SECOND COMING: Caesar (Andy Serkis) is the leader of the ape nation in Dawn of the Planet of the Apes.
By Noelene Clark
A troop of men in skin-tight motion-capture suits darted across a sparse set inside a Manhattan Beach studio on a late October morning. A grid of more than 50 cameras recorded their movements as they grunted and screeched their way toward a grey platform where Andy Serkis crouched.
The 49-year-old actor snarled and flared his nostrils, stretching the white markers painted on his face.
Anyone watching the scene unfold on the bank of computer monitors tended by the Weta Digital visual effects team, however, would have seen not weirdly attired actors but a tribe of chimpanzees scampering by.
“Good, OK, let’s keep rolling, and let’s do one more even more territorial,” called out director Matt Reeves as he worked on Dawn of the Planet of the Apes. “Just a little harder, a little louder.”
When it comes to helming the sequel to 2011’s breakout hit Rise of the Planet of the Apes, Reeves’ mission is to raise the stakes for the next installment in the Fox franchise, due in theaters this week.
Set 10 years after the earlier movie, a reboot of the sci-fi franchise inspired by Pierre Boulle’s 1963 novel that brought in more than $480mn at the worldwide box office, the new film posits a world in which apes have now developed their own civilisation and human sightings are rare.
Several survivors — including Jason Clarke’s Malcolm, a single father and former architect; Keri Russell’s Ellie, a nurse; and Gary Oldman’s Dreyfus, the leader of the human colony in the ruins of San Francisco — seek to restore electrical power to San Francisco. There, they come into conflict with the rapidly expanding tribe of apes, led by Serkis’ Caesar, the orphaned offspring of a laboratory chimp who has evolved into the leader of his own expanding tribe that includes wife Cornelia (Judy Greer), teenage son River (Nick Thurston) and a council of close friends.
“Caesar’s created a society in which there is complete equality between orangutans and chimpanzees and gorillas,” Serkis said. “There are a set of beliefs that they’ve collectively imposed, and there are strict tenets of what they should and shouldn’t do. He’s an egalitarian leader.”
“It’s an ape-point-of-view movie,” added Reeves (Cloverfield, Let Me In). “The apes are still coming into being, so it has a kind of majestic but also primitive, tribal aspect to it. ... Once you kind of get into that world, then all of a sudden you realise, ‘Oh, there are some humans left.’ The story really is about who will inherit the Earth. This is the one moment where it could have been Planet of the Humans and the Apes.”
To immerse audiences in the ape-centric world, Reeves pushed performance-capture technology to new terrain. Traditionally, motion-capture movies are filmed in a studio on a stage called a “volume,” with actors’ performances digitally enhanced by animators and visual effects technicians.
Dawn, however, was filmed almost entirely on location, with cast and crew trudging through the sweltering humidity of New Orleans and the freezing forests of Vancouver, Canada, lighting gear and enormous 3-D cameras in tow.
“We’re in the woods; we’re not creating the woods,” said Reeves, who takes over the franchise from Rise director Rupert Wyatt.
“It was crazy hard, but what’s going to be cool about the aesthetic is that you’re going to feel very grounded in the real world, so just the one fantasy is that they’re intelligent apes. No one has done that yet to the level that we did, so it should have a really distinctive feel and look.” — Los Angeles Times/MCT
Clooney miffed at false
marriage report, slams it
Hollywood star George Clooney has written a column to blast reports suggesting his fiancee’s mother is opposed to their marriage because of her religious beliefs. Clooney and Alamuddin, a lawyer, are reportedly set to wed in September this year. The actor, who is usually tight-lipped about his private life, made an exception following the publication of an article suggesting Amal Alamuddin’s Lebanese mum Baria is against the wedding because she wants her daughter to marry into the Druze religion, reports contactmusic.com.
In the column, published in the USAToday newspaper on Wednesday, the actor publicly acknowledged his engagement for the first time while blasting the original story. Clooney wrote: “I seldom respond to tabloids, unless it involves someone else and their safety or well being. The Daily Mail has printed a completely fabricated story about my fiancee’s mother opposing our marriage for religious reasons. It says Amal’s mother has been telling ‘half of Beirut’ that she’s against the wedding. It says they joke about traditions in the Druze religion that end up with the death of the bride. Let me repeat that: the death of the bride.
“First of all, none of the story is factually true. Amal’s mother is not Druze. She has not been to Beirut since Amal and I have been dating, and she is in no way against the marriage — but none of that is the issue.
“This lie involves larger issues. The irresponsibility, in this day and age, to exploit religious differences where none exist, is at the very least negligent and more appropriately dangerous. We have family members all over the world, and the idea that someone would inflame any part of that world for the sole reason of selling papers should be criminal ... And when they put my family and my friends in harm’s way, they cross far beyond just a laughable tabloid and into the arena of inciting violence.” — IANS
Pamela Anderson files for divorce, again
Pamela Anderson, who is married to poker player Rick Salomon, has reportedly filed for divorce. This is Anderson’s second time split with Salomon, whom she married in 2007 and got the marriage annulled within two months, reports tmz.com.
Interestingly, Salomon won $2.8mn in the World Series of Poker Big One for One Drop last Tuesday.
Anderson filed for divorce Thursday, so under the community property laws she gets half of the winnings unless there’s a pre-nuptial agreement. She was earlier married to Tommy Lee and Kid Rock.
— IANS