Vin Diesel Hires Mel Gibson's Language Expert  3/15/06

Vin Diesel has hired the ancient language expert who helped Mel Gibson conquer Aramaic in The Passion of the Christ to rework his Hannibal biopic into Greek, Latin and Punic.

The XXX star was so impressed with Bill Fulco's work on Gibson's religious epic he asked him to help him perfect other languages for his upcoming masterpiece, which is set in 200BC.

He says, "To do it the way that I planned to do it, I hired a guy named Bill Fulco, who translated The Passion of The Christ from English into Aramaic to translate Hannibal The Conqueror into Greek, Latin and Punic.

"Hopefully, taking an honest approach to making Hannibal will make the difference in trying to be as accurate as possible to the point of reconstructing a language (Punic) we haven't heard on this planet for 2,000 years."