I had people who were experts in feather art.
I had Mexican professional wardrobe people, and I gathered a group of Mexican artisans that I found randomly by going to remote communities. The only person who wasn’t Mexican was my wardrobe supervisor. According to an interview with the designer in the LA Times, the crew was almost entirely Mexican: Rubeo, a Mexican designer known for this film as well as Avatar (2009), John Carter (2012), World War Z (2013), Warcraft (2016), Thor: Ragnarok (2017) and Jojo Rabbit (2019), the last of which earned her Oscar and BAFTA nominations. Since we’re Frock Flicks, let’s move on to focus on: Apocalypto‘s Costumes I point you to articles in National Geographic and the Washington Post for a good overview of the debate. That being said, many argued that the various eras of Maya civilization were conflated, and that in particular, the human sacrifice depicted in the film is much more Aztec (totally different region/culture) than Maya. Some scholars were thrilled to see a civilization that rarely gets put on screen at all, let alone with a serious approach. This is interesting, and perhaps even shocking, because of the depth that the film production went to in terms of getting the facts about the Mayas right, including consulting with anthropologists and historians, using Maya-Quiche as the language for the film, hiring Native American actors, and using contemporary Mayas as film extras.” (C. “Most scholarly reviews markedly agree on the lack of historical authenticity of the film. According to the Routledge Handbook of Popular Culture and Tourism: So there was a huge debate among academics when the film came out about whether or not Gibson’s depiction of Maya civilization was historically accurate. 1502), and beyond that I’m going to leave issues of plot, direction, etc., to others, instead briefly discussing general historical accuracy and then focusing on the costumes. The film is supposedly set in the just-pre-contact Maya civilization (c. Yes, it’s definitely a chase movie, but it’s well made and luckily Gibson isn’t on screen, although by watching it we’re putting money in his pocket. Hansen, who he hired to consult on the film.
(Note: are you an expert on non-Western dress? Pre-medieval dress? Some specific corner of the world? Reach out to us, we’d love to be able to ask you questions about other films and TV series where all we can say is “pretty!”)ĭirector Gibson wanted to make a chase movie and was inspired by a documentary about the Maya presented by archaeologist Richard D. Cara Tremain, Department of Sociology & Anthropology, Langara College (Twitter: who is an expert in Maya archaeology, particularly Maya dress, and she was kind enough to answer my questions. Of course, I know nothing about historical Maya dress, but I reached out to someone who does: Dr. I finally forced myself to watch it, and while yeah, there’s gore, it wasn’t nearly as Maya Chainsaw Massacre as I thought it would be … and the depiction of Maya city life was AMAZE-BALLS. Mel Gibson (awful human being) directed it, and 2. Despite being fascinated by Central American history during the pre-contact and contact eras, I put off watching Apocalypto (2006) because 1.