JOURNEY INTO THE JUNGLE: THE PRODUCTION OF APOCALYPTO
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 sugar cane 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 APOCALYTPO'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 bring their own," he says.
After intensive discussions, Gibson and Semler decided they would shoot APOCALYTPO 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 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 rack, huts, marketplace and merchant areas. Working closely with Dr. Richard Hansen, Sanders also studied up on Mayan tools, utensils, weapons of war (in collaboration with armorer Simon Atherton), right down to their textiles and pottery. Then, he began the enormous task 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 towards 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 Shanty Town, 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 a 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 over-sized jewelry -- the trio had its work cut out for them.
Nearly ever 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 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 desire effect.
When it came to textiles, Rubeo tried to use materials indigenous to the Maya, procuring patterned fabric from such modern Mayan communities as s 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 hair stylists, wig makers and make-up 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 make-up 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 recreate 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 silicon, 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."

THE HEART OF APOCALYPTO: WHO WERE THE MAYA AND WHAT BECAME OF THEM?
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 America, 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 BC to the 15th Century AD. 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 rain forest. 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.
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 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 inter-related 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 tree were gone, clay washed into the swamps rendering the organic muck that was essential for their agriculture difficult to get to. 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 APOCALYTPO 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 Lancandon 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."


TIMELINE OF THE MAYA
A GLOSSARY OF MAYAN PHRASES FROM APOCALYPTO
MEL GIBSON (DIRECTOR/PRODUCER/CO-SCREENWRITER)

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