Dawn of the Planet of the Apes is definitely one of my most anticipated movies of 2014. Matt Reeves has taken over the directing reigns from Rupert Wyatt, and there’s a lot of pressure on him for that since ‘Rise‘ was such a great film. Below there’s some excerpts from a recent interview with Thompson on Hollywood. He had mentions the scope of the next film, the wonder of Andy Serkis, and some actual plot points from the film.
Reeves talks about what to expect in the upcoming film:
Caesar talks at the end of the movie, he has some level of speech. I wanted to make sure we’re continuing to go along the path of evolution without missing it, it was so delicious to watch in the first movie. It’s not like now they are talking in verse. Hopefully the movie is emotional and thrilling as you watch the apes come into being … The ape civilization is in the woods, between Vancouver and New Orleans, the world after what happens with the simian virus flu. The two main locales are San Francisco and the Muir Woods where the ape civilization is born. We’ll be doing a little shooting in San Francisco as well. A lot of the Louisiana shooting was to build huge wood sets outside in the woods to add realism, enormous exterior streets. We’re shooting in the rain, in the wind, all on location out in the open in the elements.
He also went on to comment on just how BIG this film is compared to the first one:
The crazy thing is the giant scale of this film, which is enormous for any movie, so much bigger. The only way it works is from an emotional intimate point-of-view. It has all the things that drive me to do something, an emotional core, as Andy, Rupert and Weta did on “Rise”: How do you become an ape? How emotional it is, the emotional intimacy. It’s a huge adjustment. It’s not only on a scale for me that is obviously larger than anything I’ve done, but huge for any film in this particular way: this is the first movie at this level to do native 3-D on an enormous canvas and mo-cap that is 95 % shot on location. The mo-cap shooting on the first movie was done really on the stage. It’s enormous do this in a naturalistic space. And it’s an exciting learning curve.
Finally, he goes on to talk about Serkis’ prowess at motion-capture acting:
Andy is a great actor, it comes down to that. The first thing I did, I wanted the VFX people to take me through all the footage on the last movie before and after of Andy so I could understand what he was doing. I was so impressed, we all know he’s a genius. I wanted to get under the hood, and they showed some minutes in scenes with even more going on, I’m hoping to pull those things out.
The film stars: Andy Serkis, Jason Clarke, Keri Russell, Gary Oldman, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Kirk Acevedo, Toby Kebbell, Enrique Murciano, and Judy Greer, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes opens on July 18, 2014
~Chaz
