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Visceral, thrilling and boldly thought-provoking,
Apocalypto brings to life, through Gibson’s ambitious creative
vision, a world from the ancient past hereto never before seen on
the modern screen that speaks powerfully to our lives today.
Shot on location in Catemaco—in
one of the last remaining tracts of rainforests left in Mexico—and
in Veracruz, with a cast made up entirely of indigenous peoples from
the Americas, Apocalypto is directed by Mel Gibson, produced by
Gibson and Bruce Davey and written by Gibson and Farhad Safinia, who
coproduce.
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. 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: At times isn’t the film
almost biblical?
A: It is biblical. If you read
Joseph Campbell who has written amazing books on mythology, religion
and they all do come together at some point. There are some of the
greatest stories that there have ever been in the Bible. Sometimes
it even goes beyond logic, it is just a sense of something.
Q: You don’t shirk from showing
the savagery because they don’t see themselves as savages. They
see what they are 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 are not
bad guys. I don’t ever want to think that you are a bad guy. You
are a part of your culture and you are doing your job and that’s
what you do. You are doing the right thing and if somebody knocks
your son off you go and hunt them down.
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 Pasion of the
Christ—and you prove the doubters wrong?
A: Well I hope they go. But the
point is not really about being vindicated but it is about doing the
things you want to do, in the way that you want to do them so that
you achieve a certain amount of independence by being indeed, in
every way, independent and not having any sort of interference. You
can just go about making your table… I’ll chip this off here,
and put a leg on here and it’ll be this high… without too many
cooks. So that’s good. But nobody makes art for an elite, not if
they are a real artist. You try and reach as many people as possible
with whatever it is that you make. I hope this story finds them and
touches them and they find access to it and the characters. That was
a primary thing, right off the bat. You are going way back, into
another culture, with a different language and they look really
different, they are all brown, the cast is entirely indigenous.
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 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 is her only language. She comes from a village that is 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.
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. But I was looking at it and thinking… I don’t know how
we are going to get this. Sometimes you go to a point where it was
not happening and you had to figure out another way to do it. It was
really hard, particularly to make the jaguar do what you want. That
was not CG, it is real guy had to run really fast and not trip and
there is a form of restraint on the creature that you can’t see.
It was all very safe. But it is real.
Apocalypto opens January 31 in
theaters nationwide from 20th Century Fox to be distributed by
Warner Bros.
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