Matt Reeves on War for the Planet of the Apes

Imagine yourself as filmmaker Matt Reeves, who made a splash in 2008 with the found-footage science-fiction film Cloverfield and then directed Let Me In, the English-language remake of Let the Right One In, followed by Dawn of the Planet of the Apes. Handed the opportunity to contribute a second film to one of the longest running and most provocative science fiction film franchises, Planet of the Apes, what would you do with it?

What Reeves definitely wouldn’t do is create a generic, commercial blockbuster – that’s just not his style, he says. “It’s all about your approach to the story. I don’t know where to put the camera if I don’t emotionally understand what the scene is about.”

The result is a deeply emotional film. The CGI is so seamless, you sense the 'humanity' of the apes, allowing a deeper level of identification, which troubles the original film's narrative. “It’s about the emotional temperature of things: the decision not to depict any of the characters as stock villains, and to have an empathy and understanding of the perspective of all the characters, even the ones who do despicable things, so we can look at this story as really being a mirror of ourselves,” says Reeves.

War for the Planet of the Apes takes the story of human versus ape in an alternative future into very topical territory. Any idea of peace between the species has collapsed. Ape leader Caesar is going to launch a final attack on the humans, but is conflicted about his own decision. “Its place in the series is specifically what we do in times of war,” says Reeves, “the ways in which we lose empathy for those who oppose us, and how that leads us to great atrocity and darkness. That has political implications: the question of empathy and our struggle with it is one of the big issues of our time.”

Reeves and co-screenwriter Mark Bomback dived into war films and westerns to find inspiration for the film’s tone, devouring “war stories where there was a context of spectacle, but what really mattered were the intimate relationships in the foreground,” he says. That means films like The Bridge on the River Kwai (also written by Planet of the Apes author Pierre Boulle), The Great Escape, The Outlaw Josey Wales, Apocalypse Now and Paths of Glory.

It ends up working as both a war film and as science fiction. The way the director employs nature is reminiscent of Terrence Malick’s use of landscape as a storytelling device in The Thin Red Line, and, crucially, there are rich characters beyond our ape hero. “It was important to me that the war wasn’t just a war between the species,” says Reeves, “but it was also a war within Caesar and other characters.” 

Of course, being a huge sci-fi blockbuster, visual impact also matters. The evolution of special effects technology within just the last few years has resulted in amazingly photorealistic apes, created by SFX firm Weta via hair, skin and moisture simulation. “All of the detail on the apes is of such higher quality that these are by far the best effects that have ever been done – it’s astonishing,” say Reeves. However, he adds, it’s not an SFX-centric movie. “The things that make the performances come through are not technological – that has to do with the artists themselves, because that’s interpretative,” he says, citing Andy Serkis’ portrayal of Caesar.

Serkis is the actor who has single-handedly made motion capture a widely used art form, and has done the best work in the field as a performer. “He and the other actors give their performances and bare their souls, and it’s the animators’ challenge to figure out how to translate the emotions on the faces of humans on to the different anatomy that is the faces of apes, and that’s a very artistic process.”

Serkis' turn in War for the Planet of the Apes is his most vivid performance in the series. You definitely see the best use of his talents as a motion capture artist since the original Lord of the Rings films. He is joined on screen by Woody Harrelson as his antagonist, called simply the Colonel.

“He’s incredibly smart and inventive,” says Reeves of Harrelson. “He had lots of brilliant ideas that we just had to write into the script. The idea of a war film is to look at how the conditions of war can bring the worst out of us, and one of the things that makes it difficult is that everything the Colonel says is true. That’s upsetting, because from their perspective he is extreme, but he has been made in extreme circumstances. Hopefully it gets you into the position that if you were in his shoes, you would not be tempted to do the things he does.”

Thanks to his gruelling production schedule, Reeves hasn’t done anything but work for months, but he’s now keen to see the new Twin Peaks series. He’s also getting started on directing a new Batman project. “I hope to tell an emotional Batman story that’s very rooted in his character,” he says, adding that he sees commonalities between Caesar and Batman – both are “tortured souls who are struggling to do the right thing in a very imperfect world.”

Another intriguing project that Reeves has been attached to for a while is a new film based on the Ray Nelson story Eight O’Clock in the Morning, also the source of John Carpenter’s They Live. It will not be a remake of Carpenter’s movie – although they share a jumping off point, he says – but a Taxi Driver-like psychological thriller, “following this lonely soul who is suddenly burdened with information: either he is right, or he is crazy.”

Planet of the Apes is the only reboot series with heart and soul, coming from a place of creativity rather than rehashing a franchise for profit, and this third film proves the most emotionally effective of the recent trilogy, with intelligent performances and fantastic special effects.