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Release Date: December 8, 2006Studio: Touchstone Pictures Director: Mel Gibson Screenwriter: Mel Gibson, Farhad Safinia Genre: Action, Adventure MPAA Rating: R **** ARTICLES AND INTERVIEWS: 1. PRODUCTION INFORMATION 2. ABOUT THE PRODUCTION 3. CASTING MAYA IN THE MODERN WORLD 4. LEARNING TO SPEAK YUCATEC MAYA 5. THE PRODUCTION OF APOCALYPTO 6. WHO WERE THE MAYA? 7. WHO WERE THE MAYA AND WHAT BECAME OF THEM? 8. TIMELINE OF THE MAYA 9. GLOSSARY OF MAYAN PHRASES APOCALYPTO
ABOUT THE PRODUCTION
Following on the heels of that success, Gibson took another daring turn. His third work as a director was “The Passion of the Christ,” an exploration of the final 12 hours of Jesus Christ’s life in a film that revisited this eternal story with the uncompromising realism and raw emotion of contemporary cinema. The film was an unprecedented worldwide success and changed the face of Hollywood. But few could have imagined where Gibson would turn next—to one of the most mysterious and alluring civilizations in all of history, where he would set a nonstop, constantly accelerating thriller, driven by visuals and pure emotion, forging an original film experience truly unlike any other.
To begin with, Gibson knew only that he wanted to create an incomparable chase film in which a man must put everything on the line. “I wanted to make a high-velocity action- adventure chase film that keeps on turning the screws,” recalls Gibson. “I was intrigued by the idea that most of the story would be told visually—hitting the audience on the most visceral and emotional of levels.” But as Gibson shared his ideas with screenwriter and graduate of Cambridge University Farhad Safinia, they began to explore the seemingly wild notion of setting this epic tale of action at the end of the reign of the Maya. Safinia, who had traveled in the Yucatan and seen Mayan ruins firsthand, intrigued Gibson with his stories, and the script began flowing from there. “The idea was like this fantastic engine,” Safinia says. “The story was always driving, driving towards something, and it was thrilling even as we were writing it. There are a lot of revelations, plot twists and developments that happen at high speed.” As they wrote, Gibson and Safinia immersed themselves in the fascinating history of the Maya. They spent months reading Mayan myths of creation and destruction, including the sacred texts of prophesy known as the Popul Vuh. They pored through the latest archeological texts about new digs and theories about the civilization’s collapse. Then, they made their own firsthand journeys to view ancient Mayan sites for themselves, which had an especially profound effect. Recalls Gibson: “I stood on top of the temple at El Mirador in Guatemala, in the only rainforest left in the country, and looking out, I could see the outlines of 26 other cities—all around us like a clock. You could see pyramids popping out of the jungle in the distance. It was quite something. You really got the sense of how powerful a civilization this once was.” Gibson and Safinia also had long conversations with Dr. Richard D. Hansen, a world- renowned archeologist and expert on the Maya, who served as a consultant on the film. “Richard’s enthusiasm for what he does is infectious. He was able to reassure us and make us feel secure that what we were writing had some authenticity as well as imagination,” says Gibson. It was Hansen who helped Gibson and Safinia uncover some of the secrets of the Maya that most intrigued them—and especially to get a grip on how such an amazing society could fall to pieces. Hansen confirmed what Gibson and Safinia had intuited: that there are provocative parallels between the end of Mayan society and the contemporary chaos of our own. “We really wanted to know—what were the reasons behind the Mayan cycles of rise and collapse?” notes Safinia. “We discovered that what archeologists and anthropologists believe is that the daunting problems faced by the Maya are extraordinarily similar to those faced today by our own civilization, especially when it comes to widespread environmental degradation, excessive consumption and political corruption.” Adds Gibson: “Throughout history, precursors to the fall of a civilization have always been the same, and one of the things that just kept coming up as we were writing is that many of the things that happened right before the fall of the Mayan civilization are occurring in our society now. It was important for me to make that parallel because you see these cycles repeating themselves over and over again. People think that modern man is so enlightened, but we’re susceptible to the same forces—and we are also capable of the same heroism and transcendence.” The deeper Gibson and Safinia probed into Mayan culture, the more they were able to fully develop their lead character—Jaguar Paw. Jaguar Paw’s story, that of an ordinary man who is pushed into heroic actions, is at the very heart of APOCALYPTO. As the movie begins, he is a young father, promising, instinctively aware but not quite yet a leader in his small, idyllic village of traditional hunters. Then, in one breathless moment, his entire world is ripped apart when he is captured and taken on a perilous march through the forest to the great Mayan city, where he learns he will be sacrificed to the gods to “pay” for the widespread famine that has ravaged their realm. Facing imminent death, Jaguar Paw must conquer his greatest fears as he makes an adrenaline-soaked, heart-racing dash to try to save all that he holds dear. Throughout his stunning journey, the camera never leaves him, revealing everything he sees, feels and experiences. Despite the fact that the character lived in a mysterious culture centuries ago, Jaguar Paw’s moving coming-of-age story and his increasingly courageous fight to save his family felt deeply contemporary to the screenwriters. “Jaguar Paw’s story is one that anyone will relate to,” notes Gibson. “In the course of his journey, he has to put his own self aside and fight for something much larger.” Part of what makes Jaguar Paw’s battle so epic is the sheer enormity of what he is fighting. “The key villain in the film is really not a person,” says Gibson. “It’s a concept, and that concept is fear. The hero has to overcome his fear, and being overtaken with fear is something we all have struggled with in history as well as in today’s world, so it’s something everyone relates to.” For Gibson and Safinia, the underlying themes of man’s struggle to live in balance with nature, of corrupted societies, of familial love and of sacrifice for others became a foundation for building sheer excitement as Jaguar Paw makes his way through a gauntlet of both human and wild threats. They hoped to create a story that moves so fast, that cuts so closely to the bone, that the full impact of its themes would only hit audiences later. “I think the first thing that strikes you about this story is the great adventure of it and the incredible kinetic impact,” Gibson says, “but beneath that are the underpinnings of all that has set Jaguar Paw’s journey in motion.” Relentless motion and starkly visual storytelling lie at the very core of APOCALYPTO’s creative concept. “ “From the minute the story gets going, almost everything you see on the screen is in motion,” Gibson explains. “In every frame, the camera is always moving and there’s always someone or something moving within that moving shot.” Once he and Safinia completed the screenplay, all the dialogue was translated into the Yucatec language, the primary Mayan dialect spoken in the Yucatan peninsula today. Gibson felt that the effect would be to pull the audience completely into this world—just as it had done when he used authentic languages for “The Passion of the Christ.” “I think hearing a different language allows the audience to completely suspend their own reality and get drawn into the world of the film,” Gibson summarizes. “And more importantly, this also puts the emphasis on the cinematic visuals, which are a kind of universal language of the heart.” |
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Production notes, photos and promotional video © 2006 Touchstone Pictures
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