Wes Ball offers a few details regarding Kingdom Of The Planet Of The Apes’ setting, look and connection to the previous films in the series.
One of this summer’s big blockbusters is Kingdom Of The Planet Of The Apes, the next entry in the modern Apes series that ran from 2011 to 2017. That series grew in success with each film whilst also introducing Caesar, a digitally-created ape character (portrayed by Andy Serkis) that really connected with audiences.
The new film’s connected to that trilogy and also a jumping-off point for a new series of films, and the project’s director, Wes Ball, has been chatting about the connection between Kingdom Of The Planet Of The Apes and the films that precede it. We know that a fair amount of time has passed since the Age of Caesar, given that humans in the film are said to have devolved into a feral state, but until now, the details have been unclear.
Ball has been chatting to ComicBook.com, though, and offered a few details on the timeline, revealing: “We have this cut, ‘Many generations later,’ and I’ll just say it’s hundreds of years later, not thousands, hundreds. We never really put a date on it, to be honest. It’s just a long enough distance that stories can, the game of telephone through history, it starts to erode and change and get lost.”
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Ball has also talked about the decision to shoot the film in Australia and the way that choice has impacted the look of the film in relation to previous iterations. According to the director, this choice will visually connect the films to the original 1960s movies while also setting them apart from the most recent entries:
“And so we kind of picked the more lush versions of Australia, so it actually kind of feels like it’s kind of got the harsh light. And that’s another big thing usually I think in the movie is that we’re not in Vancouver … We’ll see if people like it or not. It creates a different look for the movie where we’re not in the kind of soft light and this steamy smoky terrains and stuff, but we go into hard sunlight… It is bright, it’s a bright movie, it’s a new day.”
Kingdom Of The Planet Of The Apes is set to release in May and will star Owen Teague, Freya Allan, Kevin Durand, Peter Macon and William H Macy. It will be going up against Furiosa: A Mad Max Story here in the UK, which should prove to be an interesting battle. We’ll bring you more on the film as we hear it.
