"I think the reason the 2001 film wasn't embraced like the other films is because it was set on an alien planet. For me, the integral part of the appeal of the mythology is that it's about us, our world, and the apes act as a mirror to us in so many ways. They represent who we are - the best and the worst aspects of humankind."
Set in contemporary San Francisco, it's a cautionary tale of genetic engineering and the use of animals in medical laboratories.
Here, chimpanzees get a brain boost while used as test subjects in experiments to find a cure for Alzheimer's.
Much of the new film's credibility rides on the realism of the apes, all rendered digitally by Wellington's Weta Workshop, with Andy Serkis, who provided the actor motion-capture blueprint for Gollum in Lord of the Rings and Peter Jackson's King Kong remake, as leading primate Caesar.
'It couldn't be done without Weta," says Wyatt. "It was an ambitious film in so many ways. When you think of Avatar, which is bigger in scope, but not in detail, that took four years to get made. We shot Apes in 57 days with 270 scenes. It couldn't be done without using the best technical crew in the business."
The Weta team faced different challenges to those from their motion-capture work on Peter Jackson's films and Avatar.
Weta senior visual effects supervisor Joe Letteri says that for the first time they were able to take the performance capture area anywhere, even outside, instead of just on a controlled stage.
"That was something that we developed specifically for this film, to be able to use performance capture outside. "Usually there's a lot of stray light, cars with reflections and things like that and they can confuse the system, so we figured out a way to make that not a problem. We shrunk down the cameras that Andy Serkis had to wear, and then we'd watch his performance, take details from him, and go back and translate it on to Caesar," he says. "A lot of time was spent studying the primates at Wellington Zoo to make it look authentic."
Serkis says playing Caesar was probably more physically demanding than anything he's ever done.
"I'm playing Caesar from an infant, all the way to becoming a revolutionary leader, which means he goes through a massive range of emotions and physical changes. I had to spend a lot of time researching these primates which included many zoos like Rwanda, London, Wellington.
"For the psychological makeup we found a character online called Oliver, who in the 1970s had become a phenomenon called the Humanzee. He was a chimpanzee who walked on two legs and was very humanlike," he says. "For the emotional intelligence, I studied child prodigies, in particular kids who could play Beethoven concertos when they were very young."
Shot primarily in Vancouver for a budget of US$94 million (NZ$107 million), the film's human cast includes James Franco, Freida Pinto (Slumdog Millionaire), Tom Felton (Harry Potter) and veteran actor John Lithgow.
Franco says the Weta-Serkis connection made him want to work on the movie and he also responded to the multi-faceted storyline.
"I liked that the way the apes get their intelligence is actually fairly plausible. It doesn't take a huge leap of imagination to believe that genetics can be changed a little to achieve that result. Whereas in the other films you have a planet run by apes that have this other culture.
"And one of the main themes is empathy, questioning how do we as humans treat minority groups? They're often mistreated or repressed and that's what the apes represent in this film. They are a repressed group that has the same amount of intelligence as we do, and they rebel because of their mistreatment."
Franco plays a research scientist who rescues Caesar, a newborn chimpanzee, from termination.
He raises him in his home, while taking care of his father (Lithgow) who is battling Alzheimer's.
Pinto, the love interest of Franco's scientist, plays a primatologist who serves as Caesar's vet.
She says, "I hope this movie opens a conversation about what is happening in the world today in terms of the moral conscience behind animal testing. I was happy to see people who had signboards at the LA premiere that read, 'Thank you for not using real apes."'
Wyatt says, "The story is an opportunity to be subversive and the movie should raise a lot of questions, rather than only being entertaining.
"At one point in the early stages of this movie coming together there was some discussion of using real apes. I felt using real animals was morally questionable. To get an ape to do what you want means you have to dominate them because they're alpha creatures instinctively. So, given that the movie is an underdog story, and ultimately about apes getting their freedom, if we used real animals it would have been an irony that wouldn't work."
- TimeOut / Additional reporting AP
