Director
Matt Reeves and actors Andy Serkis, Jason Clarke and Keri Russell spoke about
the balance between real and fantasy what and what that means to believability
of the film. They also talked about the action of Dawn of the Planet of the
Apes, which opens on July 18th, 2014.
Matt
Reeves, the director speaks about the apes learning to speak:
“The
apes learned how to speak and watched all that happen. Obviously there
are only three or four words in the first movie. We wanted this to
be somewhere along the continuum toward the 1968 movie where, of course,
they’re fully conversing.”
Keri
Russell’s level of action in the film:
“Reeves:
What we tried to do is tell a story about all of these characters in a way
that, even though it’s a grand action story and she does have to do some action
in the film, it’s really about … character. The reason that Jason and
Keri are here is that we wanted characters who had the level of depth that Andy
brought to the first film. She brings some action, but really she’s here for
character.
Russell:
I climbed down that ladder pretty fast. I was fast, wasn’t I?
Reeves:
Pretty fast.”
On
referencing the franchise:
“Reeves:
I’ll put it this way, we don’t do it in a sort of winking way. There is a
reference to – first of all, the franchise is something that, as a little kid,
I was obsessed with and we all love those movies so much – but what was done so
brilliantly in Rise … what
was amazing about what Andy did and WETA did and Rupert [Wyatt] did and Dylan
[Clark] did in Rise was, you
did become an ape, you became Caesar; you cared about him and connected to him.
Really, the thing we wanted to carry forward was the emotionality within the
grander context of the story that that movie had. You all know that it
leads to The Planet of the Apes, not The Planet of the Humans and the Apes, so the story’s
really about, “Where does this fit along that?” So, in that way, this
references just the knowledge of what that first film is.
Within
that, there are certain things within the canon, I guess you might consider
them almost commandments and things that it does reference. They did it
very cleverly in the first film … Our references are much more about trying to
create a context for the world that Andy leads.”
Serkis
and Caeser:
“Because
of the way that Caesar was brought into the world, brought up by human beings,
for me he was always an outsider. There’s a sense of not knowing who he
was; he was brought up like you and me, and he believed himself in many ways to
be a human being with our attributes. He learns human belief systems, and
Will, (James Franco) he believed to be a good man.
I’ll
never forget reading the script for the first time and seeing the arc of that
character, the trajectory of that character and what an amazing character he is
… and it’s an ape. Take that away and he’s still an amazing character.
Here’s this creature who was going through all these recognizable human
emotions of being an outsider and then finding his people. So now, going
through to this next stage, it’s very much about Caesar having become a leader
and throwing away everything that he has grown up with as a human being.
So in a sense he’s finding his way by galvanizing this group of
orangutans and chimps and gorillas two-thousand strong. He’s also a
father to a teenage son, he also has an infant child, he has a wife, he has a
council, he has a very, very big community he’s responsible for, for their
survival. And then he has the choice of reaction to human beings who,
still, in a sense, deep down, he wants to be able to communicate with.
One
of the things that, last time around, is that they didn’t speak, so it’s a very
pure and innocent way of experiencing what their thoughts and feelings were in
this last movie. This time around, there’s an evolution; there’s an
evolution in linguistics. I’ve found this to be one of the biggest
challenges: how Caesar is spiritually, philosophically, how he is, how he
commands, how he responds on a personal level. So we worked in great
detail in terms of creating that level of sophistication versus finding
language, so through the sign language that he was taught, then also human
words he’s beginning to use. All the other apes are beginning to use
gesture and vocalizations, and of course the younger apes have been brought up
in human society and learn to speak even better and faster than their parents,
because that’s what happens. It’s a very rich and complex world that
Caesar exists in and he’s under huge pressure as the movie goes on.”
Actor
Jason Clarke on his first leading role in a big budget franchise:
“I’m
playing, in a funny kind of way, a different mirror of Caesar. I play
Malcolm, who was an architect, who has a son and lost a wife, who now has a new
partner, who is trying to find a way for his family to stay alive. That
broadens to his community, so he finds a role in that. He finds his inner
ape as well. Through the ten years that we’ve had this apocalypse, this
virus, this civil war and everything else that’s gone on, he’s lost a lot of
people and finds a lot about himself through his interactions out in the woods.”
Reeves
on real and fantasy:
“To
me, the great thing that you have going for you immediately is that they’re
apes; you’ve got it. It’s amazing to me, what WETA does and how they
transform them, but the key to the whole thing is what’s going on under them.
What Andy does and what the other actors do when they’re playing apes in
a way that’s emotionally authentic … I asked them to show me everything that
Andy had done: wearing the markers, wearing the camera on his face, wearing
this crazy gray suit that they wear. I just wanted to see what he was
doing. I watched it against the footage. I realized that the reason
I was affected emotionally was because Andy, regardless of the fact that he was
acting like an ape, was just a brilliant performer, actor. It was just so
emotionally real.
The
thing that is always important to me in whatever I do is trying to find the
reality in that. And the key is that you take the one element that is
fantastical – super-intelligent apes – and you let that be fantastical; everything
else is about trying to realize a way that feels grounded and real. The
first film was shot much more on stage, it was smaller. This film
was out in the woods; so we went out to the woods, because I wanted to
use as much available light as possible so you could bring in that reality.
The key to everything is the emotional reality that these actors play.
Once you do that, you forget about the fact that they’re apes.”
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