UP SO CLOSE WITH THE ‘APES’
BY MICHAEL ORDOÑA >>> “War for the Planet of the Apes” has its epic moments — apes riding horses on the beach, a battle at a snowy mountain fortress — but they’re not the film’s most amazing accomplishments. Those come nearer to the movie’s heart. ¶ “This is all about close-ups,” says senior visual effects supervisor Joe Letteri, a four-time Oscar winner who’s nominated again along with visual effects supervisor Dan Lemmon for “War.” Letteri says director Matt Reeves “told the story in really long, lingering close-ups. That subtlety of performance, where the camera doesn’t blink and everything is on screen; those are, to me, the moments a character lives or dies by.”
And that is a big deal. These are performance-captured, computer-generated, talking apes the audience must believe exist. The viewer has to believe they think and feel.
The final installment of Reeves’ “Planet of the Apes” trilogy has far more ape dialogue and emotion than the others: protagonist chimpanzee Caesar (Andy Serkis) has evolved over three films into a more expressive being, formed by tragedy and love, leading a new society.
“You have to be right there with that character,” says Letteri. “You have to look into Caesar’s eyes and know what he’s going through.”
Over the seven years of the trilogy and 15 years of the cinema-changing work that Letteri, Lemmon (an Oscar winner for “The Jungle Book”) and the rest of New Zealand effects house Weta Digital did on the “Lord of the Rings” films, “King Kong” and “Avatar,” they relentlessly pushed forward.
Lemmon says, “One of the things that’s great about our job is these kind of nerdy, technical problems; when you get them right, they turn into pictures that are much more realistic and compelling than they ever were before. So you get to solve this interesting technical puzzle, but you also solve a creative, artistic problem … [it] enables people to tell stories that wouldn’t have been available even 10 years ago.”
“War” couldn’t have been credibly executed without advances they’ve made recently, says Letteri: “If the first film had been all about ape dialogue, it probably would have ended up looking like a guy in a monkey suit.”
They cite the growing skill of the artists on their team, mixed with technical innovations that have allowed filmmakers to, say, shoot performance-capture sequences live with other actors and to take those scenes
outside — out of sound stages and into realworld environments, such as those snowy mountains.
But it gets nerdier than that.
Letteri and Lemmon say the Wetadeveloped tool PhysLight fixes the problem of characters and objects moving through varied lighting environments and their light and color not behaving realistically.
Lemmon says, “Now, on set, we can record all the real-world light data in a scene and measure its spectral wavelengths coming to a given point in an environment. So now our computer-generated apes have the same light” as in the real world.
Working with Serkis since 2002’s “The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers” has helped them learn subtleties and tricks they could apply to other actors’ work.
Letteri laughs and says, “We’ve spent a lot of time looking at Andy’s face. His is probably the most studied face on the planet. We’ve really learned to tease out what these details and nuances are.
“So when you get a character like Bad Ape, Steve Zahn, throwing something new at us — all that dialogue — we had a good foundation to build on, we knew how to get there.”
Serkis has expressed particular awe at Weta advances in depicting eyes — the material, the fluid, reflections of light in them.
“We’re up close on all of these characters in long, extended performance pieces,” says Lemmon. “All of that stuff happening in the face, in the eyes, the audience has to totally engage with.
“We’d put Andy side-by-side with Caesar [on monitors]. Andy, I’d see he was angry, but also a little sad. Caesar, I’d see the anger, but wasn’t reading the sadness yet. So what is it about Andy’s face that we’re not getting? It could be that Andy has these particular folds that chimpanzees just don’t have. He has this skin fold above his upper lid that we adapted into the design of Caesar.”
Letteri says the solutions “vary from case to case. For instance, chimps don’t really have eyebrows, which are very important to expressiveness. So we built these extra fat pads in, around where the eyebrows should be. If we really need to emphasize them, sometimes we’d tease in a little extra light to emphasize the line. So visually, you think you’re seeing eyebrows and expressions, but it’s all done with lighting.”
Lemmon says, “One of the things the critics touched on was that you end up more engaged with the apes and their struggle, and rooting for them to overcome the last vestiges of the human race. So if you can get human audiences rooting for their own demise, hopefully that’s a sign you’ve done something right.”