Release Date: December 8, 2006
Studio: 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

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 120degree 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 two- time 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 handpainted 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

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