MEXICO: Mel Gibson begins production on an action movie shot entirely in an ancient Mayan language

Actor Mel Gibson, who turned a Latin script on the crucifixion of Christ into box office gold last year, is in Mexico to shoot his latest film: an action movie shot entirely in an ancient Mayan tongue. The star turned independent director was in the eastern state of Veracruz this week where he is to film "Apocalypto," a thriller set in an ancient Mayan settlement and shot in the Yucatec dialect. "Well it's kind of an action adventure firstly. It came from an idea that I cooked up and than I collaborated with another gentleman called "Fahed" and we wrote the script and it's just a kind of a story that's kind of mythic in proportion yet it is a very personal story," Gibson, sporting a long beard, said at a news conference. Gibson achieved fame with lucrative movies like the epic "The Patriot," the sci-fi thriller "Signs" and the "Lethal Weapon" series and has become one of the most bankable stars in Hollywood, commanding a fee of 25 million U.S. dollars a film. A devout Roman Catholic, he had the greatest hit of his career with last year's "The Passion of the Christ," which became the most successful independent film ever made despite its impenetrable Latin and Aramaic dialogue and stomach churning flogging sequences. The 49-year-old star chose to make this movie in the native language too and explained his motives to the media in Mexico. "I spoke to one of the translators who worked on the script and she told me that a lot of the kids when they go to school and they have grown up speaking this indigenous tongue, people laugh at them so they are ashamed of it. But my hope is, and it sounds great, I mean it sounds beautiful this language, but my hope is that it makes this language cool again," he said. Gibson said the story would be told through the eyes of a Mayan man, his family and village, and would touch on universal themes about "civilizations and what undermines them," but he declined to go into details about the plot. He said Mayan myths from the Popol Vuh sacred texts formed part of his research for the film, which also drew on input from indigenous groups and Spanish mission texts from the 1700s and Mayan language translators. After visiting Guatemala, the Yucatan Peninsula and Costa Rica to scope out locations, he settled on unspoiled jungle in Veracruz, near where Spanish conquistador Hernan Cortes first made landfall in 1519, to frame the story. Gibson's popularity in Mexico has been boosted by his recent donation of 1 million U.S. dollars to the victims of hurricanes that hit southern Mexico, including heavily Mayan areas. "I noticed that in Veracruz and in Chiapas...... I saw it. I saw there were a lot of people homeless and that very soon after it seemed to drop out because there are so many horrible things happening, natural disasters all over the planet, it seemed people had forgotten about those people." Gibson is making "Apocalypto" through his Los Angeles-based Icon production company with an undisclosed budget. It will be distributed by Disney, although the shooting script remains under wraps. Filming starts in November. The runaway success of "The Passion of the Christ", which grossed more than 600 million U.S dollars worldwide, has given Gibson the financial freedom and industry clout to pursue projects like "Apocalypto"

ITN Source | November 5, 2005

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