Director Matt Reeves on’War,’ the last film in trilogy
In 1998, JJ Abrams and Matt Reeves created a show called “Felicity” about a young woman who follows her high school crush to college.
Since then, Abrams has had success with “Star Wars,” “Star Trek” and “Mission: Impossible” franchises, and Reeves with “Cloverfield,” “Let Me In” and “Dawn of the Planet of the Apes.”
And now Reeves, who was recently named the director for the upcoming “The Batman,” has a new film, “War for the Planet of the Apes,” which opens Friday.
“War” is already drawing praise for being both an epic adventure and a story with humanity.
Did Reeves’ days on “Felicity”have anything to do with that?
“As weird as it sounds, I use the same approach,” says Reeves. “It’s in having a connection to the characters, which is where the story really flows from, whether it’s a young girl going off to college or a photo-real ape who is having a war within himself.”
The director stresses that for him it’s important to let audiences experience things through the character’s eyes.
“I feel like I need an emotional compass to hold onto in order to understand where to put the camera, how to talk to the actors and what the scene is about,” he says.
In “War,” the apes’ leader, Caesar (played in motion capture by Andy Serkis), is trying to lead his band of refugees to a safe haven away from the remaining humans.
Simian flu has killed most of mankind. For a while, an uneasy truce existed between the two species, but in “Dawn” that was shattered by Koba, an ape who sought revenge on his former captors.
Koba is gone, but a specialforces colonel (Woody Harrelson) and his battle-hardened men are relentlessly pursuing Caesar’s
“One of the things that was fun for me coming to the series was that these films aren’t remakes. This is an attempt to explore the same world, but from an ape’s point of view.” — Matt Reeves
tribe.
Reeves points out that “War” is the first of the nine movies in the franchise to be told primarily from the apes’ point of view. So at first you might write the colonel off as a cardboard villain, but that’s because Caesar only sees an unyielding enemy.
Reeves and his co-writer, Mark Bomback, had something more in mind, though, and leave clues that the soldier is a more complex character.
“Woody understood that and he was very inventive in the way he portrayed the colonel,” the director says about Harrelson, noting a lot of subtle touches to his performance.
Serkis is the acknowledged master of motion-capture acting, having portrayed the creature Gollum in”The Lord of the Rings” and “The Hobbit” trilogies as well as the title role in “King Kong.”
“With Andy I’m working with one of the best actors in the world,” says Reeves, who thinks that it is nonsense to only see Serkis as a motion-capture artist. The filmmaker explains that the sensors merely record data of the actor’s performance so you can see their expressions and body movements.
“It’s still about finding those surprising moments where things feel alive,” says Reeves, “and Andy will push himself as far as anyone will push themselves as an actor.”
While “War” also pushes the boundaries of motion capture and introduces new visual effects, Reeves wanted to keep the film as real as he could. So he filmed out
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side as much as he could.
“I thought in ‘Rise’ the apes looked more realistic and believable in natural light,” the director says about the first film in the current trilogy, which was directed by Rupert Wyatt.
In “War,” the apes are heading for the California coast across the Sierra Mountains in search of a new home. So Reeves filmed a lot of it in the forests of British Columbia.
“A lot of time Andy and the other actors were out there in their motion-capture suits in the freezing cold and snow,” the filmmaker says.
“War” is the final chapter of this particular trilogy, which was conceived as its own story. It is based on the world that French writer Pierre Boulle created in the 1963 sci-fi novel, which was later turned into the 1968 film starring Charlton Heston.
“One of the things that was fun for me coming to the series was that these films aren’t remakes,” notes Reeves. “This is an attempt to explore the same world, but from an ape’s point of view.”
Still, as he and Bomback were writing the script, they were looking at the world Boulle created, and that led them to two new characters in “War.”
Steve Zahn plays a character called Bad Ape. Reeves and Bomback decided that there had to be other intelligent apes out there other than Caesar’s group.
Bad Ape is an intelligent chimp that escaped from a zoo and has been surviving on his own. Along the way he has picked up a rudimentary ability to talk, which up until now only Caesar could do fluently.
But because he’s been alone for so long, Bad Ape is kind of goofy and doesn’t really know how to act with his own species. He calls himself Bad Ape because that’s what he heard at the zoo.
“What he is,” says Reeves, “is this sweet, lonely ape desperate for company. And we were excited for the opportunity to put some humor in the film, which generally hasn’t been in any of the other ones.”
Another new character is an orphan human child called Nova, played by the young Canadian actress Amiah Miller, who is adopted by the group over Caesar’s objections.
The character should not be confused with the Nova of the 1968 film, although like that character she is mute.
When wondering how humans would change, the screenwriters decided that a second wave of the simian virus might mutate, “taking away one of the things that make us human — the ability to speak,” says Reeves.
The filmmaker calls Miller, who had no dialogue, amazingly intuitive. “With Amiah, I just threw away the script and told her I wanted her to relate to what you’re seeing in these apes.”
Nova was also important for another reason for Reeves.
“Caesar is going on this very angry revenge mission, and her presence represents decency and humanity, a part of him he wants to suppress,” he says.
What’s fun about making a “Planet of the Apes” film, says Reeves, is that “there is just enough fantasy to be able to smuggle in things that make people think.”
But if you’re wondering why the franchise has resonated with filmgoers for nearly 50 years, Reeves thinks it mostly comes down “to seeing human nature expressed in the faces of these animals. It’s really a reminder that we are animals.”