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'Apes' returns to its origins
By Kevin Williamson ,QMI Agency
SAN DIEGO, Calif. -- When last we visited the planet of the apes, Mark Wahlberg was an astronaut, Helena Bonham Carter was a love-sick chimpanzee and Charlton Heston was a grizzled monkey who spat: "Take your stinking hands off me, you damn dirty human." In other words, things had devolved, rather precipitously, from speculative satire to abject camp.
And while Tim Burton's 2001 "re-imagining" of the 1968 classic was a box-office hit -- demonstrating the still-valid power of the brand -- it wasn't a film that anyone, anywhere, really wanted a sequel to.
Which explains why only now a decade later, 20th Century Fox is hoping to rekindle interest in some of cinema's most revered simians by returning, quite literally, to the origin of the species in Rise of the Planet of the Apes.
"It's always a challenge -- it's a challenge to make any film. But it was never my intention to be slave to the franchise as it were," says director Rupert Wright, whose prequel is set in contemporary San Francisco and traces the roots of a revolt by our nearest relatives against humanity.
"The writers presented us with a script that's very, very respectful and subtly acknowledging of the mythology. But it's very much an origin story in the real sense of the world "¦ It doesn't deal with humanoid apes. It deals with apes who are of our world. The very fact we're laying the groundwork for the Planet of the Apes is the icing on the cake."
In the movie, opening Friday, James Franco is a scientist whose attempts to cure Alzheimer's involve a chimp named Caesar.
But instead of just repairing the human brain, the experiments also amplify the primate's intelligence -- putting him on a path toward revolution.
Although the human cast includes Freida Pinto, John Lithgow and Brian Cox, the star of the story is clearly Caesar himself, a digitally rendered character performed via motion capture by Andy Serkis.
It marks a first for the Apes franchise, which has until now employed make-up and prosthetics to create its cast.
Serkis, 47, is no stranger to motion-capture work, having portrayed Gollum in Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy (a role he will reprise in 2012's The Hobbit) and King Kong in Jackson's 2005 remake.
As well, he will co-star in Steven Spielberg's The Adventures of Tintin. Apes, he explains, represents only the latest leap forward for the technology.
"On Lord of the Rings, it was shot on 35 mm film, so I interacted with all the other actors and we always shot on a blank plate and I had to go reshoot all the performance capture in a tiny volume," he says, referring to the studio where the mocap work happens.
"There weren't many cameras and the markers didn't always work and the real time kept breaking down. So it was in the early days.
"When we started to work on King Kong, it was the first use of facial capture, because up to that point, with Gollum, all my facial expressions had been key-framed matched as the definitive reference "¦ With Kong it was facial capture where I was wearing 132 markers on my face ... Then in the years after that, when Avatar started, the change was you could put multiple actors in performance suits and a volume -- with head-mounted cameras so you didn't need markers on facial expressions.
"And then the whole shift happened where in Avatar principal photography was taking place within a volume. That was how Avatar was shot, then how Tintin was shot.
"Then on Planet of the Apes, it was the first time performance capture has existed outside of a volume on a live-action set. We were shooting in a live-action environment and we didn't have to go back and repeat anything. Every scene was with the live-action actors and the performance-capture actors "¦
"People aren't celebrating the technology anymore. That's passe. It's now an industry tool. It's a magnificent way of recording an actor's performance -- that's all it is."
Joining Caesar are a cast of non-human characters, Wright says.
"We have a gorilla who's named Buck, an orangutan named Maurice who's from the circus. These are really fully-formed characters of a movie of real scale, which is unusual because they are animals.
"But the way we approached it, Andy and I and the other actors, is we said, 'What if 3,000 years from now, there is a civilization where the alpha of that world are apes?' They will look back at these characters as the heroes of the day. They will build statues of Buck.
"That's the way we wanted to tell it -- almost as a Bible story or a story like any great myth with broad resonance, I guess."
And Serkis believes the appeal of the series -- which has been around for 43 years -- is just as primal for audiences.
"We go through kind of a cycle in being interested in our closest brethren, which are apes. We have to as scientific discovery moves on and we understand more where they're coming from "¦
"We live in a time of conflict and global uncertainty and if anyone were to take over, it probably would be apes.
"But whatever species took over, they would be faced with the same problems. The selfish gene would be present in whatever species did take over. They are the closest mirror to us."
Nim a harrowing doc
It's a film about a chimp raised to believe he's human. But Project Nim isn't science-fiction.
Now playing in select cities, it's a harrowing documentary that recounts how in the 1970s, "Nim Chimpsky" was taken from his mother at infancy and brought up by homo sapiens as part of an ill-conceived behavioural experiment.
The fact it's unspooling in theatres at the same time as Rise of the Planet of the Apes is coincidence, of course. But its presence only underscores that, among summertime blockbusters, Apes is uncommonly topical and timely.
"The theme is very current -- the whole animal testing thing and do we really need it and how far can we go to change evolution in order to benefit ourselves," says Freida Pinto who co-stars in the prequel. "That makes it more interesting (as an actor) -- to deal with a subject matter like that. It was an amazing script."
And director Rupert Wright recognizes the connection as well.
"(Apes protagonist) Caesar grows up in a human environment, that's not unique -- Project Nim is a good example of that.
"But he's a very interesting experiment; at what point does he become more human than ape? Caesar has an intelligence far above that of other apes, so he's always learning. But fundamentally he begins to perceive himself as a human."
He winds up "neither here nor there. That's where the revolution begins -- (with this) Frankenstein creature who is shunned by our society and his own society."
And while Tim Burton's 2001 "re-imagining" of the 1968 classic was a box-office hit -- demonstrating the still-valid power of the brand -- it wasn't a film that anyone, anywhere, really wanted a sequel to.
Which explains why only now a decade later, 20th Century Fox is hoping to rekindle interest in some of cinema's most revered simians by returning, quite literally, to the origin of the species in Rise of the Planet of the Apes.
"It's always a challenge -- it's a challenge to make any film. But it was never my intention to be slave to the franchise as it were," says director Rupert Wright, whose prequel is set in contemporary San Francisco and traces the roots of a revolt by our nearest relatives against humanity.
"The writers presented us with a script that's very, very respectful and subtly acknowledging of the mythology. But it's very much an origin story in the real sense of the world "¦ It doesn't deal with humanoid apes. It deals with apes who are of our world. The very fact we're laying the groundwork for the Planet of the Apes is the icing on the cake."
In the movie, opening Friday, James Franco is a scientist whose attempts to cure Alzheimer's involve a chimp named Caesar.
But instead of just repairing the human brain, the experiments also amplify the primate's intelligence -- putting him on a path toward revolution.
Although the human cast includes Freida Pinto, John Lithgow and Brian Cox, the star of the story is clearly Caesar himself, a digitally rendered character performed via motion capture by Andy Serkis.
It marks a first for the Apes franchise, which has until now employed make-up and prosthetics to create its cast.
Serkis, 47, is no stranger to motion-capture work, having portrayed Gollum in Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy (a role he will reprise in 2012's The Hobbit) and King Kong in Jackson's 2005 remake.
As well, he will co-star in Steven Spielberg's The Adventures of Tintin. Apes, he explains, represents only the latest leap forward for the technology.
"On Lord of the Rings, it was shot on 35 mm film, so I interacted with all the other actors and we always shot on a blank plate and I had to go reshoot all the performance capture in a tiny volume," he says, referring to the studio where the mocap work happens.
"There weren't many cameras and the markers didn't always work and the real time kept breaking down. So it was in the early days.
"When we started to work on King Kong, it was the first use of facial capture, because up to that point, with Gollum, all my facial expressions had been key-framed matched as the definitive reference "¦ With Kong it was facial capture where I was wearing 132 markers on my face ... Then in the years after that, when Avatar started, the change was you could put multiple actors in performance suits and a volume -- with head-mounted cameras so you didn't need markers on facial expressions.
"And then the whole shift happened where in Avatar principal photography was taking place within a volume. That was how Avatar was shot, then how Tintin was shot.
"Then on Planet of the Apes, it was the first time performance capture has existed outside of a volume on a live-action set. We were shooting in a live-action environment and we didn't have to go back and repeat anything. Every scene was with the live-action actors and the performance-capture actors "¦
"People aren't celebrating the technology anymore. That's passe. It's now an industry tool. It's a magnificent way of recording an actor's performance -- that's all it is."
Joining Caesar are a cast of non-human characters, Wright says.
"We have a gorilla who's named Buck, an orangutan named Maurice who's from the circus. These are really fully-formed characters of a movie of real scale, which is unusual because they are animals.
"But the way we approached it, Andy and I and the other actors, is we said, 'What if 3,000 years from now, there is a civilization where the alpha of that world are apes?' They will look back at these characters as the heroes of the day. They will build statues of Buck.
"That's the way we wanted to tell it -- almost as a Bible story or a story like any great myth with broad resonance, I guess."
And Serkis believes the appeal of the series -- which has been around for 43 years -- is just as primal for audiences.
"We go through kind of a cycle in being interested in our closest brethren, which are apes. We have to as scientific discovery moves on and we understand more where they're coming from "¦
"We live in a time of conflict and global uncertainty and if anyone were to take over, it probably would be apes.
"But whatever species took over, they would be faced with the same problems. The selfish gene would be present in whatever species did take over. They are the closest mirror to us."
Nim a harrowing doc
It's a film about a chimp raised to believe he's human. But Project Nim isn't science-fiction.
Now playing in select cities, it's a harrowing documentary that recounts how in the 1970s, "Nim Chimpsky" was taken from his mother at infancy and brought up by homo sapiens as part of an ill-conceived behavioural experiment.
The fact it's unspooling in theatres at the same time as Rise of the Planet of the Apes is coincidence, of course. But its presence only underscores that, among summertime blockbusters, Apes is uncommonly topical and timely.
"The theme is very current -- the whole animal testing thing and do we really need it and how far can we go to change evolution in order to benefit ourselves," says Freida Pinto who co-stars in the prequel. "That makes it more interesting (as an actor) -- to deal with a subject matter like that. It was an amazing script."
And director Rupert Wright recognizes the connection as well.
"(Apes protagonist) Caesar grows up in a human environment, that's not unique -- Project Nim is a good example of that.
"But he's a very interesting experiment; at what point does he become more human than ape? Caesar has an intelligence far above that of other apes, so he's always learning. But fundamentally he begins to perceive himself as a human."
He winds up "neither here nor there. That's where the revolution begins -- (with this) Frankenstein creature who is shunned by our society and his own society."
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