Smash hit

It is a long time before he can look at me, so I look at him. The face is craggily handsome and unashamed of its worry lines. It’s a face you know is never going to have surgery. He’s 51 and it’s just not something he would care about, and that’s what makes him still sexy. He speaks with a specific rhythm, a specific pattern. He co-wrote the script, and although it is sparse, it is impactful.

“The Mayan culture is shrouded in mystery and myths. I didn’t show half the stuff I read about. I read about an orgy of sacrifice: 20,000 people sacrificed in four days. They were also very fond of impaling genitals and torturing people for years on end. For instance, if they captured a king or queen from another place, they would humiliate them for a decade. They would cut off their lips, have their tongues ripped out, they would have no eyes and no ears. Oh, and they would chew their fingers off. The guy would be alive but was just a babbling mass of nerve endings, then they’d roll him up in a ball after nine years of this stuff and roll him down the temple stairs and pulverise him. He’d probably be grateful. So I went easy on people. I think it’s less violent than Braveheart or The Passion, but some people say it’s a blood bath. It was not designed to be a feelgood movie – it was designed to get your heart pumping.”

Despite mostly rave reviews, he says he’s had a lot of detractors. “There are people who do not want people to see it. Bitter people.” He says the word “bitter” with a sting. “Certainly, some of the same voices came out that criticised The Passion of the Christ. My concern is not them. My concern is to tell a good story and be happy with it myself. That is my art.”

His art is very important to him. It’s as if he was always a director trapped in a leading man’s body. He’s looking away from me, though, not twitching or smoking, but I feel the temperature rising. Do you care about being criticised? “Not so much the critics, but you care about people watching your movie, because you’re doing your level best to make it an experience to share. Like a chef who might make a chocolate cake or a lemon-meringue pie, you want people to try it.”

Chefs have the largest and most fragile, needy and greedy egos on the planet. Has he ever cooked a chocolate cake or lemon-meringue pie?

“Oh, yes. I like cooking.”

He’s said before that creative expression is a coping mechanism. So how did this movie express what he wanted to cope with? He looks stern. He looks out of the window. “I just have a lot of creative energy, and if it doesn’t eke out somewhere, it forms some kind of disorder. It’s going to be this chaotic ping-pong ball that flies around until you challenge it and it ekes itself out in art. I don’t know what spawns it. I wanted to see something visceral and brutal, and at the same time full of emotion and healing.”

Suddenly he looks right at me, and it’s as if you can see inside his head, full of all those brutal, healing thoughts. “I wanted it to be full of good messages about fear. You know the sensationalist media. They want to make people believe the sky is falling down. There are some places where the sky is falling down – Darfur, Rwanda, Iraq – where bombs are being dropped. Or missiles in Israel, bombs in Lebanon.”()

Israel. This reminds me I was supposed to have brought Mel a gift from Jamie Barber, the Jewish restaurateur and owner of Villandry food store in London: Peace Oil, olive oil that comes from no man’s land between Israel and occupied Palestine, with proceeds going towards peace charities. He thought it would be a festive and fitting gift for Mel. Mel looks touched. “Good olive-growing region. But it’s all about the energy, isn’t it?

“You know the word ‘peace’ – if you just read it, just say it, it has a positive effect, it has energy to it.” He loves the sound of words. He loves the mass in Latin. There is an unexpected ethereal side emerging here. “Mayan has a nice feeling, has a nice energy to it. It’s poetry and it has a power of its own.

“I think this movie hits your autonomic brain a lot harder than Braveheart or The Passion. And then you’re asking another part of your brain to read subtitles. Some people saw it and asked, ‘Were there subtitles?’ They didn’t remember reading them. I might try something in English next,” he chuckles to himself.

Most of the actors were untrained. He taught them in his raw, visceral way. “They didn’t know anything, so they may as well trust me. It’s a fast-paced nail-biter with a love story and a collection of primal fears, being chased and killed.”

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