Filling the shoes vacated by Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes director Rupert Wyatt is no mean feat, but new director Matt Reeves sounds genuinely excited by how things are progressing on sequel Dawn Of The Planet Of The Apes .
“Caesar talks at the end of the movie, he has some level of speech,” recaps Reeves. “I wanted to make sure we’re continuing to go along the path of evolution without missing it, it was so delicious to watch in the first movie.”
“The ape civilization is in the woods, between Vancouver and New Orleans, the world after what happens with the simian virus flu. The two main locales are San Francisco and the Muir Woods where the ape civilization is born.”
And as for the sheer size of the film, Reeves confirms that it will be bigger than any film he has worked on previously.
“The crazy thing is the giant scale of this film, which is enormous for any movie, so much bigger,” says Reeves. “The only way it works is from an emotional intimate point-of-view. It has all the things that drive me to do something, an emotional core, as Andy [ Serkis ], Rupert and Weta did on Rise .”
“It’s not only on a scale for me that is obviously larger than anything I’ve done, but this is also the first movie at this level to do native 3-D on an enormous canvas and mo-cap that is 95 % shot on location. The mo-cap shooting on the first movie was done really on the stage. It’s an exciting learning curve.”
Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes will open in the UK on 18 July 2014.