STACK NZ Nov #57

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.

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

One of the exciting things for me was discovering that Andy was one of the best actors I have ever worked with.

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

any of the films, it was a way into that world again, and I thought that was really exciting.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes is out on November 19

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