the bloody, twisted history of Apocalypto

More than 20 years after collecting both Best Actor and Best Director for Braveheart, Mel Gibson is back in the Oscars race. Up for Best Director for Hacksaw Ridge, itself the recipient of five other nominations, Gibson’s return is one few in Hollywood saw coming.

It’s not because Hacksaw Ridge, a blood-spattered biopic of conscientious objector Desmond T Doss, is a bad film - our own Robbie Collin couldn't praise it enough. Rather that, for the past decade, Gibson has been better known in Hollywood for his controversial outbursts than career moves. Even as recently as July, the 10-year anniversary of the anti-semitic outburst that resulted in his arrest, headlines were claiming that Gibson’s career was beyond recovery.

That incident, in which he was pulled over by police for driving under the influence while speeding with an open container of alcohol in his car, saw Gibson drunkenly slur: “F---ing Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world”. 

It wasn’t even a one-off. Gibson’s DUI sparked years of headlines that included the breakup of his 29-year-long marriage and battery of his new girlfriend Oksana Grigorieva, who subsequently released footage of him making yet more racial slurs.

But the start of Gibson’s move into celebrity exile also managed to outshine the release of his last – and most ambitious – directorial triumph: Apocalypto. Shot in the jungles of Costa Rica and Mexico, using a cast of up to 700 untrained, heavily costumed locals, Gibson’s chase movie was set in 1502 and performed entirely in Yucatec, the language of the ancient civilisation of Mayans.

Gibson stumped up the $40 million budget himself, and it made three times that at the box office. But while his Hollywood contemporaries ladled it with praise (Scorsese named it “a vision”, Tarantino called it “a masterpiece”), Apocalypto’s merits were rather overshadowed at the time by the off-screen failings of its director.

A decade later, let's pause to remember the sacrifices Gibson made to film his neglected Mayan masterpiece:

'A foot chase - that’s about as minimum and as primal as it gets’

“What if there’s a guy being chased by 10 really bad guys and he comes out onto this beach and he’s exhausted and it’s the end of the story and Christopher Columbus is arriving?”

This, according to Apocalypto’s co-writer Farhad Safinia, was Gibson’s question that started it all. “We laughed,” Safinia remembers at the end of the film’s director’s commentary, “we said it was hilarious.” It turned into one of the final moments of the film, gently nailing down its subtext about the rise and fall of civilisations, and mankind’s responsibility for their downfall.

Safinia is an Iranian-American Cambridge graduate who, at 30, made his feature-length screenwriting debut with Apocalypto. He was working as an assistant on the post-production of The Passion of the Christ, Gibson’s 2004 triple-Oscar nominated religious epic, when he met the director. Once Gibson had taken a break after the release of Passion, he and Safinia reunited, and enjoyed long, in-depth conversations about chase movies.

“We started to talk about what films excite us and what he wanted to do next,” Safinia told The Hollywood Reporter in 2006, “and we specifically spent a lot of time on the action-chase genre of filmmaking. Those conversations essentially grew into the skeleton of [Apocalypto]." Gibson had “been wanting to do a chase movie forever. ‘I thought, A foot chase. That’s a good idea. That’s about as minimum and as primal as it gets’.’”

The chase was originally planned to be based in Chicago, but the pair shared another niche interest: ancient civilisations, specifically, what they looked liked before the Europeans arrived. Both the Aztecs, who lived in central Mexico between the 14th and 16th centuries, and the Mayans, who were based further south, were considered. Safinia and Gibson settled on the latter, intrigued by their academic interests and fascination with their own decline. Their fondness for human sacrifice didn’t hurt, either.

‘I frankly don't give a flying f--- about much of what those critics think’

After the release of the film, the backlash from the historians would begin. They claimed that the lifestyle portrayed in Apocalypto would have occurred 400 years before Columbus’s ships arrived on Mexico’s shores; the grisly human sacrifices on screen were more befitting those undertaken by the Aztecs. There is no evidence, Maya expert Zachary Hruby told National Geographic, that Mayans ravaged other tribes’ territories, pillaging, murdering and enslaving those that were left.

But Safinia and Gibson maintain that historical accuracy was at the film’s (non-extracted) heart. Richard D Hansen, adjunct professor of anthropology at the University of Utah, was called in to advise – Gibson had been in contact with him since seeing Hansen’s film, Dawn of the Maya, a couple of years earlier. He’s insistent that the bulk of the film is backed up by historical evidence.

As well as archeological data and Spanish texts, the men poured over the Popol Vuh, a sacred text for Mesoamerican mythologies, and used it as inspiration for the doom-laden prophecy that fuels the film’s plot. They adapted the Mayan fable The Sadness of the Maya for a fireside storytelling scene.

The lullaby that the hero’s wife forlornly uses to sing their infant son to sleep is a translated version of an Zapotec song. When the San Bartolo Mayan murals were uncovered by archeologists during pre-production, Gibson wanted the set to reflect the new discovery: “We scrapped the other murals and replaced them with these. [It] was pretty cool.”

Time magazine, upon visiting the set, recalled that “stacks of archaeology books and magazines are strewn about a massive warehouse in Veracruz, where an army of costume and makeup artisans from Mexico and Italy are painstakingly re-creating feathers of the nearly extinct quetzal for royal headdresses and long, looping earlobe extensions for warriors.”

Hansen admits that some liberties were taken – instead of the gargantuan pit of bodies, for instance, there “should have been 15 or 20 [corpses], but the point is we would never known because they were eaten anyway”. Gibson didn’t seem to care much, telling Time: “After what I experienced with The Passion, I frankly don't give a flying f--- about much of what those critics think.”

But he was insistent on using the Yucatec Maya language throughout, and subtitling the film: “I think hearing a different language allows the audience to completely suspend their own reality and get drawn into the world of the film,” he said upon Apocalypto’s release. “And more importantly, this also puts the emphasis on the cinematic visuals, which are a kind of universal language of the heart.”

Apocalypto became, and remains, the only major Mayan-language film ever made. And to make his Yucatec movie, which involved huge crowd scenes and dozens of villagers, Gibson needed local actors.

‘Hasn’t anyone told you? This is for the lead of my film. You’re the star of my movie’

Casting director Carla Hool spread her net across three continents for Gibson’s list of unknowns. Rudy Youngblood, a Texan of Comanche and Cree Indian descent who was a high school athetic star, entered a casting call while in Los Angeles with his dance troupe. “He had me run around his conference table and he said I ran like an animal and I seemed like a man’s man,” Youngblood, who had turned up in worker’s boots, recalled. “This kid was in good shape, a real athlete,” Gibson would later say .

Hours later, the director called Youngblood and asked if he could fly to Mexico City the next day, much to the 25-year-old’s surprise. “Hasn’t anyone told you?” Gibson laughed, “This is for the lead of my film. You’re the star of my movie”. Youngblood had landed what is still his best-known role: Jaguar Claw.

The actor with the most experience was Raoul Trujillo, a New Mexican who had appeared in Terrence Malick’s The New World the previous year. Gibson made him wear a fake nose to become Zero Wolf, the chilling brute who leads a pack of villains against Jaguar Claw’s village, and then the man himself.

“He was very aquiline-featured,” Gibson explained, “We thought, to make him more Mayan-looking, it was good to give more of a proboscis.” When Disney’s distribution executives first saw the film, they were taken in: “these are the scariest guys ever”.

Dalia Hernandez, who plays Jaguar Claw’s sweetly pretty wife, was a local dance student (“She didn’t know it but she has the soul of an actress”, said Gibson). Isabel Diaz, cast as the maniacal mother-in-law, who berates Blunted for failing to give her grandchildren, was said to be a grand dame of Mexican theatre – although there were just as many stories that she lived on the streets.

Lorena Heranandez, the village girl who vows to look after a flock of children as they are separated from their parents, was an “11-year-old farmer’s daughter from Catemaco, who was perfectly honest in front of the camera”.

“A lot of the [extras] had never actually seen a film before,” Safinia explained. “Which was amazing to us because they were suddenly so able to perform and act.”

For the mesmerising, pox-marked child soothsayer, the Mayan villages Production Designer Tom Sanders (who grew a beard for the year he spent on set, as part of a bet with Gibson) had created were both a home from home and an alternative reality. Aquetzali Garcia came from a primitive village and only spoke Mayan. “She was a very brave girl,” remembers Safinia, “she didn’t know anything about filmmaking. Had never seen a floor in her life, a car or a road, or an ice cream, and here she was doing all this stuff.”

Gibson cast on a range of abilities, but acting was not necessarily the primary one. “He selected people off the street,” Hansen explains. “He wanted a certain face, certain features, certain characteristics.”

There was the 19-year-old he challenged to a race (“he smoked me,” Gibson recalled, “I gave him the part because he could run like a deer”) and the Mayan King, one of three men Safinia had lured away from the local dock (“He’s got that look. The sneer of cold command.”)

He put the actors on a lean diet of meat and vegetables (“A lot of the cast, they had a little 20th-century blubber on them”) and, Safinia remembers, “used every trick in the book” to get over the communication barrier. Football anthems and lewd Mexican pop songs were played over loudspeakers to get crowds to act in the right way and a lot of ice cream bribes were deployed. In one scene, a child’s terrified reaction to a howler monkey is played for real - he hated the furry puppet.

Gibson would rarely tell the less prominent members of the cast what they would be expected to do. Rolando Cura, a re-upholsterer who took shifts as an extra, told Esquire magazine how he had played out three gruesome deaths and had another to come – but Gibson would only let him know how, and when, at the last minute. Time magazine described the director’s frustration in trying to get an extra playing a limestone-heaving slave to cough blood:

Take after take, the young man, who speaks only  Spanish, politely covers his mouth as he hacks. A second candidate for  the role does the same. Gibson finally lets out a tortured howl, digs vainly for a cigarette in his empty pack of Camels and turns the set into his own Thunderdome.

The director trod a fine line between goofball - messing around with the fake leopards, “running around like a lunatic” during the fireside dance scenes - and demanding, placing a running jaguar behind Youngblood in his chase scene, forcing the bad guys to hold their burning sticks right next to their faces. In the director’s commentary, Gibson gushes that a Mexican character actor at the end of his life “wanted, with everything he had” to play the emaciated dying man. It’s impossible to know how much of this got lost in translation.

‘More ice cream, Mr Tapir?’

Gibson started to location-scout in April 2005, when he visited the Mayan site in El Mirador in Guatemala, and donated $500,000 to its research project - the first of a few dollops of cash that helped ease the making of Apocalypto (as a blogger from Catemaco, one of the film’s main locations wryly noted: “rumour is that Mel donated some money to the local government, which may be the reason why the potholes on the road to [film set] La Jungla got filled, and the rest of the roads were ignored”).

Hotels were also sourced in Belize, Costa Rica and Mexico, with Gibson and his producers settling the Mexican location of Veracruz. The jungles of La Jungla, in Catemaco, provided both thick and lush foliage, but also the depth of field necessary for filming - essential for Apocalypto’s chase scenes. Local greensmen were employed to meticulously clear 50 metres of jungle each day and cover uneven footpaths with soft soil for the shoeless actors. The four towering pyramids were built on 40 acres of sugar cane farm, Gibson delighted in “donating” the buildings to the local area after wrapping.

A zoo was created on set, which fascinated both Esquire journalist Luke Dittrich and the local blogger. The menagerie included peccaries, monkeys, tapir, birds and, probably, the three-day-old leopard cub that appears on-screen. Both, however, were mystified by the presence of horses - which were only introduced to the Mayans by European colonials.

Ponies were there to be disguised as tapirs, notoriously shy and flighty, creatures, when the real deal wouldn’t co-operate. “They’re very endangered,” Gibson explained. “That tapir got treated better than I did on this shoot. We were like, ‘More ice cream, Mr Tapir?’”

‘Even these guys with their brown complexions, they got sunburned’

While the animals may have gotten special treatment, the cast weren’t. Gibson was determined to keep the non-professional actors grounded – the only leeway for diva antics was made for the director. Reports abounded of Gibson turning up for a shoot at noon, hours after hundreds of extras had been made up, only to tear up the schedule and “instead shoot running scenes with the two lead actors until the sun went down”.

After being put on a diet, sweating through yoga lessons and made to learn Mayan before they got on set, Gibson’s cast of hundreds had to go through considerable costuming once they got there. As Safinia marvels in the director’s commentary: “What’s remarkable is there isn’t one false image. All the extras have the right make up, the right prosthetics. That’s an enormous job.” The make-up line for the larger scenes was 300-400 people long, Gibson recalls, and comprised largely of Mexican students. They started at midnight. By 8am they were ready to shoot.

Where time-saving short-cuts could be taken, they were: as Dittrich discovered while trying to uncover information about Gibson’s top-secret film, “because the makeup department doesn't want to remove these ears every night and replace them every morning, burning valuable time, the extras wear these prosthetic ears even when they're off the set.”

Even each set of ears had to be specially adapted: “they didn’t have any blood flowing through them,” Gibson recalled, “so they didn’t show translucent when the firelight was behind them. We had to put red pigment in them to make them look real.”

The prosthetics team not only had to make rubber body parts that were in-keeping with the scarification traditions of the time, but ones that would put up with being covered in white lime dust, mud, water and fake blood. Gibson was offered four different hues of the blue paint daubed over sacrificial victims (he was chuffed that he chose “the one” that was actually used by Mayans).

The film was due to be filmed in the four months between November 2005 and February 2006. But a combination of shooting in a humid jungle, where light changes constantly, a communication gap and Gibson, who was financing the film himself, being the master of his own destiny, meant the timescale more than doubled to nine months.

As a result, the cast and crew were subjected to the heats of a Mexican summer. “Extras are so cheap and Gibson's so rich from Passion of the Christ it didn't matter," one department head told the LA Times. "He worked in a less structured way and there were no studio suits to push him along. His focus on the leads added minutes to each and every setup so it all took a lot longer than it looked on paper."

“One-hundred-and-thirty-five degrees,” remembers Gibson, of the day when most of the city scenes were shot. “That stone wall behind them was like an oven, cooking. Even these guys with their brown complexions, they got sunburned. You can see it.” A Red Cross tent was set up as the sole source of air conditioning in an attempt to deal with those who fainted.

‘How do you argue against truth, without losing faith as an academic?’

“Apocalypto surprised skeptics by opening at No. 1 at the box office last weekend”, Reuters published on 15 December, 2006. Despite Gibson’s personal life descending into near-literal car crash, regardless of the fact the only Hollywood name associated with the film was the director, the brutally violent, Mayan-language labour of love was a blockbuster.

With a fortnight to go before Christmas, audiences chose barbaric homicide over the dancing penguins of Happy Feet, Kate Winslet in The Holiday and new Bond film Casino Royale. It even set the record in the UK for the biggest opening weekend for a foreign language film.

But with the crowds came the criticism: certain academics were up in arms, and the press took note. The New York Times published an article headlined: Apocalypto: a pack of inaccuracies, David Carrasco, professor of religious history at Harvard, reportedly claimed that “Gibson has made the Maya into ‘slashers’.

It didn’t take long for Youngblood to dance on the double-edged sword of fame, either. His Native American ancestry was questioned in raging debates on American Indian websites at the same time that First Americans in the Arts were awarding the emergent actor at a Beverly Hills soiree.

Youngblood’s castmates largely faded back into obscurity, returning to their day jobs as kindergarten teachers (Richard Can, the fearsome Ten Peccary, who also proved “handy with a bow and arrow”, according to Gibson), farmers and doctors. “They went back to their normal lives,” says Hansen.

Seven years later, Hansen would publish a paper, Relativism, Revisionism, Aboriginalism, and Emic/Etic Truth: The Case Study of Apocalypto, in an attempt to put his critics in their place. He still feels vehemently that, for the most part, the Apocalypto you see on screen is an honest portrayal of history - “How do you argue against truth, without losing faith as an academic?” Asked who agreed with his findings, he said: “everybody that studies data and looks at history. It’s a no-brainer.”

Much of the criticism, Hansen believes, was stirred up by the havoc of Gibson’s personal life, as was Apocalypto’s poor awards performance. It was difficult for the voting academies to give a proven anti-Semite a run of Oscar and Golden Globe nominations.

Perhaps Gibson’s own run of bad luck has come to an end. The academic seems to think so: “If he hadn’t had so many personal problems Apocalypto would have done much better in the awards. Hacksaw Ridge has got a bunch of nominations - the guy’s a genius.”

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