Along with a handful of other nerd-minded entertainment reporters, I’ve been bugging Dylan Clark for years now. Ever since Rise of the Planet of the Apes was in production seven years ago, we’d visit the producer’s sets and get our noses in his business. Especially on that first film when the prospect of a new Apes movie seemed so dicey -- he had better not screw this one up was the attitude at the time. Of course, he most certainly did not. And now here we are, three films later, and the Apes franchise is as good and strong as it’s ever been.
I recently caught up with Clark on the eve of the release of the new film, War for the Planet of the Apes. We talked about how the series has developed since those early days of Rise, when the idea of having an ape as your main character was kind of crazy, as well as about the evolution of the series, how it could still connect to the classic Charlton Heston original, and much more. Read on for our full chat!
Some mild spoilers for War follow.
IGN: Thanks for chatting, Dylan. I know you're used to us nerds trotting in every time you make one of these movies and invading your set and everything, so I appreciate that!
Dylan Clark: Look, we do it for the fans, you know, because we're fans, and having you kind of be there along the way keeps [director] Matt [Reeves] and I grounded and focused on really what's important. And I think that absolutely helps deliver the quality of the movies that at least we're trying to set out to make. So, I love it, because it's like you guys coming -- I was getting like, oh my God, the hardcore police are coming for you! [laughs]
IGN: I wanted to start off, if we could, by talking a bit about the arc of the series since Rise. It feels like you really beat the odds with these films, because it was sort of an improbable undertaking in the beginning. Any remake is already a tough nut to crack, especially something that's so revered. And then, you chose to go with an ape as one of your main characters, who then became your main character. And then a cast full of ape main characters. All computer-generated. And, despite it all, you've made these great movies that are also real crowd pleasers and not just critical favorites. When you look back at it now, could you have foreseen getting to this point?
DC: Well, first let me say, on this one we don't know yet. We think we delivered a really good movie. And no, no way. I mean, when we started the thing, we really didn't understand the technology, we didn't really know how to execute the premise. You know, we never set out to do a remake, and we don't really look at these as remakes. When we read the script for the first time that Rick [Jaffa] and Amanda [Silver] had written three years or even four years before, there was just a great idea for a character-driven story. It just happened to be that the protagonist was an ape. And that was just such a fresh idea. It starts with James Franco's character bringing this ape home, and then as a surrogate father raising it, and at the end of this first act you follow the ape and not the human character. And I had never seen that in a script. Certainly not executed that well, that emotionally. And it just really was like the impetus for us all to take a deep dive into Caesar as a character, and make a movie about an ape hero.
IGN: And another aspect of that of course that's really seen an evolution over the course of the films is the visual effects. The visual effects have always been amazing, of course, but I really felt like on War it's reached the point now where you don't ever think of them as being visual effects anymore. They're just apes.
DC: It's incredible, I know. Obviously Weta's the best in the business. They continually improve their technology. Joe Letteri, Dan Lemmon, these guys are just the best. But I will also say it really is Matt Reeves and Andy Serkis. Those two guys, the way in which we prepare how to shoot Caesar in natural environments that take advantage of what Weta's technology [can do]. That careful planning, and then Matt's execution -- he is a world-building, character-driven storyteller. And he wants to make everything felt. And so it's really important to him that we always take this technology out into natural settings, and shoot in the, as we like to say, in the wild. And you saw some of our sets, you know, being out in the snow and doing all that. But that stuff really translates in this realistic way that is important. It's very important how we shoot it.
IGN: A bunch of your producer credits are sci-fi movies. And when you were a studio exec you were involved with Children of Men and films like that as well. What is it about sci-fi that you keep coming back to it?
DC: Well, for me, it's really always about great characters. It's always about grounding it in a reality. But sci-fi has this extra thing, this big kind of what-if promise, right? What if something really happened in our world that was giant? It was world changing? Sci-fi offers, to me, the biggest portal to go through and discover a new universe. But I always like it when filmmakers come in and talk about doing it so that it feels potentially achievable, like this could happen. You know, Alfonso [Cuaron]'s take on Children of Men was “this could happen in the world.” And let's see what would happen if no more babies were born. And I just love that. Because I think we sit back and have a lot of questions about our future. And sci-fi offers up answers to some of those questions.
IGN: In terms of the Apes films, you guys have really been pretty clever about the way you've sort of slowly built up the mythology that inevitably ties into the old movies. Like in this film we see that the virus is evolving, and that kind of answers one more question about how we eventually get to that future point of the old movies. Can you talk a bit about that process and how you guys have approached that?
DC: Well, again, we received a great idea from the Rise script, which was the world in which apes got smart came about through man's hubris of testing science that they just didn't understand. Trying to cure Alzheimer's led to intelligent apes and then a virus that wiped out mankind. And so that idea was very exciting because it wasn't the 1968 background for how apes inherited the planet. You know, we didn't touch nuclear war. But it offered this other exciting idea of how apes might become the ruler of the planet. And we all know what happened. It's called Planet of the Apes; it's not Planet of the Humans. And the fun in this reimagining -- it's not really a reimagining, but it's also not a remake. It's almost its own alternate reality of Planet of the Apes that we're careful to sprinkle in fun connective tissue -- names, people. And we still adhere to the mythology and the big idea of Planet of the Apes. But again, the inciting incident was much different.
So that I think is probably also why it feels contemporary, right? Because audiences appreciate that. Any time you give them the same movie over, they don't like it as much. Nolan taught us that with Batman. We had seen a million Batmans, and then Chris Nolan came along and said, you think you know Batman? Well, let me tell you who Batman is. And Batman Begins led us into this examination of this character in such a great way. And that's what we tried to do with Apes.
Continues
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