High-velocity action adventure in Mel Gibson's 'Apocalypto'

From Academy Award® winning filmmaker Mel Gibson ("The Passion of the Christ," "Braveheart"), comes APOCALYPTO: a heart stopping mythic action-adventure set against the turbulent end times of the once great Mayan civilization. Visceral, thrilling and boldly thought-provoking, APOCALYTO 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.

After Gibson's huge success in the uncompromising realism of "The Passion of The Christ," many have wondered where Gibson would turn next. Always drawn to the biggest, boldest and most enduring of stories, Gibson turned to the most mysterious and alluring civilization in all of history-the Mayan civilization-where he would set a non-stop, constantly accelerating thriller, driven by visuals and pure emotion, forging an original film experience truly unlike any other.

The inspiration for APOCALYPTO came following "The Passion of the Christ," as Gibson began to sense a growing hunger among film audiences for movies that would be thrilling and entertaining, but also something more. "I think people really want to see big stories that say something to them emotionally and touch them spiritually," Gibson says. Fascinated by the precipitous collapse of the ancient Mayan civilization, Gibson imagined setting such a story inside this mystery-laden culture.

To begin with, Gibson knew only that he wanted to create an incomparable chase film in which a man must put everything on the line. "I wanted to make a high-velocity action adventure chase film that keeps on turning the screws," recalls Gibson. "I was intrigued by the idea that most of the story would be told visually-hitting the audience on the most visceral and emotional of levels."

But as Gibson shared his ideas with screenwriter and graduate of Cambridge University, Farhad Safinia, they began to explore the seemingly wild notion of setting this epic tale of action at the end of the reign of the Maya. Safinia, who had traveled in the Yucatan and seen Mayan ruins firsthand, intrigued Gibson with his stories and the script began flowing from there.

The deeper Gibson and Safinia probed into Mayan culture, the more they were able to fully develop their lead character-Jaguar Paw. Jaguar Paw's story, that of an ordinary man who is pushed into heroic actions, is at the very heart of APOCALYTPO. As the movie begins, he is a young father, promising, instinctively aware but not quite yet a leader in his small, idyllic village of traditional hunters. Then, in one breathless moment, his entire world is ripped apart.

When he is captured and taken on a perilous march through the forest to the great Mayan city-where he learns he will be sacrificed to the gods to "pay" for the widespread famine that has ravaged their realm. Throughout his stunning journey, the camera never leaves him, revealing everything he sees, feels and experiences.

Part of what makes Jaguar Paw's battle so epic is the sheer enormity of what he is fighting. "The key villain in the film is really not a person," says Gibson. "It's a concept, and that concept is fear. The hero has to overcome his fear, and being overtaken with fear is something we all have struggled with in history as well as in today's world, so it's something everyone relates to."

Relentless motion and starkly visual storytelling lay at the very core of APOCALYPTO's creative concept. "From the minute the story gets going, almost everything you see on the screen is in motion," Gibson explains. "In every frame, the camera is always moving and there's always someone or something moving within that moving shot."

Once he and Safinia completed the screenplay, all dialogues were translated into the Yucatec language, the primary Mayan dialect spoken in the Yucatan peninsula today. Gibson felt that the effect would be to pull the audience completely into this world-just as it had done when he used authentic languages for "The Passion of the Christ."

"I think hearing a different language allows the audience to completely suspend their own reality and get drawn into the world of the film," Gibson summarizes. "And more importantly, this also puts the emphasis on the cinematic visuals, which are a kind of universal language of the heart."

APOCALYPTO opens very soon in theaters nationwide from 20th Century Fox to be distributed by Warner Bros.