STACK #121 Nov 2015

DVD&BD

FEATURE

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From monsters in Cloverfield and vampires in Let Me In , to the DAWN OFTHE PLANET OFTHEAPES. Director MATT REEVES’s first big franchise film is still all about the story and emotions amidst the spectacle.

How did you become involved with Dawn of the Planet of theApes ? MATT REEVES: It is a very interesting thing. I did Cloverfield and that brought me to a lot of people’s attention, but strangely it was my last film [ Let Me In ] that got me the most attention in Hollywood.

I knew he was an actor and I also knew he was legendary for the motion capture work that he had done. I knew that I had been moved by his performances, especially by his performance in Rise of the Planet of the Apes , but I didn’t understand if there was some technical thing he was doing. And when we began, I learned very quickly that there was nothing technical that he was doing. It was just about him wearing a device that recorded his performance and the big secret as to why Caesar is so powerful is that Andy is a powerful actor. So I was like, ‘Oh, it is all performance driven!’ You push the technology to the back and think

about the story because if you don’t, you’re in trouble. I think a lot of these tent-pole movies end up being driven by the spectacle itself and you can lose your compass as to what the story is, what the emotions are supposed to be. As a filmmaker, the only way I know what to do is by following that compass. So in a way, you have to push that stuff into the background. Of course. He is another actor.There is such confusion about this – and I had it as well when I started – whereby somehow, people think that motion capture is this really technical thing.There is nothing technical about it.The technical part 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. 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 How does it work withAndy Serkis; do you direct him? What preparation did your ape actors have to go through?

So I think it was a combination of the fact that I had done something that was rooted in special effects with Cloverfield and we did that on a budget, and then my next film was more performance driven even though, of course, it also had effects and was a genre piece.That combination of someone who cared about the interior life of the characters but could also do special effects created a lot of opportunities for me. I was approached by a lot of studios with tent-pole movies for the first time, and I had never done anything on that scale. I never found any that had been offered to me where I felt like I had the way in.To me, unless I have an emotional way into something, I feel like I don’t have the compass to tell me where to put the camera or how to talk to the actors, or what the story is really about. I always look for the personal. So when they came to me with this one, it was the first time that someone had approached me about a big tent-pole movie where I felt I really had something personal to say. So it was exciting to me. I was thrilled. How challenging was it working on a big budget franchise film? I’d never made a movie on this scale, but the job is exactly the same, which is you are telling a story and you are trying to find the emotional reality of the scenes with the actors. I thought maybe the technology would

We had an ape camp where [the actors] had to learn to be quadruped, and learn to let go of their human movements.

be an obstacle to doing these things and I didn’t really know what Andy Serkis did.

impossible, they started doing what we call key-frame animation instead

NOVEMBER 2014 JB Hi-Fi www.jbhifi.com.au

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