Wes Ball’s continuation of thePlanet of the Apesfranchise,Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, earned an Academy Award nomination this year forBest Visual Effects, alongside other majorly talented nominees, for their innovative combination of CG and live-action. This sprawling epic had the task of bridging theCaesar Trilogyto the original 1968 film and included more talking apes" than the movies before, as well as “33 minutes of 100% full CG.” To pull this off, Ball collaborated with the top of their profession, with a team from Wētā Workshop anda stellar ensemble castfeaturingOwen Teague,Kevin Durand,Frey Allan, andPeter Macon.
To celebrate this monumental feat, we teamed up with Walt Disney and 20th Century fora very special screeningahead of the Oscars ceremony. The IMAX showing was followed by an extended Q&A moderated by Collider’sPerri Nemiroffthat invited Ball, VFX SupervisorErik Winquist(Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness), Senior Animation SupervisorPaul Story(Avengers: Infinity War), and VFX ProducerDanielle Immerman(The Suicide Squad) to share a behind-the-scenes look at how they earned that Oscar nomination.
You can watch the full conversation in the video above or read the transcript below to find out how the cast and crew collaborated down to the movement of an eyelid for unbelievably realistic CG work. They discuss using facial-solving technology on set, utilizing the previous films, full CG sequences, “invisible” VFX, andBall’s plans for the sequel, as well as his “super cyberpunk” pitch for aRuineradaptation.
Crafting a New Era of Apedom
“That was an intimidating process.”
PERRI NEMIROFF: I have to ask you this particular question to start here because this movie is now an Oscar nominee. I know that’s not why you do the work, but it’s a very, very big deal when that happens, so for each of you, what does it mean right now to see this kind of movie honored by the Academy?
ERIK WINQUIST: We love this. It’s hugely humbling, especially in a year that has had so much amazing visual effects work across the board. To be nominated or to be recognized by our peers in the industry is huge. We love it.
It’s so well-deserved.
PAUL STORY: I just think it’s great for the whole team to feel recognized by the Academy.
WES BALL: They deserve it. Damn it, this is the one, guys. This is the Apes movie that’s going to get it!
Again, so well deserved, and we’re going to get a sense of why it was so well deserved. I have a mile-long list of things that you do in this movie that are just absolutely mind-blowing to me.
‘Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes’ Review: Caesar Looms Large in Wes Ball’s New Beginning
‘Kingdom’ exists in a strange middle ground that is reverential to the past, while attempting to create its own future in the series.
Wes, I did want to start with you about signing on in your journey with this film. When you first agreed to direct this movie, what single thing about it were you most excited to get to do, and then ultimately, was there anything about makingKingdom of the Planet of the Apesthat was more creatively fulfilling than you ever could have imagined at the start?
BALL: It’s interesting. I was really nervous about the mocap aspect of it all. I had never done that before. I had worked with Matt Reeves on my previous movie, which isMouse Guard, which was going to be a big motion capture thing, and Matt was a producer on that. He would talk to me about it a lot, so I felt comfortable about it, but I was a little intimidated just wondering what the hell that thing was going to be like. The thing that excited me the most was probably the world-creation aspect of it all. When we figured out that idea, the 300-year time cut, it was like, “Oh, we can go forward and see how the world is starting to kind of disappear and erode away on our way towards that ‘68 version of the Charlton Heston movie, where there are, like, no signs left of humanity.” I was like, “Oh, that would be fun!”
I’ve been playing in that visual space for a long time. I made this little short film calledRuina long time ago, like 12 or 13 years ago, where I was doing the same kind of thing. And, of course, all theMaze Runnermovies play in that same kind of space. This is not by design; it just happens to be I find myself in these places of working on post-apocalyptic civilization. But it was fun to be able to do it, make it a real character in the movie.
Then, on top of that, to come up with new characters and try to pull off this crazy magic trick of audiences have expectations of what they want to see, but you also have to surprise them. Then, at the same time, try to figure out how not to derail the entire franchise that’s been going on for 50 years and try to finish up a trilogy that was so well received and so highly regarded, but close that door gently and then open up a new door to hopefully start a new trajectory of movies. That was an intimidating process. But some of the funnest stuff was honestly watching the magic trick unfold for a year in post. It was really fun.
Really, true movie magic in the best possible sense. Before I dig into those details, I do want to jump into Make Wes Blush time. We’re going to sing your praises, but truly, as a leader on this film, you deserve it. It really is something else. I know two of you have worked on all three of the movies, one of you has worked onDawn[of the Plant of the Apes]. Is there something about Wes that made him the perfect new addition as a director, someone who fit right into this franchise, but then can you also tell me something about him that is uniquely him and added a new layer that none of these past films had?
WINQUIST: The thing that’s awesome, and I’ve said it before about Wes, is that he comes from our world, and obviously having that experience meant that…
BALL: I was a wannabe visual effects artist.
WINQUIST: You’re right, which basically meant every conversation became a lot easier. We didn’t have to get into, “What I mean when I say whatever.” The specifics of the technical aspect of why we approach the things that we’re going to be doing becomes a lot easier to deal with, and that means that we’ve got that much more time to spend talking about the creative aspects of it, and not having to get in the weeds of me wasting time explaining things. So that was kind of a key part of the success of how we were able to get through as much as we did as quickly as we did, both in post, but then also on the shoot, as well. I think there was just a huge amount of trust.
We had the benefit, obviously, with this, of having those three previous movies that we had worked through a lot of teething and growing pains, let’s say, or teething issues of the technology betweenRiseandDawn, and being able to actually point to specific examples of, “We did this on the second movie, and it worked really well,” or, “We tried this on the first movie, and we would never do it that way again.” All that kind of stuff. You actually have those examples that we can all look at together, not just Wes and I, but all of the HODs during the shoot, and it just put everybody in the same kind of frame of mind about how we were going to achieve what we were setting out to achieve.
But then the aspects, I guess, generally about Wes, that has been hilarious and amazing were the pitch meetings through prep before we were even shooting this thing of just, “Alright, Wes is gonna walk us through what this scene is going to be,” and you get this fully narrated, full sound effects kind of extravaganza, standing up, acting everything out. You’ve seen what this film is going to be, and it just gets everyone so jazzed. I think that kind of energy carries through the production, which you need when it’s, like, 40°C and it’s a sweltering heat and everybody’s pulling leeches off each other, and it’s in Australia. They never tell you about the leeches. Anyway, it was a huge amount of fun.
Do you want to add anything about Wes?
STORY: Wes makes the process fun. He’s got a lot of energy when he’s trying to describe what he’s wanting for the shots and what he’s wanting out of the characters. The way he describes things just makes it a lot easier for us to understand, and the process is fun, so it gets a lot of people on board and wanting to actually do the work that he’s after. Great experience.
BALL: Thanks, guys.
How ‘Star Wars’ Influenced Wes Ball’s ‘Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes’
Director Wes Ball discusses the sequel’s timeline, world-building, how the VFX exceed even ‘Avatar: The Way of Water,’ and more.
I did want to follow up on something that I heard you did, Erik. You made a video at the beginning to show to all of the department heads who are maybe newer to this process. Can you run us through some key points that were high priority to convey in that video?
WINQUIST: The video is what was touching on earlier. It was having the actual material from all three. The thing that’s great is the system we have at Wētā, I can still pull up clips from Lord of the Rings. It’s all still there, and so it makes it so easy to dig back into previous shows or to try and remember how we did something. Having that at our disposal meant thatI could put together a whole playlist of material, of shots chronologically, even, just from all three of the previous movies, and cut it together and essentially just do voiceover of walking through, scenario by scenario, even, why we approached it the way that we did.
BALL: Like film school.
WINQUIST: Exactly. You put it up on Vimeo so everybody on the cast and everybody in the crew could actually get their head around what we were about to set out and embark upon before any frame, before we started rolling.
BALL: That’s the key, I think, with these movies is that it doesn’t matter how brilliant the visual effects team is on this,if we don’t set them up for success, you get shitty VFX.So we have to shoot it right, we have to approach it right, we have to take the right approach to it and get everyone and the actors on board and the set design on board. All these different disciplines have to all come together and set the foundation so that they can do their absolute best work. I think they do, but it’s a big, giant team effort.
I know why a video like that is especially important for a film like this, but as you were describing that, it’s just making me think, I feel like any growing franchise would benefit from having that as they add to their filmmaking family.
‘Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes’ Is “Unlike a Typical Movie”
Erik Winquist digs into the technology necessary to make it happen.
Let’s get into some specifics now. Again, I referenced the fact that the three of you, in varying capacities, have worked on the past films. You already mentioned that you learn each step of the way. Can you give us a specific example of something that has evolved from film to film to the point that you’ve kind of perfected it here, but also give us an example of a first that you experienced makingKingdom of the Planet of the Apes?
WINQUIST: Technology-wise, a lot of the approach that we have here was, at face value, at least, similar to what we were doing. Over the years, the hardware has gotten a lot more polished and professional, maybe, and a lot more ergonomic.
As an example, this time around, this is our third generation of performance capture suits, like the active capture suit, soour primary cast was wearing the latest and greatest of the tech. To back up a sec, with the stuff we’re doing in these movies, typically on a mocap stage, you’d have actors wearing reflective little markers on their suits, and the lights of the actual cameras on the stage shoot out infrared light that bounces back off the markers to the cameras. That doesn’t work in the sunshine when you take it outside. So, what we had to do, and we started doing this onRise of the Planet of the Apes, was actually have the actor suits emit infrared light from LEDs on their suits. The problem is that those LEDs all have to be connected by wires, and as soon as you start having wires on the outside of everybody’s costumes—and we learned this on the first film—they were ripping the wires out if they’re trying to do any of this stunt-heavy stuff.
BALL: Running through the forest.
WINQUIST: Yeah. So, over the years, that became more and more robust. This time, now, it’s all really streamlined. All that stuff is embedded within the suit itself, so there’s nothing to snag, nothing to catch. So that’s that’s one aspect of it.
The other thing is the actual capture technology itself. This is the first of the Apes franchise films where we’ve actually had stereo cameras on the head-mounted rig, and that’s essentially given our facial team a three-dimensional mesh at 48 frames a second of the actor’s face. So we can really see with extreme detail every little nuance of every expression, especially lips and jaws and things like that, that become really difficult to ascertain with any precision what the actual expression was on the actor. So by doing that, we’ve just got such a greater view of what’s going on.
To couple with that, this time around, we’re also, for the first time on the franchise, using a pair of little machine vision cameras on the Mapbox of the main motion picture rig, which gives us, again, a three-dimensional view, if we wanted, of everything that’s within a certain radius of the camera. So all of this technology is going into just giving us the best data that we can get coming back from the shoot because that’shugebecause we can’t go back and get it again.
BALL: That’s what’s wild is that people are wearing computers. They’ve got all these computers. They’ve got this battery computer system on their back, and the batteries are constantly getting replaced. Not only that, but we have a giant computer truck in the background of the shot that’s also capturing all this data and feeding it in. So it’s unlike a typical movie that you could imagine. It’s wild.
WINQUIST: All that said, I don’t want to let the technology overshadow the rest of this because that’s just the data coming in. Thenthe real magic happens when we actually pull it in and apply it to the characters. Pauly should talk about some of the facial solver stuff.
STORY: With the dual-face cameras, we got the depth measures that gives us the faces that we can go and reference, and that was a big help for us when we used our new deep-learning facial solver. Basically, we could set up the solver having all this information for each character to basically get a good base for all of our solves that the data went through, and from that, we were able to output some really great performances. But this served as a really base performance for all of our animators that you go through and actually detail the emotional performance.
BALL: Paul deserves some credit, too, by the way, because sometimes wecan’tmotion capture this stuff because humans can’t do it. SoPaul and his team have to go and animate this stuff by handand not pull you out. Hopefully, you’re watching this movie, and it’s like you forget you’re watching visual effects, and you just kind of assume that we actually cast apes, and they’re actually emoting and all this kind of stuff. The thing about this magic trick is that if there’soneweak shot, if one little shot kind of falls down, it breaks the spell, and you have to spend time building it back up again. So I think a lot of credit goes to Paul and his team that when we had to do it by hand, we’re still meeting that threshold of reality and something that is, again, that magic trick, that miracle of, like, “Holy crap, most of the characters in this movie are full CG by a bunch of artists, including the actors that drive them.” Hopefully, you believe that they’re real.
WINQUIST: That facial solver, the thing is really huge about that on this film is that there’s so much dialogue going on here, and it was clear from the script thatthere are more talking apes in this movie than we’ve had in the previous trilogy together, and so the approach of needing to bring in that solver was because we needed to make sure that the facial animation team… We split it up at Wētā so there’s actually a separation between the body and the facial animation because the facial animation is such a specific discipline. We’ve got some of the best animators in the world on this kind of stuff that just absolutely innately understand the anatomy of the face and the muscle structure underneath all that that drives that face. So the solver takes care of a base pass from what the actors were doing, and it sort of learns the correlation between the dots moving on the actor’s face to what the shapes of the ape faces need to be to give you, as an audience, the same kind of emotional hit from what you just saw that we were seeing on the day when the actors were there in front of camera. But that’s just a base pass.
That’s the thing is all of your team is spending their time on doing exactly that, of looking at the ape and going, “Am I reading the same level of anxiety, apprehension, or exuberance or whatever it may be in this exact moment, and making sure that that’s what we’re spending our time talking about and not the nuts and bolts of just, “Oh, the jaw should be a little bit more open.”
STORY: And a lot of that comes through the eyes. A majority of the emotion you read through the eyes. So just having the eyelid a little bit higher or lower can really change the expression. or even just a head angle to the camera can really change your expression. So a lot of that detail that we’re looking at just with the facial reference cameras might look fine just when we’re comparing it against the camera’s pointing straight at the face, but when we put that in front of the shot camera, it can actually look different again, so we need to go and adjust that head angle or that eyeline to make it look as it did in shot camera, as well.
BALL: It’s hard to impress upon you guys how subtle this work really is. We would go through shots like, “There’s something that’s not right. What is it? There’s something that’s not working.” And I swearsometimes it’s like the eyelid just needs to go up one millimeterand click, there it is. Suddenly now it feels real. It’s amazing to watch how well they know their stuff.
Andy Serkis Shared Invaluable Advice for the Cast
Wes, what are some of the first pointers you give actors doing this kind of performance capture work for the very first time so that you can hit the ground running as soon as possible?
BALL: I’m sure you guys all kind of heard before: Ape school. We put them through ape school for six or seven weeks with a real motion trainer and all the actors just became buddies. I’ve done it before where it’s almost like a camp where you put all the actors together and they have their own little spaces, this little basement dungeon on stage on the lot that we were shooting at. They would just walk around—for a while, not talking at all—and just put on their little stilt arms and they’d walk around and just act like apes the entire day. We’d do this for weeks and weeks.
I never saw this at first. There’s a story where they invited me to come down one day, and I come down this crazy dark tunnel, and I’m in this little weird pit, this dungeon, and all of a sudden, I’m accosted by all these human beings apeing me. It was creepy. It was very weird. But it was so crucial for them because if it feels freaking weird when you’re out on set, and you’ve got 100 people, all crew members, looking at you with a boom up there and a guy with his butt hanging out, and they’ve got to go around and act totally silly when you look at it from the from the outside…. ButAndy Serkis came on it and told us how important it is: you may’t pretend to be an ape. You have tobean ape. So it has to become such an internal process that you’re not even thinking about it. It becomes second nature. So that was a huge, necessary part for all the actors to go through this kind of process of just internalizing.
They would all come up with their own body language. A lot of times, when Erik talks about this mocap stuff, this data that comes through, I’ll just see the skeleton, right? I’ll see just a skeleton, the plot points essentially of all these little markers around their suits. you may’t see the actor. You just see their little weird stick figure of the people moving through the shots, and I can pick out which actor is which based on that skeleton, based on how they hold themselves. Anaya is a good example. You see him in the movie, and he’s always holding his left arm like this. What that was is he came up with a background story that wasn’t in the movie at all, but when he was a boy, and he was a little tiny, tiny, tiny ape, he had a little toy that he always carried in his arm, and so that’s why he always walked around. So now, as he grew up, he still has this weird little thing. It just becomes this little character signature, and all the actors came up with these little things for themselves. They really, really embraced that.
A lot of credit goes to these guys. They’ve never done this before, especially Owen [Teague], who had to kind of shoulder this thing. Who would want to follow Andy Serkis? So he had to come into this thing and never wane. He was brave and courageous and just committed to this thing. They all did. I couldn’t be more proud of them.
Andy Serkis’s 10 Best Movies, Ranked by Rotten Tomatoes
With or without VFX, Andy Serkis is an incredible performer.
I just want to be greedy. I love character backstory that we don’t see on screen, but we can feel informing a performance like that. Do you have another example?
BALL: Not off the top of my mind. I’m sure if we keep talking. [Laughs]
I could hear about that kind of stuff all day long.
BALL: There was tons of that. Even the actors. Even Erik with those videos he edited, he would interview all the actors and they would just talk about the characters. He would film it for all the artists to go on so they would have this background of what the actor was thinking during the scene or during that shot, or what kind of inspired their characters. So it’s this intuitive thing of how do you make something that’s synthetic, believable and real and magical? There’s no button that makes that happen. It is sheer effort by a lot of people. That’s why they deserve the Oscar.
WINQUIST: Tell us how you really feel! [Laughs]
This Revelation Was Eye-Opening to Unlocking Owen Teague’s Performance
Something was just slightly off, and then it clicked.
I’ll broaden this question for the three of you. Whether it was something from those video interviews or maybe even a surprising creative choice an actor made on set while doing the work, can you give me an example of a time when one of their choices inspired you in a new way or changed what you thought a scene was going to turn out to be?
DANIELLE IMMERMAN: Talking about their performance, their performance was essential. What I think about is on set, they couldn’t see themselves. They couldn’t see the end result of what they were going to be.We were building it as they were filming them.So to imagine themselves in product and have that visual is amazing. Then in reverse, when we got the intro videos, our artists would take them, and it would inspire them to add nuances of their performance into the build of the characters. So while they’re shooting for six months, or whatever, we’re building and we’re working in tandem so by the end of the shoot they can see a semblance. They might have seen a couple of sets, but they haven’t seen themselves moving. So you’re able to understand that by the time they finished filming was probably the first time that they saw themselves as their true character.
There was a moment when Noa sees his dad and he’s passed away. That was one of our first shots that we visualized because it was very emotive and we wanted to get his emotion on screen.
BALL: When he says, “I will find them. I will bring them.” We looked at that shot for months!
IMMERMAN: I remember sitting in dailies, and everyone just stopped because we were like, “That’s him. That’s the character. He’s real.” You didn’t question it. So it was like, “Make everything look like that! How long does that take?” [Laughs]
That’s such a beautiful example. Any others?
BALL: Koro, Noa’s father. I was so sick and worrying about that character because when you look at it through the camera and they’ve got these silly dots on their face and they’re just saying the lines and looking funny, you’re like, “Oh my god, is this going to work?” I mean, it is a leap of faith. But fortunately, we had all these movies before us, so we’re like, “I’m gonna trust. I’m gonna trust it.” And Erik kept saying, “Don’t worry, it’s gonna be fine.” As soon as we got that ape in there with all his cool freaking feathers and his costume thing, and he had that gravelly voice like he smokes a pack of cigarettes an hour,boom, it just works. That was a huge surprise for me. I was like, “Oh, this is going to work. Okay, good.”
WINQUIST: For Noa as an example, the thing that’s awesome is Owen has these expressions, these kinds of typical expressions that we would see him do all the time. You may have noticed that every time he’d get apprehensive, he would put his lips together, and he’s got these very specific eyes. One exercise we did early on in the design process of these characters was to take whatever photograph or image of the actor and flip-flop it and look at it and see how asymmetrical somebody’s face is, and Owen’s face is insanely asymmetrical. His left eye has got to be like, I don’t know, an eighth of an inch lower than his right or something like that.
BALL: You don’t notice when you’re looking at him.
WINQUIST: We’d been working on the design of Noa for weeks and weeks and weeks, and it was like, “Eh, it’s getting there.” We’d pass images and Wes would take it into Photoshop and liquify and push things around and try different proportions and stuff, and we finally noticed this eye thing and applied that to Noa. Shifting his eye down, you went, “Whoa, there he is.” Then all of everything that Owen’s doing and his performance throughout the shoot then just translates straight through to that character. I remember talking to Owen’s parents after the premiere, and they’re like, “We saw him so many times!
BALL: “He’s in there!”
WINQUIST: They saw their son on screen in an ape performance, which is really cool.
“There Are 33 Minutes of 100% CG”
COVID and the actors’ strike nearly put production at a halt.
It’s very, very impressive. We’ve been highlighting the centerpiece of your movie, the apes, but one thing I tend to get a little obsessed with with VFX is invisible VFX. You also have a wealth of challenges in that particular department, so can you maybe each take a moment to highlight some vital VFX work that is front and center?
BALL: There’s 33 minutes of 100% full CG in the movie. There are shots in the movie where you go from two horses that are real to the next shot with CG horses and then back to real horses. That kind of magic trick is really hard to do. There’s fire in the movie and most of the fire in the movie is all CG. That alone is like a, “Don’t go there, guys. That’s dangerous.” The water, for crying out loud! All the water. So, we had a small little river for the river sequence. We had a small little tank that we built so all the shots with Mae, we have some water, but most of it got replaced anyway, but all the rest of it is all CG. All that stuff with the flood in the end there, when the water’s coming in, and the apes are drowning and all this stuff, it’s all CG.Not just the water, not just the apes—the bolts, the lights, the railing, the whole world. It’s all CG.
I’ve been wanting to do basically a full CG, mocap movie for a long time, so I got a little taste of it here. So, to me, I love the fact that we kind of could mix live-action and full CG all over the movie, and I don’t think most people, even educated people about this process, can tell. I think that’s a testament to your work.
WINQUIST: You see I’m talking about, right?
Your enthusiasm for their work and supporting them right now is infectious.
BALL: These movies are fun because we are trying to capture that magic and tell a story and entertain people, but they’re also really, really complicated technical problems constantly that you’re dealing with, and there’s so much enjoyment in that. The fact that we get to wield these incredible tools that they are masters of, it’s inspiring.
WINQUIST: You asked about some of the invisible stuff that people wouldn’t notice. There’s a scene when we first meet the marauders on horseback with the torches, that scene at nighttime after Noa goes out. That was a location that we had found an hour south of Sydney in an abandoned petroleum coke plant—not Coca-Cola, but coke, the petroleum product. That would have been different story. We had this really fantastic derelict-looking place that then was just naturally overgrown because it hadn’t been used for years, and then greens came in and put even more stuff down. It was a night shoot, big lighting rigs, balloons, everything else.
BALL: In one eight-hour shoot, we had to shoot that scene. It’s impossible.
WINQUIST: So we went out there, gave it our best, shot things. Our DP, Gyula [Pados], had lit the place and it looked awesome. Then Wes and Dan [Zimmerman] got it into the editing room, and were like, “Eh…”
BALL: “I can do better.”
WINQUIST: So by the time we get around to additional photography, a few months from the end of our production period, it was like, “Alright, we’re gonna go back and do this right.” So we essentially recaptured the scene, all the performance work, everything else, no horses this time…
BALL: You’re missing one part of that story. We planned this reshoot.
IMMERMAN: COVID.
BALL: Not just COVID, the frickin actors’ strike happened, so we couldn’t bring our actors in, but we had to get going on this thing. So, we couldn’t plan the shoot, we couldn’t do this, and I was like, “Erik, can we just go full CG?” And so we did, and it worked great.
WINQUIST: But the thing that was awesome is by that point, of course, we already had all of this photography from the original go-around, and so we had the most perfect reference you could ask for because we had scanned the shit out of that place. We had data about the location and everything we needed in terms of what it looked like in the daytime, so we could just make all the materials and everything else match. That scene came through really quickly, as well.
BALL: It was amazing. So we didn’tshootthat scene, really. We were on stage. It was after Christmas, really late in the game. There was another scene, too, with Proximus in that dinner table scene, when he brings Noa to the window and he talks about humans and their tools. That was last minute. We didn’t have that scene in there for the longest time. We had a version of the scene, but we kept watching that scene, and it was like, “There’s something we’re missing. It’s not quite working.” So once we realized that, we had to have Proximus state his goals here and talk about the idea that he’s fascinated by humans, he’s a fan of man, he’s enamored by these tools that human beings were able to create. So once we figured out the dialogue of that thing, we literally had to fly out because we went to New Zealand. Why bring New Zealand and the Wētā team all the way to Los Angeles when we can just go to New Zealand?
Literally, this was, like, two months before we were supposed to deliver. It was crazy. We had this one-and-a-half-minute-long scene we had to go shoot. I flew Kevin [Durand], myself, and Owen out there to Wētā, and we just went out there and shot it for a day. I even had some of the people watching the take because we were so worried about, “This thing’s gotta work, it’s gotta work. We have to have no backup plan if this doesn’t work.” So, we turned it over and Paul and the gang basically took it on like a champ. It was down to the wire. We had no time. But I’ll say this, it’s the only movie I’ve ever done where when we’ve finished, we had a day leftover. Usually, you’re working at the last frickin minute, and they’re pulling it out of my hands. It was a testament to Danielle’s work here. It just ran so frickin smoothly. We had less time than the previous movies, we had more apes, more everything, more worlds, more everything, but it went so smoothly. At the very end of the movie, it was weird, it was like that story of Titanic where when the ship sunk, you just kind of swam off. It wasn’t this violent thing. We just drifted off and went our own ways. The movie’s over and then go off on the release date. It was a good experience.
WINQUIST: Again, a testament to Danielle and her entire production crew in the planning of this, because we actually were able to ramp down towards the end instead of having this panic crunch in the last weeks.
BALL: We get the shitty shots where you’re just racing to just do something, do something, whatever!
WINQUIST: We had the opposite. We actually had time to go back and make some shots better that he had already filed three months ago.
BALL: By the way, that’s a cool story, too, frommylearning experience. I could talk all night for this thing, guys. From my experience, it’s interesting because I knew enough to be dangerous about visual effects, but I had no clue what it really takes to do these movies. There was this one shot when Noa wakes up from a dream that got cut—which goddamn it, it’s the one cut I wish they’d kept. It had this awesome shot of Koro coming out of the fire in Noa’s dream. Anyway, that scene when he sees the eagle, his spirit animal basically, we worked on that shot for the longest time, and I remember I filed that really early on. I was like, “This looks amazing! Look at this.” In the editing bay, me and the editor and all the guys were like, “This is amazing. This is incredible.” So a couple weeks go on and keep working on their shots, and this is how we go, one shot at a time, constant, through weeks and weeks and weeks. Then finally, two months later or something, I get a new version of that shot that I’d filed months ago, and it was an extra level better. I had no clue it could get better. So, that was a learning experience for me.
It’s like they could see, “Oh, this isn’t there yet,” even though I said, “That’s perfect.” They could tell, “No, we could do better than this.” So, that recalibration for me was like a huge learning experience to see what’s possible. I think that’s what separates a lot of things in movies is the people that stop versus the people that keep pushing and going into that new territory and that new ground that you can break. I always remember that moment.
WINQUIST: Kind of realizing on the next one we’re going to be screwed.
BALL: Oh yeah. Just wait.
Wes Ball Has Big Plans for ‘Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes’ Sequel
“There are so many cool places we could go with the next one.”
Thank you for saying “the next one” because that can tee up my greedy question quite a bit. I asked you this back at the junket when the movie came out, and then I heard some positive rumblings back in the fall. Has there been any more forward momentum with another installment?
BALL: Yeah, we’re talking about it. That’s all I can say, really. But I’m greedy. I’ve got multiple things that I’m playing with right now. I’d love to do all of them, but there are so many cool places that we could go with the next one. We have these ideas of where we want it to go.Things are set up in this movie that you don’t even realize are setups.But movie two is almost always the best one of the trilogy.That’s the way it works. That’s where all the drama is, where all the conflict is, and that’s where this really dark stuff happens, or really consequential stuff. And this character of Noa and how much he has changed by the events of this movie, the fact that we set up all these characters and we’ve kind of set this runway for where ultimately we could go, we have in our minds, and it’s super exciting.
These movies, they’re some of the last thinking person’s blockbusters. They’re big, giant Hollywood [movies], although, we made the for very cheap. $160 million, guys? That’s crazy compared to other movies that cost twice that. Anyway, we could do some really, really special stuff, and we’re looking forward to that. But there are other projects that are also in the wings, too.
What Is Wes Ball’s ‘Ruiner’?
Between the Apes franchise,Zelda, and this, he’s not slowing down any time soon.
I’ll be extra greedy and follow up on that. Do you know what you’re going to jump into next?ZeldaorRuiner?
BALL: No!Ruineris actually very cool.
I was watching some gameplay. It looked really cool, and it looked like it could probably be one of the more violent things you’ve ever done.
BALL: My pitch was imagineLéon: The Profesionalin aBladerunneruniverse. It’s super cyberpunk, freaking aggressive, muscular. I want to play in that world. That’ll take its time. Let’s just say the two things areZeldaand Apes. That’s what I’m being greedy for right now.
I’ll take that answer. A lot of people in this audience know this is one of my favorite questions to end on, and I do think it’s especially important here because, in this industry, we give each other awards, and I do think that’s really cool, and I’m glad we’re celebrating your Oscar nomination tonight, but I find that nobody in film and television tells themselves good job as much as they should. Can you each give me an example of something you accomplished makingKingdom of the Planet of the Apesthat you know you’ll always be able to look back on and say, “You know what? I’m really proud of what I did there?” And again, I know it’s a team effort, but give yourself a little credit.
WINQUIST: I just think the experience of the shoot told me that the prep part of that movie and what we talked about earlier, just getting everybody calibrated for what we were going to be doing, this was the smoothest shoot I’ve ever been on. In terms of, I’ve never felt more supported by a crew than this movie. So, right there, that tells me something. We did something right.
STORY: I’m just really proud of all the character work and basically being able to bring these characters to life from helping to understand with the design and making sure that the animation was going to work for these characters and to bring their performances through. So, I’m really pleased for the team that we were able to achieve that.
IMMERMAN: What I’m most proud of is the people that you don’t see that helped make this movie, all around the world, at Wētā, and that they were proud by the end in looking at what they had pulled off. It’s a long, arduous time to keep people engaged, and they were energized thanks to Wes and all of these guys, and to create a team of people that was supportive and feeding that vision, and for a very long period of time. We were in post for over a year. So to keep that energy up is a testament to the production team and the supervisors and everybody having the right synergy, and Wes at the head of that being really generous and inspiring them. People feed off creative vision, and I was really proud of being part of that.
WINQUIST: If I can be greedy, on the post side of things, I think we made an environment for the team where people felt empowered to work together in ways that they maybe haven’t done before, and so we saw the fruits of that all over the place constantly…just having a little side meeting, trying to figure out what’s the best approach. It wasn’t people were being told, “Alright, you asked me to do the thing, I’ll do the thing.” There was a lot of proactivity going on for the film, and then you see it on the screen.
BALL: I’m proud of all of it. It was quite a learning experience. It’s my fourth movie, so I’ve got a lot to learn still. I look at this movie, and I still see a lot of things, like, “Ah, I can do better next time.” I think most directors would probably say that. When they feel like they made a perfect movie, they probably should just stop. Whatever we do next, we’ll attempt to do even better.
Kingdom of the Planet of the Apesis available on Hulu and Disney+ now.
