THE LAST PLANET OF THE APES TRILOGY ENDED WITH WAR AND DEATH. BUT NOW, RISING FROM THE ASHES, COMES KINGDOM OF THE PLANET OF THE APES. AS CAST AND CREW TELL US, THIS ONE’S A WHOLE NEW BEAST
Rick Jaffa motions to the tidy, unassuming workplace in which he and his screenwriting (and life) partner, Amanda Silver, are sitting. Speaking to Empire, the duo are flashing back to 2006, and the moment they realised that the thriller script they were working on, inspired by true-life stories of people adopting baby chimps (which “always ended badly”), could be the key to rebooting Planet Of The Apes —dormant since Tim Burton’s maligned ‘reinvention’ five years earlier.
They saw it as a character-piece about a genetically enhanced chimpanzee “raised as a boy, like Pinocchio,” says Silver. “But he has to learn who he really is and, once he embraces his ape-ness, he can lead his apes to freedom, like Moses.” By entwining their simian ‘Pinocchio-to-Moses’ idea with Apes lore, they were able to unexpectedly resurrect a franchise.
Released in 2011, Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes (directed by Rupert Wyatt) used state-of-the-art performance-capture VFX to bring an astonishing new level of realism to the series, with mo-cap master Andy Serkis —formerly Gollum and Kong —anchoring the drama in the role of Caesar. This furry Moses sparked a series of world-shattering events that would eventually, Jaffa and Silver suggested, lead to the weirdly inverted talking-ape civilisation we saw in the 1968 Charlton Heston-starring original.
Caesar was a role Serkis would portray all the way to the grave over the following two movies, 2014’s Dawn Of The Planet Of The Apes and 2017’s War For The Planet Of The Apes, both directed with gritty panache by Matt Reeves. So with their epic “character-piece” concluded, Silver and Jaffa’s work was done. They moved on to other projects, such as the live-action Mulan, and Avatar: The Way Of Water (plus its sequels). They weren’t expecting to be pulled back into the Planet Of The Apes’ orbit. So when that happened, it was, says Jaffa, “a bit of a surprise”.
It was a surprise for Wes Ball, too. In September 2019, the director of the Maze Runner trilogy was summoned to a meeting with Emma Watts, chief executive of 20th Century Studios. Ball was still licking his wounds after his talking-rodent fantasy epic Mouse Guard —produced by Reeves and starring Serkis —had been cancelled by its new parent company, Disney. But Watts had a consolation prize in mind. One with a close connection to his Mouse Guard collaborators.
