MATT REEVES: Hi, I'm Matt Reeves,
co-writer and director of War for the Planet of the Apes,
and we're gonna talk about the movie.
Um...
When we finished Dawn, I took off a few weeks
and had a vacation for the first time with my family
after a couple of years and then we started writing on this.
So it took three years to do.
And Mark Bomback and I spent a year writing the script.
And what we wanted to do was to create sort of
a mythic final leg to Caesar's journey.
To turn him into kind of an ape Moses, the seminal figure in all of ape history,
like we were gonna do sort of a Darwinian Biblical epic.
So that was our sort of goal as we began.
And then, we started by watching really a lot of movies.
We watched all the Planet of the Apes movies.
And then, we watched a lot of war movies and a lot of Westerns.
And for me, what was exciting was this idea of,
for the first time, doing an ape-point-of-view movie
that was really Caesar's perspective.
So this opening shot that we did is really the one time in the movie
that I wanted the point of view to not be from the apes' point of view.
This is the point of view from the soldiers.
And this particular scene that we shot was a challenging scene
because we were shooting in a logging area in British Columbia
and it was a very steep grade.
And so, what we did was, we actually lidared,
which is scanned the entire area
and then I began setting cameras with the previs people
so that I could figure out how we would shoot this sequence.
And in this particular shot,
it was actually a cable cam shot,
and the camera was loosened
and our camera operator, John Clothier, was holding the camera
but the tension was still going on the shot
so that we could make this point of view
that revealed itself to be from the perspective of these soldiers.
And this was actually a shot that Mark and I wrote into the script.
'Cause we wanted to... Whenever I'm writing,
I always try and write as if we're watching the movie.
And so, we had this idea,
this kind of Full Metal Jacket idea that you would see
these helmets with these phrases that would indicate
that the humans were not in a good way regarding apes and...
There's a little Alpha-Omega reference.
That was one of the things, too, when Mark and I were watching the movie,
there were all these elements in the apes' universe that we wanted
to kind of have vibrate up against the films that we were doing.
With the idea being that the timeline was changed in Rise.
The way that the apes are in the original,
we destroyed ourselves with a nuclear holocaust
and that's the kind of amazing ending that the...
That the original has that Rod Serling actually wrote
in the draft of the script that he wrote,
and it's one of the greatest endings, I think, of all time.
And you already know that that is what that becomes,
Planet of the Apes, and that sort of robbed from any future revelation
in terms of knowing it's the Planet of the Apes.
That's what we know.
So we never wanted to tell that story.
We wanted to tell the story of how we get from here to there.
And as I said, Rise changed the timeline because
it was evolution that created that change in the apes in the original,
over thousands of years.
But that was changed with ALZ-113 in Rise and so,
our thought was that what we're really talking about is a trajectory.
We're going toward what the Planet of the Apes is going to become
even though it's not literally the same timeline.
And whenever we change the story
from what happens, the narrative "What" to "How, "
you start doing a story that is very much about character
and very much about the intimate relationship that you have
with their motivations and how you get from the world you're seeing
to the world that we know from the '68 movie.
And Caesar's apes, in the world of these films,
is very different from the '68 movie.
So it provided a lot of opportunity to do kind of our Russian ape novel,
chapter after chapter of following these characters.
But specifically, this story is really about Caesar.
And for the first time,
this is from the perspective of his character fully.
There's no scene in this movie that doesn't have apes.
And this is the one moment where we're from the soldiers' perspective,
and this will be the only moment like that.
There's no other scene in the movie
where we are just with the soldiers and not with the apes.
Come on!
(SOLDIERS YELLING)
(CHITTERING)
REEVES: So for this sequence, here again, we're using the cable cam shot,
and this was a shot that I was able to actually plan out
before we ever shot it.
Because the ground was so steep
that if we had to try and find this on the day, it never could have happened.
And the idea was to start the story in the Muir Woods
where the apes had retreated after this battalion of soldiers,
led by Woody Harrelson, had come to the city
and basically flushed the apes out, and this area would be
the area that the apes would go to because they had an advantage here
and they know this area.
And they've been fighting for two years here, successfully.
So there are a lot of movies we watched and this, to me,
was kind of a Kurosawa sort of shot.
We watched Kurosawa movies, we watched Sergio Leone movies...
And, to me, this idea of marrying
the kind of classical forms,
classic kind of cinema forms,
with this cutting-edge technology so that we could tell a mythic story,
like a Kurosawa movie, like Throne of Blood,
they're all very like Shakespearean,
or the Leone films or John Ford movies.
They're all very kind of mythic tales
and the idea was to use this cutting-edge technology
to render the main characters as apes,
and then you would go through this uncanny experience
of watching a very classical story
with this collision of characters who were not human
but who you related to emotionally as if they were human,
and that that would be an uncanny and strange experience.
It would be both familiar and new.
(GROANING)
So in the last movie, we shot on native 3D
and this shot would have been impossible,
because the cameras were so heavy that we couldn't really move very easily.
And, on this movie, we were able to use Steadicam
and use a bunch of pieces of equipment with these beautiful new lenses
and the cameras from Alexa called the Alexa 65.
And so, the aspect ratio is different. It's more like a war movie.
And I enjoyed shooting with these cameras much more
because it allowed me a lot more mobility.
And I was able visually to get much more of the kind of shots
that I was hoping to get on Dawn,
but which were just hard because everything was on a crane.
And we got a lot of what I wanted but a lot of times I couldn't do it.
I'm sorry.
I'm so sorry, sir.
THE COLONEL: Listen to me. You kill as many as you can.
(GRUNTING)
No! No, no!
REEVES: So, this shot here, as we go into this amazing set
that was designed by James Chinlund,
was really kind of our Paths of Glory shot,
where Kirk Douglas is walking through the trenches,
and this was supposed to be our ape trench.
And then we would have our reveal of Caesar.
And the way we shoot this is that
we walk in there and shoot Andy and the actors
and then we walk through again and take them out,
and take their performances, and then put them back into these shots.
And one of the things we really had to figure out
as we came into this film
was vocalizations and articulation and just how much more advanced
Caesar's speech should be than the last movie.
And if you remember in Dawn, the way that the articulation goes,
it starts slow and increases in speed and in articulation
but it actually never gets that fast, and if Caesar spoke in the same way,
this movie would probably be about five hours long.
So, with Andy,
I kind of worked on how primitive the speech should be.
And we would do different takes.
Some takes he would be more primitive, some takes he would be more articulate
and we really fished around with it.
And the great thing about performance capture
is after we did the whole movie,
we cut it together
and I could then take another pass with him, just at the speech.
We could keep his performance but we could actually redo the lines.
And in any other movie that would be ADR, but in this movie,
we can actually replace his mouth and use that new vocal performance.
And when we're shooting, Andy is right here,
and he's playing opposite Gabe, who plays Preacher, and the other actors.
And so, this is the great thing about performance capture.
In any other sort of visual effects movie that I've done,
often the thing that is the visual effect is not there.
And so, you have actors who are playing to tennis balls and to marks
and to things that aren't the things that you see in the final film.
But performance capture is all about capturing your performance.
And so, it's a series of cameras,
and they basically record everything so that you can take that performance
and find a way to animate it into the CG characters,
but it means that all of the actors get to play opposite each other.
And so, the performances have the energy
of the human characters playing off of the ape characters.
They are really there at the time that we're shooting.
And I think it makes a big difference.
And as a director, for me,
I really like to go on a search for the emotional sort of tenor of a scene.
I have an idea, especially when I write it, Mark and I wrote the movie,
and I'm thinking a lot emotionally about what the scenes are supposed to be,
but I'm looking for that surprise, that thing that is...
Something you didn't expect.
If I could tell the actors exactly how to say it,
then it would be them doing me.
And I'm not a great actor, so...
But I'll tell you who is, is Andy Serkis, and so we go on these searches
and then I look kind of as the guy who's got the emotional compass
to see if those things that we find, which often surprise me,
fulfill what I'm looking for but are different from what I ever could have imagined.
And with Andy, that happened all the time.
He's just a brilliant, brilliant actor.
And people talk a lot about performance capture
and they talk about him as being the greatest
performance capture actor of all time,
and it's kind of a nonsensical designation
because performance capture is just a technology that records performance.
What Andy is, is one of the best actors on the planet.
And working with him on these two movies over the past five years,
the five years that it took to make Dawn and War, has been really
one of the most satisfying relationships that I've had with an actor in my career.
I just think he's an incredible person but an astonishing actor.
And watching him play and Karin Konoval who plays Maurice here,
they're just remarkable.
And there's something about knowing the actors
and knowing we're coming back to do another movie
that, I think, was really inspiring to me and to Mark Bomback
when we were writing, which was that we knew it was going to be Andy.
We knew we were gonna push Caesar into a place that was darker
than any of the places he had been in the other two films,
and more challenging, and we knew that because it was Andy,
we were gonna go on a journey that was gonna be breathtaking to watch.
And so, that was really an exciting thing.
The content of this scene in particular
was sort of the key to the whole movie for Mark and I,
because as we were writing, we were thinking about Dawn
and how the last movie ended
with the apes on the precipice of a war that Caesar did not want.
And it was a war that he didn't start.
Koba started the war.
But Caesar's greatest strength in the first two films
is his ability to empathize with really both species.
And he was in a unique position in Dawn
because he was the bridge, really, that could have led to peace.
And he was raised by humans but he wasn't a human.
And he wasn't raised by apes, but he was an ape
and so he had this connection to both species
but was also an outsider to both and as a result, had always understood
a lot about what it meant to be either of the two species.
And the one character who he really couldn't fully empathize with was Koba,
who had been so badly treated by the humans
and had never known human love the way that Caesar did.
That Caesar, in his blindness to that experience,
couldn't understand that there was no way
Koba would ever have lived alongside the humans.
That it was like asking him to live alongside the characters who tortured him
and that was just an impossibility.
And so, the key to the movie for us ended up being that
we wanted Maurice to say to him, "Well, there was no way
"that you could have known the darkness that was inside of Koba,"
and the journey of this movie would be
to put Caesar through that experience so that he could,
for the first time, end up empathizing
with just how much hatred Koba had toward humans
because he was so desperately wounded by the humans.
And that, for the first time,
Caesar would be in danger of losing his empathy.
And that's sort of the key to the whole journey.
I do wanna say, this is an incredible thing.
This set that we have here, this is purely virtual.
And it was built by James Chinlund in virtual space
with the virtual artists from Weta and his designers as well.
And he built a giant model and I scoped all of these shots in 3D,
I did some work with the...
It's called a virtual cam, where you can shoot it
as if you're in the space with the actors.
And it's an amazing thing because the set looks very real
and what was interesting is we built a small section of it
which is coming up, the area where you see the catacombs,
where the soldiers are coming or Caesar's walking down,
and also, Caesar's bedroom.
But we didn't build any more than that,
and it's incredible what Weta has done here
to make it look really as realistic as the rest of the stuff.
And part of it is that when you build something real, it gives you the textures
that then can be used in building the rest of it.
This scene in particular that you're seeing here,
this was the hardest scene for me to shoot in the whole movie
because it was purely virtual.
And in the last scene where the camera's moving, I can...
I can choreograph those shots because
they're really about the movement of actors in space
that's meant to reveal a space and to give you the emotion.
This is a scene that in any other circumstance,
I would never previs or storyboard because it's a performance scene.
I would stage the actors in a space
and they would start playing off of each other
and then, that would enable me to find the shots.
But in this case, we couldn't build the set.
It was too expensive and we had so much to do.
We were not in this set very long, so it made no sense to build the set.
So this was actually shot on the volume,
which is basically a stage with fluorescent lights.
There's no set there.
And I staged the action
but I set all of the cameras afterwards,
which is totally counterintuitive,
because normally what happens is an actor is in a space, you're on a set,
and you say, "Andy, if you take one step to your left, I have a great shot here
"of Max who's playing Blue Eyes, or Aleks right there who's playing Winter."
But I couldn't do any of that.
What I did was I captured their performances
and then after the fact, had to choose every single one of these angles
and in some cases, push the actors from here to there,
a foot over, and it was, for such a simple scene,
it was very challenging for me, personally.
And we shot it differently from the way that...
Like, Jim Cameron on Avatar,
he shoots with a virtual cam
and then he's able to go back and continually refine.
So he's got the virtual cam in there and that is more like traditional filmmaking.
But we didn't have the time or resources to set up the scene that way.
So we did it this crazy way
where you essentially capture performances
and later figure out the cameras.
And it's something I hope to never do in that way again.
This is actually now a real set.
And this is one of the sets that was built by James.
And I think the textures and everything in it look
very much like the textures in the last scene
and this is the amazing magic that Weta is capable of.
Of course, the thing that wasn't there was the waterfall.
And it was very challenging
for Michael Seresin to figure out exactly how to light
when we didn't have water that he was lighting through
and this was one of the more challenging sequences to shoot.
This whole idea of being
behind the waterfall was something that
Mark and I sort of stole from The Hidden Fortress,
which is a Kurosawa movie
where they're hiding a princess behind this waterfall,
and that movie was actually one of the inspirations for Star Wars.
It's a terrific movie and we actually...
The code name for our movie when we were shooting,
because whenever you're shooting you put up signs,
and if you put up Planet of the Apes, a lot of people might show up
and say, "Hey, what are you doing?"
And so, you always come up with a name that isn't the name of the movie.
And ours was The Hidden Fortress.
(RAGGED BREATHING)
- (GASPS) - (GROWLS)
Caesar! What's wrong?!
How many on patrol?
Five? Six?
Get them!
Luca, get Rocket, too.
REEVES: But that waterfall...
I have to say, the work when we saw certain things like
in this shot, in particular,
I thought that the work that Weta did in order to
supplement the set that was there was pretty remarkable.
In this movie, we used a piece of equipment I didn't have in the last movie,
which was called a Technodolly.
When you shoot a shot like this,
you have to shoot the performance with the actors who are playing the apes,
and that's called the performance pass.
Then you do another pass after that
which involves just the characters who are human characters,
and that I call the human pass.
And then we do another pass
which is just for paint out, which is a totally clean pass
so that they can paint out anything
in the event that we have to use the performance pass.
And in the last movie,
the idea of following a character in a really complex way...
Let's say if I wanted to follow Caesar and arc around him,
there was no way to get that clean or human pass
to be exactly the same as the performance pass.
Because you could think that a camera can arc around an actor that isn't there,
but it actually doesn't work.
We tried it a few times.
We had to abandon a lot of shots that I didn't want
to have look different from what we had shot originally.
So I ended up having to cut those shots.
But in this movie,
this Technodolly enabled me to shoot the shot
with the performance that I wanted from, let's say, Andy,
and then he could step out and I could literally play the shot back.
And so, I could...
I was much more free to do things with the camera
that in the first two movies were really, really hard to do.
These shots were shot at 48 frames and we slowed it down
with this idea that it would be a showdown out of a Leone movie.
And then the revelation about Caesar's family.
This music is the introduction of the Colonel's theme as played on the timpani.
I love Michael's music for the movie. I just think it's incredible.
And I think we were inspired by a lot of different things,
and I know Michael loves the Goldsmith score.
Michael is a lifelong, as I am, Planet of the Apes fan.
When I was doing a little movie with him called Let Me In,
we recorded everything in his office.
And I saw all of these dolls that were from the original Planet of the Apes TV series,
and I said, "Oh, my God, I had all those, too."
He said, "Oh, this is before Star Wars.
"Planet of the Apes was my Star Wars."
I was like, "Totally. Me, too."
I said, "I used to walk like an ape in the supermarket with my dad."
So the first person I called when I got Dawn was Michael.
He is a huge fan of the Jerry Goldsmith score,
and a lot of the percussion that you hear...
There's an amazing percussionist named Emil Richards.
He's an incredible percussionist.
He's played with Thelonious Monk and George Harrison,
but he has recorded on every single Planet of the Apes score
since the 1968 original.
He had these bowls that... You're hearing some of them now.
That's like a gamelan and then there are some of these other bowl sounds
which are very distinctive.
And they do sound like the Goldsmith score.
We use the bowls on Dawn and on War,
that were the bowls that they used in the original
which Michael called, "Emil's bowls."
We're still searching.
Let's go look for Caesar's little son.
(SIGHS)
(BREATHING HEAVILY)
(RUSTLING)
(PANTING)
(SIGHING)
(STUTTERS) Cornelius!
REEVES: This particular piece of music,
which is, at the time, Michael called it "The Loss Theme, "
because it was about Caesar's loss.
I thought it was so moving.
I just said to Michael, "Where did that come from?"
And he said, "You know, I think it was a little bit of sadness in me
"I didn't know I had."
Michael is really an incredible artist.
He reminds me of Andy. He's like working with a great actor.
He's expressing himself not through words, but through music.
And the emotions that you feel from him he creates through the music.
And working with him on these movies has been such a joy.
I just think he's such an incredible composer.
These shots out here are so challenging
because normally we shoot empty plates and the apes are put in,
but because of the horses and because of the difficulty of the shoot this day,
most of these shots actually involve a radical paint out,
where that big wide shot when Caesar's walking towards us,
all of the actors who play apes were in those shots,
and they had to be painted out, and it was raining.
It was freezing this day.
Karin, who plays Maurice, who's sitting up on the horse,
by the time we were done, she was having hypothermia.
She was freezing.
And the rain has to be taken off.
The actors have to be painted out.
The apes then are put in, and then the rain is put back on.
So that shot and this one here, that you're seeing here,
took just months and months to achieve.
I think it's kind of amazing what Weta is capable of.
What Dan Lemmon, who is our super,
told me on the last movie, they had remade the pipeline.
The pipeline has to do with how they render the hair,
the moisture, the detail on the skin.
And I said, "Well..."
They had just remade the pipeline at the end of Dawn,
and I said, "Does that mean..."
Oh, wait. Wait, I have to stop for one second.
That little orangutan is my son.
My son Andrew. I just have to point that out.
So we had our kids play all of the young apes in the movie.
We did that in Dawn.
Terry Notary's kids are in the movie, and they are amazing.
He actually trained them to quadruped and they jump up on him,
and our children play all of the children in the movie.
But anyway, back to the story.
Dan had told me, "Oh, no, the shots won't be better in War.
"It will just be easier for us to do."
Then when the first shots started coming in,
I knew that Dan had lied.
Because these apes look so much better than in either of the two films.
Just the detail.
The hair, the detail on their skin, it's just amazing.
And it was typical Dan Lemmon
because he always under-promises and then over-delivers.
He is emblematic and typical of the artists at Weta,
in that they are the best in the world.
And this work is just incredible.
To make sure you do.
So the idea here, of course, is that Caesar sets off on this revenge mission,
and yet, his group, his closest confidants, can't let him go by himself.
It's the beginning of this war for Caesar. Will he lose his soul?
Will he lose empathy completely for the human race, and his decency?
And these guys are kind of his conscience, in particular Maurice.
They make it hard for him to completely forget himself.
One of the big inspirations for Mark and I...
We watched a lot of war movies.
And one of the war movies that we watched was a Civil War movie,
which is The Outlaw Josey Wales, a Clint Eastwood movie.
And in it, Clint Eastwood's family is killed at the beginning of the story,
and he goes on this revenge mission.
We thought it would really be interesting to take Caesar,
who is this very empathic, understanding character,
and push him to a place where he was so wounded and so filled with rage,
that he would essentially become like a simian Clint Eastwood.
And this moment here is very much in that vein.
I mean, it's like a Western.
And that's like Andy Serkis filled with rage in an Eastwoodian way.
It's an interesting thing, too, about the apes, too.
The performances that you see, they are all the performances of our actors,
and the idea is always to follow them as closely as possible,
so that the same thing that we felt watching them perform,
you feel when you see the apes.
And the way that we do it
is that I capture the performances, we shoot them on the day,
and then I cut the performances together with my editors,
and then at a certain point...
Before this movie becomes Planet of the Apes,
it's Planet of the Mo-cap Actors.
What's incredible is that that movie works emotionally.
You have to get over the fact
that you're seeing these actors in tight Lycra suits,
and dots on their faces, and GoPro boom cameras on their heads,
but that goes away very quickly.
And because these actors are so incredible, you engage in it.
And then what we end up doing is, we take the performances
and we watch side by side the submissions of animation from Weta,
and we look at the performances,
and I say, for example...
Like here, Andy looks really angry.
But he also looks slightly stunned because of his own rage.
And we might look at Caesar and he might have the anger,
but that confusion or that sense of being unsettled might not be there.
And then we get into this discussion with the artists at Weta,
"How do you get that to express itself onto Caesar's face,
"so I feel just what I'm feeling when I'm watching Andy?"
And the challenge of that is...
This is what's incredible about the process is that,
the anatomy of Andy's face is different from the anatomy of Caesar's face.
Or like right here,
the anatomy of Maurice, of course, is very different from Karin who plays Maurice.
And the challenge is to take the shapes and get them to express the same shapes
that make us feel what we feel when we watch the actors,
and have that express itself on the apes' faces,
so that you feel the same way.
And it's an incredible level of artistry.
There's first the level of artistry of the actors
who are performing in this very soulful way.
And then there's the performance of the animators
who have to find a way to express what those actors are doing.
And it is no easy task.
We spent over a year in post doing these shots.
Shot by shot.
Ten hours a day, I have a link to Weta in New Zealand,
and I'm in Los Angeles at Fox,
and we are talking about these shots just endlessly.
What I really wanted to do in the film
was to put you as much as possible into the perspective of these characters.
So here, Amiah is looking into the camera.
One of my favorite shots in the movie is this series of shots here.
When this shot came in, the idea that excited me was
that Karin would come right up and look right into the lens,
knowing that it was going to be Maurice.
And the idea was to put you inside of this...
Inside of Amiah's perspective,
and feel what it was like to have this encounter between you and an orangutan,
and the other way around.
Because we are really the apes in this movie.
So when Amiah is looking at Karin, you feel what it is to be Maurice.
For me, point of view is one of the most important things that you use in a story.
'Cause this is a summer movie and they come out,
and they're filled with spectacle, summer movies, you know?
Grand action, and usually characters with some kind of superpower.
But our spectacle is different.
Our spectacle is that by the end of this movie, you're an ape.
You watch the movie and you identify with the emotions
that you're seeing expressed on these apes
in a way that you can recognize yourself in them.
And this is the biggest gift of getting to work in this franchise,
is that in doing Planet of the Apes,
we get to hold a mirror up to human behavior.
And for a summer blockbuster to examine our nature
is incredibly fun,
because it's something that is unusual to do on this scale.
This is the kind of movie you couldn't make,
except for the fact that we're looking at apes.
We shot this on Vancouver Island.
We chose it 'cause it was rainy season.
And it was supposed to be really gloomy.
And what was so amazing is the sand was so dark,
that when we scouted, it was like a mirror, and you could see the apes reflected.
And we got out there that day, and of course, it was like this, which was sunny,
which I was initially upset, and then I was like, "Oh, wait a minute,
"actually, this is about a million times better than what we had planned.
"It's absolutely stunning." And so this whole sequence,
including the oyster shack that you saw just before that,
that was all shot on Vancouver Island.
And it was supposed to be rainy, but we had just a gorgeous series of days.
And these were the first few days of shooting the movie.
There it says, "The only good Kong is a dead Kong."
And the idea was that the humans,
because of their desperate situation, have come to, in their own minds,
vilify the apes so much that they demean them
by calling them names, trying to make them lesser than them.
And they would come up with these dark,
what they thought were funny names,
like Donkey Kong, and Caesar was King Kong.
That's why the apes have "donkey" written on their backs, these turncoats.
Which again was inspired by true war stories.
This idea of not being able to see yourself in your adversary.
And really the central question of the movie is empathy
and how the extremity of war pushes us to a place
where we lose the ability to empathize with those
who we are caught in conflict with.
And that makes it easier to demean them and to destroy them.
And it's the horror of war.
And it's unfortunately a big facet of human nature.
It's interesting.
We showed the movie to some primatologists,
and they were saying...
We said, "Just out of curiosity,
"how accurate would you say it is to ape behavior?"
Even though the point of the movie is to do human behavior
as seen in these photo-real apes.
They said actually it was quite accurate in certain ways.
That Maurice was...
The behavior that Karin expressed through Maurice
was very much like an orangutan.
In fact, it's not a surprise, because Karin who plays Maurice,
she spends time with orangutans.
To learn how to play Maurice,
she, on Rise, got these visitations with an orangutan.
She created a very personal relationship with one of them named Towan.
She used to paint with Towan.
And now he has since died.
She modeled her performance emotionally off of Towan and her experience with him.
But they also said, the primatologists,
that the chimps behave very much like chimps.
And in particular,
one of the things that we think of as being really a human quality
is the ability to empathize.
And apes actually are very empathic.
And actually many animals are empathic.
What was interesting is that as we pushed Caesar into darker places,
the things that we might think of as his animalistic instincts,
this desire for revenge,
that was the thing the primatologist said was really more of a human thing.
And so it was interesting that the darker places we went
as we were exploring the nature of these characters,
the more human Caesar became.
And that revenge in particular
is something that is a particularly human trait and emotion.
Now what do we do?
REEVES: This scene we shot on, I think, the second day,
and it's so interesting to look at Amiah here,
because this is as young as she looks in the film.
And she was 11 at the time.
She just started sprouting up as we were going.
Amiah, she just was so wonderful.
When I was casting for Nova, we got a lot of young actors who came in,
and I threw out the script,
and I had Deb Zane, who was our casting director, be an ape.
And I said, "I'm not gonna tell Amiah what you're gonna do."
And I said, "Amiah, I just want you to relate."
Because the whole idea was, I wanted a young actor
who could form relationships with all of these actors who were playing the apes,
and connect to them in a way that felt behaviorally very real.
And she was fascinating to watch.
Here she's actually on Karin's back, which was really fun.
It's an interesting problem,
the idea of how do you get Karin to be an orangutan
and have this young woman on her back.
Because Karin is not the size of an orangutan.
So these were the kind of things, like, we wrote that in the script,
and then I sent it off to Weta and I said, "So, how do we do that?"
And they built Karin this big backpack so that we could increase her width
and make her seem to be the size of these apes.
Now here's something. So this shot here, which I think is amazing.
This sequence of shots, this is purely virtual.
They don't exist.
The first shot actually was shot in Calgary.
So that's where the textures come from.
And then this thing is shot on a stage,
where they go up and hide behind this rock and we have a bunch of fans going.
But the work that Weta did here was quite remarkable.
I don't know.
So the implication in this story is that there's some mystery.
The humans are killing their own kind.
And why would they do that?
In fact, the deserter
who deserted at that oyster shack where they found Nova,
who was not named Nova yet, but they found the girl,
all indicate that there's something else going on
that isn't even necessarily about the apes.
And, of course, the idea is that the virus that spread
from the ALZ-113, the viral delivery system,
which was used in part of the experimental treatment for Alzheimer's in Rise,
it spread and wiped out 99% of humanity.
The rest of the human survivors all carry the virus,
but they are immune to it.
And so they are the survivors.
They are the lucky or unlucky ones, depending on how you look at it.
What Mark and I were talking about was,
what's so interesting is the apes in the '68 movie are different from Caesar's apes.
They have these humans as cattle and the humans can't speak.
So how did that happen?
Mark actually did some reading about the Spanish flu,
and there was a theory
that there was a second outbreak of the Spanish flu,
and that the virus mutated and had a different effect,
and it brought on a kind of catatonia in the infected.
And we started thinking,
"Oh. Well, maybe there's a second wave of this flu.
"That the virus that all of the humans are carrying has begun to mutate,
"and that the way that it's spreading now is not killing people,
"but robbing them of the things that we think of as human."
Which is their ability to speak, their higher thinking.
So that the humans are beginning to devolve as the apes evolve,
and leading us further along that journey.
And so Nova is not Nova from the '68 movie.
Nova is an answer to how characters like Nova in the '68 movie
were created, which was the spread of this virus.
So it's an Easter egg for people who know the original film,
but it's also an explanation and an answer
to the question of how we get from here to there.
Winter said they were going to a border.
Yes, but which way is that?!
REEVES: So we have a shot coming up here
that is actually the one shot in the movie
where Steve Zahn, without the aid of computer graphics,
is Bad Ape.
Because this is him wearing that jacket, and he walks up.
The whole idea was that we realized we didn't want to see him as Bad Ape here,
because we want to hide who he is.
And so we realized we could actually shoot him.
So this is Steve in the one part of the movie
where Steve is not supplemented by the incredible visual effects.
But that's just Steve.
(ROARING)
(GIRL GASPS)
These stunts that you're seeing...
Now, they're actually done with real horses.
Our stunt people jumped up on the horses, and then we turned them into apes.
But we covered the performers.
So these are actually riders, not our actors.
We did their facial performances in the volume.
Although this one particular shot is purely virtual.
That horse and Caesar are totally CG.
But that's the only one in the sequence.
The rest of these shots are all stunt people riding horses.
Then we later paint out those actors on top and then cover them with the apes.
This was all shot in Calgary,
which is actually the same area where they shot The Revenant.
You can see those iconic peaks back there.
That little sign there, the Inn at Kettle Ridge,
James Chinlund asked me what the hotel should be called, and I said,
"I want it to be the kind of place
"where you could go back before the end of the world,
"and sit there in the cold and have a nice cup of warm tea.
"You could have some high tea and some scones."
And he said, "How about the Inn at Kettle Ridge?"
This set we built on the stage.
It's a beautiful set that James built.
It was inspired sort of by Doctor Zhivago.
As Mark and I were writing, we called this kind of like The Ice Palace.
With this idea of this old hotel
that was like The Overlook Hotel in The Shining or something,
that had long since been breached by weather,
and now the inside was the same as the outside.
And there was this little hoarder who lived here
and had been surviving on his own for years,
and had no contact with anyone,
except for the occasional soldiers who came through,
who he scavenged from and stole from.
And that's what he thought he was doing
when he was stealing the gun and binoculars from these guys.
And the big revelation to him is that there are more apes like him.
So Steve Zahn, who plays Bad Ape, who's just incredible,
I cast him over Skype.
He was down doing a TV series in Puerto Rico,
and so we just started talking about the movies.
He said how much he loved that we let things play
and that it was real.
And I said, "Well, that's because the whole thing is about performance.
"I'm trying to create an environment where the actors can play off of each other,
"and we can explore and find things,
"the way you would if it was an independent movie.
"And then later all the craziness comes in where we have to turn them into apes."
He knew that Bad Ape was supposed to be, in some way,
a source of comedy in the film.
But he also found him heartbreaking, which was really what Mark and I thought.
And he read the scene that's coming up,
where Caesar and he talk about their children.
And it was over Skype.
And the reason, truly, that I cast Steve Zahn
is because he made me cry over Skype.
I mean, he was doing that scene and he was so filled with emotion.
It was so true
that I was like, "He has to be Bad Ape,
"because not only will he be funny,
"but I know that all that humor is gonna come from this heartbreaking place."
I thought he was just extraordinary.
These scenes that you're seeing here were the first scenes that we shot.
So we started for him with what was the hardest scenes
to possibly shoot.
And it was a real challenge for him.
But it was really exciting to watch as he would explore,
and come up with little details.
Each ape that speaks in these movies expresses themselves in a different way.
And what I thought he came up with which was brilliant,
that was a chimpy thing was that,
right there, the... (EXCLAIMS)
Which is... Toby, in the last movie, he spoke a certain way.
He played Koba, and he spoke in this very guttural way.
He expressed himself as a bonobo. He watched a lot of bonobos.
He expressed himself in a way
that was very particular to the rage that his character felt.
Obviously Andy communicates in a certain way
that really has to do with his character.
For Bad Ape, the idea is that he's so lonely,
and he's just so happy to have company.
This is one of the greatest days that he's had in his life.
To discover that there are other apes like him,
and he can just have a conversation.
And so the thing he came up with that was a chimp expression of speaking,
is, I think, an emotional analogy
to the idea of going, "Oh, oh! Let me tell you."
And it was the chimp going... (IMITATES CHIMP SOUND)
I just thought he was brilliant and really inventive.
It was fun to watch him, and Andy, and Terry, and Karin, and Michael
play in this scene.
It was so great.
(STUTTERS) That's mine.
REEVES: This shot coming up right here is a perfect example of mo-cap.
Like, he actually did fall. It was a mistake.
And I just thought it was so funny that we used it.
And the great thing about performance capture is,
in any other movie you plan out the shots to such a degree
that there is no spontaneity.
But here, because all it is, is just a series of cameras,
we go on an exploration.
And we try different lines, we try different emotional takes,
and when accidents happen, when people fall over,
we can use them,
and it allows for the kind of performances that you are seeing here.
It's an incredible technology.
'Cause essentially what we're doing is recording these actors performing,
and then turning them into apes,
but you're really seeing them performing.
And it's not about the CG until much later.
Then when it is about the CG,
it's about getting them to look as much like the actors emotionally
as what we've seen.
I love that even in this scene here, when Steve was chewing those crackers,
the crackers were coming out of his mouth.
Weta was really careful to... As he spoke,
sometimes as he hits certain sibilant sounds,
those crackers come flying out.
Soldiers.
A deserted military camp!
On the border!
Maybe the Colonel and the troops are going there?
Is it far? Can you take us?
Human zoo?
No.
REEVES: It's funny because even in a scene like this,
certain things are taken for granted, like... These are just overs,
so you would figure, every time we just go back and forth with those overs.
You're shooting over Caesar or you're shooting over Bad Ape,
you're gonna return to the same shot.
And I like things to have an emotional continuity
so that you're not feeling too much change.
You're just focusing on the emotion that the actors are playing.
But each shot is done by a different artist,
so one over, even though they have the information,
the next artist may take that ape
and move him just a few inches to the left or a few inches to the right,
and suddenly, the overs don't match
and you keep seeing all these subtle changes
that take you out of the movie.
And so even that, in a movie like this, is an incredible challenge.
We look at the shots and then I'll say,
"Oh. I don't think you have the apes in the same position, "
and then they'll go and they'll check it and they say, "Oh! No, we don't."
And simple things that you would do in any other movie
are not simple in this movie.
BAD APE: Who is...
REEVES: In this shot here,
everything that you're seeing, the apes are put in,
but that blanket...
Weta was like, "We should keep the blanket."
So that's actually Steve under the blanket.
The movement that you see is Steve moving the blanket.
But then his head is painted out and Bad Ape is put in.
This is the scene where, when we were doing it over Skype,
Steve really touched me,
and I just thought this was one of the key scenes in the movie,
this relationship between these two apes.
And we shot these ultra tight Sergio Leone-type close-ups,
and the actors, when you look at this scene,
there's a version of this scene that looks just like this
that has Andy and Steve in it, and it affects me just as much, emotionally,
but, of course, it's incredible to see them become apes.
I had child.
You think you will find him...
REEVES: I love this next shot of Andy.
We worked really hard to make sure that he had the same pose, Caesar,
that Andy did, because I thought that Andy,
when he says, "I don't know. Maybe, "
he reminded me of like a samurai master or something.
He seems like a badass, which, again, is very different for Caesar,
because he usually has a level of empathy even though he's very strong and stoic.
Here, he's like, "Yeah, I'm gonna join you."
And this is one of those scenes, too, that when we were shooting this,
we did an exploration, and initially, this scene was very sad,
but then there was this idea that somehow
if this is what had happened to Caesar and what had happened to Bad Ape,
that these soldiers had killed his family, that maybe this was a chance for Bad Ape
to go back and to avenge what had happened to him.
And so there was a level of rage in his motivation
to take Caesar to a place that he never wants to go to again.
These shots, I think, are some of the most amazing shots.
I mean, Michael, who plays Luca, is so wonderful.
And all of those gestures you're seeing are his gestures.
And there's something incredible about the way that Luca looks
in this light, it's all natural light.
The hairs around his eyes, I just think it's astonishing.
And the hotel that you're seeing, we shot this at Whistler in a ski area.
And the hotel that's in that shot is not real,
but everything else is actually there.
And Steve, when he walked out in this shot,
he actually did come out in this jacket that Melissa Bruning designed.
Which we thought was so funny, because the idea is he's this hoarder,
he's staying in this ski lodge.
And there's little great skiers that are printed onto the shoulders.
This day, it was really snowing like this.
This was up in Whistler, and it was just coming down hard.
So that's another case where they have to take the snow off,
put the apes over the riders and then put the snow back on.
On these particular shots, actually, our actors did ride the horses,
so that actually is Karin with her backpack, the blue backpack that makes her thick,
and Amiah's holding onto her.
And that is Andy handing over that gourd.
It's amazing to watch all those things come together, really.
You kind of can't separate what's real from what's not.
Luca, come. Let's go closer.
Keep them safe.
REEVES: And then this scene also we shot in the heaviest snow.
And that's, I think, the thing that people don't necessarily realize
when they see these movies.
We took mo-cap into environments that I thought would add reality,
and if like in this scene, they're in the freezing cold...
When you're seeing Andy, and Terry, and Michael in the freezing cold,
they actually were in the freezing cold.
And it's raining in certain scenes. Well, they're actually out there in the rain,
and they're wearing their mo-cap suits, they've got wet suits on underneath.
I could look like the Michelin Man.
I wore this very thick coat that kept me warm.
But nobody had to track my movement, but we did have to track their movements.
So we had to figure out how to keep them warm in the utter cold
and damp weather that we were in.
And this is one of those scenes
where, for the most part, we try to use, when the humans are in the shots,
we try to shoot what are called human passes
where it's just them acting by themselves,
but with Amiah, I wanted the interaction to be so intimate
that Weta actually had to, again, paint out the actors
and put in the apes, so that they could have this intimate contact
and all of the actors could play together and have this very emotional moment.
And I thought she was so great,
and I thought that Michael was amazing, especially in this little moment
right here, where he just...
It's so interesting 'cause what you're seeing on Luca
is exactly what Michael did.
His face, the muscles just finally relaxed
and you could see the life ebbing out of his face.
It was just a wonderful performance.
(CONTINUES CRYING)
Caesar...
This must stop...
REEVES: And the idea here was that Maurice,
who really is Caesar's conscience,
he's that tether back to his decency and humanity.
He inadvertently touches a raw nerve
in accusing Caesar of being like Koba here
because he's really so filled with rage.
And for the first time, we see a rift in their friendship,
really, for the first time in the three movies,
'cause they are incredibly close.
And he rejects him.
It was a mistake bringing you all.
This is my fight.
I will finish this alone.
Go.
Now!
Join the others.
(CHITTERING)
(PANTING)
REEVES: We shot this in Mount Seymour in British Columbia.
And it was so cold. (CHUCKLES)
And then, everything beyond that
is actually a virtual representation of our set,
based on photography that we did with drones,
because this area, up top,
was in a different location from the camp that was down below.
Because no such thing existed,
there were no mountains around our camp.
That set is the biggest set in the movie,
and, actually, I was told by Fox production executives
that it was one of the biggest sets
that had been built in a great number of years at Fox.
It was a huge, huge set that James Chinlund designed.
And we built, basically, the flat area, that was the set,
and then the mountains that surrounded it were all virtual,
and it was, again, another model that James built
and then Weta realized and pulled that off.
And so we were constantly shooting this set, trying to keep in mind
the things that were in the set that weren't visible to our eyes yet,
and that's always the challenge on these movies is to...
You try to have as much real in the camera as possible,
but sometimes much of what is meant to be there, just isn't there
and you have to always keep that in mind
because your shot might be better framing for something that isn't there yet.
(FOOTSTEPS APPROACHING)
(CAESAR GRUNTS)
This scene, right here, Woody is so inventive and smart.
And he was like, "You know, this is a big moment.
"I mean, we're like the two most important leaders left on this planet."
And he said, "Oh, you know, this would be like
"Custer and Sitting Bull. Wellington, Napoleon."
And I said, "Well, yeah, but you're talking to an ape.
"How's that gonna work?" And he said, "Oh, that's easy."
He goes, "You're probably not much of a reader."
And I was like, "Okay." (LAUGHS)
And so Mark and I just wrote that right into the script.
REEVES: Woody is an incredibly inventive actor,
and he had a lot of input into the script.
Because we wanted to humanize the role as much as possible.
And he unerringly had ideas that added depth to his character.
And so the idea is to have the story,
because it's an ape-point-of-view story,
you are with Caesar
and you are emotionally identifying with his desire for revenge.
You want revenge. You saw his family murdered.
And the idea is to implicate the audience in that choice,
is through the identification that you have with Caesar,
make you want revenge, and then to go along on a journey
that finally brings Caesar face-to-face with the Colonel
and allows Caesar and then the audience to confront that question,
as to whether or not revenge, in that sense, was the right thing to want.
And I think that's sort of the trick of these movies.
It's sort of like that thing in Dial M for Murder,
where Alfred Hitchcock
has this scene where they're planning to kill Grace Kelly
and you're hearing the plan laid out beat for beat.
And then when the scene starts happening, you're afraid for Grace Kelly,
you're like, "Oh, no. She's gonna get killed."
But everything starts going wrong and something very strange happens,
because you know the plan and because of the point of view of the scene,
you actually find yourself, despite yourself,
feeling bad for the killer and starting to think,
"Wait! No, you're doing it wrong!" You're really worried for him
and you feel bad for him,
and you even want him, in a certain way, to kill her.
And it's a real sort of amazing thing that Hitchcock is doing,
where he's getting you to be implicated
in this idea that you could get drawn up in this concept of murder
and desiring it.
And it's a brilliant thing that he does.
And I try, in everything I do, to use point of view as much as possible,
because the idea is to put you in the shoes of a character who you're not,
and in these movies, you become an ape,
and the idea is to extend your empathy and your sympathy
so that you can recognize yourself
in the experience of a character who is very, very different from you.
(APES CHITTERING)
Father!
REEVES: This was this enormous set that James built,
and yet as big as it was,
it wasn't nearly as big as what you finally see in the movie.
(GRUNTS)
This scene was meant to be a sort of awakening for Caesar,
where he's wanted revenge all this time
and his selfish desire for that has put his apes, his family, in jeopardy.
And for the first time,
really, since the beginning of Rise where they had no respect for him,
the apes are turning their backs.
Lake...
Forgive them.
We've been through much.
(CORNELIUS CHITTERING)
Father!
What have I done?
REEVES: This wall there was supposed to be...
You only see it fleetingly, but it's...
Mark and I had conceived of it as how they were trying to contain the virus
and that there would be
an almost state-long border wall,
which was actually meant to keep the sick in California,
since it started in San Francisco in the Muir Woods.
And they would've built a wall to contain the virus,
and, of course, it didn't work.
And the idea was that this armory, because it was on the border
and because there were already train lines and things to it
because it was about keeping heavy arms inside the mountain,
was turned into a relocation camp.
(ALL CHEERING)
And this idea of Alpha-Omega comes from Beneath the Planet of the Apes.
They're praying to a nuclear weapon.
And there's this very scary scene that I remember as a kid,
where the humans turn out to be mutants,
and they peel off the masks that they have, their human faces,
and they say, "I reveal my inmost self unto my God."
So we thought, "Oh, we should use this here, "
because they would think they were the beginning and the end.
It would become almost...
Take on the level of an almost religious fervor.
And here they're playing the national anthem
with the idea that this is the last...
It's all that's left of the U.S. Army.
And they're trying to hold on to any sense of the world that once was
with a kind of fanatical purpose.
Initially, we had...
We had the Jimi Hendrix version of that in there.
We ended up not being able to get the rights to that.
But it was also very unnerving,
and somehow when we started playing it with the band,
it was even more unnerving.
(ALL GRUNTING)
This building of the wall was meant to be...
(CHITTERS)
Sort of something out of a biblical epic,
this idea of the apes being imprisoned and enslaved.
And Mark and I watched Ben-Hur and The Ten Commandments,
and the idea was to put Caesar through an epic journey
and, yet, also to raise the narrative question of,
"Why would they be building a wall?"
It's interesting how that ended up having a different resonance
to current events as the story continued.
It was strange and entirely coincidental.
(RED DONKEY GRUNTING)
Now, in a scene like this, performance-capture can only capture
about a dozen apes at a time.
There's so much data that the computers have to hold
on the movement of just 12 people
and yet, there are meant to be hundreds of apes.
So when I'm shooting it, I frame-up on the actors
and then I put a couple of extras who represent, maybe, 50 apes in one place
and 50 in another.
And they're not actually there at the time,
and then what we do is, we go back into the volume,
which is that space where the mo-cap cameras are
in a stage where there's no sets,
and we take the takes that we have cut together
and we flesh out the rest of the action.
And so these guys up here,
some of them were on the set, but most of them weren't.
(ALL CHITTERING)
And so we went in there with our actors and our ape stunt performers
and fleshed out all of these shots.
And, of course, there are no mountains back there.
So when you're shooting, you've got Andy, you've got this amazing set,
you've got the human actors.
And then bit by bit, over the course of the year,
the shots start becoming more real, more fleshed out,
and containing much more detail and information.
(ALL CONTINUE CHITTERING)
This scene, as Mark and I were writing it, we imagined it as a kind of prison riot.
But their cheers will soon be over.
And this is the amazing thing about Andy. I mean, Andy,
like in that shot where they're pulling him across the yard,
he wants them to push him harder.
He wants to... He just...
He's willing to go to places in order to portray the emotion.
And they weren't actually physically whipping him,
but emotionally, it sure felt like they were, based on the way he was playing it.
- (WHIPPING) - (RED DONKEY GRUNTS)
(GRUNTS)
(CAESAR EXHALES)
And this is another example
of where we used the shots where the actors were together,
so Woody actually is looking at Andy there.
And then he reaches over and touches his face.
And then this idea of Ape Elder getting shot,
that's the character's name, as we know him,
this orangutan who Woody shoots,
that was Woody's idea.
He said, "You know, I... "
He said, "I think I need to kill one of these apes very early on
"so that you know from that point forward that I mean business."
And we always talked about everything he does is very purpose-driven.
(LAKE PANTING)
And so that was his idea.
And he was right.
And it was very disturbing to watch,
just the efficiency and the coldness with which he did it,
just flares, takes out the gun, and that's that.
Hurry! Back to work!
REEVES: And this is Sara, who plays Lake...
(HEAVY BREATHING)
Trying to get them all to work so that Caesar's life can be spared.
That gun is actually against Andy's head, in both these shots.
String him up, donkey.
REEVES: And these X's that you see are actually...
They're iconography that's from the Planet of the Apes.
You see these kind of strange X scarecrows from the '68 original,
and then there's a very strange
series of images that the mutants are creating
to scare off the apes in Beneath the Planet of the Apes.
They have this power to create illusions,
and some of the apes are hanging on crosses upside down.
And so the X's were...
The inspiration really came from watching Planet of the Apes, again,
and then, obviously, it applied to those biblical epics as well.
Oh!
REEVES: That set wasn't actually up there, it was just Woody on a scaffolding,
very high up where there would have been that structure
because we didn't have anything that was vertical.
The set was totally flat and horizontal.
And anything that was higher up, we had to create
and then actually flesh out with the CG.
(GRUNTS)
And so the reason that we're playing Hey Joe here
is because we thought it worked really well in the scene.
He was listening to a lot of Hendrix,
and unfortunately, we didn't get the first piece of music,
that Star-Spangled Banner,
but this is a perfect example of where Woody's input affected the script a lot.
The scene was very much like this.
But Woody wanted to make sure
we could humanize the character as much as possible,
which was my goal, as well.
And one of the things that he wanted was, he said, "I need..."
Mark and I had written the reference to his son,
and, obviously, it was clear that he had to kill his son.
But what Woody wanted was the actual moment where he killed his son,
he wanted to relive it in front of Caesar.
Which, I thought, was brilliant
because it was a way to get Caesar to empathize,
for the first time, with the Colonel.
That he would suddenly see that the extremity in this man
had been created through the extremity of his situation.
And that he was brutal, and yet there was
an understanding of where that brutality came from,
and the desperation that the humans must be feeling,
and the excruciating, probably mind-shattering pain
that the tragedy of what he was confronted,
what he had to do to his own son.
The impossible choice that that was, what that would have done to him,
how he responded by taking on
a sense of purpose that was almost religious.
It was his place to sacrifice his son
so that he could keep that virus from spreading.
And so it made him probably act in a grandiose manner,
but at the same time, there's truth to what he says.
The interesting thing about the Colonel
is there actually isn't anything he says in the movie that is false.
He's telling the truth.
It's just, the truth that he has to tell is very dark.
And, in fact, he is the one who says this will become a planet of apes.
He's right.
And that was intentional by Mark and I, we wanted to really,
sort of, not have you be able to write him off solely as a villain.
To say, "Hey, you know what? He's actually right.
"And if we were in this position,
"how far might we be pushed to go?
"What would we consider?"
Something that was morally acceptable, what kind of brutality?
You're smart as hell.
REEVES: And, in a way, the interaction between the two of them
was inspired by another Pierre Boulle story,
a war movie by David Lean,
which is a great movie called Bridge on the River Kwai.
And the idea was that there was a war that we wanted to depict,
that was between the species, obviously,
but the most important war was this battle of wills
between these two characters,
who are on either side of the battle.
And, of course, the most important war being
something even more intimate, which was the war for Caesar's soul.
That the war that is the most violent is the one inside Caesar,
and whether or not he could transcend his desire for revenge
and find the way to do the right thing and to deliver his people.
Or if he would be consumed by his rage and sense of revenge
and, essentially, become what Koba became
and be destroyed.
And it felt like
if he could pass that test,
that that would push him truly into the realm of the mythic
and that his character would be,
or who he was would be
not only an inspiration for the apes who followed,
but he would be an explanation
and it might be the birth of a religion,
that you would look at the history and say,
"If it weren't for him we wouldn't be here, "
and he would take on a mythic, almost super-heroic quality
and would be the kind of myth
that the apes might need, to define their lives.
...he looked at me...
trust in his eyes.
REEVES: And this was the moment that Woody really wanted,
so Mark and I wrote this for him.
I felt his... love.
(GULPS)
I pulled the trigger.
It purified me.
It made my purpose clear.
I gave the orders to kill the other infected. All of them.
Burn their belongings...
REEVES: This was a scary scene for Mark and I to write because
we had, aside from the opening crawl,
you know, we had virtually no exposition in the movie,
that and the trench scene, just to let you know where you were entering the story,
but we just had these clues, this evidence.
Caesar was on a revenge mission, he's coming in search of the Colonel
and he's finding murdered soldiers and a mute young girl
and walls are being built by the apes.
They're not being exterminated immediately. Why is that?
And the idea was that because the battle wasn't just a battle
between humans and apes, but also between the Colonel and his superiors
who do not believe in the way that he is dealing with the situation.
They think he's too extreme.
And this scene shifts that whole paradigm
so you understand the coming conflict
in a way that you had no idea it would be,
it's gonna be a fight right here, to the death, between two human groups,
and the apes are gonna be in trouble if they're here.
They turned it into a relocation camp
when the crisis was just beginning.
But the weapons are still here...
inside the mountain.
CAESAR: How many men...
will be coming?
Probably all of them. But don't get any ideas.
The only thing they fear more than me is you apes.
This is... a holy war.
REEVES: The Colonel really believes that he can do everything
driven by the purpose, the purpose of saving humanity,
this idea that he would have no problem being brutal
if it meant that there could be a future
where brutality was not the order of the day for his species.
And it let him do unspeakable things,
but in his mind, for a greater purpose.
And this whole idea of emotion that drives Caesar,
which up until this film has been the core of his strength,
his ability to empathize.
That here he's losing control of his emotions.
The Colonel demeans this idea, but of course he doesn't want to admit it
but he's just as driven by emotion,
so he's frustratingly accusing him
of being just too emotional here.
And I love the way Woody did that.
As you can see, that here he is talking about him being too emotional
and it's clear that Woody is very emotional.
As if somehow you could separate that aspect of your nature
from who you are.
What do you think...
my men would have done to your apes if you had killed me?
Or is killing me more important?
(PANTING)
Soldiers everywhere!
How will we get in?
REEVES: In a way, when Mark and I were writing
this counterpoint of Caesar
involved in this very mythic, epic, dark trial,
and the idea that the hope for the apes was this completely unlikely group,
that was something that really intrigued us and that we enjoyed.
And in a way what the whole concept is that
the apes are acting in light of
the way Caesar has instilled
a sense of morality and decency in them.
And earlier in the movie, the idea is that when they're saying,
"Well, what are we gonna do?"
Maurice and Rocket say, "Well, we have to think, 'What would Caesar do?"'
And the idea is that they need to find a way, over the course of this movie,
to rise to the occasion
so that they can become
a population that has a future without Caesar.
That they will take
the things that he taught them, and values he instilled in them,
and that they will be able to move forward.
And the idea that Bad Ape is an ape who didn't have those values.
He implies that there are other apes out there.
This virus spread and...
He's a hoarder living by himself, a hermit,
but there may be other communities out there
and they would not have had the benefit of Caesar's leadership.
And so, who knows
what they might be like?
And in my mind, that meant that that could be an answer
to how Caesar's apes become like the apes in the '68 movie,
who enslave the mute humans.
And the idea is that future conflicts
might not be between Caesar's apes and humans,
but actually between Caesar's apes and these other colonies of apes
who aren't Caesar's apes, who might be quite brutal.
And they might be much more like the apes of the '68 movie.
(CHITTERING)
What?
What you see?
REEVES: So this scene here, we did the "Ape-pocalypse Now" idea
because it seemed like the humans who were all kept in this camp,
they were all dying of the Simian Flu
and they were desperate to get out of this imprisonment
and it seemed like it was very much human nature to be
aware of it in a way that was tragically funny.
And that was sort of an idea of sort of gallows humor,
that they would look at their situation as the "Ape-pocalypse Now."
And obviously Apocalypse Now, the forms of that movie
were an inspiration for Mark and I as we were writing, too,
this idea of moving up the river metaphorically,
which was really out across the landscape of California and into the Sierras,
looking for the answer to the mystery of who is the Colonel,
and why is he this way.
(SHIVERING)
Koba!
(SHIVERING)
Sleep.
You cannot save them.
Apes all die here.
REEVES: In the earlier scene when the water was poured on Andy,
we did that in the volume,
and the water was supposed to be warmed and...
We just forgot to do it,
so the reaction you see is actually his reaction
because cold water was poured on him,
and he really did have that reaction.
And afterwards we were all so apologetic and Andy was like...
(CHUCKLES) "Well, it worked for the scene."
He goes to work like everyone else...
REEVES: That was one of those things too, where Woody,
when he did the scene, he said, "I feel like I have to touch him."
I said, "Go ahead."
She go in!
(WHIMPERING SOFTLY)
REEVES: As Mark and I were writing this,
this was one of our favorite scenes because...
The girl who was an innocent,
she was that last bit of humanity,
that flicker of humanity that was burning
and keeping Caesar from losing himself totally.
And he didn't want her along and yet she's what saves him.
And she gives him that doll to comfort him.
And of course, that's the doll that is going to
spread the virus to the Colonel.
And when we were shooting these scenes it was raining like this.
It was freezing and cold.
And Andy was... That actually is Andy, drinking.
And Caesar's on top of that.
I mean, the alchemy of these different shots,
between what's real and what's not, is kind of amazing.
The idea is that this girl is so inconsequential,
she's wearing that little military jacket, that nobody would care
or see her or think about her.
And as a result, because she was essentially a nobody, a disposable soul,
she could come in and show some compassion
and be the first step to bringing Caesar back to life.
And really, the apes in this scene...
It's the first real scene where the apes begin to accept her,
and over the course of the movie, really, Nova becomes an ape.
And the idea here was that...
The love that Caesar had shown the apes was now being reflected back to him,
and he'd won them fully back now.
They were no longer lost to him,
and that this would be the thing that would save his life.
That the spark would be Nova but then the apes,
saying, "Apes together, strong," would be the thing
that was going to keep Caesar alive.
(DISTANT INDISTINCT CONVERSATIONS)
(FOOTSTEPS APPROACHING)
Hide!
Quick!
Humans will kill her!
I know what to do! Go!
REEVES: This is one of my favorite Rocket moments in the movie.
Incredibly brave, not necessarily the smartest idea,
but actually ends up being a brilliant idea.
And he's willing to sacrifice himself and potentially die.
SOLDIER 2: Let's go!
Keep 'em up!
Follow him down.
SOLDIER 1: Keep them up!
(SNIFFS)
(RED DONKEY GRUNTS)
REEVES: That's one of my favorite shots in the whole movie.
There's something about the way Weta was able to realize Caesar in this scene
that you get the emotion of Andy's expressions
but also the detail in his face, he's so startling.
Especially in those shots when he's staring at Woody.
And here, because Woody had that idea, that he should kill Ape Elder,
it keeps alive the idea that
maybe this is going to be the death of Rocket.
So it was a terrific idea he had.
And Michael Seresin had this idea to have all those roving searchlights
as a sense of menace in the scene,
and I think they're happening throughout the camp,
and I think they do add this great sense of atmosphere
and it does seem like a classic war movie in that sense.
There again, this is the other angle.
Those two angles of Caesar looking at Caesar,
I just think, are remarkable.
(RED DONKEY GRUNTING)
(APES CHITTERING)
This is one of those things that I love that Terry did.
He gets beaten to a pulp
and he's barely lifting himself up and Caesar's worried,
"Is he gonna make it?" And then he's smiling,
which is a very Rocket idea and a very Terry thing.
(SIGHS)
Good.
REEVES: And then the act ends and you know
that from this point forward, we're in a new mode,
which is that the apes, together, are gonna get out of this mess.
They got to find some way to escape.
(BREATHING DEEPLY)
COMMANDING OFFICER: We are the beginning!
SOLDIERS: And the end!
(ALL YELLING)
REEVES: This, to me, was like a classic Western showdown.
And Andy doing this like Leone thing, and so Michael had
the music in a kind of Leone mode, a showdown,
and the little spring sound you hear,
that is actually a piece of percussion
that was designed by his son Griffy.
Because Michael always tries to have his kids
design one of the instruments
and so it's basically a little
piece of metal that has some nuts and things on it
that shake and then have a huge reverb on it,
that, to me, sounds like spurs in a Western.
I thought this was like a big showdown scene,
so it worked perfectly.
And that's the beginning of the end for the Colonel, picking that up.
What is this?
How did this get in there?
Get him to work.
REEVES: I thought this music was so inventive from Michael.
This very rhythmic,
percussive music.
That was a feeling of a plan that was afoot,
but also, the apes and their work and being forced to work.
(GRUNTS)
I like this scene between Ty and...
Ty, who plays... We call him Red,
but he's the turncoat gorilla here.
...when wall is done.
REEVES: Ty played him with a nice level of bitterness.
It won't save him...
any more than it will save you.
And this is where Caesar gets into his head.
And for me, this is the seed that's planted,
so that in the end
he becomes an ape again.
And the idea, being a war movie, was to watch the apes
and what they themselves might do for survival.
And how you might turn against your own kind
in order to just survive.
And he could never believe,
and none of the apes that followed Koba could believe,
that Caesar would accept them back,
because they all made an attempt on his life.
And they would assume that he was gonna have them killed.
And so they're willing to live
as third-class citizens,
as virtual slaves just in order to live another day, to survive.
And the journey of the movie is to get Caesar to connect to him in a way
where he wants to become who he is again.
Ape?
Me...?
Ape?
You are...
Nova.
(BAD APE GRUNTING)
Come! Come! Come see!
Come! Come see!
REEVES: This next scene...
The scene was actually lit by the actors themselves.
They had these flashlights.
And the idea was to allow the apes to hold these flashlights
and have Nova hold the flashlight,
and that that would be the source of light in the scene,
and it actually was.
And so, it was all just to try and add this level of reality.
So you would look at this and think, "How is this not real?"
What?
REEVES: (LAUGHS) I think Steve is brilliant in this scene and so is Karin.
She was so annoyed with him like,
"Don't you understand what I'm talking about?
"Just get on my back."
This is one of my favorite sequences in the movie
because you get this sense of impending hope
but also, kind of, the ridiculousness of the whole thing.
And I think Steve and Karin were just brilliant in it.
And when we shot this,
we actually had a hole that could hold one person
on the set and a camera.
So this shot is virtual, but the digging shot is real
and Steve is down there in his mo-cap suit, and we had a little hole,
and his head came up through it looking just like that.
There's a version of this scene that looks like this scene,
except with the mo-cap actors, 'cause it was all on the set.
And it surprised me how well it worked
without them being apes yet.
And then of course once they became apes it worked a lot better.
But this was all very much Steve.
He had this whole idea about
when the ape would come over to shake his hand,
he noticed that he couldn't really keep his head up there
and bring his hand up and so he tried to stick it up
and then go down and then bring his hand up...
Thank you.
REEVES: He was really very funny.
Bad Ape.
(MAURICE GRUNTS)
(BAD APE YELPS)
(CHITTERING)
(STUTTERING)
What's wrong?
(CHITTERING)
(MAURICE STRAINING)
REEVES: So, obviously, this section was very inspired
by The Great Escape, which Mark and I watched,
and the movie transforms really,
from being a war movie in the opening battle
to becoming like a revenge Western war movie.
And then, in this section,
they're imprisoned and are trying to escape
and it's very much The Great Escape with apes,
in a certain way, just in terms of the energy.
What's nice is that, for a movie that has been as challenging as it is,
that there's a bit of hope here, and even some comedy.
And it's one of the sections that I just enjoy watching.
And us with them!
We'll have to get the children out above ground!
How...?
REEVES: What I like about this is the idea that with what happens in the next scene,
this is now Caesar thinking of what they're about to do,
and when you realize what they're about to do,
there's something in my mind, which is that that expression
obviously precedes the conversation that they must've had
in which they described that they would do exactly what you're about to see.
And exactly how that conversation transpires,
I don't know, but it makes me laugh to think that it did.
Hey!
You animals!
REEVES: That was Caesar's brilliant idea
that they should lure him down in this particular manner.
And in this scene,
this is, again, supposed to be like a Western showdown moment.
And Rocket standing there with the goo in his hand.
As he stands up, there's like a very distinctive sound
like a horn, and it's actually Michael Giacchino playing on a ram's horn
which was a ram's horn from the 1968 original.
I told you he was a Planet of the Apes fanatic,
but this sound right here...
This thing where it goes... (MIMICS HORN)
You'll hear it in a second.
There you go, that's Michael blowing on the ram's horn
from the original Planet of the Apes.
- (YELPS) - (THUDS)
And of course, we actually did pull him into the hole,
and did toss up the keys, so that's all practical.
(MAURICE GRUNTS)
I think a lot of the fun in these movies has been
the humans underestimating the apes.
And that's also one of the fun things about this sequence.
Being right above their heads and sneaking by
and since Rise, that's sort of been a fun thing,
and obviously that plays out in a very dark way
with the soldiers in the armory.
The colonists in the armory in Dawn
where Koba plays the fool and then murders them.
(CORNELIUS COOING)
I love you, son.
(EXCITED CHITTERING)
REEVES: Michael's score cycles through all of the themes
that you've heard in the movie in this section.
Just keeps changing themes, kind of taking you through the journey.
Go, go, go.
And this next scene right here was originally longer
and it's actually one of the few scenes...
We're gonna have it in the deleted section, you can see it in there.
...where we actually got all the way to having the scene fully rendered
with the performances as apes
and then we realized that we needed to trim it down,
and Terry Notary, who plays Rocket,
gives just a wonderful performance in this scene.
And it was one of these things where the scene played
as if there were too many final goodbyes.
You can only have so many final goodbyes,
and it was actually undercutting the emotion of the end of the movie.
And so, very late in the process,
we decided to trim the scene significantly.
But it always sort of broke my heart
because Terry gives a wonderful performance
as he's looking at Caesar for what he thinks might be the last time.
But now, the scene ends here.
Go, go, go.
COMMANDER: Fire!
REEVES: So, on the set, all these explosions are practical.
And what we do is we have...
Like, Steve... I planned out this shot with Steve.
And he's standing there and I'm calling out the explosions and he's reacting
and I'm getting his performance.
And then, he steps out, and then, without him there
we play the very same camera move, only now, the explosions go off
to where I called them.
And then it becomes the shot that you see.
(OVERLAPPING YELLING)
EXECUTIVE OFFICER: Colonel! Colonel!
Where the hell is he?
REEVES: Gabe's character had a few more scenes.
And there was a point
where he seemed like he might be someone
who was gonna show the apes some mercy.
And then, it turned out not to be the case at all.
And Caesar thought that he might have an ally in him,
and then, he's disabused of that notion.
And the movie was very long, and so, we ended up not keeping those scenes.
The thing that was important here to track
was that Caesar was still on a mission for revenge.
And this scene, I would love to be able to show you
the performance of Andy
side by side with the performance of Caesar,
because it is the same.
I mean, when we shot this, Andy was so emotional,
and the guys from Weta who were there
were saying, "Oh, my God, this is gonna be one of the hardest scenes
"that we've done with Caesar, "
because the intensity that Andy was expressing was so strong,
it felt like he was gonna burst a vessel. He was just so intense.
And Woody was incredible.
And the shots that you're seeing...
Again, this is a scene that we never could have done
without them together. They are together.
Except for those shots which, again, are meant to
bring you directly into the experience
where, for this moment right here, you literally are...
The camera is the Colonel, and Caesar's looking at you, wants to kill you.
And now you're Caesar, and the Colonel is looking at you.
And the performances that these guys gave in the scene, it's just amazing.
And what's so interesting is...
There's certain things you can't always get exactly right.
And we went through a number of passes on Caesar and they really got the emotion.
It's exactly like this, but the way that tear moved down Andy's face and dropped,
they couldn't get it to quite happen that way on Caesar.
So eventually what they did was they took Andy's tear from the take and used it.
And so, there are a few places in the movie
where Caesar's tears aren't CG, they're literally Andy's.
And this scene is one of those scenes
where, you know, the artists take what they can.
That little... Right here, too. See, that little jiggle on his eye,
that is Andy's.
And it's funny because if you look back...
I remember Andy telling me about Gollum.
And there are some places where Gollum is...
They shot him on the set and then, they went back
and got Andy to redo his performance but he was there on the set.
And he was talking with such ferocity that he was spitting.
And they kept it.
So, Gollum's spit was actually Andy's spit.
And many of Caesar's tears are actually Andy's tears.
(RASPING)
And this was one of these scenes where, in talking with Andy and Woody...
Mark and I wrote it a little differently to begin with.
I don't even quite remember now exactly what it was.
But Andy said, "You know what I really would love to do
"is I would like to take the gun,
"and I'd like to leave it just within the Colonel's grasp
"and give him the option to finish it himself."
And there's a real ambiguity here.
And I think if you were to ask Andy, he also wouldn't know.
There's a war in his soul. He doesn't want to kill him.
He doesn't want to be consumed, but he also really wants to kill him.
And is his leaving the gun behind mercy or not?
But in any case, the idea is that he will not be consumed anymore
by that Koba rage.
- (GUNSHOT) - (CASING CLINKING)
And he does stay long enough to see it.
(GUNFIRE)
But that also, that desire for revenge,
in the poetic sense, is actually the thing that does kill Caesar.
Because had he not gone back, he wouldn't be in the position he is
when Preacher gets him.
But then, there's another irony as well because had he not been where he was,
he wouldn't have been able to save the apes,
which, of course, is also what happens.
OFFICER: Colonel, are you in there? Colonel!
Just break it down.
REEVES: And these shots coming up
of the ape massacre are meant to mimic the opening.
And in the opening we saw
the turncoat gorilla watching the massacre
in a very ambiguous and cold way.
But somehow, now, seeing them getting massacred
in this moment, after all he's been through, and his experience with Caesar,
he's really seeing them as apes now. He's seeing his connection to them
and it's starting to affect him.
Grenade launcher!
And then the idea here was having him see that Caesar
is willing to put himself in tremendous danger
in order to save the apes
really affects him to the place where
he finally regains himself in the coming moments.
(PANTING)
(GROANING)
God damn it, donkey! Get me the launcher!
(GRUNTING)
REEVES: And now, for a brief moment,
the gorilla is an ape again.
But, of course, it's very short-lived,
and just as Caesar was willing to sacrifice himself,
he finally is okay with sacrificing himself for Caesar.
(GUNSHOT)
Now, this explosion that's coming up,
it actually is 100% real. We were on the news.
We set off this explosion.
There's a supplementation in this last section here.
That stuff there, knocking down the wall.
But everything else is real.
And it was such a large explosion
that people felt it around Vancouver.
And we were on the news, people were worried
and then they said, "No, no. It's just a movie."
(CHITTERING)
The idea here was that
they'd been through so much, and the apes were essentially out of there.
But Caesar's still down there by himself,
and there's yet one more thing to contend with,
which is the final arrival of that northern army.
(SOLDIERS CLAMORING)
And there they are,
cheering the success that is, in some way, actually because of Caesar.
But their success is short-lived...
(CHEERING)
because of Mother Nature coming in.
When Mother Nature's coming in, it's a lot bigger
than everyone here.
And people have said, "Wait, is this kind of a cheat?
"Is this the way they get out of it?"
And actually, in my mind it wasn't.
This was our, kind of, parting of the Red Sea.
It was the act of God that would pit the two species against each other
and the stronger one would win.
And the only reason Caesar even reveals himself
is because of the awesome power of the avalanche that's upon them.
So, he could have just escaped,
but the avalanche and what is about to happen
is too awesome. And it draws him out.
And suddenly, they're pitted against each other.
And the stronger species will win. And so, it's the Darwinian test
(SOLDIERS YELLING)
that is going to end up in the apes being the victors in this particular moment.
But it's a trial that Caesar must go through.
And he is at the lowest place, of course, in the mountain.
And the idea was to watch him go through
this very, sort of, mythic challenge.
Oh, no! Oh, no!
REEVES: And you see the humans just decimated.
And for a moment you think that it's gonna be easy for Caesar.
That he's gotten away. 'Cause they're down below.
And then, as we turn here,
turns out that he is in for it.
Weta literally has a new program that enables them to grow a forest.
And to have the trees have that natural variation that they would
because the trees... There's so much variation in nature
that when you create a forest it almost invariably looks fake.
But that shot where those trees were falling
was one of the first times that they used it
because it actually had a perfect application here,
'cause this stuff was all virtual.
And we shot it on that fluorescent lit stage, and then, Weta took it
and just brought in this incredible detail to it.
(APES CHITTERING)
(WHOOPING)
REEVES: Well, the Colonel was right.
He said that, "You apes are stronger than us, and you will replace us."
And at least with these humans that we see here, that is what happens.
And it's the cruelty and indifference of nature.
They happen to be stronger.
And through their will and strength, they survive.
And the humans weren't as fortunate.
And so, they make their journey toward the homeland that Blue Eyes found,
where they were meant to go, and they finally do make it here.
And when we shot this scene, it was near the end of the shoot.
And it was very emotional 'cause we all knew what it meant.
I had done two movies with Andy,
and some of the people had been around since Rise,
and it was just a very significant moment.
And it was interesting because we started rehearsing
and we did a take, I think, even,
and the way Mark and I wrote it, Maurice didn't actually speak.
And something about the scene wasn't feeling as emotional as it needed to be.
And in the last movie, as we were exploring speech,
I always felt that it needed to come from a place of emotional urgency.
That the apes could communicate non-verbally,
and then they had sign language which could communicate information,
and that... When that first "No" that Caesar says in Rise comes,
it makes your hair stand on end
because he's been waiting to say no and been trying to find the way to articulate it
throughout the whole movie,
and suddenly, it comes with this emotional force.
And it felt like that's where the verbal expressions needed to come from,
a place of emotion. And when I walked up next to Karin,
before I said anything, she just turned to me and she said,
"You think I should speak, don't you?
"You think I should say these words, not sign them."
And I said, "I was about to say that." And she said, "I feel the same way."
And so we did the scene spoken
and it changed the whole scene.
And she actually did really lose it when she realized
that this is where Andy's character died.
And you can see that's... This was all...
The way he says, "Don't worry, Maurice."
This "Maurice" was an improvisation,
because Karin was so distraught
and Andy wanted to make her feel okay.
But the whole idea was that this was a test for Caesar's soul
and he passed that.
But it was also a test for the apes,
and they've now reached a place where,
through this challenge, they also have matured.
And now they're going to be able to make it without him.
And so, it really is a goodbye.
And this was a very emotional shoot for us.
It was the last movie for Caesar,
and also, just personally, Andy's mother died during the production.
And on the very last day of production my father died.
And the films are very much about family.
And we were... My father was dying as we were shooting this,
and as Mark and I were writing it.
And I think we were all aware of our own personal connection to this scene.
And it informed the way we shot it.
And still watching it now, I'll always think of my dad,
and I'm sure that Andy will be thinking of his mother.
The movie is very much about fathers and sons, and families,
and this idea of him looking at his son
and imagining not being there, and not getting to see him grow up.
And that thought is a very sad thought.
I certainly was thinking, looking at Andy looking at his son,
of what a painful idea that would be, and Andy just played it so beautifully.
And when we were shooting, he wasn't supposed to pass on camera.
The shot that you see that tips up to the sky was gonna have,
superimposed over it, his close-up of his eyes,
and then, he was going to shut them.
Just as he shut his eyes, it was gonna cut to black.
But then after a couple of takes, I just said, "You know, Andy, go ahead.
"Why don't you let go?"
And then, the way that Karin played it
as Andy was passing was just so heartbreaking.
And everybody just fell silent.
She began to gently stroke his leg to comfort him during his passing.
And it became clear that that should be in the movie.
And so this shot in particular, we were all watching.
It was just Karin who was stroking Andy's leg,
and everyone on the set was crying.
And I was like, "I think that has to be the end of the movie."
And so it was.
With the idea being that it would end
like a biblical epic.
This would be the passing, the moment that he became the legend.
And that was the end of my journey with Andy and Caesar,
and it was an amazing five years.
And I'm so happy to have been in this world so...
And I know that a lot of people have that connection to Caesar and...
Thanks for listening.