Capone interviews RISE OF THE PLANET OF THE APES director Rupert Wyatt!!!

Hey everyone. Capone in Chicago here.

Unless you saw his 2001 debut feature SUBTERRAIN or his 2008 work THE ESCAPIST, it's not likely that you'll have heard the name Rupert Wyatt, the director of RISE OF THE PLANET OF THE APES, so one might wonder how he got the gig in the first place. Perhaps more importantly in the film community, Wyatt and several of his filmmaking buddies formed Picture Farm, a production house that has put out several shorts and features since it was formed eight years ago.





Beyond that, I can tell you that Wyatt has made one of the best films of the summer and of the year so far. About the interview, it was conducted just prior to the RISE panel at Comic-Con a couple weeks back, so I hadn't seen the film or even the clips they played during the panel as yet. During the interview, I was scraping away for details about plot points, some of which are pretty well known at this point. But having now seen the movie, I can say with utter confidence, I can say with utter confidence that Wyatt was dodging some of my questions, and rightfully so. Still, this was a fun interview and much longer than your typical Comic-Con interview. I got this weird sense that in the maze of interview rooms and events happening this day that the Fox representative might have forgotten about us for a brief moment. Please enjoy Rupert Wyatt…


Capone: Obviously, we are here before the panel, so I don’t know what you are going to show yet. But at any point during the preproduction was there any debate about whether you were going to do this motion-capture approach? Was there ever any sort of discussion about that?

Rupert Wyatt: Well, no, and the simple reason is is because the story is about real apes, real chimpanzees and orangutans and gorillas and such. We wanted to tell the story in a very real world sense, so there’s no way actors could have played those…

Capone: Actors have played…

RW: Not a humanoid… Do you mean in terms of the other movies?

Capone: No, I just mean sometimes they will put a human in a gorilla suit or something, even in a realistic gorilla portrayal.





RW: Well gorillas yes, you're quite right with gorillas, but when you look at chimpanzees their anatomy is so different, they have these long torsos and then these four short legs, and so we just never could have pulled it off. I went straight into this project thinking I had two choices only and that was live apes or performance capture, and I was very new to performance capture, I hadn’t done it before and had never worked with it before, so I didn’t really understand what I could achieve with it until I sat down with Weta and really talked to them and found out that they have so evolved themselves interestingly and ironically from KING KONG back in 2005. It’s so interesting, when you make movies so often you kind of look to reference other films, especially from a studio point of view, they want to have the comfort of that and they want to see, “What’s this movie going to look like? Can we reference other movies that have created photorealistic characters?” No other film had.

Capone: So Andy [Serkis] must have been the first, maybe the only, choice in terms of doing Caesar.

RW: Yeah I think so. I think we were obviously very fortunate to get him, and I think in some ways we were actually a little skeptical as to whether we would, and I say that in the sense that he has played obviously King Kong. He was sort of the Holy Grail for us and so the very fact that…

Capone: You’d have to get somebody like him. “No, why don’t we just get him?”

RW: Exactly and so when we put out the feelers to get him--we did that obviously through Weta and Joe Letteri and they have a very good friendship and working relationship--the response came back almost immediately, “Send me the script, and let’s take a look.”

Capone: This is not a remake of any of the other films, but it’s a story that’s been told and referenced in the other PLANET OF THE APES films. This is that story, yes? I don’t want to ruin it, but will Caesar speak at the end of this movie?

RW: The way the characters communicate is in the same way that apes in our world communicate, and we've been very, very keen to preserve the plausibility aspect in the storytelling and so without giving too much away I would say that Caesar, for example, is taught sing language and therefore there is an aspect of that kind of communication, but that’s really controversial, because a lot of primatologists don’t believe that apes can sign.

Capone: They think they're doing a progression of movements that get them a reward without understanding their meaning?

RW: Mimicking, exactly…

Capone: I just saw PROJECT NIM, which is out right now. Have you seen it, yet?

RW: No, I haven’t seen it, but I heard it’s great.

Capone: It’s practically a prequel to your film, minus the drugs or whatever.

RW: No, This American Life actually did a piece on the story of Project Nim, and so I remember in preproduction actually listening to it and thinking “How close…”, and I’m sure the writers you would have to ask them, because I don’t know, but I’m sure the writers knew of Nim and echoed various aspects.

Capone: There are certain things that are almost eerily the same ,as far as I can tell.

RW: But there is one creature, a humanzee basically, this odd hybrid in many people’s eyes of a chimp and a human, called Oliver.

Capone: A real one?

RW: Yeah, in the 70s. There’s a documentary, and you can check it out on YouTube, but they ultimately discovered him to have DNA that was a very, very rare subspecies of chimpanzee, so he wasn't human, but he walked like a human, he looked like a human, and he had these amazing eyes where you looked into his eyes and you saw a real thinking, sentient being.

Capone: From the trailer, I can see that one shot of Caesar with his eyes closed and he looks up, and it’s like he’s thinking, more like plotting.

RW: Yeah and that’s Andy. That’s totally Andy’s performance.

Capone: Obviously, we get a sense that his intelligence is increasing exponentially, but do we see that it’s maybe a little bit terrifying for him that it’s happening so fast and he doesn’t know how to interpret all of this data?

RW: Yeah, I mean the film in many ways is broken down into three acts, and they're very clearly delineated acts in terms of the mood and the tone and the piece and early on in the film it’s very much a fairy tale, because everything is sort of seen through Caesar’s eyes, and so he sees the world for all of the beauty that our world possesses and he sees the glass half full in all of these different scenarios. And he learns from humans and he wants to be like a human, and then something happens and that just turns the world on its head for him and it becomes a much darker place and a much more threatening place.

He is then really sort of thrown out of our community and our society and he’s neither one thing nor the other, he’s neither ape nor human. He thinks like a human, he looks like an ape, so even his own kind, the apes, turn their back on him like he’s a freak. I think, it’s at that moment there that the story really starts to kick off in terms of the beginnings of the revolution and how he’s going to rise through the ranks of his own kind to become their alpha in order to turn the tables against us. That’s our story.

Capone: Nothing excites me more than watching a group of people be skeptical about a film, and then see the first trailer and just say, “Holy shit, this looks great.” You must have gotten a sense that that was happening when the first trailer hit.

RW: Well no, you tell me. I’ve had my face at the glass for so long I can’t tell.

Capone: Well, that’s what happened, like people just went, “Oh that’s what this is.” I don’t think anyone really had a sense of what you were going for. That shot of the apes on the rooftop just took my breath away.

RW: Well, it’s a great premise, the idea of an ape revolution taking place within our world and our society.

Capone: Did you care that much about linking RISE to the bigger universe of the PLANET OF THE APES films?

RW: Certainly. I mean it ties in, it’s part of the mythology. What the writers did, and they made certain choices when they were writing the script to kind of reference other characters from other films, and I would say that there are certain character… I don’t want to give too much away, but there are subtle nods. If you look in the background of one shot you might see a café called “Nova,” or it’s trying to kind of work its way into the mythology and sort of give the audience I guess certain Easter eggs to enjoy, but at the same time have a real resonance and a real logic as to why that is. And Icarus, for example, does play a part, but at the same time, we're very much an origin story in the real sense of the word, and therefore we're starting fresh and we are deviating from the mythology from CONQUEST, for example, where the plague wiped out domestic pets.

Capone: That’s right, that’s why we took apes in as pets.

RW: Yeah, we were to take apes and domesticate them, and that’s where the revolution starts, and we have done away with that and we've actually, frankly, tried to place it in a more plausible, real-world context. In this day and age, it’s a not a futuristic scenario, it’s about modern science and the beauty of what modern science can provide us, but at the same time the potential hazards of it as well.

Capone: The clip that just came out the other day of Caesar coming to John Lithgow’s rescue after that car accident and the fact that there’s a character with Alzheimer’s in the film, it adds sort of an immediacy to James Franco’s character, sort of pushing this forward maybe a little recklessly.

RW: Yeah. If you take the Dr. Frankenstein story, it’s that kind of sense of hubris, but at the same time it’s born out of a real genuine desire to achieve something, and he has personal motivation to do that through his own sort of connection to the disease. You really understand what his motivation is now. The fact that he pushes the envelope to such a point that it has these repercussions I think is the beauty of the story in many ways, and that’s what’s really intriguing, but you could relate it to Dr. Frankentstein in that respect.

Capone: Speaking of which, who are we going to be rooting for in this movie?

RW: Without a doubt, the apes. It’s very much Caesar’s story in terms of it’s his journey that we follow. He's our protagonist ultimately and it’s very much like the baby in the basket floating down the river and that river gets larger and larger and grows into something a lot more epic than perhaps it starts off as being. It’s very different to the other films in the sense that obviously in the original we were very much on the side of the human’s albeit the mute, savage humans, but Charlton Heston was our protagonist, and in this it’s actually a story told from the perspective of the apes.

Capone: How did you get your name thrown in the hat to do this? I’ve got to imagine this was a fairly coveted project. This didn’t come out of your production company, did it?

RW: No it didn’t, I was brought in as a director for hire. I had a relationship with Fox. I was developing a script with them. They knew of me. They knew of my previous film, THE ESCAPIST, which is why they brought me in to develop something with them, and then I had a predecessor, Scott Frank, on this project who was going to direct it and who had developed it. He left, and they obviously made the decision to still make the film. Obviously this is part of a hugely important franchise for Fox, and it’s one where there is so much mileage in the story and the mythology. And the great thing is is as much as people sort of say, “Nothing is new in Hollywood,” and “Nothing is original.” This is actually an original script. It’s not a remake, it’s an origin story, and from here hopefully there will be other films that will then take the story and develop it.

Capone: Is that the plan? Is that hopefully what you're hoping for?

RW: Yeah I would imagine. I mean, I don’t know. It all depends on how many people go see this movie I guess, but it’s like I came into it, I read the script and it was the script first and foremost, it wasn’t the sense of “I would love to make a PLANET OF THE APES.” I read this script. And because it is such an unusual story in relation to the other films, it didn’t read as a PLANET OF THE APES, it read as its own self-contained story It was really appealing in that respect, so I just pitched for it and had my numerous meetings with the powers that be, and eventually they gave me the job.

Capone: What do you remember about seeing PLANET OF THE APES for the first time?

RW: I saw the first one I think when I was about 12. They used to show it in England every Christmas. It was this sort of perennial holiday movie.

Capone: In the States, we watch IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE; in England it’s PLANET OF THE APES.

RW: It is, it’s very odd. So for that reason, I always equate it with Christmas and family, but yeah, it’s a huge part of British culture as much as it is in America.

Capone: Do you remember your actual reaction to the ending?

RW: Yeah, my last film had a similar ending in a sense of “everything that you have witnessed isn’t necessarily how one imagines it to be,” and there’s a different I think between shaggy dog stories and different windows into a story, and I certainly tried to do it with the last film. I think the original PLANET OF THE APES does that so brilliantly, because it’s not even about sort of pulling the rug from the audience, it’s making sense to the audience of what the actual movie that they have just witnessed has been about, and the “planet of the apes” is actually our planet, and even in the title it’s great. So, I think it’s one of those films that obviously is a part of one’s growing up.

Capone: Like most great science fiction, there's sometimes a political subtext or just a text, maybe not so sub-, or a sociological comment to something. What is sort of the underlying message here? You could look at it as medical experimentation gone awry, but is there some other thing in there about society?

RW: Well it is. Like all of the APES films it’s about the zeitgeist in terms of our hero in itself I think very much fallible heroes, questioning heroes, those that in a way have to suffer for their success and everything. They always seem to be heroes of an age of turmoil and conflict, and that’s certainly obviously our age, and I think in a way that’s why Caesar represents the perfect hero for our times for me. Ironically, he is very human.

That question always comes about, because obviously PLANET OF THE APES is known to tackle much bigger themes than perhaps the science fiction with origins and civil rights and the ever-present fear of nuclear annihilation. Certainly, this is a story told within a microcosm. It takes place within the confines of San Fransisco and the immediate area, so it’s not a global story. It’s not about oil spills in the Gulf of Mexico, although we see them on TV sets within the story, and that was my opportunity to try and kind of pepper that in, because I thought that would be fascinating to do to sort of open the story up as much as I could.

But I think it’s about the idea of what science can do for us and how it can harm us. It’s not about a morality tale; I’m not a fan of “Careful what you wish for,” or “Science is bad” and “We should not dabble with things we don’t understand.” There are certain characters within the film that are proponents of that kind of cautionary tale, but for me it’s not about that. The great thing is is here is a man who has found a cure for a disease that… It would be wonderful in our world obviously to find a cure for that disease. It just so happens in our fictional world that that cure then has these side effects.

Capone: Rupert, it was great to meet you. I’m really excited to see the film. Thank you.

RW: Thank you so much.

-- Capone
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