Matt Reeves Discusses PLANET OF THE APES Films Leading to 1968 Story
What I love about these new Planet of the Apes films that are being made, is that we know what everything is leading up to. It's just really interesting to see the road being paved to the original 1968 movie. Somewhere down the line, some poor astronaut returns to earth only to find that it has been taken over by apes.
In an interview with JoBlo, director Matt Reeves talks about the upcoming coming sequel that he's developing. One of the things he says is that the next chapter in the story might just reach the point of the original movie.
Reeves talks about his excitement about Caesar and where his story will take him, and he goes into a lot of detail.
"Well it’s interesting because Mark Bomback and I are working on the next story, and I have to say given the trajectory of how his arc has gone from the first movie through DAWN so far, what is so exciting to us is that this is sort of his biggest arc yet. We are going to take him to places that test him in a way that is more painful, and in ways that he has never been tested before. [We will] really test his leadership, and more than that his heart and soul. There are ways in which the experience he had with Koba in the last film, really create a context in this story that is going to be, in a way, his greatest challenge yet. We are very excited about it you know.
"You have to keep in mind that he is such a unique character and the world he comes from is a human background. He was raised by humans and in a way he sort of thought he was human, yet an outsider, but he is also an ape. And when he was thrown in with the apes who he later led to a revolution, he was quite different than they were because he hadn’t been brought up as an ape. He was both ape and human and also neither. That made him a unique character to be a bridge between these two worlds in the story.
"As this story continues, we know that war is not avoided by the end of DAWN. That is going to take us into the world of what he is grappling with. Where he is going to be thrust into circumstances that he never, ever wanted to deal with, and was hoping he could avoid. And now he is right in the middle of it. The things that happen in that story test him in huge ways, in the ways in which his relationship with Koba haunts him deeply. It’s going to be an epic story. I think you’ve probably read that I sort of described it where in the first film was very much about his rise from humble beginnings to being a revolutionary. The second movie was about having to rise to the challenge of being a great leader in the most difficult of times. This is going to be the story that is going to cement his status as a seminal figure in ape history, and sort of leads to an almost biblical status. He is going to become like a mythic ape figure, like Moses."
Caesar is such a great and complex character, and it has been amazing watching him grow into the leader that he has become. Reeves was then asked if he would remake the 1968 movie if the story goes that far, and this was his reply:
"To me the idea is that the 1968 films stands as trajectory in that, what is so exciting is that the world of that film is so different from where things started in RISE, and the way they are in DAWN and now will be in the next film. There is a huge distance to cover between here and there that is all about Caesar and future generations, and how this world has transformed into that world, and the struggle that they’ll have to go through and how we create the world that we know from that. I think once you’ve gone through all of those chapters, you’ve gotten all the richness of those stories, you could very well find yourself going into that story again, but I think it would be from a new perspective.
"The idea would never be to remake the ’68 film. There might be some of those events from another perspective, and obviously to also see them as events that grew out of everything that we’ve been watching from this new iteration. They wouldn’t be exactly the same either. So if, and when, we ever get there, which I think is an exciting notion, it would definitely not be a remake but it would be sort of a re-telling of those events from a new perspective. And the events themselves would probably be a bit different since they will have grown out of these films."
That's a pretty interesting answer, so there is the possibility of seeing a film that takes place in that timeline. I love the idea of seeing what happens from a different perspective. I don't have an issue with him playing with the original film like that because I love what he and Rupert Wyatt have done with the franchise so far. Basically it sounds like there could be a lot of other movies made in this story before putting the focus back onto the humans.