What there are, of course, are some very complex ape costumes. The story’s starting point is the same as that of the original film: an interplanetary craft, lost in space, crash-lands on a strange world with two suns. Escaping from the wreckage, the pilot - Mark Wahlberg taking over from the original’s Charlton Heston - finds himself being hunted by a superior race of talking apes. The latter (who were pretty impressive by 1968 standards in the original film) are quite breathtaking in the new version - as well they should be, since they are the work of multiple Oscar-winning make-up artist (and ape aficionado) Rick Baker.
Michael Clarke Duncan as lieutenant, Attar
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Like Burton, Baker was hugely impressed by the original film. But, for him, it was more than just a part of growing up: it all but inspired his career. “When I was a teenager,” Baker told a journalist visiting the set of Apes, “I actually saw 2001: A Space Odyssey and Planet of the Apes in the same week. And I couldn’t understand why you saw [the apes] moving their lips and showing their teeth in the first but not in the second!
“The make-up was great for the time, but basically they had one sculpture - in gorilla, chimp and orangutan versions - which they duplicated for everyone. They all had the same slicked-back hair and button noses. The teeth were in the mouth, but you never saw them. I wanted to be sure our apes had lips that move so you can see the teeth. In addition, I wanted each creature to be uniquely different. I like making them characters and bringing out the individual differences.”
male and female of the species: Mark Wahlberg as Leo, who crash-lands his space craft on the Planet of the Apes, and Estella Warren as Daena, a member of the planet’s oppressed race of humans
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That, of course, was also the key for Burton, who wanted the film to be a drama about two sets of characters - humans and apes - just as some films are about, say, Americans and Australians. There are cultural differences, but that’s not all the story is about. Burton didn’t want audiences to focus exclusively on the make-up or even the way of speaking. His Planet of the Apes is about the conflict between characters, some of whom are human, others simian.
“The biggest challenge,” he says, “was to get the actors’ performances to overcome the make-up. And I think we pulled it off. I’m more affected and moved by actors’ performances than by illusions and masks.”
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“I wasn’t interested in doing a remake
or a sequel, but I was intrigued by the idea of revisiting that world. Like a lot of people, I was affected by the original: it’s like a
good myth or fairytale that stays with you”
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The screenplay for the 2001 version of Planet of the Apes was written by William Broyles Jr, who was Oscar-nominated for Apollo 13 and recently penned another Tom Hanks hit, Cast Away. Broyles was responsible for removing the big shock effect of the first film: the moment when Charlton Heston sees the remains of the Statue of Liberty sticking out of the sand, and realises that he has somehow ended up on his planet far into the future, long after human civilisation has been destroyed in a series of nuclear wars.
Broyles wanted the surprises in the new film to come from elsewhere. “We’re definitely not in Kansas any more,” he jokes. The new film, he says, “makes us look at people who we think are across some deep divide - be it cultural, racial, intellectual, national or religious - and then look at those people in a different way.”
