Gibson to talk in Maya at Oscars

Mel Gibson will give the Oscars audience a preview of the ancient language spoken in his forthcoming movie Apocalypto.
Gibson told the Time magazine website he would speak Maya when he appeared at the Kodak Theatre in Los Angeles.

"I wanted to shake up the stale action-adventure genre so we almost had to come up with something utterly different like this," he said.

His last film, The Passion of the Christ, was in Latin and Aramaic.

Apocalypto, set 3,000 years ago in central America, features dialogue spoken in an obscure Mayan dialect.

Gibson, who will not act in the film, has said Apocalypto will focus on the life of a Mayan man, touching on "civilisations and what undermines them".

Set before the conquest of Central America by Europeans, Gibson says the film will shun "European faces" to preserve authenticity.

The film is Gibson's first as a director since 2004's The Passion of the Christ, which detailed the last 12 hours in the life of Jesus Christ leading up to a brutal depiction of his crucifixion.

The Passion took more than $600m (£337.5m) worldwide despite being filmed in the Aramaic dialect.

Like The Passion, Apocalypto is expected to be distributed with English subtitles.