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

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. WHO WERE THE MAYA? 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. Yet 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.”

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