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is that the equipment is recording his
motion. Dealing with him is simply dealing
with an actor, so when you are staging
a scene it is no different. I don’t stage a
scene differently because of performance
capture. I get in the room with Andy and
the actors and we look at the scene and
we go, ‘Where do you think you will stand?
Where do you think you are coming from?
What did you do in the previous scene?’
You are doing it just like with any other
scene.One of the exciting things for me
was discovering that Andy was one of the
best actors I have ever worked with, and
what was cool was that the performance
capture enables all the other actors to
relate to each other. I directed Andy
in the way I directed any other actor
that I have worked with.
What preparation did your ape
actors have to go through?
We had a movement specialist, Terry Notary,
a former Cirque du Soleil performer – he
plays Rocket, actually. He is a wonderful
actor as well, and a great artist in terms of
body movement. He trained all of the actors
to move like they were apes. We had an
ape camp where everybody had to learn to
be quadruped, and everybody had to learn
to let go of all of their human movements.
He was like our Zen ape master. In the last
movie, whenever there were stunts that
became impossible, they started doing
what we call key-frame animation instead
of performance capture, which broke the
methodology of how this is done. The
problem is that when you are getting
performance capture, the actors are bound
by gravity, by the real energy of being in a
real space, the real topography. Yet if you
start key-frame animating at that transition,
they suddenly start looking a bit more like
The Amazing Spider-Man. They just have
that little bit more elasticity because it is
very hard to perfectly recreate those things.
So in this movie we decided to use stunt
people to do all of those tricky stunts, and
we hired parkour guys. Now, the guys who
can do parkour can do amazing things. They
defy gravity; they are incredible. But if we
had them just do it exactly the way they do
it in real life, it would seem as though the
apes knew human parkour, which would look
really weird! SoTerry had this training camp
where he trained these guys to do parkour
as apes. So we had like ape parkour, which
was bizarre! But all of these things add to
the reality of the film because there is real
performance capture for virtually all of
what you are seeing.
Dawn of the
Planet of the
Apes
is out on
November 19
17
Apparently the Apes films were
something of an obsession for
you growing up?
Yes, I was obsessed with
Planet of the
Apes
and I was introduced to it by the
television show, which somebody recently
told me had only been on air for three
months. That surprised me, because my
memory of it was that it lasted most of
my childhood – it was that important to
me! And because of that, a series of dolls
came out and I had all the dolls and the
tree house and the records. I had all of
that merchandise. That became my entry
into all of the movies. I saw
Planet of the
Apes
, which is my favourite, but
Beneath
the Planet of the Apes
also really terrified
me – when the guys take off their faces
and they are praying to the bomb. I
thought, ‘this is pretty terrifying stuff’. So
I am a huge fan of the franchise. When I
saw
Rise of the Planet of the Apes
, I was
really excited by it because I thought,
‘Well, they have found a way to re-enter
this universe but in a way that is more
emotional, from a different point
of view.’ Without remaking
any of the films, it was
a way into that world
again, and I thought that
was really exciting.
One of the exciting
things for me was
discovering that Andy
was one of the best
actors I have ever
worked with.