Rise of the Planet of the Apes Movie Review

Director Wyatt on ‘Rise of the Planet of the Apes’.

In his 2008 debut film ‘The Escapist,” director Rupert Wyatt detailed the prison break of a group of inmates. For his second, the upcoming action film “Rise of the Planet of the Apes,” the filmmaker moves on to imprisoned primates. A reboot of the classic “Planet of the Apes” franchise, “Rise” features James Franco as a scientist looking for a cure for Alzheimer’s disease. The real star of the film, however, is Caesar, a chimp that is raised by Franco’s character and portrayed in real life by

performance capture specialist Andy Serkis, with the help of digital-effects company Weta Digital. We spoke to Wyatt about “Rise of the Planet of the Apes” ahead of the film’s presentation at Comic-Con later this week and August 5 release date.

Speakeasy: This is only your second film, following 2008′'s “The Escapist,” which was more of an independent film.

Rupert Wyatt: Everyone has an independent background in the beginning. I was fortunate to make the leap.”The Escapist” had a $2 million budget and this film is obviously on a very different scale. Interestingly, it’s the same process, but with a lot more people. It didn’t phase me in that respect. The challenge was understanding how when you’re operating on so big a ship, you’re only as good as your crew. Delegation is important, because you can’t put your fingerprints on absolutely everything. In terms of performance capture, I’d never worked with it before, so I had to learn quickly how we were going to go about using it. I had to learn the implications of using it; for example, every time I wanted to change a camera position, there was a huge process involved in terms of re-rigging everything around the camera and making sure there were witness cameras. It was very time consuming, so preparation was the key to all that.

Production on this moved pretty quickly.

Yes, especially when you think of “Avatar” taking four years. I came on in January 2010 and started pre-production in April. We were shooting by June and wrapped in September, and have been in post-production ever since. Towards the end, everyone [on the film] was working seven days a week, and pulling 18-hour days. We had an original release date of June 24, and very quickly into post-production, everyone realized that to finish this film by then, we would need more time. Because it is a process to, and I include myself in this, understand the technology. It’s not like [the film] comes out of the oven and it’s fully baked and done. Every single shot goes through six or seven processes where you start with a basic ape and then you animate him and turn him into an animated ape that has lighting. Then you give him fur, and you give him eyes, and you render him. When you get to 900 shots, the animators are echoing the human performance, but there are still discrepancies. Chimps do not look like Andy Serkis, and so if Andy has a furrowed brow and looks scared, when that expression is adapted for the ape, who has a heavier brow, it can look more intimidating instead. So you have to work on factoring that in and redrafting, which is very time consuming. I think there were roughly 900 shots and 1,100 to 1,200 effects shots.

Was it liberating to be able to shoot atop an outdoor replica of the Golden Gate Bridge, as opposed to one inside a closed set?

Being able to shoot performance capture outside was new to both Weta and myself, because they were learning as much as I was and they’re the best in the world. We had to create a “volume” on a live-action exterior set. When you’re talking about a set that’s 300 feet long, it’s quite a task. The preparation was a real challenge. You’d have to ask them about how many times [the technology] broke down. For me, it never broke down. Okay, maybe once we got held up because of a technical issues, which is impressive. It spoils you. The one thing there was a delay, I was like, ‘Why are we waiting?’ [Laughs.]

Another great thing about working with Weta is that they focus as much on the story and the telling of the story as they do on the technology. They love working with actors and filmmakers who aren’t geeking out on just the technology, but looking to use the technology to make something that is narratively compelling and translating what they can do behind the scenes into fully-realized characters. That’s the beauty of performance capture and that’s what’s going to make it so revolutionary. For the first time in cinema history, we can perform characters that are not us. It’s like being the body in the puppet.