I’m standing in a prisoner of war camp in Richmond, Canada. But this place is not holding any regular prisoners. No, these inmates are apes. POWs from the War for the Planet of the Apes!
It’s cold and wet and misty out, early January of 2016, and in fact there aren’t any apes around -- just actors and performers in motion capture suits. And we’re not really in the mountains, but rather in an empty lot that’s surrounded by giant green screens which will be filled in with the Sierra landscape in post. It’s day 54 of 96 of production of this third modern Planet of the Apes movie, which once again stars Andy Serkis as Caesar, leader of the simian forces who are facing an increasingly dangerous threat from a desperate humankind. Matt Reeves, who directed the last film, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, is back once again to tell Caesar’s story.
The assembled press visiting the set this day would catch some very interesting glimpses of ape action at times. There’s Serkis hanging from a cross in the camp courtyard! And there’s a group of apes in shackles being ushered into a pen while soldiers monitor them from a catwalk above… Oh, and are some of the apes actually working with the humans to imprison their fellow apes?! Read on for seven secrets we uncovered while on the Planet of the Apes…
Serkis sits with us for a chat, dressed in his full mo-cap suit and head gear. He says that while one of Caesar’s main characteristics has always been to be empathetic to both human and ape -- a side effect of his having been raised by humans (James Franco humans to be exact) -- in War, an inciting event sends him on a troubling path.
“That sets him off on a track which kind of eats him up,” says the actor. “He goes off on a revenge mission because of this event that happens, without giving too much away. He goes through this incredible journey of very much going to a darker part of himself, probably the darkest he's ever encountered, of … self-destruction almost.”
Apes producer Dylan Clark, whose been on the series since Rise of the Planet of the Apes, explains that when the film begins, the apes and humans have been at war for two years -- the war that began as Dawn of the Planet of the Apes ended. And Caesar has seen unbearable losses heaped upon both the ape and human sides.
“Caesar is at some point not fit to lead the apes and goes on a very dark journey,” says Clark. “A dark journey to end this war. … This is also a war inside of Caesar. All of the things that have happened under his leadership from Rise to Dawn and this movie, and through the course of this movie -- [he’s] wrestling and grappling with how to make that right. … The real drama inside of Caesar is, are you going to reclaim your morality? Are you going to find your humanity? You're the most human of all characters. You're the most just, you're the most right, you seem to have lost your way a bit in this movie. Can you regain it back? That's the suspense and drama that plays out through the course of this thing.”
Caesar is not doing human work anymore.
The crux of the last film, Dawn, was that Caesar was betrayed by one of his lieutenants, the tormented ape Koba. The guilt of how that situation played out will haunt Caesar in War.
“If you remember where we left off at the last story, the apes have become divided under the leadership of Koba,” Serkis says. “[Caesar]'s carrying an enormous amount of guilt at killing, at going against one of the primary tenets of their belief structure, which is that ape shall not kill ape. He's killed, in effect, a person who he believes was his cause célèbre.”
Koba (Toby Kebbell) from Dawn of the Planet of the Apes
Koba was so important to Dawn that the film even had a post-credits audio cue that appeared to indicate he had somehow lived through the un-survivable fall he suffered there. As strongly depicted as that character (and actor Toby Kebbell) were, however, Clark says Koba is definitely dead.
“I can tell you 100%, Koba is not alive in this movie,” he says. There was talk about somehow keeping the character alive after Dawn, because Reeves and Clark were so in love with Kebbell and Koba. But it ultimately didn’t make sense.
“Yeah, there were conversations like, they wouldn't have done that to Darth Vader,” Clark says. “We're not saying we're Star Wars good, and we're not saying Koba is Darth Vader good, but … we were like, God, did we make a mistake killing Koba? We have to look each other in the eyes and say could anybody survive that fall? For real? And the answer is no, and then we were sad.”
(Read my theory about who really made Planet of the Apes' Koba here.)
One question that fans have often had about this rebooted Apes series is how many “smart” apes are actually out there, and how could they prove to be a match for the humans if it’s just Caesar’s small group of renegades? War for the Planet of the Apes will finally address this question, with Steve Zahn joining the series as an ape who comes from beyond Caesar’s realm.
“It's on a massive scale, this film, and not just because of its title,” says Serkis. “The stakes are just so much higher. But also [there’s a] global understanding. The apes realize that there are other apes outside. They find out that there are other apes outside of the smaller group in Muir Woods who are evolving and who are changing.”
Terry Notary, who has appeared in each of the new films as Caesar’s loyal friend Rocket (as well as many other background apes), thinks Zahn’s character will bring a “real light” to the new movie.
“He's a little sprite of goodness,” laughs Notary. “I think everyone is going to go, oh, he's back, cool, cool, I love that guy. You're going to love his character. He's a good element in this film for taking us in new directions and sort of leading us off into this thing and lightening up certain heaviness, because it's a very dark, heavy movie. It's full of good story and a great journey but it's heavy and it needed this little bubble to kind of break things up. He's playing that role really well.”
Ape attack
For Clark, it was important to finally show that other apes like Zahn’s character are out there.
“All of sudden [it’s] like, where did this guy come from?” he says. “How is he able to talk? Are other apes in the world smart? We are looking constantly ahead to what we might want to be doing in this world. How else can we show the evolution of these characters? Who else can we bring in both on the human side and the ape side?”
Continues
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