Maxance Vincent
Making another Planet of the Apes movie after Matt Reeves‘ trilogy could prove quite challenging, especially if one continues the storyline laid out by the filmmaker in the wake of Caesar’s (Andy Serkis) death. And it’s part of the reason why director Wes Ball, who spoke to Awards Radar on Zoom, was hesitant to take a crack at this beloved sci-fi franchise with Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes (reviewed here by Joey) at first but had an idea to evolve the series in a different direction:
“I didn’t want this movie to feel like a part four, and I felt pretty strongly about that. As much as people, including myself, wanted to see how that story would evolve, it felt like we’d be on a downtrend instead of an uptrend.”
A big part of the reason why Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes is set 300 years after Caesar is that the filmmakers do not need to create an entirely different world. Instead, they can set it in the same universe as the Rise trilogy while introducing new characters to the franchise:
“We didn’t need to lose stuff from Caesar in this storyline. We tried to figure out how to do a story about Caesar and a new beginning simultaneously. It was kind of a soft reboot, which was the original idea. Everything else stemmed from that, where we came up with this adventure, more of a coming-of-age story. The aesthetic felt a little bit like we’re marching towards that 1968 Charlton Heston world, how we used 60s lenses to convey this, and so on.
It felt like you were straddling both worlds in this movie, and hopefully, at the same time, start to at least let people fall in love with some of these characters so they want to continue to see the franchise go on with more of these stories.”
Alongside the release of Avatar, the arrival of Rise of the Planet of the Apes marked a significant advancement — and turning point — into the acceptance of motion capture into performance capture. The technology has evolved much further than the release of James Cameron’s 2009 film and subsequent Apes installments, allowing for greater precision in the actors’ performances.
It’s even more critical when the filmmakers are taking motion capture suits outside, in environments that aren’t necessarily suited for this type of technology, as explained by Visual Effects Supervisor Erik Winquist, who also joined Wes during a Zoom press day to discuss their work on Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes:
“Avatar took motion capture and turned it into performance capture. And then Rise of the Planet of the Apes came along, and we said, “Let’s take this outside,” because the Avatar movies were entirely made within the confines of a nice, comfy, climate-controlled, perfectly hermetically sealed mocap stage. You must deal with all sorts of unexpected things when you say we will take this on location.
Rise of the Planet of the Apes worked out in a crude prototype: the hardware side of things. We fast forward 10 years, and many years have gone into upgrading hardware and techniques for the second Avatar film. Now, another Apes film comes along, and we take it outside. There’s this fun cycle that seems to be emerging here. But many of the advancements were all about ensuring we were getting greater fidelity and higher precision from the actors’ facial cameras. It allowed us to go a little more accessible on the capture side of things.
We didn’t have to be so buttoned down and super calibrated when we were shooting in Australia. We were going into some pretty crazy locations. It required a whole bunch of people, a ton of infrastructure, giant trucks we can’t get up the mountain, and so on.
That sort of footprint often doesn’t fit into some of the places we wanted to shoot the movie in. Where we could take advantage of that, we certainly were, because that gives us really great quality. But we had other ways and tools to accomplish this. Some of that came from Avatar: The Way of Water, such as adding a little more light footprint on the capture day. You would still get all the performance Wes is getting from his actors, at the moment, in front of the camera.”
In our video interview, seen below, we also discuss how the evolution in technology goes hand-in-hand with the Apes’ own personal evolution, how Wes approached directing the actors to convey their emotions through subtle shifts in their faces, and the balancing act of making the visual effects feel as real as possible while also supporting the characters in their journey. We also discussed the film’s climax sequence and broke down how the visual effects were designed and how it was envisioned within the movie.
You can check out the full interview with Wes and Erik below and watch Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes on Disney+ today:
[Some of the quotes in this article were edited for length and clarity]
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