The Press Box - 'The Big Picture' — Matt Reeves Puts Humanity in ‘The Planet of the Apes’ (Ep. 330)

Episode Date: July 14, 2017

The Ringer’s Sean Fennessey and Chris Ryan discuss the successes and failures of filmmakers who have recently overseen big-budget franchises, such as Matt Reeves’s ‘Planet of the Apes’ series, Michael Bay’s ‘Transformers’ series, and Christopher Nolan’s sustained run (1:05). Later, Sean sits down with Matt Reeves to discuss the intricate filmmaking process of ‘War for the Planet of the Apes’ and what to expect from his next movie, ‘The Batman’ (13:30). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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My name is Sean Fennacy. I'm the editor-in-chief of The Ringer. Today I will be speaking with Matt Reeves. Matt is the director of War for the Planet of the Apes. This is his second Apes movie. Very smart guy. Very entertaining movie. Looking forward to that conversation.

But first, joined by one of the greats, one of the podcast legends. The Matt Reeves of Podcasts. Yes. A shepherder of IP, of his own. Cut fresh off a live performance at Largo last night. I'm exhausted. I gave it all. All I had. It's Chris Ryan, executive editor of The Ringer.

This is what Pryor felt like in the 70s. That was your sunset trip. Yeah. And did you let yourself on fire last night after the performance? No, I did not. I did not. Well, Chris, thank you for coming in today. I love being on the big picture. It's my favorite podcast.

Okay. Disonesty begins right here. So, as I said, I spoke to Matt Reeves. Matt is responsible for a very big property in Hollywood, which is the Apes franchise. It's very strange that that franchise has become as popular as it has, but it has. This is the third movie in the franchise. His next project is Batman. That's pretty crazy.

It's hard to believe that the guy who co-created Felicity 20 years ago is now doing Batman, but I think he kind of brings to mind what happens to directors now in the 21st century and how guys are vaulted into these situations. This is something you and Andy Greenwald talk about a lot on the watch, something I'm talking to a lot of filmmakers hear about. I'm curious from your perspective if the path that Matt Reeves is on right now seems normal for

young aspiring indie filmmakers and it's something they should be shooting for or is there another way to go? Matt's interesting because I feel like his minor league days were spent making films that would lead to these kinds of franchise films, right? So he's not necessarily

making art projects and then somebody saw his David Lowry movie and we're like but if you could just do this one scene for two and a half hours and also connect the dots between a prequel and a sequel that would be great. It's I you know he made a very competent vampire movie

he has worked within really like the modern version of the old studio system by working on television before he knows how to work collaborate with probably big corporations other producers demanding stars all these different things and

there's something about the tone he sets, I'll be really interested to hear your interview with him, where he doesn't outkick the coverage. He's not like, say, like, a Joe Carnahan who will be like, I'm going to make this, I don't know, pick whatever Joe Carnahan movie he's been attached. Smokeyaces. Yeah, and he's like, this is going to be the citizen cane of card heist movies. It's just, Marrives just like, is like, I know exactly what I find interesting about Batman. I know exactly what I find interesting about these apes movies and I zero in on it and I do an incredibly effective job at once entertaining and provoking. And I think that's what that, you know, the first apes movie was not as

success as a film. You know, I mean, I think it did fine at the box office, but this is one of those funny franchises that someone came along and like if that second apes movie doesn't do well, they probably let it go to bed for a while, right? Yeah, this podcast becomes about Spider-Man Homecoming and not about War for the planet of the apes. Right. And so I find his ability to revive it. And we've seen this a couple of times.

Scott Derrickson with Dr. Strange and James Gunn with Guardians of the Galaxy, taking things that people didn't necessarily have huge expectations for. I think people were all like, okay, you're going to try that one out? And these guys have just been, that's who I associate Reeves with, those kinds of directors, not so much the Josh Tranks of the world. Yes. The guys who get catapulted into these positions. Yeah, even Trevor.

All right, Colin Trevor, who, you. you know, has now been dinged pretty aggressively for the Book of Henry, which at this point I'm almost like, this is unfair to him. Like we haven't seen a frame of the second Star Wars movie, much less the third one, so maybe we shouldn't be like too second-guessy about it. Do you think, you know, just as a consumer and as a thoughtful man? Yeah. Do you think that the track that Matt is on is a wiser choice for filmmakers to not grab the brass ring quickly if offered and sort of to take their time? Because, you know, obviously he earned his way into it and he had to try a lot of different films.

But there is something strategic, too, I think, about some of the choices he made and taking on a second Apes movie in some ways, I think there was a savviness to it, even though I think he connected to the story and he talks about that in the interview. There was something smart about saying, like, if I can do this again,

I'll show people that I can take on the biggest project imaginable. Yeah, and I like the fact that he seems to somehow split the difference between what he finds interesting about this and what people are going to need. Like, you're not going to be able to, I don't think you could exclusively make a movie without a human being in it. But clearly he's more interested in the apes than he is the humans, right? You can see that in war.

It's 85% apes. Yeah. So it's all Woody Harrelson in the trailer. You know, there's a lot of apes in the trailer, but like you would think. And I think that it'll be very fascinating to see what he does with the Batman because the things that he's been pitching out so far is that it's a noir. It's a Hitchcock movie. It's a thriller. And that's not necessarily the tone that a lot of these DC movies have taken on, which are largely based in.

a kind of even more on steroids version of 80s blockbuster action early 90s Michael Bay blockbuster action the idea of making an intimate Batman film is really appealing. He seems to be working in this area that is one satisfying

to himself as a filmmaker but really does the job that the studios need to be done. Let's talk a little bit about Spider-Man homecoming which I just mentioned. That is that filmmaker who made that movie John Watts is more from the Trevoro school.

He'd only made two small films clown, I think a small horror movie and Copcar. And now somehow, magically, I feel like he has just arrived on the A list. I think the Spider-Man movie is more successful

than anybody guessed it would be. And it's also, frankly, just better. I think, you know, as you guys talked about earlier on your show this week, I don't know anybody who doesn't like this movie. And that's a rare feat

for a comic book movie, for a tent pole, for anything released in July. If you're John Watts, what should you be trying to do next? It depends on what kind of movies Hollywood is going to make. Does John Watts have any options outside of making a superhero or Star Wars movie? That would not be a step down? I honestly don't know.

Does John Watts have a baby driver, I guess, is the question. Yeah, I mean, the thing that Andy mentioned this on the pod, and I hadn't really thought about this, but one thing that Watts does obviously very well is direct kids. So if he can find something that tickles his fancy, now in retrospect, I'm like, should he have directed it? You know what I mean? Like, is there something that he could have done?

It's almost frustrating to think about it in terms of what piece of franchise property or intellectual, like pre-existing IP could he have sicked his teeth into. It's like in the world of professional wrestling. It's called fantasy booking. Yeah. So I don't know what he would do now. next that would be much of a curveball.

If anything, I think he feels more like a Rousseau's, where it's like, obviously, the Marvel guy's really like him. Obviously, he's appealing enough that Downey did five days or whatever that was. That's right. And I think that he has a very easygoing style that would be suited to a high school, another kind of like high school movie or something in the Ambulin Revival vein. But who knows? I mean, what do you think?

It's hard to say. I think a lot of times when you have filmmakers that try to do something specifically nostalgic, they stumble. I think specifically of one of Matt Reeves' best friends, JJ Abrams, going back and trying to make more Spielberg-style movies. And weirdly, the thing that he always should have been was this IP Shepherd. He should have been the guy entrusted with Star Wars to take it to the next level. That's what he really is best out, in my opinion.

So for John Watts, it's unclear. I mean, I think clown and cop car and homecoming are so different. And you're right about being able to direct kids, but how that manifests is difficult to say because there are frankly not a lot of movies about kids now. Yeah. And also, I mean, it gives it, who knows what that movie is if it's not Tom Holland and Sondaya. You know, it could have been Dylan O'Brien and somebody else, and you might have been like, oh, that's pretty good, but it wasn't really that, you know, like. Yeah, a little less effective. Yeah.

So let's talk about two other filmmakers that are sort of in this ilk, but a little bit more aged. One, your boy Michael Bay. Mm-hmm. Two, Christopher Nolan. Yeah. Two of the biggest franchise figures in Hollywood for the last 10 years. Bay made one choice and I think Nolan made the other just for this summer. Bay went back to the well, made a fifth Transformers movie,

not well received, did not do well at the box office. I haven't seen it, which is crazy because I spent three months reporting a story about Michael Bay once upon time in my life. Nolan, who tends to go big top, has obviously worked with Batman before. Their pals. has now done something historical. It's still big, but it's actually smaller relative to Transformers the last night. What do you think about the two choices those guys have made and the divergent arcs of their careers?

I would like to present the alternative history of Michael Bay, which is that he has been trying to make Christopher Nolan movies for the last 10 years and people just aren't interested in that pain and gain at 13 hours are clearly where he would like to be in a lot of ways. And in some ways, I wonder whether he's in some sort of one for you, one for me, except the one for him is also the one for them. You know what I mean? I think that clearly, you know, you and I actually both saw those two movies together very alone in the theater.

So that should be speaking towards the box office success of both. I think painting gain did fine, but 13 hours wasn't able to find that lone survivor kind of that audience. So I think it's almost unfair to bay to say like all you've been doing for the last 10 years is. Transformers. He spent obviously a lot of time on them, and I would love it if he got away from that. With Nolan, the interesting thing about that is that, by all accounts, Dunkirk is kind of a thrill ride. It sounds like there's no fat on it. It sounds like it's literally like it's like an IMAX ride. And I'll be, you know, so it's interesting that Nolan is actually using this huge historical canvas to make something very, in some ways, small.

In terms of it's you're going to be with these guys for this incredibly intense ride. And because it's so intense, I can only keep you there for so long. Just as a viewer, does it matter to you if a movie about World War II doesn't grapple with, say, post-traumatic stress or world conflict in the politics they're in? Are you okay with a movie that's just bombs being dropped, ships flying across the ocean, and Mark Rylane saying cool stuff? Yeah, because I think World War II has been covered enough that I'm not unaware of those things. I mean, you can have Tom Hanks's shaky hand at the beginning of saving Private Ryan and do the PTSD thing. And I'm sure there will be several scenes of children longingly looking at an older man dying and thinking about their own mortality. But I kind of, I'm very into the idea that Nolan is basically revisiting something that has been filmed as recently as Joe Wright's Atonement and saying, look, I want to approach this with these 70-millimeter IMAX cameras.

I want to recreate this world on screen and almost memorialize it in that way. Is there any part of you, and I asked this because when I spoke to Matt, he talked a lot about the three-year period it takes to make an Apes movie. Is there any part of you that wishes that Nolan would do a painting gain of his own, something that takes six months and then he can move on to the next thing? No, in the same way I don't. I'm happy that Nolan takes three years in the same way that I'm happy that at his peak, Soderberg takes 18 months.

Because I think that there are some directors that I want to have to take their time, just like there are some musicians that I'm happy to have them take three years. And there are some musicians I just think should be on the CCR diet of putting out a record every nine months. So I like the – I think some people shoot quick and fast and dirty and pump stuff out and just give me the Swanberg hit every year. And some people I think, yeah, it's going to take a long time for you to buy a thousand spitfire planes or whatever and put them up in the air. What a gift that you gave us the time today, Chris Ryan. Thank you for coming in, man. Yeah, thanks for having me. Very lucky to be joined by Matt Reeves today.

Matt, thank you for coming in. My pleasure. So, Matt, this is the third Apes film. This is your second Apes film. Yes. I'm curious about your decision to go back to this. After having so much success with the second film and also coming into that film fairly late,

was there any part of you that wanted to move on to something new? What brought you back? Well, no, I mean, you know, the thing is, is that when I came into Dawn, it was very accelerated. And I came in with a story. They weren't able to to work out the movie that they wanted to do with Rupert Wyatt. And so he stepped away. And I stepped in. And initially I said no, because the story that they had proposed to me, which was not Rupert's story, I wasn't interested in. I didn't want to do. And they said, well, wait, we really, you know, would love to hear if there's a story that you would want to do. And I was like, well, you'll

never do my story. And amazingly, I came in. I thought about it for a week. I pitched them a story I would do and they said, uh, that sounds great. Are you in? And I was like, but what's the, what's the catch? And they said, the catch is, we have spent a year doing a story that we're not going to do. We still have a release date. So now a movie that would normally take three years, we're going to do in two years. You'll get to tell your story, but you're going to have to do it by jumping in right now. And so I did, which was crazy, because I didn't know anything about motion capture. And I learned all about that in the process. And as we were getting toward the end. They were really liking the movie. And they said, hey, we would love you to do

the next movie. And I felt at the end of the process that I had just spent two years doing this and now understood so much more about it and felt that it would be great to have the full three years to go at it again and to try to be more ambitious and to try and take the things that I'd learned and push things further. And so that's what we did. They initially said, hey, you know, you did that in two years. Could you do this next one in two years? And I was like, no, because I have no, I don't know what the story is. But I knew that, you know, I wanted it to be this kind of the mythification of Caesar. I wanted him to become this sort of like, you know, the seminal ape figure in all ape history and that this would be this big mythic test. And so Mark Baumack and I spent a year writing the script and I've been making it for

the last three years. And I, yeah, I absolutely love being in this world. I've been in this world for five years now. Five straight years of doing these movies. That's an amazing amount of commitment. So do you spend that whole year that you didn't have last time? Yes. Just writing and crackiness. Yes. Just writing. Yeah. So we spent... What's great is, you know, Mark and I

sat down and we worked out the story that we wanted to tell. And then, you know, I pitched it and they loved the story. We actually, we did the thing where we, it was the writing period was so intensive that we pitched only the first half and they said, okay, good so far. And then we pitched the second half. And what we pitched is the movie we made. And then that was the script we wrote.

And that was the movie that you see, except, you know, missing some scenes because, of course, it was really long. I have to say the really exciting thing for me and why I had been reticent in the beginning to get involved with Dawn is that I'd never done a studio film. and I felt that if I did, it might be some weird Faustian bargain where you wouldn't be able to tell the story you wanted it. You always hear all these nightmare stories about this kind of committee approach that a studio might take. And I have to say that I didn't have that experience on these two movies. These two movies for whatever faults there may be there, that's as a result of whether it's schedule or creative failures or whatever there. These are the movies that I set out to make. And so I feel really fortunate.

And I do feel like we were more ambitious. I'm excited for people to see this one. Yeah, it's a really interesting thing. I think a lot of people hear IP and this pre-existing world and having to exist inside of something that has been happening for 50 years in the movies, especially with the Ape series. And they think that this is a very micromantic scenario. But you've been saying for years that that's not the case.

No, not at all. I mean, the thing about it is is what's so great about, you know, it's not like the Marvel world where people know so much about every single character that you feel like, wait a minute, you're violating the canon in this way, or doing that or this. This is more like, you know, every single one of even the original Planet of the Apes movies was remarkably different. And what's exciting to me about this iteration of the franchise,

these three films, rise, dawn, and war, is that the original really serves as a trajectory. It doesn't serve as anything but that. So what it means is you know the end of the story. It's going to become planet of the apes. It doesn't become planet of the humans in the apes. And that means that the focus of the story is very different. You can only do that amazing Rod Serling ending to the Pierre Boules story as he adapted the script with the Statue of Liberty.

You can do that once, right? So that's over. And the great thing is that means that the burden of the what is gone and everything becomes about how. And when you make a movie about how, that is a story that focuses heavily. on character and psychology and philosophy, you know, all of the things that kind of are juicy and fun. And so you're not in any way hemmed in. It's actually a relief. You're like, oh, okay, so I know this is where we're going. And now we get to tell all of the stories that take us to get there. And none of that has been laid out. You know, it was really an exciting world to be in.

And it didn't feel constricted at all, except just the actual production itself, which is, you know, these MoCat movies are not easy. They're hard. I want to ask you about that. But before, you noted that you already know the what, so you're focusing on the how. Yeah. But how do you capture tension inside of a story like that? You have this biblical war epic, but we kind of know the end result here. I mean, there are a lot of movies where you know the end of the story and the question is how. And just because you know that it becomes a planet of the apes, there are so many differences

between the world that we're in and the world that is in that 68 film. And so how we get there and which can. characters may not make it along the way. I mean, the idea is to be very intimate. So the movie's supposed to be very epic, right? It's like a biblical epic. It's like a war movie, a Western. But that is the context. The story really lives or dies in the intimate moments. And the war that's the most important in this story is the war for Caesar's soul, right? So there's a battle of wills between him and Woody Harrelson's character, the colonel, and they face off. And that is much more important than the spectacle, although we have spectacle. And so there's countless

movies that the ending is what you start with. And then the question is, oh, wait a minute, how do we get from here to there? It's you lean forward to find out, you know, the journey is the fun. The journey is the pleasure. It makes it more emotional in a way. It's an emotional journey, I think, these movies. And I think that for me is what's the most exciting about, you know, from Rise onward is that the surprising thing I think about these films, especially given, because I love Planet of the Apes when I was a kid. And I found them fascinating and, you know, I loved beneath especially because I was really freaked out when they took off their faces and they were praying to the nuclear weapons. But, you know, those weren't emotional movies. They were really

fascinating movies and they were suspenseful, like what's going on? And they were, there was something very eerie and dynamic about seeing these talking apes and that amazing John Chambers makeup. But they weren't emotional stories. These are emotional stories. And, you know, Caesar's character, when I saw Rise, the thing that I really responded to was it was the first time I'd had that level of emotional identification with a CG character. And I think that that is what is continually surprising to people when they see these movies, is they're going to, they know they're going to go see, you know, these apes that are acting in ways that remind us of ourselves. And that's also the sub. I mean, look, the whole idea of Planet of the Apes and what we're doing is not that we're seeing what the apes are like. we're seeing what we are like as reflected in these apes.

And so the fact that the stories are very emotional, I think has always been the thing that people take away. In war, there's a huge focus on the apes. I mean, the story is essentially told through Caesar's eyes. Yeah, that's what I wanted to do. You spent a lot of time with him. Yes. I mean, I felt that when I came in on Dawn, the story that they had didn't have Caesar as central as he ended up being in Dawn. That was part of my pitch.

And I wanted to start in the world that the apes had created. I wanted it to be like 2001 with the Dawn of Man. I wanted it to be the dawn of intelligent apes. And just doing the visual effects alone, that's a very high wire act because those effects are so expensive. And the character who you're going to be following through every scene, I mean, there's not, unlike Dawn, there is not a scene in this movie that doesn't have apes. Is that true? There's not a single shot. There's not a single scene that doesn't have apes.

Wow. And that's not true of Dawn. And in fact, part of the makeability of Dawn had to do. with making sure we had some scenes that we're going to have human drama between humans. And that way we knew that we could sort of put the resources that we had toward the effects, but that we'd also have a counterbalance. And also there was this question of whether or not an audience would identify with Caesar, but I knew from Rise that that was the character I was identifying with.

And I said, on this one, I said, I want to make this an eight point of you movie. And we had enough success with Dawn that, and plus, you know, when I pitched them the story that Mark and I wanted to do, they were into it. And they said, okay, all right, we're going to do it. And every now and then the question would kind of pop its head up, like, don't we want to do this or that? And I'd say, no.

Because I think that the spectacle, you know, so many summer movies have a certain kind of spectacle, right? That's what people go to see these popcorn movies for. So spectacle can be, you know, tremendous action in a certain kind of way. It can also be some sort of supernatural element. You're seeing something aspirational, some sort of character that has a superpower that you wish that you had. It's like a mythic god story, you know, like a Greek myth or something. But ours is this very strange, uncanny experience that you have where the characters that are the most human, the characters that you relate to the most are CG apes. And that's a very strange experience.

You start connecting to them. And I felt, I was quite confident that, and I hope this is born out to be right, we'll see if people go to the movie and like the movie. But I know from the first two that people, when they go away, the thing they remember, of course, is, you know. is Andy Circus as Caesar. And I just feel like the movies finally reached a place where we could do that, and everything is told from his perspective. And even the human story, which is very important, I mean, Woody Harrelson is great in the movie,

and what he's doing, from the outside, he looks like a monster. And as Caesar gets closer and closer to him, and they finally connect and they have this major scene together, you suddenly understand that he's an extreme character, but he's been made in extreme circumstances. And so it's not as easy to write off his motivations. fact, some of his motivations make total sense. In fact, all of them do. He doesn't say a single thing in the movie, the colonel, played by Woody, that isn't true. Everything he says is absolutely

true. But you encounter him entirely from Caesar's perspective. So he begins as a kind of horrific mystery. And then as you get closer and closer and Caesar finds out, so does the audience. So that you, in essence, become apes in this movie. That's our spectacle. The audience goes, and for two hours, they are apes. It's very effective. It completely works, which is bizarre. I mean, even going back and watching Dawn, there is clearly some evolution happening just in terms of the technology where I don't know if maybe you couldn't have pulled this off three years ago. I mean, it's, it is truly more realistic. Well, I couldn't have because I, everything that I learned in Dawn is what I used in war. I was anxious to come back because I felt like that was my crash course. And now I could flex my muscles.

You know what I mean? Yeah, I just, well, that was a crazy thing. I mean, it was like, that was a thing is It was an opportunity that I thought, when is that going to come back to me again? Because I had turned down a lot of franchises as somebody who'd really only made, I'd been in TV and I'd made small movies. And Cloverfield, even people think of as a studio film, but it really wasn't. It was an independent movie that was made a bad robot that was released by Paramount. I mean, it was not the same experience. And I had turned these movies down because for me, you know, you look at my filmography,

everything I've done, and it seems very disparate. But actually, for me, it's all the same, which is it all comes from an emotional point of view and point of view filmmaking. And I had turned down a bunch of franchises that were offered me after I did Cloverfield and let me in because there was a lot of interest like, oh, maybe you'd want to make a studio film. And none of the films I could connect to emotionally

in a way that I knew that I could say where the camera would go or what I would tell the actors or what story I wanted to tell. And so I turned them all down and then when they told me that I could do the story I wanted to do in Apes, they gave me every reason not to say no for the first time.

And I was like, well, I think I have to take this. Even though it's going to be hard because I'm going to do apparently what should be a three-year movie in two years, I'm going to jump into it because I don't know when that opportunity will present itself again. And so it was a crash course that I couldn't resist. And it ended up being, you know, my fear was that somehow they wouldn't let me make the movie that I wanted to do, but they did. And the movie did well. And so making the third one was really like, okay, let's see if we can stretch farther. Let's see if we can do more.

Was there anything you got close on accepting before Apes came along? I mean, I engaged in a few things, you know, like I was developing Twilight Zone with Warner Brothers for a couple years. I mean, there were a few different things that I was developing, but nothing that I felt reached a place where I was willing to commit. And the things that I'm talking about that came to me, came to me fully formed, which is another thing too. I mean, I like to have, for me, in order to understand something fully, I like to be

part of the creation of that story. and a lot of these things were, you know, were interesting. It turned out to be good movies, but not necessarily movies that I would have made well, because you have to come from your strength and you have to come from, for me, it's not some precious thing like I don't want to do somebody else's story. It's about being inside something so that I can be confident in my choices, and then the choices will hopefully be the right ones. On a purely practical level, what is the hardest part about making the Apes films?

Well, the shooting is hard because everything you shoot, you have to shoot multiple times. You have to shoot the scene with the mocap actors, and maybe they're going to be interacting with the characters who are human. And then you have to shoot those shots again without mocap actors in it. And on the first movie, that was very restricting

because we were shooting in native 3D because we didn't have time to convert, which we did have this time. And that's very hard because those cameras are so heavy and you have to shoot everything off a crane and certain things that you might want to do, you can't actually do because the empty plate is too hard to repeat. So, for example, if I wanted to arc my camera around a character who was walking,

he wouldn't be walking for the clean plate. So there'd be nothing there in the operator, and I can tell you that we tried it, and it didn't work. So I was really limited. This time, because we didn't have to use those cameras, I shot on 65 millimeter, the new Alexa 65, which is a beautiful system, and we used a new piece of equipment called a test. Techno Dolly, which allowed me to set very precise frames, and then actually after I shot,

let's say, Andy, he could step out and then I could actually play back that exact frame. It was a long setup time. It was not, again, it's much more cumbersome than shooting a normal movie, but actually I was able finally to get all of the shots that I wanted to get. So I felt much freer visually in this movie, but that part is very trying and very hard. And people don't necessarily know it, but when we're in the snow, we actually shoot in the snow. And when we're in the rain, we shoot in the rain. These are real places we shoot in, and we shoot there with the actors, and it's a hard experience. But that part weirdly pales

in comparison to the post-production period. Because the post-production period, what you do is, I work with my editors, and we put together a cut of the movie that has the actors in their mocap outfits. And that movie exists. You can see that movie, and it works. You know, You have to make sure that movie works before you begin turning over shots because the effects are so expensive that Caesar can't appear until you make sure that the story you're telling me Caesar works, right? I feel like that's something you'll want to give to the academy when you push for Andy, you know, to see what kind of performance it gives. I mean, we've done this a little bit where we showed the 50-50. And we want to do more of it because you'll be astonished at how, first of all, how well it works, right? This is the weird thing.

I'm not, I truly mean it. The movie works. It's not Planet of the Apes. It's Planet of the MoCap dudes, but it works. And so that part of it is a trying experience because what happens is once you get toward a cut that you start feeling is working, and you don't have everything nailed down

because at the same time that you're starting to work on the effects, you're still working on your movie. I mean, we're in post for over a year, and during that time I'm not just refining effects. I'm also refining the cut. And it's a crazy process because I don't have my final shots until very late. And what we do is we put up the shots

that have been chosen, the take of Andy, let's say, and we put it 50-50 with an image that is of the proposed animation from Weta, and then we get into these debates, and I spent half of the day doing this. So my days were long. I would come in at like nine, and I would leave at midnight, sometimes two in the morning, and we did that every day, except for the weekends this time. On dawn, we did it on the weekends, too. How long is that process? Over a year. And I would spend half of the day in a dark room with, you know, with the editors and the VFX people, my VFX producer, and we would look at those shots. And I would say, I would look at what Weta was proposing. We were on a link to Weta in New Zealand. And we had a screen, they had a Skype camera on my screen, and I could use laser

pointers, and I could point to things that I was seeing in Andy's face that I wasn't seeing in Caesar's face. So, you know, Caesar's anatomy is not the same as Andy's. So they, their first try is to say, hey, here is how we think we can express what Andy was doing in the mocap data and in what we're seeing on Caesar's face. And a lot of times I would look at it and I would say, well, you're not, I feel like we're missing something that Andy has, whether it's more intensity or more, maybe he'd have a mix of emotions. He'd be angry and sad at the same time and maybe Caesar would look just angry or look just sad. And I'd say, well, we have to get this other aspect out. How do we do that? And so we would get into that discussion and the animators had to figure out what,

shapes were on Andy's face that were conveying those emotions and then figure out how to put them on Caesar's face, though he didn't necessarily have all of the same anatomy. So in some cases, Andy's eyelids, which have these, you know, they called them fatty packets, but there was something about the way that his eyelids sat on his eyes that could be profoundly emotional. And you looked at Caesar and he didn't have the same eyelids. So it was like, well, how do we express that shape? And they would find ways with the animation puppet to stretch and shape things, his brow, different things, so that it gave you the same emotional impression as what Andy was doing. So the emotion all does come, the source is Andy, right?

We're looking at a performance that we got on the set. But then taking that shot by shot until you have his performance, Steve Zon's performance, Karen's performance, Terry's performance, until that translates into apes, you do it literally shot by shot for over a year until you feel like you're getting the emotions. And it's, uh, that part was a head spinner. I'd always thought that the editorial was a bit of a relief from the craziness of shooting, and that's not true in a mocap movie. It's a harder period.

So that's an amazing three-part process. You talked about the one year spent with your partner writing the story, a very arduous shooting process theoretically. The writing was the most fun. Okay. Well, I mean, I don't mean that. It's not true. I mean, I love working with the actors, and I love working with the editors.

I love working with my crew. That part's fun, but it actually is intense work. And the writing can be intense, but it's, it's, you're more in the dreaming phase, right? So that period, you know, Mark and I, we literally, he lives in New York, right? So we literally Skyped the script together. Our computers were connected via Skype and through this program called Screen Hero. And we could type on each other's computers. And it was like having my friend next to me and we would just talk through every moment.

And it was a ball. It was really great. And that part was great. And it was this thing going like, wow, you know, we're going. going to do all this stuff and knowing it's going to be Andy was great because we knew we were going to push him into places that we hadn't pushed him yet and that we wanted to be really ambitious with this and knowing he was going to eat it up and he did so and then the other parts anyway i interrupted you but yeah that that part just out of the three the writing and i'm this is not to say that i don't

think right i think writing is the most important thing you can do because if you don't have a blueprint for your movie that movie doesn't work right so the script is critically important but the process was didn't feel as brutal as the shooting, which was brutal for a number of reasons, the conditions and just the trying things of mocap, and then just the brutality of the intensity of the volume of work and the attention to detail, shot to shot that the post takes, those are just the difficulty level is super high.

How do you keep that experience creative and not just mechanical? Everything is driven by this emotional compass. That's why I'm saying I have to understand the story. You know, when we're writing the story, I'm weighing it against that. And then when I'm shooting a scene, I'm weighing it against that. You have a plan, but when you go to shoot, you have to create an environment where things can surprise you

because that's where the true emotional things come from, right? You go on an exploration. You're exploring with the actors, and you're exploring with the camera until something strikes you in a certain way. And I consider that the hunting and gathering period. We go out and we get all this stuff, and in my head, I'm ticking emotionally the things that made me feel something in a way that I thought was relevant to the story that I know we're telling.

And then when you get into post, you put that movie together based on that very same thing, which is I know that I'm trying to, I want the audience, I want to feel his rage in this scene. That's what the scene is about. Let's find the thing. And it's like a piece of music, right? You just keep refining it and the rhythms of it. And then after you do that, you have to make the movie again because you have to take it from the performance capture, actors' faces and turn them into apes.

And so I don't know. I have to, I have a capacity, and I guess probably an illness where I enjoy repetition to some degree. I would say that this presses the limits of what that is, but I do like to do things again and again and again and look for the detail. Like when I write, I often will say to Mark, I want to start by reading from like 20 pages back so that you can feel the flow like it's a piece of music. And then you can tell what that next piece should feel like because you're in the flow of the music. And I think that that's the way it is with good acting you. When you're watching it, there's a kind of flow. There's a rhythm to it.

And so in that sense, I have a somewhat addiction to rhythm and to filmic rhythm. And I enjoy that. And I think it's the thing that sustains me at a time when other people would probably be like, oh, my God, do we have to look. I mean, there are weird things about this thing. Like when I shoot, let's say I was shooting a scene between you and me and we were just going to shoot a conversation. If you and I really hit it off in a particular take, I could take that series of takes. and I could cut it together, and there'd be a real flow from the fact that you and I had a flow. But with performance capture, each shot is done by a different artist.

So even just something as simple as an over the shoulder, it changes based on whether or not the artist has placed that over, that character, in exactly the same position to the camera that the next time I cut to that shot is. And if each time you cut, the camera's moving just a tiny bit, you're having this subliminal break in flow. So we spent a lot of time, because this is just a pet peeve of mine, I want those overs to match because that way you get drawn in by the performance and you're not sort of, unless there's a moment where you're deliberately trying to create that disconnection and then sometimes that energy is great. But often I want this flow and that in performance capture, as weird as it sounds, we shoot these empty plates, right?

So they have to do artist to artist, take each shot and put that model relative to the camera essentially where it's supposed to be and it moves all the time. So I'd be like, well, these, they're not in the same spot. They're not in the same spot. So it's exhausting detail that you would never think would matter, which wouldn't matter, in any other version of making a movie, because you wouldn't have to match, you'd have the over. I shot you, you shot me, and then we put the shots together. It was fine.

This is like, oh my God, even the most basic thing requires attention. And that part's exhausting. Did anything radical change in the film in posts? Was there anything that you just thought, this doesn't work, or we didn't get what? we needed. There were things that didn't work, but they fell away very naturally. You know, what, you know, that always happens, right? You have a thing where you get, you have to boil down to your essence. And I tend, I tend to write long, I tend to shoot long, especially if you're looking for something emotional, it's, it's almost always the space between the lines or the

space between the moments where that emotion comes, right? Emotion doesn't come fast. I never saw a fast-paced movie that made me emotional. It made me laugh. You know, rhythm is very important to comedy. But if you're going to touch somebody, it's often about that struggle, that moment when somebody is struggling to express themselves or to contain themselves or whatever it is, that's the thing that makes an audience member connect. And so I shoot all of that. And then what ends up happening is the first version of the movie, which has all of those in, has every single moment at the same level of emotionality. And then you're not emotional because you're like, wow, every single moment. And so then what you do is you spend the next year taking out those moments

and then keeping the ones that really matter that you need. So you start alternating the rhythms, so you start feeling things. And as you're doing that, you start seeing certain things that don't feel relevant. You go, oh, well, that seemed important when we were writing it, but it's not really so important now. And then sometimes even something you realize that it made sense to at the script stage, but when you look at it with an audience, you start to realize, oh, this is actually working counter to my purposes. You know, there were some scenes in the movie, which we didn't keep in the movie, because I had intended them to work one way, and they didn't work that way.

So let's go back a little bit. I'm curious, I mean, it's now 10 years ago since you were shooting Cloverfield, which you mentioned earlier, your first film. But, you know, you've... Is it 10 years? I believe shot in 07, right? God, wow. Yeah, that's right.

So, and before that, obviously, you know, you co-created Felicity, you worked in episodic television. Sure. You've had a long career. Yeah. When you were in that stage before Cloverfield, was the goal to get to this place where you were, moving into major filmmaking, major studio pictures, summer blockbusters, or did you think you

would have a different kind of career? I never thought this was the career I was going to have. And I think, you know, my first film, which a lot of people don't know or remember, was actually a comedy for Miramax that starred David Schwimmer and Guineff Paltro and it was called Paul Bear. And my intention, see, I always talk about this thing because I remember that talking to friends who were like into music and saying, you know, oh, when you're, when you're, you're, when you're a band and you write your first album and you're like 25 years old, that album really took

you 25 years to write. And then it's how do you write your next album? How do you do the next thing? And I think that when you're first breaking in, the whole idea, the pallbearer was definitely for that, that for me. Like it was like, oh, okay, this is very personal. I wanted to be, at the time, somebody recently told me that I said at the time that what I was interested in making was painful comedies. And what I wanted to make really were movies like Hal Ashby movies. I wanted to make a movie like shampoo or Harold and Maude. I wanted to, by the way, movies that, to be honest, are not made now. These are not the kind of things that are done. And the movie didn't work for a number of reasons. You know, I mean, and so that's the thing is that when you imagine when you're

breaking in, okay, it took me 25 years to write this and this is because this is, you know, the thing that I've been doing all my life has led to this moment, and then it comes out, and then it doesn't work 100%. And so when it doesn't work 100%, what do you do? And I wasn't sure what to do. And one of the things that happened was TV presented itself to me, and I thought, I suddenly discovered in doing that series with JJ that I could explore a lot of emotionality through this young woman, through this character, and that that was incredibly exciting. And that, Again, everything was very driven by point of view. I'm always interested in empathy.

I want the audience to become the characters that are the subject of the movies that we're doing. And so that was totally unexpected. And then I actually wrote a very personal film as that finished that I still have yet to make that I really want to do. And Naomi Watts was attached for a brief period of time. And then she fell out. And then JJ came to me and he said, look, you're going to make that movie. I know you'll make that movie one day. And I really believe I'll make this movie one day.

But he said, you should do Cloverfield. And I was like, you think I should do Cloverfield? And he goes, yeah. And I said, why? I don't know anything about visual effects. He goes, yeah, I know. He goes, that's the easy part. You're going to learn the visual effects.

But I know you're going to ground it in this point of view and in this perspective that's going to make it feel real and stand out in a way that's going to be different from somebody if I brought in a VFX person. And when I got involved, there was only an outline. And I was like, gosh, I don't know. Can I do this? Then I started getting into the metaphors of genre. And Drew Goddard and I sat down and talked and we rebroke.

the whole outline, and then he went off and wrote the script, while we went out and shot the teaser trailer that was sort of the legendary teaser trailer, which the point of which was actually, of course, it was to publicize the film, but also I wanted to shoot the film in a certain way that the VFX people weren't sure we could do, and this was basically a proof of concept. If that hadn't worked, we'd have a trailer for a movie we couldn't make, then it worked. And that opened up a lot of doors for me, and what ended up happening is I always love genre films, but I never necessarily saw myself as a genre filmmaker and then I started discovering that through genre you could smuggle things into movies that maybe you couldn't make otherwise. And so, you know, when when Let Me In came to

me as a possibility, I turned it down because I loved the Swedish film. I thought it was great. And I tried to get my movie made, the little movie I wrote. And at that moment, it was a bad moment in the independent film world and a lot of companies went under, you know, like, oh, the Vantage and a bunch of places all at once. studios closed their shingles. Yeah, they all closed their shingles. And I was like, whoa, this is like a bad moment to try and make this movie. And so I then, the one that kept sticking with me was that that story felt reminded me of my childhood. And I was bullied and there were all these things about it that felt really personal. And I read the book. And in reading the book, I was like, wow, this guy,

John Lindquist, he grew up at the same time I did. He grew up in the 80s and we must be the same age. And so I wrote to him and I said, look, this is very strange because I love the movie that you and Thomas Alfredson did. But I've been approached about doing this, and it's the most personal thing that I could do, even though technically it's a remake. And he said, you know what? I love Cloverfield. I want you to do it. You should do it. And then when we made the movie, he loved the movie, and he invited me and my wife to stay with him and his wife and his son in Sweden. It was an amazing experience. But again, it was one of these things where I thought, okay, well, here's a chance to tell a vampire story that's really about the pain of adolescence. And then the same thing happened

with the Apes movie when that came too. So suddenly I started realizing that right now, studio films are a really, really narrow band of subjects, right? There's like a superhero. There's got to be some kind of spectacle. There's got to be some known IP. And it just so happened that the planet of the Apes, I loved as a child, and that the metaphors I find really powerful, it's a way of holding a mirror up to our own nature. It was a way for me to think about my son, who was very young and just learning how to talk and reminded me of Caesar. And so I ended up having a path

that I never expected to have. And I never thought I would be a genre filmmaker, even though I love those movies. I always wanted to be a personal filmmaker and what I've discovered is you can be a personal filmmaker making genre films. I mean, we can wrap with this. It's well known now that you're making the Batman next.

Yes. Obviously, this dovetails completely, I think, with what you're describing, which is entering headlong into another genre picture. For sure, yeah. So how do you apply? What are the themes want to get at? How do you apply some of these lessons into a big story like this? Well, again, I think

that I want to be ambitious and I feel like there's a chance to do a very heavily point of view driven character story that is an emotional and psychological exploration of who that character is of Batman. And I think that that, it's weird because I find that there's an interesting parallel between Caesar and Batman in that they are these tortured characters who are struggling within themselves to find the way to do the right thing in a corrupt world. Personal metaphor? Personal metaphor. That's me. Well, never thought of it that way.

I think that they're much more heroic than I am. But to me, I think that there's an opportunity to do a story that is different as a result of that. I think, you know, they started the Bob Kane original, the Golden Era, Golden Age comics were really, you know, was detective comics, right? That's what D.C. is. And I think that there's a chance to do an almost noir kind of take, which is very point of view driven, where he takes you into that world and where you are looking at the way he sees the world and experiencing the film as it emanates through him. And I think that and then finding the way to crack him open in some way so that you can get at, you know, at his emotion.

You know, without it being an origin tale. I think we've seen that. But getting at, you know, the origins matter. And, you know, his past matters and his emotional makeup matters. And I feel like, wow, this could be really exciting to do an emotional Batman with this kind of heavy point of view, noirish take. So I don't know anything more about it than that. We're literally just starting. I just finished, you know, this movie.

So I'm only just, but I'm excited. I'm really excited. Tell me one more thing. So how do you deal with the notion of expectations ahead of this, given that you have made a remake, that you have created a, you and JJ created a movie that had incredible anticipation because of the marketing, apes has this preexisting history? You have to block it out. You can't, it's irrelevant, you know, because I can't make something for someone else. I have to make it from the perspective where I think it's going to work. And I remember specifically that thing on Cloverfield.

I remember everybody was speculating about what that movie was. And I was like, this is crazy because we're trying to make this movie and we're still finding what it is. And they think we have all the answers. And we still don't have all the answers yet. And the other thing that was happening, it was a strange thing that happened with the publicity is the publicity came out in such a way where people wanted to know the answer and they thought the movie was going to give the answer. And there are a lot of people, there are people who hate Cloorfield. And I contend that one of the reasons they hate Cloverfield, aside from maybe not liking, you know, handicam monster movies, is that things were positioned in such a way that they thought they were going to get the answer. But the concept was always not about the answer. The concept was about being at the center of something that was larger than you, that you couldn't possibly from the perspective, from the vantage that it was told know all the answer.

It was to imply some answers, but not to have the answers so that that was part of the terror. That was part of that experience, being at the center of an unfolding nightmare and to have to deal with that. And the movie was never meant to answer all the questions that, interestingly, the trailer that we did and all of the ads ended up provoking in the audience. Like, what is that? Are we going to find out what it is? And I don't know that we ever gave people a satisfactory answer to that. So that was an interesting thing, but there's nothing you can do about that. All you can do is tell the story from the perspective that makes sense to you and work as hard as you possibly can and hope that that's going to work for people. And I don't think you can really calculate it beyond that because, you know, I have to hope that my love for these characters and my excitement for this world translates when people will see the movie that those people who have those same feelings are going to engage in a similar way.

But you never know. You had the answers today. Matt, thank you for coming in. I really appreciate it, Matt. Thank you. Thanks so much. This was fun.