award® nominee who previously collaborated with Gibson on his Oscar®- winning film “Braveheart.” Sanders’ career has spanned numerous epic films—his designs have ranged from World War II battlefields in “Saving Private Ryan” to the fairy tale world of “Dracula”—but for APOCALYPTO, he faced the unique task of bringing fully to life a vanished world of primal villages and kingdoms of extreme opulence.
He began with extensive research into Mayan architecture and construction techniques that would have been used in an ancient Maya city, including the fortification walls, buildings, pyramids, plazas, monuments, skull racks, huts, marketplaces and merchant areas. Working closely with Dr. Richard Hansen, Sanders also studied up on Mayan tools, utensils, weapons of war (in collaboration with armourer Simon Atherton), right down to their textiles and pottery. Then, he began the enormous task of building this world from scratch. “Almost everything you see in the film, including the props, was made by hand in Mexico,” says Sanders.
For Jaguar Paw’s village, where the people live in harmony with nature, Sanders found that there was not a lot of factual data to draw from. As only the lives of Mayan nobles were written or drawn, the life of the common villager in the forest remains a mystery to this day—so here Sanders used extrapolation and imagination. “I thought it would be interesting if the village huts looked like nests in the forest. In the village, everything is very round and organic, which contrasts with the mechanical, square stone columns of the Mayan city,” he says.
The design was also influenced by the harrowing, surprise siege that sets off Jaguar Paw’s journey. “Because of the verticalness of the forest, I wanted to create structures where you could see through the walls of the houses when the village is being attacked,” Sanders notes. “We elevated the huts so you would be able to see just feet running and to get frighteningly chaotic points of view of people attacking and fleeing.”
But Sanders’ coup de grace was constructing the great Maya City in a way that gives audiences a sense of the full resplendence—but also the teetering chaos with intimations of slavery, starvation and panic—of the Mayan centers of power toward the end of their days. The mission started with an intricately detailed model. “I am a sculptor, and the way I design is to build the entire set first in a large, 14-foot, three-dimensional model,” Sanders comments. “In this way, I could see how each piece related to another, and I would see the best camera positions for how Mel envisioned it on the screen.”
He then recruited several construction teams, as well as sculptors, model makers, painters, plasterers, greens masters and over 100 local workers to turn the model into life-sized reality. Ultimately, the city would contain a remarkably diverse landscape. On the periphery is the destitute and dilapidated shantytown, leading into the middle-class sections of the town with their palm-thatched huts, and on to the commercial area where manufacturing is taking place, and finally to the marketplace where rich and poor gather to buy and sell commodities, including slaves.
After the primary construction, everything was distressed to reveal the city’s recent state of decline—right down to simulated raw sewage flowing into the polluted city canals. Terraced fields of corn and other crops were grown and then killed to add to the looming atmosphere of famine and catastrophe. “Everything we planted, we wanted dead,” says Sanders. “The theory is that we’re in the middle of a drought and that’s why they’re sacrificing human beings at such a great pace. We wanted to show the environmental damage that has led to this situation.”
The pyramids Sanders and his team built were inspired by those found in the ancient city of Tikal, which was once the largest of the Mayan cities. Although they based their designs on extensive research, the team also had to adapt the proportions to the demands of modern filmmaking. “To accommodate actors, extras, crew and cameras on top of the main pyramid, we had to scale the narrowest sections up 20% to give more space in which the action could occur,” explains Sanders.
Especially gratifying to Sanders was how moved the Mayan expert Dr. Hansen was the first time he set foot in the re-created Mayan city. Says Hansen: “They have brought the past to life in a way that has rarely been seen in the movies.”
To further bring the past to life, Gibson relied on another key team—costume designer Mayes Rubeo, hair and makeup designer Aldo Signoretti and makeup designer Vittorio Sodano, who worked in concert to craft a complete head-to-toe look for each of the film’s characters. From the scantily clad villagers—with their ear plugs and rotted teeth—to the elaborate costumes of the Mayan royalty and priests—with their patterned embroidery, elaborate shell beading, ornate headpieces and oversized jewelry—the trio had its work cut out for them.
Nearly every element of the costuming was created by hand in exquisite detail by hundreds of artists from throughout Mexico. Costume designer Mayes Rubeo, a native of Mexico City, was well prepared for the task. She had previously conducted extensive research for a never-made Mexican documentary on the ancient Maya, so she was intimately aware of Mayan fashion, from the everyday to the ceremonial. Rubeo then assembled a team of 52 people, including professors of fine arts, fashion students, embroiderers and feather artists, who individually created each piece for each character.
Rubeo focused on bringing out the surprising diversity of looks that would have been seen in a major Mayan city. “We wanted to show the complexity and variety of Mayan styles, from patterns to jewelry to headdresses and show the way different classes dressed in Maya society,” says Rubeo. “The Maya had many styles of beauty. Everyone would personalize his or her being.”
One challenge Rubeo faced was the Mayan love of jade in their jewelry, denoting power, wealth and prestige. “Because jade is so heavy and expensive, my team learned how to hand paint other materials to allow them to have the beauty of jade but be lightweight,” says Rubeo. Also impossible to come by were the prized, emerald-colored quetzal bird feathers traditionally used in the spectacular headdresses of Mayan kings. Since the quetzal bird now lingers near extinction, Rubeo found a suitable substitute in the form of more mundane, brown pheasant feathers which were individually bleached, dyed green and hand-painted for the desired effect.
When it came to textiles, Rubeo tried to use materials indigenous to the Maya, procuring patterned fabric from such modern Mayan communities as San Cristobal de las Casas in Chiapas as well as from Oaxaca where cotton is still hand loomed. “Obviously, we could not get enough of this fabric to make over 700 costumes with multiple copies of each,” says Rubeo. “So using authentic samples, I did intensive research to find reproducible fabrics that look very close to the real thing.” Using the services of a master dyer from Mexico City, the fabrics were hand dyed to match the colors that the ancient Maya would have obtained from animal, mineral and plant sources.
Enhancing Rubeo’s work and adding more intricate details was an international team of hairstylists, wig makers and makeup artists, ultimately numbering 300, from Italy, Mexico, Malta, France, England, Ireland and other countries. Their jobs ranged from applying tattoos and body paint to simulating the body markings of ritual scarification. Several of the film’s characters—including the powerful Mayan figures of the King, Queen, High Priest, Chacs, and Jade Women—were so complex in their look that they took three to four hours of preparation in the makeup chair each morning. In the case of Snake Ink, with his wild tangle of scarifications and tattoos, the complete makeup procedure lasted about seven hours. “All our tattooing was done by hand for the actors as well as the extras,” says hair and makeup designer Signoretti. “We wanted the lines of the tattoos to look just like a real tattoo artist would have done them.”
No matter what the character, perfection of the tiniest details was a necessity. “Because of the way Mel shoots, we had to have everything perfect at every angle, even for every single extra,” says makeup designer Sodano. “Mel does a lot of close-ups, and while the camera is focusing on the scene being shot, another may be focusing on one of the extras.”
The makeup artists also had to attempt to re-create some of the unusual body deformations which the Maya used as indicators of status. Every actor and extra had to don special ear spools, extended ear lobes plugged with stones or bone, which were a trademark of the ancient Maya. Since they couldn’t actually stretch the ears of the actors—as the Maya did—special ear attachments were made of a pliable silicone, then painstakingly painted to match each actor’s skin. Another common Mayan practice was the deformation of the skull. A few days after an infant was born, a board was placed on the forehead, which caused the forehead to recede into the famous Mayan head shape. To simulate this effect, many of the actors had their hairlines shaved higher up on the head and wore elongated hairpieces.
The spectacular sets and makeup—along with the digital cinematography and irreplaceable beauty and dangers of the jungle—helped to forge the intense visual reality that was so key to Gibson’s vision. “What we wanted to do with the camera, sets, makeup, costumes and performances is make everything as real and believable for the time as possible,” he says. “I think the film has an important message to convey, but if you can carry that message in a heart-stopping, thrilling way, that is so much better.” | | Mel Gibson, Apocalypto Interview |
This October, UGO was invited to screen a rough cut of Mel Gibson's new film Apocalypto at his LA offices and sit down afterward with the Oscar-winning director to talk about his follow-up to 2004's The Passion of the Christ. Taking place in 16th century Central America and set against the violent backdrop of the Mayan Empire's collapse, Apocalypto is a clear progression from both Braveheart and The Passion, combining a huge production spectacle with a simple story of human perseverance. And yes... there will be blood.
In his final pre-production interview for Apocalypto, Gibson gave us the low-down on the film.
UGO: The chase in the second half of Apocalypto seemed very similar to the 1960's film The Naked Prey. Was that an influence for you at all?
MEL: Man, that's a cool little movie. I remember seeing that when I was a kid. I always thought, "How could that guy get away from those guys?" He was an old guy and these guys were like young and healthy and it was their environment. It always bugged me that he got away from them. We're all influenced by whatever we've seen, but I think with something like that film - it didn't have the social and civilizational aspects this had. This had more of an almost 'biblical' feel to it.
UGO: Did you consider it a kind of companion piece to The Passion?
MEL: It was just a story that appealed to me. I'd been wanting to do a chase movie forever; that's how it started, just as a chase. And I thought, "Well, there's all kinds of chases; car chases and horse chases." And I thought, "A foot chase... that's a good idea." That's about as minimum and primal as it gets, feet just running. So, of course, then you start searching for an environment in which that could have happened. So, it was important to find the right place, the right time in history. To actually hook it onto a real place, and it was pre-European Honduras.
UGO: Similar to The Passion, in this film you use the regional language of the characters rather than have them speaking English. How difficult is it for you, as a director, to do that?
MEL: It's not difficult because, well, there's not that much dialogue. And you kind of have an ear for what they're saying. You don't know what every word means; the structure of that language is backwards to the language that I'm most familiar with, Romance languages. You know, they put the adjective after the verb and that kind of stuff. It wasn't difficult and it wasn't difficult for the actors to get a handle on.
UGO: How difficult was it filming in the jungle?
MEL: That's difficult. The physical nature of it; you're being bitten and sweating and it's tough on all the performers and crew. It's unwieldy, especially when you have to move at speed. You see how fast this kid could run, he was going like an express train, this guy; a supreme athlete, this kid. We had to come up with a lot of different ways to do things. We were really like test-pilots for a different system. I think Superman and Click they'd shot on Genesis (Genesis = the high performance 35mm camera system used to shoot the film) so this was really the place where Genesis got put to the test. It's not inside a studio all nice and friendly, it was actually out there in the woods and we were treating it like a camera should be treated.
UGO: Where was the film shot?
MEL: In the jungles of Catemaco in the state of Veracruz. The rest of the film was shot closer to the city of Veracruz. We found a farm with some jungle, in case we needed to catch up on any foliage moments, and we were able to build the city there, on some guy's farm.
UGO: What about the casting? It seemed like many of the people in this film were locals.
MEL: I consider this a major motion picture. It is independent, yes. Farhid [Safinia] and I wrote it, and we just went out and found the people. It was important in my mind that the people we found be, in some way, immediately identifiable as some kind of archetypal... 'types', from a mythic perspective. So that if you had 'the hero' guy, you wanted that guy, and when I met him [Rudy Youngblood], that's what I got from him. Or the guy that played his father or the guy that played his big friend - you know, loveable but tough. So you're sort of looking at those archetypes of myth. And it's important, if you're going to do a film that has themes in another language and involving an indigenous culture, that everybody's able to identify with them immediately. So in the casting process, you had to find people who had those qualities already, who just looked like you imagined they should; in a predictable way, sometimes, and yet who didn't betray the feeling of real people back in the 16th century, in some of those Mayan cities. And I think it's the first [mainstream] film ever to have indigenous native-American guys in the four biggest parts. They were amazing, how they picked up. I think they did a brilliant job.
UGO: Like the man in the sacrifice ceremony portraying the Mayan king?
MEL: They kept bringing fine looking fellas - you know, they'd been in the gym and they looked tough. And I'd look at the guy and say "well, he just looks like a guy from the gym. Why would that guy be the king of this whole city? I want to look at this guy one time and know he killed all his brothers for the position, that he's probably really sick in some way, that he's powerful" - all those things that that guy, who Farhid found working at the docks [laughs]. But when you look at him you go "whoa!" You knew why that guy was the king, when you look at him. He looked dangerous and oddly handsome, and just had it all going on.
UGO: That scene was very graphic, yet less violent than a lot of stuff in The Passion. Did you deliberately try and tone down the intensity for this film?
MEL: That was intended to be extremely intense, and I wanted to zone in on that. That was the nature of that film: to be almost as graphic as you could stand and not have everyone run out screening. With this, that wasn't the main point of the exercise, so I did come back and pull away from stuff. You never saw anybody with a hand inside someone's chest cavity or anything; I don't need to see that. It's bad enough seeing the thing beating. Wherever I could do that, I did it, but some things are necessary.
UGO: As far as keeping things authentic, how did you do research for Apocalypto?
MEL: There are a lot of books around, and there was a lot of evidence being un-earthed as we worked. I mean, they were digging out murals going, "Look at this!" In fact, we even changed the murals we drew on the walls, when those guys are walking down the tunnel, to emulate the murals that they just found. They were a whole different color scheme and we changed it and tried to match up with the latest stuff they had just found. Some of the stuff was so cryptic when you looked at it, you think, "What is that? Oh, that's a snake!" You couldn't quite make it out, so we had to make things a little bit more readable. Ones eyes don't just adjust to that, unless you lived in that culture and were familiar with the signs and hieroglyphs and all that stuff.
UGO: And those sacrificial ceremonies, that was how they went down back then?
MEL: I would think so, they were cardiectomies. I mean, there's a lot of hypothetical dialogue as to what's addressed, but I'm sure that's what it was about. It was an appeasement of God's wrath, the hearts and bloodletting. We just put words to it. I don't know if they used those words but they probably used something like them. But the cardiectomy part: it used to take them less than a minute to get a guy's heart out; that's if you didn't go through the ribcage, if you went under, through the diaphragm. There's a recorded - and this is in our history, because Europeans were there - they watched an Aztec festival, and in the course of four days they performed 20,000 cardiectomies on people, in one of their 'things.' They had a blood bath. That's a lot of people. I think they must have had more than one temple going. And it was far more violent, the stuff that they would do to one another, than anything I've shown you. We've studied up on this; it was awful what they did to one another: chewing their fingers off, cutting your eyelids off and your lips, ripping your tongue out, hanging you up, stabbing you in the genitals, putting you up as a living target in the fields like a firing range and firing arrows at you. At least we had our guys running when they were doing that, but they used to just tie them up on boards and then: "Hey, I bet I can hit him right in the heart!" And if they captured you as a queen of another city? Oh god, it was a fate much worse than death. Or a king; they kept this guy alive for nine years cutting pieces off of him. And they were experts at it. They could open you up, take out all your entrails, cauterize you and keep you alive... without your insides, for quite a while. And that's the really fascinating thing about the culture: you have this incredibly sophisticated civilization, on one hand, and then there are such acts of barbarism in there. They knew about the stars and the constellations... and about building; they had libraries and books and a language and they were cultured. They were like the Greeks, but they also had this other thing with the human sacrifice, which I think came actually from the north; it traveled from the Aztecs. There was commercial intercourse and they picked up a lot of the customs. And there were conquests; sometimes you'd get an Aztec regime come in and conquer and rule.
UGO: With all that, it must have been difficult humanizing such characters, especially ones who lived so long ago.
MEL: It's all to do with the human story. It's the universal, mythic kind of tale but brought down to a level that, hopefully, we can all understand. When I was 15 years old - it was a really interesting thing: you're just growing up at that point and you're not complete. At 15, guys are not complete not all. In fact, I'm not complete yet. I just remember some older guy really putting the jab into the middle of me by calling me the most insulting thing I could think of. He could have called me a horse's ass or a whore or anything else, and it would've been fine, I would've told him to go and get knotted. But what he did was to call me 'almost' (a line used in the film). "Hey almost"...like that. And I just was so offended by that. And that's where that came from: he's almost, and then he becomes. The human experiences we have sort of get put into it. It's the guy's family and his wife and his father. And the advice his father gives him is solid advice: "Don't live with fear." And the film's about fear. We've explored every primal fear we could fit into 2 hours and 5 minutes. Actually, the one you just saw was 2 hours and 9 minutes. I've got another version already I've been cutting... it's smoother now.
UGO: Is it true that after production you had a small village built?
MEL: They had a lot of floods down there. It was like Louisiana in the southern regions of Chiapa. They had severe flooding and something like a million people displaced and washed out. I've always been of the opinion that if you go into someone else's country to make a film, you don't just go in there and stomp all over the place. It's like going to somebody's house: you bring them a bottle of wine or a bunch of flowers or a box of chocolates, and it's the same sort of thing on a big scale when you're going into somebody's country and they're going to help you make your film. You help them first. So we assisted with the flood relief stuff down there.
UGO: What do you hope audiences walk away with from this film?
MEL: This gave me a real kick. It's pure somehow. I'm hoping that it fulfills on a number of levels, that it's not just a great action picture. It's got a lot of levels to it that mean something. I tried to have it be multi-strata in the stories it was telling and the meanings you could extract from them. But if you didn't want to extract those meanings, you could always watch a damn good foot-chase. | | Apocalypto - Mel Gibsoninterview |
MEL Gibson talks about some of the challenges of making his Mayan epic Apocalypto, as well as filming in the jungle.
He also reveals why the violence on show needed to be so intense and why appealing to mainstream audiences continues to be important…
Q: How long has Apocalypto taken?
A: We started writing this two and a half years ago. The editing time has been insane because the post production time was extremely abbreviated, due to the fact that the film was a very difficult one to shoot and went four months over schedule. It really curtailed our post time and we had to edit fast and mix in half the time but I think we did a really good job.
Q: How tough was it to film in the rain forest?
A: There’s a guy down there who looks like a Mexican John Malkovich who’s decided to keep his land pristine. He left all the trees alone and it’s beautiful. Unfortunately, much of the rain forest in Southern Mexico has gone but this guy at least has kept a chunk of it.
It’s only about 50 acres. So down there you’re kind of away from things a little bit and you’re dealing with a film that’s always moving. The shots are moving and the people are moving in the shots. Many of the cast had not ever been in front of a camera before and they had to learn how to be film actors, and they were very good. They just trusted, which was really nice.
The really good thing about using people who are really green is that you don’t have to erase a bunch of bad habits and then put good ones in. You can just start feeding them good habits. This was the case here. It took a little while but then they got in the swing of it. By the time we were finished they were just doing stuff automatically. They were being paid to go to school for eight months, so it was good.
Q: How did you keep up your enthusiasm and energy levels for eight months?
A: It was difficult at times. You can get pretty cranky and it just seems to be like an on going thing… “when is this going to end”! But when we conceived this story there was a real passion involved in telling a really compelling story and then having all these very subtle things hidden, all the way along.
The story is actually very simple, with a very straightforward through line, but the meat that’s attached to the bones of it is quite complex. There are messages about civilisations and we are trying to be true to history as much as possible. We wanted all this to gel with some good theory about why these civilisations went down, why they weakened and crumbled. Because they did, they vanished.
Q: At times isn’t the film almost Biblical?
A: It is Biblical. If you just read Joseph Campbell, who has written amazing books on mythology and religion, they all do come together at some point. There are some of the greatest stories that there have ever been in the Bible. All you have to do is read the book of Maccabi, it’s like a film script. You can access that on many levels and the human spirit and the human mind responds to those themes because they recognise the veracity of them. That they are real things. Sometimes it even goes beyond logic, it’s just a sense of something.
Q: What research did you do?
A: There was a really good book by Diego De Landa who was a Franciscan and his was a first hand eye witness account of the customs, the mores. He saw the human sacrifices happen. He was also responsible, I think, for leaving the code breaker. He looked at the hieroglyphs and taught some guy Spanish and got him to translate, so there was a record of that which they did not really find until after the Second World War, because it was lost behind the Iron Curtain.
Q: Do you think this could be the sort of film that makes people want to find out more about this time in history?
A: I hope so. They are finding out more every day. That’s the amazing thing. We employed the help of Richard Hansen, who was a professor at UCLA and is now at the University of Idaho, who deals with an even older period of Mayan history. We went to the places and stood at the top of the pyramids to see the footprint of the sophistication that once was. It’s just staggering, it’s like Manhattan. You have the biggest pyramid in the world there, bigger than the ones in Egypt.
Massive things from which you can look around and see the outlines of all these cities with roads all coming to the middle. They had a sense of balance, everything had its right place, it was all married up to the firmament. They knew all about the stars and the sun and the moon and their movements. They had a very complex calendar, more complicated than ours, by far. They knew so much. They were a very sophisticated society that was pretty savage too.
Q: You don’t shirk from showing the savagery because they don’t see themselves as savages. They see what they’re doing – human sacrifice – as keeping them in touch with their god…
A: That’s right. That’s what I told the actors when they were all doing it. I said you’re not bad guys, I don’t ever want you to think that you’re a bad guy. You’re a part of your culture and you’re doing your job and that’s what you do. That’s all you know and all you were raised to do.
Q: Can we draw comparisons between your making of this film and The Passion Of The Christ?
A: A lot of the same sensibilities go into them. I think you move on but there are certain rhythms that are yours and so you leave your mark on something. There are certain things that I will do viscerally to affect people emotionally, with speed changes and sound, and various other things. Sure there are links; the same kind of sensibilities went into it and I worked on writing that script as well so there was an emphasis on a minimalisation of dialogue as far as possible, to focus on the visual and to put it in another language, of course.
Q: It must give you tremendous satisfaction when you can make a film that is out of the mainstream and the mainstream audience goes – like with The Passion Of The Christ – and you prove the doubters wrong?
A: Well, I hope they go. But the point is not really about being vindicated. It’s about doing the things you want to do, in the way that you want to do them. You achieve a certain amount of independence by being independent and not having any sort of interference.
But nobody makes art for an elite, not if they’re a real artist. You try and reach as many people as possible with whatever it is that you make. If a chef is making an omelette, he wants everyone to think that it tastes great because he did it. And if it does, then that’s a success because everyone eats it. I hope this story finds them and touches them and they find access to it and the characters.
Q: Did you have to employ special people to keep your cast and crew safe from bugs and jungle creatures?
A: Yeah, we had snake wranglers around. If you step on a Ferdelance you are in trouble. That’s the highly poisonous snake that bites the Mayan in the neck in the film. We had to be careful about snakes, bugs and ticks. Then, of course, there are the injuries. It was kind of rough terrain. But the reason we chose to film in Mexico was that you could have primary rain forest and you could also have some flat ground that you could work on.
Q: You have never made an easy film. Was this the toughest?
A: This was the hardest… by far. The schedule turned out to be longer than anything else, some of the things turned out to be really difficult to achieve because you were working with animals… jaguars, tapirs, snakes, monkeys. I can’t even remember all the animals. The peccaries were nasty.
Q: How did you cast your two leading men?
A: We found them through a long process. I looked at a lot of people. I put out a call and we went from Canada, California, New Mexico to Oklahoma. I wanted to see native peoples and we found them from everywhere.
The little girl, for instance, that we found, she doesn’t speak anything else but Mayan. That’s her only language. She comes from a village that’s less sophisticated than the village we showed you in the film. That’s the way she still lives, in the forest, in huts with dirt floors. She was seven-years-old and had never seen a camera or a car before. When we initially went to the casting people in Mexico they sent all the European looking actors but I wanted the Indian looking ones with the high cheek bones.
Q: Were the actors aware of how physically demanding this was going to be?
A: They knew going in. I told them what it was going to be like. It’s about the most physical film that I have ever seen as far as sheer endurance is concerned… eight months of that stuff! How do you keep a guy from breaking a leg? And nobody was hurt. I got them down there a good bit beforehand and told them they were looking a bit flabby. I said they were good and I knew they had it in them but they had to go on a diet that made them look as though they lived back then. So they started to eat the right kind of food and got really lean and muscular.
I got them to exercise to keep their ankles and ligaments strong. So they trained for six weeks in pre-production. We had a movement coach who made them all graceful. It was good for them because a lot of them had never been in any kind of performance before. The coach started to knock the 20th Century out of them.
Q: Was there any moment when you thought you had bitten off more than you could chew?
A: Of course! It scares the hell out of you! The amount of work, the logistical nightmare. But I had been through those kinds of things before, so I knew it was possible. Sometimes you got to a point where it wasn’t happening and you had to figure out another way to do it, particularly in terms of making the jaguar do what you wanted. That was not CG, a real guy had to run really fast and not trip. There was a form of restraint on the creature that you can’t see. so it was all very safe – but it is real. | | Apocalypto sets UKrecord |
MEL Gibson’s Apocalypto has enjoyed the highest ever opening weekend box office figure for a foreign language film in the UK, taking £1,360,110 from 385 sites.
The previous record holders were Hero with £1.05 million, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (£686,000) and Amelie (£559,000).
The epic follows the fortunes of lone Mayan hunter Jaguar Paw (played by Rudy Youngblood) after his idyllic existence is brutally disrupted by a violent invading force.
Taken on a perilous journey to a world ruled by fear and oppression, Jaguar Paw finds a harrowing end awaits him until – through a twist of fate and spurred by the power of his love for his stricken family – he makes a desperate break to return home and save his way of life.
Apocalypto, which Gibson co-wrote, directed and produced, is a Greek term meaning “an unveiling” or “new beginning”.
The film is spoken in Mayan dialect, although like his last film, The Passion of The Christ, which he shot in Aramaic, it has English subtitles.
Shooting took place on location in the Mexican state of Veracruz. The cast features actors from Mexico, the United States and Canada as well as indigenous Mayan-speakers from the region of Yucatan. | | Mel Gibson honoured forApocalypto |
MEL Gibson has been honoured with the Visionary Award from the Latino Business Association (LBA) for his new epic, Apocalypto.
The actor-director, who is trying to rebuild his reputation following a drunken anti-Semitic outburst earlier this year, was flattered to receive the accolade and described his film as “a badge of honour for the Latino community”.
Apocalypto is a Mexican-made film, spoken in Mayan, that chronicles the decline of Mexico’s native civilisation. It is due for a release in the US in December and in the UK early next year.
But even though it has been seen by very few people – and many are predicting a turbulent box office reception – the epic has impressed the Latin business community.
Its chairman, Rick Sarmiento, said that Gibson’s much-publicised outburst earlier this year, had not been taken into account when the group made their decision to recognise the film.
He told the BBC: “Hearing him tell the story about using Latino actors, it was a no-brainer.”
Apocalypto features a cast of unknown actors and most of the crew were also recruited in Mexico.
Mr Sarmiento added that the film had made him “feel extremely proud of everything to do with our culture”.
Gibson, who is himself a devout Catholic, said the Mayan civilisation had always been of interest to him and wanted to make a film that raised awareness of their story.
He wants to dismiss the popular myth that history “only began with Europeans”.
The former Lethal Weapon star was, however, shielded from members of the press at the ceremony, which was held at the Beverly Hilton Hotel in Los Angeles on Thursday (November 2, 2006).
Reporters who did attend were kept a few hundred feet away and weren’t allowed to ask the star any questions. | | Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto: Fear killed the Mayas |
The Mayan civilization existed for more than one thousand years. The Mayas were a much advanced people. They built flourishing cities and giant pyramids. The Mayas were superb mathematicians and astronomers. However, the highly evolved and mysterious Mayan civilization came to an abrupt end, leaving a handful of pyramids in the dense forests of Central America for scientists to unravel one of the biggest mysteries of our time. The actor/director Mel Gibson has just released his latest movie Apocalypto that revolves around the events preceding the fall of the ancient Mayan civilization. The movie opened in the U.S. and Europe last weekend. It should hit the theaters across Russia on December 14.
The commercial success of his previous movie, The Passion of the Christ, was apparently an impetus to Gibson to direct another movie that touches on similarly fundamental issues. “It seems to me that people would like to see big stories unfolded on the screen, the stories that connect to them both emotionally and spiritually,” as Mel Gibson put it in one of the interviews.
People with whom he already made The Brave Heart and The Passion of the Christ made up the nucleus of Gibson’s crew for the making of a new movie that promises to be yet another blockbuster. Thomas E. Sanders was in charge of production design. Kevin Stitt and John Right were responsible for film editing, and Dean Semler became chief cinematographer. Looks like Gibson chose the right people.
As Gibson and his crew were preparing to launch the filming, the director/writer and his co-writer Farhad Safinia read all the available Mayan myths on creation and destruction, including the Mayan Popol Vuh’s (Mayan Bible) concept of the “Fin de los Tiempos” (End of Time). The authors familiarized with all the theories explaining the demise of the Mayan civilization. They kept abreast of the latest archeological finds by reading reliable sources of information and scouting around the location in which the events of Apocalypto were to take place.
The events of the movie begin in one the peaceful tribes whose members lead a happy life in accordance with their primitive laws: hunting, dances round the fire and a shaman’s story told at night. The tribesman could have lived until the end of time had not the Pypil warriors invaded their land. The invaders pillaged the village, killed the chieftain, and took all the able-bodied prisoners into the woods.
As it turned, some of the prisoners were sent to the construction site of the Mayan white city, whose erection required hundreds and thousands of slaves; others were used on the maize plantations, which had been struck by a series of poor harvests by the time. Maize was the Mayas’ bread, the cornerstone of their diet. They had worshipped maize for centuries. According to the canons of Popol Vuh, the tribesmen were supposed to make sacrifices to the gods for the benefit of future crops. The Mayan practices included human sacrifice.
Filming a movie based on a purely historical plot would have bored Gibson. That is why he brings a personal story into play. The story features the chieftain’s son called Jaguar Paw. He and his loved ones were doomed to die a horrible death since the captors had set them aside for making a sacrifice for the benefit of the entire Mayan people. By virtue of the plot, Jaguar Paw has to overcome his fear and show lots of courage under the circumstances. He has to act like a real hero to change his fate. The story of Jaguar Paw is a story of an ordinary average person who is forced to act heroically. “Man isn’t the main evil portrayed in the movie. It’s human fear. The lead character has to overcome his fear,” said Mel Gibson about the message of his new movie.
The practice of human sacrifice was an essential part of the deep-rooted religious and sociopolitical traditions of the Mayan civilization. The human sacrifice was considered an indispensable means of keeping the gods alive, and therefore a guarantee against the collapse of the Universe. The rites involving human sacrifices were usually witnessed by a large crowd of tribesmen. The priests who performed the rites were extremely knowledgeable in terms of anatomy. A victim’s chest would be cut open to remove his beating heart in the nick of time. Then a victim would be beheaded, his wrists and feet cut off, and his shinbones separated from the rest of the body. The rite was carried out smoothly and effectively to make sure that nothing could come in the way of its cut-and-dried solemnity.
There are several versions with regard to the arrival of conquistadors to the land of the Mayas. According to one version, the Spanish conquistadors conquered the indigenous people of the region and leveled a larger part of their cultural heritage to the ground. Most of the Mayas’ lands laid waste by invading armies. The wars and diseases took a heavy toll of the nation’s men and women. The second version of the story maintains that the Mayan civilization was discovered by the Spanish king Francisco Fernandes de Cordova who came across the small piece of land off the Mexican eastern shore. The vanguard of the troops came ashore on the island and found a statute erected by the Mayas a few centuries ago in honor of the goddess of fertility. Later the Mayas vanished in the haze for reasons unknown. However, another version indicates that the conquistadors found nothing but ruins of the abandoned cities on the land formerly populated by the Mayas. | | 'Gibson's film Apocalypto is racist' |
Much like his bloody epic about the death of Christ, a new Mel Gibson production about the collapse of the Mayan civilization is angering members of the culture it depicts even before it hits the screen.
The "Passion of Christ" was accused by some of being anti-Semitic - long before Gibson's career-damaging outbursts against a Jewish policeman in Malibu this year.
Now indigenous activists in Guatemala, once home to a large part of the Mayan empire that built elaborate jungle cities in southern Mexico and northern Central America centuries ago, say his film "Apocalypto" is racist.
Gibson's representatives were not immediately available for comment.
Only trailers for "Apocalypto," which will be released on Friday, have been shown in Guatemala, but leaders say scenes of scary-looking Mayans with bone piercings and scarred faces hurling spears and sacrificing humans promote stereotypes about their culture.
"Gibson replays, in glorious big budget Technicolor, an offensive and racist notion that Maya people were brutal to one another long before the arrival of Europeans and thus they deserved, in fact, needed, rescue," said Ignacio Ochoa, director of the Nahual Foundation that promotes Mayan culture.
At their height, the Maya built monumental cities in the Peten region of Guatemala, but the civilization went into decline after the 8th century, some say because of overuse of natural resources.
The culture is not thought to have been as blood-thirsty as the neighboring Aztec empire, but some archeologists say human sacrifice was common in the final years before the Spanish conquest.
More than half of Guatemala's population is descended from the original Maya. They face frequent discrimination and most live in poverty with little access to education and social services.
Over 200,000 people, mostly Mayan, were killed during Guatemala's 36-year civil war that ended a decade ago. Some rights groups say the army tried to wipe out the Maya.
Lucio Yaxon, a 23-year-old Mayan human rights activist, said Apocalypto's heart-pounding trailer was unrealistic.
"Basically the director is saying the Mayans are savages," said Yaxon, who speaks Kaqchikel, one of 22 Guatemalan Mayan languages, as well as Spanish.
But Richard Hansen, an archeologist who Gibson consulted on the making of the film, says the director took pains to ensure authenticity and historical accuracy.
The entire script is spoken in Yucatec Maya and the star is a Native American dancer named Rudy Youngblood. Gibson's use of indigenous actors has won praise from Latino and Native American groups in the United States.
"I am a little apprehensive about how the Maya themselves are going to perceive it," said Hansen, who directs an archeological project at the Mirador Basin in northern Guatemala, "but Gibson is trying to make a social statement."
| | Gibson bounces back with box office hit |
Mel Gibson has bounced back from the scandal over his drink-driving arrest and anti-Semitic rant to secure a box office hit with his epic film Apocalypto.
The movie about the last days of the Mayan civilisation came in at number one in its opening weekend in the US and Canada, taking 14.2 million dollars (£7.2 million) according to studio estimates.
Some had believed director Gibson's personal troubles in the summer, which saw him issue a grovelling apology to the Jewish community and get banned from driving for three months, had harmed his career.
Disney release Apocalypto, which has no big name stars, has also come under fire from some Mayan groups and shocked critics with its sheer bloodiness as it depicts beheadings and hearts being ripped from people's chests.
But it seemed to have overcome those potential problems to beat new romance The Holiday, starring Kate Winslet, Jude Law, Cameron Diaz and Jack Black, into second place with 13.5 million dollars (£6.9 million).
Apocalypto's earnings were modest however compared with Gibson's last movie, The Passion of the Christ, which made 83.8 million dollars (£42.7 million) on its opening weekend in 2004.
Chuck Viane, head of distribution for Disney, said the film had beaten people's pessimistic expectations.
"The movie obviously succeeds on its own level," he said.
"I think people probably are a bit on the surprised side around town that it's number one. "Two months ago, nobody would have bet on that."
Disney reported that Apocalypto drew cinema-goers across-the-board, with audiences mainly aged between 18 and 45 and split equally between men and women.
Some experts believed the publicity over Gibson's outburst and his contriteness had actually helped.
Paul Dergarabedian, president of box-office tracker Media By Numbers, said there was a "huge curiosity factor".
"A movie about Mayan civilisation was never destined to be a big hit, let alone a number one movie," he said.
"But through Disney's marketing, which highlights Mel Gibson - I believe they associated him very closely with the movie - I think that strategy paid off."
Some activists in Guatemala, which was once home to a large part of the central American Mayan empire, said Apocalypto was unrealistic and complained that it portrayed Mayans as savages.
Blood Diamond, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, opened in fifth place with 8.5 million dollars (£4.3 million).
The film is set against Sierra Leone's civil war in the 1990s and follows a mercenary pursuing a rare diamond. |
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How accurate is the cinematic fantasy, Apocalypto, a film by Mel Gibson that presents his version of the end of Mayan civilization? Scholars on the Maya and other Mesoamerican civilizations are not holding their breath. Despite the Hollywood movie’s dazzling look, the film contains numerous factual errors. If you want an accurate examination of Mayan civilization, there are many absorbing scholarly books on the topic written by experts, but if you don’t care about facts and will settle for an action adventure set in an exotic location - Apocalypto is for you.  [ A scene from Mel Gibson's cinematic fantasy, Apocalypto. ] Apocalypto presents the viewer with Gibson’s take on the fall of Mayan civilization, and he attributes this collapse to corrupt rulers desperate to hold on to power by any means. According to Gibson, Mayan elites used religion as a means to control and manipulate the people, and the film focuses on the director’s view that the practice of ritual human sacrifice - which the movie depicts as having been performed on a massive scale, was one of the primary reasons for the downfall of the Maya. That is what raises the eyebrows of archaeologists and scholars - since there is absolutely no evidence that the Maya practiced human sacrifice on a massive scale. Gibson’s contention reveals his religious bias, he sees the Maya as victims of a controlling religious cult - but sees his own religious dogma as “the one true faith.” The film’s official website even uses the tagline, “When the end comes, not everyone is ready to go”, which can also be construed as a clear reference to the end times and one’s acceptance of the Christian savior. It is well understood by the scientific community that the Maya did conduct rituals involving blood as a supplication to their gods. In prayer, Mayan priests and political elites pierced their earlobes, tongues, lips and even genitals, offering the drawn blood to favored deities. Everyday worship also involved making prayers to agricultural gods and goddess, providing deities with offerings of food, flowers, and other forms of tribute. During special observances or events, individuals were sacrificed by priests who cut out the hearts of the victims - but this practice was limited and not conducted to the magnitude depicted in Gibson’s film. While Archaeologists agree that warfare played a major role in the life of Mayan Kingdoms, they also agree that Mayan religious practice played no significant role in the collapse of their civilization. Gibson’s assertion to the contrary is pure conjecture on his part - and further evidence of his own zealous religious beliefs.  [ Apocalypto is pure conjecture. An action adventure/chase film set in an "exotic" past. ] Jewish critics of Gibson’s previous film, The Passion of the Christ, were fearful that movie would reinforce anti-Semitism, with some making the charge that the film itself was an exercise in Jew-bashing. Those accusations took on new life when an inebriated Gibson let loose a flurry of anti-Semitic diatribes against L.A. County Deputies during his arrest for drunk driving in July, 2006. “F**king Jews. The Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world”, was among the vitriol Gibson shouted at his arresting officers, and while Gibson apologized for his outlandish behavior - it’s still understandable why many Jewish people and their friends will not be flocking to see Apocalypto.  [ Apocalypto - full of visual details but short on historical accuracy. ] The Walt Disney Co. is the distributor for Apocalypto, and they are investing big money into reshaping Gibson’s public image from that of an anti-Semite loudmouth to that of a sensitive master film director. An aggressive promotional campaign for the movie began Thanksgiving evening, when Gibson appeared on the Disney owned ABC network with Diane Sawyer in an hour long special on the film. Sawyer abandoned the role of journalist to become one of Disney’s marketers - politely asking Gibson softball questions that would allow him to promote his film. At one point Gibson said the local amateur Mexican actors and stand-ins he worked with were ashamed to speak Mayan Yucatec (the film is being shot in Veracruz, Mexico), but then arrogantly proclaimed that he had “made the language cool again” - a supposed fact that inordinately pleased him. With an equally bigheaded attitude, Gibson explained that he taught the actors, many of them descendents of the ancient Maya - how to dance like their ancestors. Where Gibson was schooled in the art of ancient Maya dance and how he became an expert in the field remains a mystery. Diane Sawyer’s co-host was John Quinones, who reported from the Maya heartland of Guatemala in a series of remarkably uninformative and misleading “special reports.” In one such commentary focusing on the squalor and poverty suffered by large numbers of Maya in Guatemala, Quinones actually said their misery was due to the “excesses of their ancestors.” That utterly despicable remark fits the imperialist pattern of blaming the oppressed for their own misery. Quinones’ reports did not mention the Spanish invader’s murder and plunder of the indigenous peoples that truly did take place on a massive scale, nor did it mention the indigenous being ravaged by small pox, venereal diseases, and other plagues introduced by the Spanish conquerors - afflictions that took the lives of hundreds of thousands. The entire legacy of a brutal colonial rule was ignored. In passing, Quinones did mention that in the 1980’s over 200,000 Maya were killed by the Guatemalan army during the nation’s bloody counterinsurgency war, but he didn’t mention the U.S. arming, financing and training of the Guatemalan army. At any rate, his mention of the massive number of deaths that occurred during the genocidal war of the 1980’s was simply a footnote, as if it had little significance to the Maya and their way of life.  [ The Maya did not practice ritual human sacrifice on a massive scale as depicted in Apocalypto. ] The Walt Disney Co. has intentionally aimed Apocalypto at Latinos, hiring the oldest Latino marketing agency in the entertainment industry, The Arenas Group, to help popularize and sell the movie. The Beverly Hills-based Arenas arranged screenings of the film to the L.A. Latin Business Association, which afterwards conferred their “Visionary Award” to Gibson. Disney spokesman Dennis Rice said: “We think this movie plays to a wide audience and that there’s going to be a tremendous amount of interest generated from the Latino community, especially the Mexican community, because this is a story about their ancestors.” The elite sector of Latino politicians and businessmen in Los Angeles have been invited to advance screenings, including L.A.’s Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. The omnipresent Chicano actor, Edward James Olmos, attended a screening, and gave the film a good review, but he made an interesting remark in doing so. Olmos said, “Basically, if you watch Elia Kazan’s movies, I could surely watch Mel Gibson’s movie. I think more damage was done understanding what Elia Kazan did than what Mel Gibson did. That’s his problem and he has to live with it.” | | Trivia |
- · Jaguars, unlike leopards, are not generally known to kill humans, although there are a few cases of this happening.
- · For the waterfall jump scene, Rudy Youngblood performed his own stunt, jumping in a harness from a 15-story building in Veracruz over about 10 takes. (The shot was later digitally composited with the real waterfall.) After director Mel Gibson harassed Youngblood about the actor's initial hesitancy and fear of jumping, Youngblood got together with the stunt crew and goaded Gibson into taking a jump for himself.
- · Because of heavy rains in Mexico, the released date had been changed from 4 August 2006 to 8 December 2006.
- · The amount of digital footage shot would approximately equal 2 million feet of conventional film.
- · Many substantial speaking roles in the film were filled by Mayan people who had never acted before. For instance, the sick little girl who curses the hunting party as they and the captives pass right before entering the city, was played by a seven year old who lived in a dirt-floored hut in a village not unlike Jaguar Paw's.
- · There was severe flooding in the southern region of the country during filming, which displaced at least a million people. The crew helped with some flood relief.
- · The teaser trailer for the movie has an almost entirely different cast than the one that ends up in the film.
- · Due to the unpredictable climate in the rain forest of Mexico, special care was needed to protect the digital cameras. Under extreme heat, they were covered with space blankets to reflect the heat. Temperature was closely monitored via thermometers added to the cameras. While shooting at a waterfall, the cameras were protected in specially built Hydroflex splash bags designed by Pete Romano.
- · During the course of filming the 170-ft waterfall for the scene in which Jaguar Paw (Rudy Youngblood) jumps to escape the headhunters, a real cow that was attempting to cross upstream went over the waterfall. Remarkably, it emerged from the fall alive and the dazed and confused animal banged with the current along rocks near the bank. Mel Gibson and crew were certain the cow was done for, but after a local man swam into the river and calmed it, the cow climbed up on bank and began eating grass as if nothing had happened.
- · In casting, it was important to Mel Gibson that he and Farhad Safinia find actors that matched the archetype each character represented. For instance, Rudy Youngblood struck Gibson as fitting the mythic archetype of a hero. Gibson saw that as necessary to allow people to identify with the film, since the movie's context is unfamiliar to most viewers, being in a foreign language and concerning an indigenous culture in the 16th century.
- · As a teenager, Mel Gibson was actually once called 'almost' by an older boy, which was a deep insult to him. This inspired the line in the movie in which Jaguar Paw is called 'almost' by one of the headhunters.
- · Mel Gibson makes a brief (nearly hidden) appearance in the Apocolypto trailer. Click the pause button when the screaming monkey appears (a little bit after the pregnant woman, but before the solar eclipse) then use the left arrow (button) to step the video back, frame by frame, to the guys painted white. Step back another frame or two and you'll see Mel, with a lot of beard, smoking a cigar.
- · Mel Gibson turned down the lead role in World Trade Center (2006) in order to direct this film.
- · The film is allegedly inspired by the text of the Popol Vuh (sometimes called the Maya Bible) and Spanish missionary descriptions of the Maya.
- · Actor Raw Leiba was originally offered the part of "Hanging Moss" played by Ariel Galvan, but turned it down due to time commitment needed in Mexico.
- · (At 01:31:34) There is a single frame in which Waldo (from Where's Waldo?) is seen lying on the pile of dead bodies.
- · According to Director Mel Gibson's and co-writer Farhad Safinia's DVD commentary, the halting of the sacrifices at the onset of a solar eclipse is meant to be a carefully timed ruse by the Mayan ruling class. Being precocious astrologers, the Mayans utilized their knowledge of celestial phenomena as a means to control the underclass populace.
- · The entire prophecy spoken by the Oracle girl comes true; including being "reborn" from mud and earth; as once he escapes from the sinkhole, Jaguar Paw emerges black (like the Jaguar) turning the tables on his pursuers, becoming their hunters, and no longer the quarry.
- · This movie's poster does not depict Jaguar Paw running from his pursuers, but rather it's Middle Eye.
- · The Jaguar's attack in the film is portrayed accurately, with the cat attacking the skull, rather than the throat. Unique among the other big cats, as where Lions, Cheetahs, Tigers, and Leopards asphyxiate their prey with a bite to the throat, Jaguars kill with a penetrating bite to the brain.
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