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Wednesday, July 16, 2014

Let's Talk "Apes": Of Original & Endings

Many folks (including myself) have assumed that, eventually, the rebooted Planet of the Apes franchise will tie back into the events seen in the original 1968 classic - perhaps as soon as the next film.


That is not the case...

"Dawn of the Planet of the Apes" director Matt Reeves talked to Cinema Blend and was asked how many more films Fox would make before the story comes back around to the events in the original film. Reeves replied:

"I think some people assume that we're going to get back to the '68 film, like, next. And actually… no. To me, the cool thing – people have asked me, ‘Isn't it boring, because you know how it's going to end?' And I say that's the best part about it. This world is nothing like that world. How do we get from here to there? Instead of being a story about ‘what,' it becomes a story about how and why, which is all about character. And if this is Caesar's story, and the story of the mythic character that he becomes, then as we know in the apes timeline, Caesars begat other Caesars, and it's a generational story. This is an epic journey toward the trajectory of that story. It could be many movies. I think there are a lot of interesting stories that come, not only from Caesar, but from what comes after Caesar, his children, and his children's children. What happens when humans return? All of those stories… it's so rich.And I think that it's so cool that we know how it ends without knowing how we get there. Because that becomes the fuel for these stories. So it's not going to be next, for sure. We are going to take a while to get there."

Meantime "Dawn" co-screenwriter Mark Bomback appeared on The Q&A podcast and talked about the original ending of the film.



MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD

The change happens after Caesar () and Koba's () final face-off. The decision was made not very long ago to conclude with the current film's ending, a quiet moment between Malcolm () and Caesar with the pair saying goodbye before pushing in on Caesar's eyes.

Originally though, we were going to see the apes retreat back to Muir Woods as a military battleship approached San Francisco.

Bomback says:

"There was always a queasiness when we did it. For one thing, the people on the battleship we don't know. It's weird to end your movie with strangers and also we knew we were locking into a scenario for the next one. Why do we want to lock in? I'm guessing when Dreyfus [] said there was a military base up north that's coming, that will play a role in what we do next. I don't know, does it need to? On a purely character level, it's Caesar's story. Why are we leaving Caesar at the end of his story? We want to end on his emotional place, not on a battleship."

Reeves also talked about the coda with Slashfilm:

"I realized that we had skipped too much of the emotion by doing that. And that it actually in a way boxed us in too much to like the exact moment that felt like and also when we started showing this to people, some people are going wait, so does that mean the battle… like I meant for those ships to be way in the distance and they hadn't even seen the apes, because obviously the apes weren't gathering to begin the fight. The apes were gathering to look and see the fight that was coming toward them. It was hard to render that idea. And when I showed it to some people they were like going, so that's it? They're gonna start fighting right now? And I was like well no, and I realized that we didn't have the right ending. So actually that last beat that is the last beat on Andy, this is actually kind of a cool thing too".

In fact that actual ending was partly done using Skype with Reeves directing the two actors on a conference call so that Serkis could act out the scene in his mo-cap studio while the other two were in different parts of the world.

Perhaps we will see the alternate ending on the disc release this fall.

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