From The Guardian, a piece on Mel Gibson in which he places his new Apocalypto within a line of bigger-budget movies that are forming a new breed of independent films:

Gibson has evidently chosen to turn his back on mainstream American cinema and take risks. “I’m getting to a place where I look at the future of cinema as independent film, through which there’s a hunger for a different kind of fare that simply isn’t being catered to by anyone, other than independent film-makers.” Not, he says, that he is deliberately shunning the mainstream studio system: “I really don’t think in those terms. I’ve just been financing the stuff myself because only a lunatic would do that,” he says. “There’s a gamble aspect to it, in that you could fall flat on your face, which is always a possibility, but at some point you’ve got to try and put your money where your mouth is and say: I can do this.”