EVOLUTIONARY

CINEMA’S FOREMOST SIMIAN SAGA CONTINUES TO ADAPT IN LATEST INSTALMENT KINGDOM OF THE PLANET OF THE APES. TOTAL FILM MEETS ITS CAST AND CREW TO DISCOVER HOW THE FRANCHISE IS EMBRACING CHANGE IN BOTH STORYTELLING AND TECHNOLOGY.

The Planet of the Apes trilogy is one of the most acclaimed of recent years. Both a prequel to and a reboot of (preboot?) the five-movie series that began in 1968 with Planet of the Apes – itself loosely based on the 1963 Pierre Boulle novel – the modern reimagining kicked off in 2011 with Rise of the Planet of the Apes. Over the course of the three films, we followed the arc of noble, superintelligent ape Caesar. Beginning as a sort of secondary Patient Zero smart-chimp (his mother, Bright Eyes, actually passes the genetic mutation to her son), he would ultimately become a benevolent ape leader in a near-future post-apocalyptic society until his death in trilogy-closer War.

But you can’t keep a good franchise down. Fast forward to 2024 and audiences are poised for a ‘soft reboot’. Director Wes Ball refutes the tag; writer/producers Amanda Silver and Rick Jaffa refer to it as a reset. Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes is the fourth in this series, picking up hundreds of years after the events of War. Caesar is long gone; forgotten by most. But one ape, a bonobo named Proximus Caesar (Kevin Durand), has twisted Caesar’s teachings to his purpose, enslaving apes as he searches for longlost human technology to reaffirm the new world order, while a young chimpanzee, Noa (Owen Teague), embarks on a journey of discovery – meeting young human Nova (The Witcher’s Freya Allan) along the way.

War was released in 2017 by 20th Century Fox. The studio has since been taken over by Disney, so should we expect a film more in line with other ‘House of Mouse’ fare? It sounds like it, with a coming-of-age element and an emphasis on adventure. Maze Runner trilogy director Wes Ball captains the fourth film, taking over from outgoing helmer Matt Reeves (and Rupert Wyatt, who directed Rise).

‘These movies are regarded as one of the best trilogies in a long time,’ Ball tells Total Film over Zoom as we chat some six weeks ahead of the production deadline. He’s working daily into the early hours. Today, though, he’s energised; animated, even. ‘It’s one of the few, or last [trio of], thinking-person’s blockbusters.’

It’s why he initially hesitated to tackle a fourth film. Reeves and Wyatt left big shoes to fill. Encouraged by Reeves, with whom he’d worked on a cancelled adaptation of graphic novel Mouse Guard (a casualty of the Disney-Fox merger: ‘I still have hopes that one day that project might come back because it’s really a special one; it was a giant mo-cap Avatar, [with] medieval fighting mice’), Ball also had performance-capture king Andy Serkis, who he’d cast in Mouse Guard, offering help. The Disney takeover ultimately made it even easier to say ‘yes’ when it was suggested that Ball target a different audience – newcomers to the franchise and families alike – from the Caesar trilogy’s male-dominated turnout. One big ol’ time jump later and suddenly it was a spicier challenge. ‘It opens up a lot of really interesting opportunities – [exploring] what has happened in that time. We get to learn new things and be exposed to new ideas the same way that Noa is.’

Making a film you could take your kids to was always on the table at conception when the project was still governed by Fox, driven largely by the story. ‘Part of the idea was that it is a coming-of-age story. It’s got slightly more of a feel of adventure than the previous ones,’ says franchise writer and producer Jaffa, speaking to TF over Zoom as he sits side-by-side with collaborator wife Silver. A bust of an Apes chimp peers over their shoulders. They naturally, rather than actively, avoided anything that might make it too intense for younger children. The franchise is, by nature, thoughtful, philosophical. ‘But at the same time, it’s very accessible emotionally,’ says Silver. ‘And Wes has done an amazing job infusing it with energy and making it a fun ride. So, it’s both things at once.’

Ball drops the name of author Joseph Campbell, who wrote about the archetypal hero’s journey, and whose work George Lucas credits with shaping Star Wars. Kingdom follows a similar classic narrative path. ‘Noa fits that archetype of Frodo Baggins and Luke Skywalker,’ explains the director. ‘He’s a new character we can identify with, appreciate, respect, because he’s incredibly kind and nice. But he is going to undergo this great transformation, or at least the beginnings of one in this movie, where that innocence is robbed of him a little bit.’

‘PART OF THE IDEA WAS THAT IT IS A COMING-OF-AGE STORY’

RICK JAFFA

‘NOA’S INNER DESIRE IS TO LEARN ABOUT THE WORLD, TO SEE WHAT’S OUT THERE’

OWEN TEAGUE

Ball labels the teen chimp a new Caesar prototype who has to ‘carry that torch forward into subsequent movies’ – providing they get the go-ahead to make more, that is. ‘He’s from a village called Eagle Clan, which has its own kind of lies,’ says Noa actor Owen Teague, drawing a parallel to the regime under which Proximus Caesar’s apes live. ‘It’s not really lies. It’s just ignorance. They keep to themselves. They’re an isolationist society. It’s a small village but they have a territory. And Noa isn’t allowed outside that territory. The majority of the clan are kept within the boundaries.’ Noa’s clansmen (clansapes?) are ignorant about the world outside, knowing nothing of Caesar or where apes came from. In true Disney movie fashion, Noa yearns to discover the bigger picture. ‘The thing that drives him in his story is saving his people. But his inner desire is to learn about the world, to see what’s out there, which is something that his father isn’t really eager for him to do.’

It’s this curiosity that leads Noa to explore beyond the confines of his camp. Production designer Daniel T. Dorrance describes a real-life abandoned train tunnel they found in Australia, where they shot, that became a pivotal part of the film. It introduces one of several nods to the 1968 Planet of the Apes starring Charlton Heston as marooned astronaut Taylor.

‘WE LIKE TO THINK THAT ALL OUR CHARACTERS HAVE AN AGENDA OF SOME KIND’

RICK JAFFA

‘That became the border between the Eagle Clan village and the Forbidden Zone, which is where Noa is told you never go,’ says Dorrance. In the original films, the Forbidden Zone is an area off limits to most apes. It’s where relics of the old world of human dominance lie. Noa, naturally, decides to cross the border. ‘He’s going into a world he’s never seen before,’ says Dorrance. He discovers cities and other human artefacts, and he meets the orangutan Raka (Peter Macon), from whom he learns a great deal.

Noa also meets Nova, a girl smarter than other humans, most of whom have regressed to feral creatures like those from the 1968 film. Should we be suspicious of Freya Allan’s character?

‘We like to think that all of our characters have an agenda of some kind,’ says Jaffa, obliquely. ‘When characters act and react and speak, they’re acting towards something they want. And so, wherever she is on the evolutionary trail – up, down or sideways – like all characters, she does have needs and wants.’

Importantly for the story, Nova is a looking glass for the audience through her pairing with Noa. ‘Their relationship is symbolic of looking beyond everything they’ve ever known of one another’s species and realising there are far more parallels and commonalities between the two of them than they might have originally imagined,’ says Allan.

Nova is a name apes have adopted for humans, hence its repetition through the franchise. It comes originally, remarks Allan, from the book where the character is likened to a supernova because of her beauty. ‘Noa also calls her Echo, which I love.’ With so many callbacks to the original 1968 Apes and its sequels, more than ever fans are looking for definitive answers as to how these movies all fit together. The events of Matt Reeves’ instalments line up to some degree to the future depicted in the Charlton Heston movie, which is still nigh-on two millennia ahead of Kingdom in the timeline, ‘but it’s not like a rigid canon thing,’ says Ball. He approached the film as being related to all the movies in that they point towards the same ideas. ‘Fortunately, in our story, we don’t really have to [address it]. It’s too early for [Taylor] to show up anyway, so we don’t have to go there yet.’

The believable, gritty universe of Reeves’ films might not allow much space for time-travelling astronauts, but Ball is all for human beings coming back and being exposed to a world that is totally new to them conceptually. ‘Maybe it’s not literally time travel – but never say never. There’s always a chance.’

With hopes for Kingdom to kickstart a new trilogy and one more after that, Jaffa and Silver have ideas about where they want the story to go. The start of the 1968 film, perhaps? ‘It would be cool if we could pull that off,’ says Jaffa. ‘There’s a natural progression toward that. We always thought if you set the dominoes up in just the right way, in terms of science and science fiction, then if you just hit one domino, we could certainly get to that movie.’

None of them wants to remake Planet of the Apes like Tim Burton did, but, says Jaffa, ‘certainly there’s a question of how Colonel Taylor ended up on that beach.’ Meanwhile, Kingdom has some major callbacks to the original movie that pay homage on one level and presage what’s to come on another. One is the human roundup sequence (‘There is a mirroring in our film to that first one but it’s also completely different,’ says Allan). Another has echoes of the Statue of Liberty sequence: the discovery of the observatory, seen in the trailer. ‘That’s our Statue of Liberty moment,’ Dorrance tells TF.

‘IT’S NOT ABOUT IMITATING A CHIMP’

OWEN TEAGUE

One aspect that doesn’t pay homage to the original, aesthetically speaking, is the representation of the apes, played anthropomorphically first time around by actors in make-up and costume. As with Rise, Dawn and War, performance capture was used in Kingdom to create realistic apes with the help of the digital effects supremos at New Zealand’s Weta FX. For this, the actors attended movement coach Alain Gauthier’s six-weeklong ape school to learn how to incorporate simian motion into their performances.

Says Teague: ‘It wasn’t like Alain was teaching us to impersonate chimpanzees… He was really helping us figure out who these characters were.’ Voice work was critical – this is where Apes veteran, King Kong actor and mo-cap specialist Andy Serkis (Caesar himself)

stepped in. He Zoomed with the cast individually to give them pointers, such as building the voice from the stomach rather than the throat.

‘The thing that he stresses is that it’s really not different from any other kind of acting; it’s just that the ape body is a costume and you put it on and that’s just how this person moves,’ says Teague. ‘You still do all the other work that you would do. It’s not about imitating a chimp.’ With cameras also strapped to actors’ faces to record their expressions, however, it was crucial for them to be aware of the difference between human and ape physiognomy and adjust accordingly.

‘[Apes] don’t smile [like humans],’ explains Teague. ‘Their smile is drooping the lower lip, so anytime Noa is laughing or happy he’s not like, “Say cheese.” His lip goes down. That ended up feeling very normal to me after a few weeks… I’ve got a chimpy face anyway so that helps!’

Allan joined in some of the movement lessons, but as a human character, she had a different remit. Albeit a human different from us – even if she wasn’t quite feral like the film’s other humans (‘It was a different process for me because of Nova’s backstory’) whose movement coaching was more involved.

‘There’s a sort of rabbit-in-headlights quality to the physicality,’ says Allan of playing a human, even an intelligent one, living in an environment where apes are the dominant species. ‘It was important in terms of just feeling uncomfortable being around these apes and how scary that is, but also feeling “less than” in terms of how the world is and how humans are within this world.’

Kevin Durand, who plays antagonist Proximus Caesar, took to ape school like a bonobo to a tree. ‘I’m probably more ape than most, and so is Owen,’ says Durand. The two first properly met monkeying around when the cameras weren’t rolling. ‘There’s human vanity, looking around like, “Wow, people are going to think we’re nuts.” And then, finally, I gave in and my chest puffed out… We set off on 45 minutes of just pure fun, improvising, without having met him as a human, really.’

‘WE GET TO LEARN NEW THINGS AND BE EXPOSED TO NEW IDEAS – THE SAME WAY NOA IS’

WES BALL

Ball envisioned Proximus as a Genghis Khan-type character, whose ‘ultimate goal is to build a world for apes’ as his kind begins to mirror humanity’s march through civilisation – at a far quicker pace as a result of discovering human advancements. Durand saw Proximus as the first truly high-thinking ape. ‘He drew a lot of inspiration from the words that Caesar left behind. But he interpreted them to fit his philosophy of what needs to happen to ensure a future for apes,’ says Durand. ‘Sure, there’s some narcissism, but I truly believe he was like, “Unless we do it this way, we’re going to end up back where we were hundreds of years ago. We’re not going to be able to have any control in society unless we continue to evolve.” So he studied human history like crazy. He learned everything that he possibly could about the empires that rose and fell.’

PRODUCTION PERFECTION

Kingdom is the hardest movie Ball has ever had to work on, in a post-production sense: ‘There’s not a lot of movies that do it this way; it’s a very specific process.’ The director, however, is enthused as he works towards a fast-approaching deadline. ‘It’s ridiculously fun. I’m a tinkerer, I’m a perfectionist. I can talk about every little pixel; I can change that little thing. See that highlight right here? That needs to be over here, not there. I could sit here for another year just honing this movie. Of course – what did Kubrick say? – films are abandoned, not finished. That will be the case here, too.’

‘THERE’S A RABBIT-IN-THE-HEADLIGHTS QUALITY TO THE PHYSICALITY OF PLAYING NOVA’

FREYA ALLAN

Will he do another? He says it would be ‘awesome’ to, but that there are other movies he wants to tackle. Like his next project, a screen adaptation of seminal video game The Legend of Zelda. He stands and unzips his hoodie to reveal a T-shirt featuring Japanese typography emblazoned above a picture of Zelda protagonist Link. ‘I have this awesome idea,’ he teases. ‘I’ve been thinking about it for a long freakin’ time, of how cool a Zelda movie would be. We’ve got another few weeks before we’re supposed to turn over [Kingdom] and off it goes into the world to do what it’s going to do. Then I’ll probably take a short break to recharge. Then we’ll go off to the races. I want to fulfil people’s greatest desires. I know it’s important, this [Zelda] franchise, to people and I want it to be a serious movie. A real movie that can give people an escape. That’s the thing for me about those games – I want to live in that world. That’s the thing I want to try to create – it’s got to feel like something real. Something serious and cool, but fun and whimsical.’

That might sound like a grand ambition – but if he pulls off Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, there’s every reason to beat his chest for what’s next.