By Joe Utichi
Edited by Josiah Watters

For British director Rupert Wyatt, wrangling a movie full of performance capture-enhanced CGI apes, giant set pieces and powerhouse performances from the likes of James Franco, Freida Pinto and John Lithgow, seems to be the easiest task in the world. Or at least, on the film’s Vancouver set he makes it look easy. It’s only Wyatt’s second feature film, following 2008’s crime thriller THE ESCAPIST. In terms of scale, it was a whole other level. For him, RISE OF THE PLANET OF THE APES is, at heart, a character-driven piece, and Wyatt is keen to get the films smallest, most intimate moments spot on.

Set in the present day, cast and crew are busy crafting the origin of the story that led to Charlton Heston’s torment when he crash landed 2000 years into Earth’s future in the 1968 original film. ‘The rule with remakes is you try not to touch the classics,’ explains producer Dylan Clark. ‘We’re touching a classic here. You have to be very mindful and specific when you’re going to do a movie like that.’

Their specific concept, says director Rupert Wyatt, is to peel back the onion on the franchise and start from moment one. ‘It’s an origin story,’ he says. ‘What we’ve always intended to do, while being very faithful and respectful of the mythology—and there are plenty of seeds planted in our story that do relate to that—is approach it in the same way BATMAN BEGINS took the core BATMAN story and re-crafted it. It starts off as a very small story and gets progressively bigger. It ends up on a very epic scale.’

From an original script by screenwriters Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver, RISE OF THE PLANET OF THE APES is the tale of the titular first ape who would begin the uprising against humanity and eventually help the apes rise to dominance on the planet Earth. ‘It’s about Will Rodman, played by James Franco, who’s a scientist trying to achieve a breakthrough science for his company,’ says Clark. ‘His father is in need of the help this drug would provide.’

The drug in question is a cure for Alzheimer’s, and as Will’s father’s condition deteriorates exponentially, he’s forced to up the pace of his research. ‘In testing on chimpanzees, the drug creates the first smart ape: Caesar,’ Clark continues. ‘The story is ultimately about our scientist, who raises this ape, and the identity questions the ape goes through until he ultimately realises he’s more ape than man and battle lines are drawn.’

One particular challenge faced by the production very early on in the process was that of achieving plausible chimpanzee, gorilla and orangutan interaction in the film. While the PLANET OF THE APES films in previous years have featured actors in make-up, they were hyper-evolved and more humanoid apes. In this film, Caesar and the apes he meets are apes as we know them today.

But training real apes to perform the range of emotional interaction necessary for the story would have been both impossible and contrary to the story’s animal rights themes. Instead, the production turned to Weta Digital, the pioneers of performance capture, to create all-CGI apes, and to actor Andy Serkis to bring Caesar to life. ‘It’s exciting to be able to use this performance capture technology in our real world,’ says Clark. ‘We get to use real actors. Andy Serkis is on this movie with us and our main premise is that this is a real situation. The only way to do that is to do it with this technology. As a studio executive, I got to watch the making of KING KONG and that technology, and now as a producer I’ve gotten to watch it evolve and change into something new.’

Interview

Here is an interview with the director Rupert Wyatt, talking about the groundbreaking RISE OF THE PLANET OF THE APES:

It is a bit of a departure for a Planet of the Apes film, isn’t it?
Yeah, and we set out to try and do something different. I think the very fact that it is set in the modern day and it’s a contemporary story, whereas none of the other Planet of the Apes films are, lends itself to a bit more of a basis in reality.

How is the edit coming together?
It’s been going great. The thing that we’ve found a real challenge is that every step of the way we’re having to make the movie two or three times over with the performance capture work in terms of rendering from humans into photorealistic apes.

Has the procedure of motion capture advanced a lot in recent years?
Yes it has. I was very new to the game in the sense that this film was a very different kettle of fish to what I’d done before. But it is remarkable now what we’ve achieved, not even just in terms of the photorealistic nature of what they can now create. It has more to do with the speed, efficiency and the sheer number of shots, and how expert these guys are.

Do you think the movie will offer a different experience for an audience?
Yes, and it’s very much a marriage between the performer and the actual effects guys, because it’s not so simple. When I first started this project, I was naively under the impression that whatever we created on set would be thrown through a computer and out would pop a fully-realised walking, talking ape. In this case there’s still a hell of a long way to go, because you do need to rely on the animators to not so much create their own performance but to pick up on certain subtleties and nuances.

Does the movie offer an interesting bit of counter-programming from the usual blockbuster fare, do you think?
Well, yes.  It’s an interesting movie because it’s certainly not TRANSFORMERS, and I mean that in the sense that it’s not wall-to-wall action. I think this is a very big movie in many ways but in large proportion it’s quite a small, intimate film. But the remarkable thing was that every single shot was a special effects shot, so in other ways it’s an immense film. We’re basically laying the groundwork for what I hope will be further films down the line which deal with major conflict between humans and apes, but this is a genesis story, if anything.

Do you think it brings it back to the original’s sense of being a parable for what was going on in the world?
The original was obviously very much a play on the civil rights movement, and that’s our inspiration for the starting point of the world in which this story is set. It’s all about mankind’s hubris and a genuine and sincere attempt to progress as a civilization and a species. It’s always, for me, the easy option to play that science is evil and wrong, because of course it’s not. Within humanity there is both good and evil, and we also touch on that with the apes as well, there are good apes and bad apes.

You get a sense of struggle from the characters too – none of them is black or white; there are shades of grey throughout.
Absolutely. The spine of the story is very much about a father/son relationship. You see this in both the relationship between Will and his father, played by James Franco and John Lithgow. It’s an unusual narrative for such a big movie. It’s a character narrative that is not born out of incidents or circumstance. It’s about human folly, kindness and selfishness. It’s great to be able to explore that, especially with really fantastic character actors.

James Franco seems to be quite unlike most actors. He seems to have a very particular way of looking at the world that’s at odds with his contemporaries. How was he to work with?
It’s funny you say that because you’re quite right. His instinct for performance is really quite remarkable. And it’s something that you can see in 127 HOURS. He has that ability, and I saw it so many times while we were shooting, to play a certain line or a certain moment in such a way that immediately makes you feel very satisfied. So often, when you’re working on a scene, you already have a preconceived idea of how that scene is going to play out.

How did his interaction with Andy Serkis work, while Andy was doing the performance capture work?
It was seamless, really. I’d never worked with Andy before he started on this film, and aside from being one of the nicest guys you’re likely to meet, he’s just one of those actors who has the ability to raise the game of everyone around him.

I would say that Andy would succeed in every aspect of acting and he does, but he’s got a real passion for it, and he’s even set up his own studio now, The Imaginarium, so he’s looking to explore what actors are capable of. It allows him and others to break out of their bodies and become something else. You can’t compare that to anything in their world, so it’s pretty groundbreaking. Uniting the talents behind The Lord Of The Rings and Avatar, Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes is not only reinventing one of cinema’s most compelling sci-fi franchises — it is also taking the next visual-effects quantum leap.

RISE OF THE PLANET OF THE APES opens in cinemas worldwide Summer 2011.