VFX Breakdown Of “War for the Planet of the Apes” With Its Director

(door banging)

Hi, I'm Matt Reeves, and this is Notes on a Scene

for War for the Planet of the Apes.

Caesar is on hunt.

The idea of the movie is to create emotional empathy

and identification with apes so that by the end

of the movie, everybody watching the movie is an ape.

The apes are not real.

They're basically our guys in MoCap suits,

and they're wearing these little cameras

that focus on their expressions.

Caesar's really on a revenge mission,

and the problem with this revenge mission

is that he keeps finding things that make it harder

for him to lose his empathy for humanity.

They're looking for soldiers,

but instead of finding soldiers, they find Amiah Miller.

So even here, as he's filled with a lust for revenge,

when Maurice stops him, he comes to his senses,

and he lets him go.

And Maurice is always Caesar's conscience.

Here the idea was to have a meeting of the minds.

It was very exciting to me to have Karin kinda come up

and walk right up to the camera

and look right into the lens.

We take her voice and pitch it just slightly

so that her essence comes through.

(grunts)

If we pitch it too much, you don't get the

incredible performance that she gives

that makes me very emotional watching it.

Actually, right under here is Karin's finger,

and she actually did all of this.

What Amiah's looking at is Karin, who's reaching forward,

and you'll see the finger is Maurice's,

but actually she's looking at Karin's finger.

And she starts to pet the doll,

which lets us know, and lets Amiah know,

that Maurice is going to be kind and bring her in.

Weta, who does the VFX, they are absolutely

the best in the world at this.

Not only are they best at what they do,

in terms of the technical side of it,

but it also has to do with the artistry

because here's the crazy thing:

Every single one of these hairs, it's astonishing, right?

None of this was here.

What was here was Karin with this expression,

and then we shoot the shot again.

I cut the movie together with the editors,

and we send out the shot.

And then what happens is two, three months later,

we get a blocking pass, and then we get into talking

about the animation and whether or not the emotion

I'm seeing on Karin's face is on Maurice's face.

And then after that, they work on the render.

So this whole thing, from the time when we shoot it,

probably takes about six months

before I ever get to see this shot.

But when it comes in and it looks like this,

I say, Dan, this is crazy real.

The whole sequence has no music,

so here is where, for the first time,

Michael Giacchino's music comes in here.

We cannot take her, Maurice.

And this particular theme, which is Nova's Theme,

starts playing, and it recurs throughout the movie,

and it's that little flicker of empathy,

that music that sort of pulls at your emotion

at a time when Caesar's out for blood.

And Maurice is like, well, I know you are,

but I can't leave her.

And so the question is, is Caesar going to be

the new version of himself who basically is not gonna

take any crap, or is he going to relent?

The way we shot this shot,

Karin is right here, so she's right here,

right in that space, and then we're filming her,

and here is Amiah,

and we take Karin's performance,

and the animators at Weta take this photoreal puppet,

and they animate her into this puppet.

And then we take the puppet and put it over.

A lot of times you have to shoot the shot again,

and there'll be nothing except for Amiah.

But in this case, we actually took her ape,

and put her over Karin.

But that is definitely her emotion coming through,

so you're actually getting her performance as that goes.

We shot this on Vancouver Island,

and it was supposed to be really cloudy and gloomy that day.

It's actually why we chose it.

It was rainy season, but instead it looked like this,

which was kind of like an amazing gift.

The apes on horseback is something

from the '68 original, right, the apes all ride horses.

In fact, as a kid, I really wanted to be an ape.

Caesar goes on this revenge journey,

and it really does become like a John Ford western.

This was one of those shots that makes

VFX people freak out, and Dan Lemmon,

who was our VFX super as we were shooting this,

he did freak out, but he assured me it was gonna be fine

in the end of the day, and it sure was.

It's kind of an amazing shot.

Under this area where Maurice is,

is actually a big blue backpack,

which is to increase the width of her body.

So, Amiah's holding onto the backpack

so that when we fill this in, it can all be this

giant orangutan and make the illusion complete.

The apes have legs that are much shorter than ours.

Our actors, of course, can't do that.

They can't just get rid of their legs,

and so we end up having to not only paint out their legs,

but put in CG parts of horses to cover over

where the legs go, it's a very complex process.

We shot actually all this stuff

with real horses on the beach.

The key to this kind of thing is

to put as much real in the frame as possible.

That's pretty much as real as a photoreal ape can look.

We cannot take her, Maurice.

(sad piano music)