Interview conducted by and copyright Edward Gross
As has been well established by this point, the film explores the ramifications of genetic experimentation on chimpanzees by a scientist (James Franco) who is desperately searching for a cure to his father’s (John Lithgow) Alzheimer’s Disease. The results of this experimentation triggers a series of dominoes that will result in humanity’s decline and the ascension of the apes.
Wyatt, best known for directing The Escapist, can’t say much about the film at this stage, though he does reveal that the film will feature different facets of evolution that are as significant for the apes as the discovery of fire and learning how to use a wheel were for humans.
“There are a lot of things that relate to how we’ve evolved as a species,” he says, “and the great thing about movies, and the ability to do this in a story, is we’ve been able to show all of that evolution in one generation of this chimp [Caesar, played by Andy Serkis]. This movie is laying the groundwork for what is to come, and of course we’ve tried to be faithful out of respect for the original and out of love for the original. But at the same time, like any re-imagining of an ultimately very mythological story, there are changes. My approach has been to imagine this as a bit like a Bible story in a way. This is a story that’s going to be told by generations of chimpanzees as the passing of stories down from father to son in the future civilization of the apes. So when they talk about the heroic Buck the Gorilla, they will talk about him in mythical terms, because he was the first gorilla to rise up. The same with Caesar. So it’s a very ambitious story, and a very challenging one to tell.
“We are an origins story, in the purest sense of the word,” Wyatt continues. “My inspiration is that if you take those final lines from Charlton Heston [in the original Planet of the Apes] on the beach, looking up at the Statue of Liberty, and he’s shouting up at the sky, ‘You did it! You really went and did it!’, we discovered that we as a civilization went to hell in a hand basket. Now obviously that was the 1968 film made at the height of the Cold War, and with the threat of nuclear war ever present. The thing is that all of those things that really reflected the culture then, today, within movie making and storytelling, we’re not in that dissimilar a world. Even more so, one might say. So the world within which we’ve told this story is a world of oil spills in the Gulf of Mexico, of economic unrest, the fear of terrorism… so many things. That’s a great way to kick off why our civilization has come to an untimely end, and this is the beginning of a new one.”
He does emphasize that Caesar: Rise of the Apes doesn’t go as far as showing the civilization that’s to come. “It’s just beginning,” he says, “the rest is the sequel, and hopefully there will be many more after that. I think the perfect sequel to this would be the actual war between the apes and the humans, which could be a fun story to tell.”