Adding to a legacy the size of Planet of the Apes is no small feat, especially given that Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes is the big tenth film in its history. Following on from the reboot trilogy which followed Caesar (Andy Serkis) from birth to supremacy, we now find ourselves a couple of hundred years down the line in a world where intelligent humans no longer exist in living memory. This is a new take on an old formula, and a standalone story in its own right.
Prior to its theatrical release, FILMHOUNDS spoke to director Wes Ball.
I saw the film yesterday, and I thought it was brilliant. But going into it I was kind of worried, because I love Planet of the Apes.
Me too!
Well, this is what I was going to ask. For me, it felt like it was made by someone who loves Planet of the Apes. So, I suppose I'm looking for confirmation that that's correct?
Yeah! I grew up on the original one. I was born in 1980 so I don't know why I watched that when I was a kid, but I did. There was something about those movies I just loved. I watched a little bit of the TV show, not too much of it. Then of course when the reboot happened — the “Caesar Trilogy” — it blew my mind for a lot of reasons.
The story, character, direction, everything. The writing was fantastic, but also, I'm a VFX nerd. So the fact that it was the pinnacle of what CG could do, I gravitate towards that too. So Planet of the Apes was important to me, and we took that challenge and responsibility seriously. We approached it from a place of love, but hopefully also confidence. At least trying to be confident in doing something that deserved its own thing.
It is hopefully its own standalone story — we're not trying to rehash the old stories. It's been done, and it's been done well. We're not trying to replace it or redo anything, we're just trying to do another chapter in this long legacy of ten movies now over 55 years. We just tried to make sure we had a good enough story that needed to be told.
Another thing that we've probably got in common then, is that I was really disappointed that Mouse Guard got cancelled.
Yes! Me too!
Because of the link with Matt Reeves, I wondered if there was anything in Mouse Guard that made its way into Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes?
Oh yeah, actually. I see it now but I didn't know it at the time. But a lot of story stuff did actually. I came on to the Planet of the Apes project when there was no story or anything. Me and my producing partner, Joe [Hartwick Jr.], were the first people who they approached like, “Hey we're doing Planet of the Apes, what do you think?”
So we had to kind of crack it, and figure out what it is. But yeah, even the design stuff I see now that I look back on it. I've been looking back a lot at Mouse Guard lately, and I'd forgotten all the stuff we did on that thing. We had created so much stuff. It's a similar kind of a story I suppose, and who knows. If Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes is really successful maybe we'll get a chance to bring that back to life because it is fantastic. It's a really cool thing that I think would've blown people away.
One of the things Planet of the Apes has always been about is that allegory for things like racism and classism. I felt like with Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes it was as if the further you went into the future with the story, the further you looked into the past at the allegory. Was that a deliberate choice?
Yeah there is an element that this movie is more of a historical epic than it is a sci-fi futuristic thing, right? These movies have always been about looking at humanity through the eyes of apes. That's always been the case.
We see figures in this movie that we could look back throughout our history and our present-day and relate to. They all hold up a mirror to what's going on in the world. We're not necessarily passing judgement on them, but we're certainly presenting them to be judged or to have your own interpretation of. That's the key, I think, to these movies — they're always thoughtful, they're always interesting, and they're always asking interesting questions while trying to be these spectacle-driven adventures that they always are.
I want to pick up on the spectacle actually, because I kept thinking back to the '60s and '70s, and the big blockbuster films from that era. It's a little bit later, but one film I kept coming back to in particular was Jurassic Park. Just visually I thought it was quite similar.
Wow, okay. Well Jurassic Park is probably the movie that made me want to make movies. I was thirteen years old in 1993, and it was the movie where I was like “This is what I want to do.” I didn't know what that meant, but it was the first movie where I understood there was a craft to movies. The technical artistry and all of that kind of stuff, because it was one of the first big CG movies. There was Terminator 2 of course and The Abyss before that, but it's really Jurassic Park that showed you we'd entered into a new era of movie-making.
I don't see the connection, but I'm happy to know you saw something there because that is in my DNA, that movie. I think it's a perfect movie. It's a simple movie, it's a small movie actually. There's only something like sixteen VFX shots in the whole movie, but it doesn't feel that way. Not only that, but the reason those VFX shots still work to this day, is because they're shot well. They shot that stuff and they were constrained by it in a way.
The way Spielberg was figuring it out on the fly, it's incredible stuff. I think that's why it still holds up even though we've had so much advancement in shading, and rigging, and rendering, and animation and all of that kind of stuff, Jurassic Park still works because the shots work. That was a big thing for us, we tried to spend a lot of time on shot design. It's the kind of thing audiences don't really care about necessarily — or they do, but they don't realise that they do. But the flow of storytelling I think is the biggest thing a director does.
Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes is in cinemas in the UK and Ireland from May 9th.
