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Gorillas
in Our Midst By Andrew O. Thompson • Photos by Sam Emerson “What you have seen
here today, apes on the five continents will be imitating tomorrow.
Where there is fire, there is smoke and in that smoke from this day
forward, my people will crouch and conspire and plot and plan for the
inevitable day of man’s downfall: the day when he finally, and self
destructively, turns his weapons against his own kind. The day of the
writing-in-the-sky, when your cities lie buried under radioactive rubble.
When the sea is a dead sea, and the land is a wasteland, out of which
I will lead my people out of their captivity. And we shall build our
own cities, in which there will be no place for humans — except to serve
our ends. And we shall found our own armies, our own religion, our own
dynasty and that day is upon you now. . . So cast out your vengeance.
Tonight, we have seen the birth of the planet of the apes!!!”
Ever since the short-runs of twoTV series, Twentieth Century Fox had been eager to resuscitate its Apes franchise. After several aborted launches — with directors AdamRifkin, Oliver Stone, Chris Columbus and James Cameron all attached at various times — the studio turned to Tim Burton, best known for the brooding aesthetic he brought to Batman, Ed Wood, The Nightmare Before Christmas, Edward Scissorhands and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. In Apes redux, Captain Leo Davidson (Mark Wahlberg) is probing stellar systems when his trained chimp Pericles gets lost in an astral anomaly. The headstrong Captain embarks on a rescue mission, but is also cast adrift in an unstable vortex. Forced to hard-land on an alien world, he is enslaved by a simian society bent on exterminating Homo sapiens. Aided by ape activist Ari (Helena Bonham Carter) and human agitators Daena (Estella Warren) and Karubi (Kris Kristofferson), Davidson must unearth the mystery behind the planet’s abnormal evolution before being butchered by fascist human-hater General Thade (Tim Roth) and his trusted adjutant Attar (Michael Clarke Duncan).
But Apes forced the cinematographer to think outside the box, and embrace approaches uncommon to his photographic style. He had to draw on ample backlight to illuminate the darkened apes, record numerous desert exteriors day-for-night, and flood sets with layers of diffusion, particularly dust and smoke. He exploited three separate filmstocks — EXR 100T (5248) on day exteriors, with the occasional shift to Vision 250D (5246) during dusk and overcast days, and Vision 500T (5279) on nighttime and stage-bound shots. Composing in an anamorphic frame that magnified the grandeur of desert-bound landscapes, Rousselot used a Panaflex camera fitted with Primos, C and E-series lenses.He confined any on-camera diffusion to a SoftFX 1 on tight shots because “Scope doesn’t need a lot of it. The lenses are sharp, but not as ‘cruel’ as spherical ones.” Burton and Rousselot also resolved to keep effects work in-camera as much as possible. But Industrial Light and Magic does offer such digital components as the Oberon in outer space, spacepods getting sucked into electromagnetic storms, replicated apes for marching armadas, as well as sky extensions and exterior shots of Ape City. From its opening moments, the director wanted audiences to recognize that his version of Planet of the Apes does not exist on a post-apocalyptic Earth ravaged by nuclear holocaust. During preproduction, he and Rousselot studied NASA photographs and artistic renderings of interstellar expanses — such as satellite moons rising in the skies of Jupiter — for insight on how to conjure an alien skyscape. The cinematographer once suggested that all nights be colored crimson, as established by fixing a giant red moon in the twilight sky. Burton was not keen on the concept due to his misgivings of having to warrant a scarlet sky in every exterior shot. “If you constantly have to explain your lighting scheme by a stellar body,” remarks Rousselot, relaying Burton’s rationale, “then it becomes a film about cosmology, and not apes, and you take the fun out of it. I often see science-fiction films that go too far in extraordinary aesthetics and lose credibility. It’s hard enough to have a story with apes speaking English with British accents and maintain credibility.” “ Scientifically, the domain of Planet of the Apes is complete baloney. There’s no way you can justify any one shot of this film with scientific facts — it’s totally imaginary. But my fear was that I would end up shooting a white, sandy and totally colorless desert with a perfect blue sky — or at best, a white sky — all the way around. My thought was ‘How do I get out of this very banal looking shot?’ Rousselot added alien exotica to Alar’s atmosphere with Varicolor filters, which are polarized dichroics fashioned by French company Cokin. He purchased these filters in the Eighties, but abandoned them because the effects did not mesh with his mode of photography. As his sets are smaller-sized for still camera attachment, he had Cokin customize larger ones to fit his Primo lenses. Undertaking a series of tests in the Mojave Desert, he combined these dichroics with traditional polarizers to intensify their strangeeffect.“Playing on complementary colors, the Varicolors basically polarize certain wavelengths, turning them to the opposite color,” he explains. “So you could turn part of the sky completely green, and the rest will turn completely magenta.What was very interesting for me was combining that filter with a normal polar screen — whether a linear or circular one — thereby augmenting the effects. As you turn one against the other, what it does is give you a whole spectrum of colors, which is like being on the wrong medication!” Though he fixeda crude assortment of celestial bodies — planets, moons and suns — in the heavens after taking these images to telecine, the final print depicts only two moons hanging above Alar. Admiring the subtle shimmer of yellow, magenta and red hues glistening off skintones and landforms, he utilized the Varicolor screens on all exteriors except for the final battle at the Trona Pinnacles and shots taken of a parched lava flow on the Big Island of Hawaii. On day-for-night sequences, he applied graduated filters and other polarizers atop the Varicolors. Even though Rousselot had no need to manipulate his image on interiors, the Varicolors would have been unusable on the already-darkened stage because the filters factor in a four-stop light loss. He planned to deepen the off-key chroma during timing, but after seeing the finished footage, which oddly enough did not reflect results of his test images or dailies, Rousselot opted for a tapered-off look. “There’s a very bizarre yet very effective Steadicam shot as we follow a group of characters [Captain Davidson, Deana, Ariand their fellow fugitives]strolling in a winding canyon,” he relates. “Therefore, the background changes constantly, flowing from right-to-left and left-to-right constantly. The filtration system brought out a lot of magenta, but I cut a lot out in timing. But there are still some very strange hues. Dark hair [both human and ape] goes completely purple, even if the face doesn’t read as purple. It’s weird but I quite like it — I would never do that on any other film, but it’s fairly appropriate on this one.” Prior to his doomed voyage to the ape-governed world, Captain Davidson is stationed aboard the Oberon, a vessel conducting stellar research with genetically enhanced chimpanzees. Its sleek, streamlined design references that of the USS Discovery of 2001-A Space Odyssey. Multiple mirrors on one end lend the illusion of extended length. Its ovular shape offered a potential, 360-degree perspective with both the floor and ceiling casting reflections in the glass-covered spacepods inset into the Oberon’s imposing, open-maw corridors of slanted archways. With cockpits of curved Plexiglas, the pods recede into the corridors when jettisoned into deep space. “With these big glass bubbles in front of them, the pod was essentially a crystal ball in the spaceship that saw everything,” indicates gaffer Jack English. “If you look real closely at Wizard of Oz, you can see the film crew in the crystal ball, and that’s something we had to struggle with too. So we had to hide cameras as best we could and light the room with lamps that couldn’t be seen — essentially from a fish-eye lens look at what you’re doing.” To offset chances of fixtures, camera or crew reflecting in shot, the grip crew set grid-patterned light boxes into the Oberon ceiling, and constructed them to appear as part of its internal schematics. Cutting diamond-shaped holes into the set, grips placed 12 to 16 muslin-covered nook lights into each opening, and then covered them with egg-crate grids. Because the Oberon is coatedin shades of white, gray and off-white, light bounced off the interior — including the mirrored and glass surfaces — and provided more than enough ambiance. “When you’ve got lots of glass and reflections, you don’t need so much light because basically everything bounces,” says Rousselot. “I remember a long time ago I had a ballroom that was entirely mirrored everywhere [in the film Claire de Terne] and I used one lamp, because the light bouncing back and forth lit up the whole room.” Despite the space’s small size, Rousselot could still shoot with a 35mm lens because its omni-present curvature offset any distortion produced by anamorphic lenses. Welcome to the Jungle After crashing into a swampy marsh, Captain Davidson ejects from the Delta pod, swims to shore, and trudges his way through the dense undergrowth right into a human raiding party. The cinematographer had prior experience photographing forestry on The Emerald Forest, The River Runs through It, Queen Margot and Instinct, but the rain forest outlying Ape City was mostly artificial in nature. Using images from the Hawaiian jungles as a reference, production designer Rick Heinrichs sprouted one on-stage at the Los Angeles Center Studios. Production crews drilled some 15 feet into the ground to castthe murky lake at the jungle’s apex. Underwater specialist Pete Romano shot all below-the-surface sequences in a tank at Sony Studios — including Davidson exiting his sunken pod, and he and Daena’s later diving excursion to retrieve navigational equipment only to find submerged ape corpses. To get some tips on lighting a simulated jungle, he and gaffer English paid a visit to Shelly Johnson, ASC at Universal Studios Stage 12 during the shooting of Jurassic Park III (see ICG Magazine, July 2001). Johnson turned them onto the idea of using Mole Richardson’s beam projectors (Mole Beams) to shoot intense shafts of highly focused light. Rousselot prefers them to Xenon lamps because in such situations he favors playing tungsten over HMI light. He created hot rays of streaming sunlight from 15 Mole Beams (5Ks and 10Ks) along with 26 Spot Par lamps spaced in, around and on the lush vegetation. As a controllable blanketing source, Rousselot ran 60 Spacelights above set on the permanents overhead. As sidelight, he resorted to his homemade “Baggos,” which are 2K Spacelights in a bag. With strategically placed holes of darkness, he extended the set’s apparent depth through highlights and separation. A light haze of smoke infused the set with a steamy humidity. (Having other ends of the stage backed by bluescreen for sky and tree extensions did make it difficult for him to judge the overall contrast at times.) “What we tried to do on-stage [of the jungle] was put the camera as much as we could on a low angle,” expounds Rousselot. “Basically, just shoot at the sky, try not to see the perms and, of course, switch off whatever lights would be directly in shot. The only way that this forest or any forest looks real is by shooting up. If you look down, it’s a set. Maybe it’s just my imagination, but when you look up to see enough white behind the foliage to feel that there’s a sky somewhere, then suddenly the whole space becomes real.” When two gorillas stumble upon the after-burn trail that Davidson’s pod scorched in the thicket, the soldiers alert General Thade. As he is entrusted to protect the secrets of ape civilization, Thade murders the two warriors by pouncing upon them from above and disemboweling them with handheld blades. On this death after-dark, the cinematographer opted to emulate a work of art with operatic undertones. “While we were shooting, I looked at the set and it suddenly seemed very Wagnerian. It looked like those illustrations by Arthur Rackham of Wagner’s The Ring. It had that very staged, a little bit German, turn-of-the-century look to it, with the armor and very dramatic light coming from the sky [via a 10K Mole Beam] It’s only when I saw the big CGI shot that comes before that I got reconciled to what I’d done. ILM put a huge white moon in the sky and justified my melodramatic lighting.” All workprints had been developed on Vision stock. But in striking the final prints on the Premier emulsion, Rousselot netteddeeper blacks and heightened contrast, which he observes are similar to the silver-retention process. That altered look became particularly apparent when he presented Burton with a segment of the disoriented Davidson’s initial jaunt through the jungle. “I’ve timed all the forest scenes very dark — in a very contrasty, very cold, blue-greenish tone,” the cinematographer reveals. “I showed a print to Tim and was a little worried that it was too dark. When Tim saw the print, he said, ‘Can we print it a little darker?’ I said, ‘Fine — suits me.’ Tim was looking at the scene as being about a guy lost in the forest who’s scared, puzzled, completely confused and doesn’t know what’s happening, and that’s what the image has to convey. I’m thinking ‘Do we see enough of the set?’ But it’s not about seeing the set — it’s about describing someone who’s confused and scared.” After being captured by ape slave traders, Captain Davidson is rounded up with the other human outlaws and chucked into a wooden prison cart. Under gorilla guard, the deserters are hauled across a dried-up, fissured lava flow en route to the mountainous city of Derkein. Production spent a few days at the volcanic crusts on Hawaii’s Big Island shooting the caravan and background plates of the cracked-earth for CGI composites of Ape City looming in the horizon. Only hand-carried equipment could be brought along the fossilized turf. Rousselot relied upon bounced ambiance from the bright tropical sunshine with an assist from 6K and 12K Pars. Even with its impressive primordial vista, capturing an awe-inspiring view of the expansive plain of desiccated, gray crevices became an exercise in ingenuity because “it’s all flat surfaces,” the cinematographer attests. “There’s no mountain range to balance it out. There’s no perspective — you don’t know whether it’s 10 feet or two miles long. Looking down on the lava is very interesting because its beautiful detail makes for an absolutely fascinating rock. But as a master shot, it’s very disappointing. Actually, the only shots that came out very well are those with Ape City added to them, because then there is some scale. They used plates of the lava flow from somewhere called Tree Sanctuary, which is a huge, flat expanse of lava on the saddle ridge. Adding the Ape City, which is like a big pyramid, makes the whole image work. But when it doesn’t have an edge, you can’t read [the depth]. You could use a 75 or a 35 [millimeter] lens and still get that same flat expanse with no border — it’s very disconcerting.” Metropolis of Monkeys Conceived by production designer Heinrichs on Stage 30 at Sony Studios, Ape City occupied some 2 million cubic feet of soundstage space. As the city of Derkein is a pyramidal mountain domain of multi-terraced levels, winding caverns and jutting ledges of stone, its exterior set had to be built up to the perms. During the four-month construction period, Rousselot often visited the Derkein set to monitor placement of greenbeds and other technical details that might impact lighting setups. Heinrichs based his blueprints on architecture from primeval and contemporary cultures that co-exist with nature as opposed to dominating it (see “Remodeling a Monkey Planet” on page 19). Because of that preference, Ape City is drafted from an uneven scheme of irregular lines. “Nothing is horizontal, vertical or at a right angle — it’s all sloping and crooked,” the cinematographer confirms. “All the doorways are bizarre parallelograms. Since this city is not on one plane and has different levels, you can get the full scale of the set by pointing the camera up, down or rather normally.” (Knowing that ILM was drawing-up digital set and sky extensions encouraged Rousselot to shoot up into the ceiling or past other set perimeters. Thus, he did not feel obliged to obscure limitations of set scope not covered by the 75-foot high matte painting portraying the horizon.) “Therefore you’re not tied to leveling the camera to avoid distortions of verticals and make parallels meet. You’re much freer to Dutch the camera — point up, point down or do whatever — because you don’t have to respect right angles. Also, we frequently used an anamorphic 35 millimeter lens, which I usually never use because it distorts everything. But the lens was ideal on these sets. When using extremely wide angles on a street, building or a conventional set, the vertical lines are no longer vertical. That distortion in the lens is basically unavoidable, especially when looking up or down. But with a set that has no right angles, you don’t see bending or deformation in the lens.” One might assume that any sunshine in Ape City gets filtered through teeming outgrowths of foliage or is blocked by overhangs of rocky outcroppings. Because the set’s enormity made it difficult for Rousselot to aim sunlight directly onto the city streets, the moviemakers determined that Ape City should never appear during the day. Most shots occur at dusk or the dead-of-night. The sole day shot — as Thade asks Senator Sandar (David Warner) to declare martial law against humanity — is cloaked in a creeping mist of hazy fog. “Not having sunshine on that set helped tremendously because that’s so difficult to achieve with a big, huge open stage,” Rousselot admits. “You can’t place a bright source light far enough away — it’s too close, almost within the volume of the set itself. Even if you lifted the roof of the stage, they would still build to the perms!” He lined the ceiling perms with an array of Spacelights, and manipulated them in variable patterns according to a shot’s needs. Because he prefers an unfocused yet directional soft source, greenbeds on the set’s opposing ends featured Nine-lights covered with tracing paper (216 frost) and aimed through egg-crates. He then hid Chinese lanterns in the many nooks-and-crannies on the stage’s lower levels. Besides operating lamps on a programmable dimmer board, he also recorded all moves on disk for future reference. Being able go back-and-forth between setups with ease allowed for a freer range of shot blocking, as opposed to capturing all aspects of a particular scene in one direction and then realigning all the lamps for its reverse angle. Better yet, he could now deactivate all his lamps between takes; the sets needed to remain at 50 degrees Fahrenheit to prevent actors adorned in heavy ape costumes from succumbing to heat exhaustion. Like the original picture, the primates exist in a primitive, pre-electric civilization lit by tiki-torches, oil lamps and bonfires. Rousselot has proven himself a master at shooting such shadowy light in period pieces like Interview with the Vampire, Dangerous Liaisons, Queen Margot and Mary Reilly. He sometimes ran 35 fire effects simultaneously in one scene, and boosted the actual flames with hidden, orange-tinted lights (15-volt peanut bulbs) enriched with flicker effects. Sometimes, he conceals frosted fashion bulbs and dims them to a low level to match the actual flames. Because he finds the redness of artificial firelight a bit too intense — it often turns skintones and costumes to a mushy hue that he must curtail in timing — he put up flame bars only when major fires erupt in shot. Otherwise, he matches the blazes with the aura of Chinese lanterns. With so much darkness at his disposal, Rousselot often rode a fine line when finessing shadowy silhouettes while still wishing to retain facial details within frame. Photographing co-mingling dusky apes and pale-skinned humans obviously poses challenges different than shooting the ebony primates at nighttime. Just ask Bruce Surtees, ASC, who in Conquest of the Planet of the Apes had to expose gun-toting gorillas raiding the darkened passageways of Century City, as lit only by spotlights and bonfires. With a stop range that hovered between 2.8 at the low end to a 3.5, Rousselot approached ape illumination on a case-by-case basis. “If you fully backlight the dark apes, the fur becomes very bizarre and you read the artificiality of the backlight very quickly,” he observes. “You have to be aware that the backlight is always cooler than a front light when hitting that kind of material. Or, just dim the backlights so it doesn’t look like a Junior is focusing on the apes’ heads. “The best way of seeing the apes and the armor and still keeping darkness is using sidelights and lights from three-quarters back just to make the costumes and armor glisten. It also helps to create shine on the faces and the wrinkles around the mouth, which you usually you don’t do with humans! It’s reversing what I would normally do, because I rarely use strong backlights and sidelights. It’s difficult enough because it’s a dark set at night with dark apes. But then suddenly there’s an ape [namely General Thade] bouncing from one wall to another on a cable [to boast his warrior prowess] and we have to make that action very readable. Creating darkness and seeing at the same time is always a Catch 22. But the real problem is when you start doing stunts or special effects with wires, because you are using multiple cameras and multiple angles — wide and tight — and having to make compromises between one and the other.” Desert Storm After escaping from Ape City through the jungle, a homing beacon leads Captain Davidson to the simian’s sacred grounds of the Calima. Production first established its presence outside Paige, Arizona for shots of escapees fleeing across the arid wilds. To indicate a transition in terrain from the jungle to the desert wastes, ILM digitally specked the rocky dunes with shrub-brush vegetation. The exiles encounter a red-tented military ape camp erected on the shores of a small lagoon. Because apes fear contact with water, the outcasts take to pillaging their horses, torching the camp and crossing the river to safety. The ambush was shot on the sandstone shores of Independence Bay in Lake Powell, Arizona. The body-of-water and its desolate milieu actually appear in the original film — as the grounds from where Colonel Taylor and colleagues start their exodus from the up-ended rocketship to Ape City, albeit from a different stretch of land. Above the encampment, Rousselot floated 12 helium balloons [12K tungsten], tweaking the throw via dimmer control. He lit inside the red tents with Blonds, flame bars and bulb-enhanced fires. Because this sequence is action-oriented, he wasn’t as concerned with catching facial features. But with the blazing tents and gorillas flinging balls-of-flame from bolos and Jai-alai baskets, Rousselot had more than enough light. Outside Death Valley, California, production assembled the Calima as a hulking sculpture of crystallized corkscrews spouting from the Trona Pinnacles, which are 500 tufa rock spires (some 140 feet tall) sitting in a dry lakebed formed 10,000 years ago while the area was an underwater reef. Because the endless expanse could not be justified with moonlight or firelight, Rousselot had to shoot these badlands day-for-night. Preproduction tests prompted him to consider digitally replacing the day-for-night skies, changing contrast and washing color for greater realism and then adding moons and stars. But he replaced this affected approach with measures of filtration. “On master shots, I did a lot of filtration with grads,” emphasizes Rousselot. “Actually, there’s an establishing shot that starts at dawn and opens on day. The Trona Pinnacles with that big set opens all dark blue and changes into a bright yellow, which we actually did by rotating those filters. The shot looks like it’s digital, but it’s absolutely untouched. When you play with this combination of filters, at one position you get a very dark blue, almost moonlight effect. I’m still timing that right now. It’s not yet printed completely, as I wished. We took some of the blue out, leaving a sort of cold cyan effect.” After penetrating the orifice opening into the Calima’s bowels, Captain Davidson discovers it to be the wreckage of the Oberon, which has been wasting away ever since crashing eons ago. Davidson and his rag-tag corps of multi-species freedom fighters enter it via a jagged, aboveground portal emptying into a series of subterranean chambers that allows sunlight to spill into its innards. “The Calima is a total ruin — it’s this huge, bizarre thing that’s been buried in the ground and rotting for thousands of years. It looks like the inside of the whale from the Jonah tale.” Rousselot found a conceptual rendering of the inner Calima relic so breathtaking that he replicated its pattern of light on the actual set. “The light completely fit the logic of the set, and the set was built in a way that made it the way to light it,” he affirms. “Half the problem with a set on stage is that you never experience its logic, but have to figure it out yourself. On a location, you can watch a set and see the light when it’s sunny or cloudy, and night or day and then reproduce or play around with that logic.You’re left totally dry on a stage because you have no experience of it — especially in science fiction.” He cast narrow shafts of hard light from above with dimmer-controlled 5K and 10K Mole Beams, along with multiple Par heads with 1200-watt (firestarter) bulbs. He paid special attention in lamp positioning to acquire a painterly contrast between sparkle and shade. “It’s not the first time [that I patternedlighting after conceptual art]. On Queen Margot, I remember having a drawing by the costume designer [Moidele Bickel] just for the purpose of showing costumes for a scene. It is the shot where Isabelle Adjani [as the Queen] and Dominique Blanc, her lady-in-waiting [Henriette de Nevers] face the severed heads of their lovers in a basement room. The drawing and its light direction was so beautiful that we absolutely copied the same shot — same framing, same light — because it was just right.” Aware that the Calima rubble holds the key to the origins of ape civilization, Thade goes to all costs to guard its secrets. In his quest for ultimate rule, he orders the simian armada to engage the human rebels in a last-ditch standoff in and around the Calima. Finding that the tri-engine powered Oberon is still left with some fuel, Captain Davidson hatches a surprise tactic to ignite its last engine as hordes of apes converge upon the humans. The nuclear-powered exhaust propels a giant cloud of sand into the atmosphere, with the dusty haze acting as a layer of diffusion as apes and terrans engage in hand-to-paw combat. Using several giant Ritter fans, bags of Fuller’s Earth were circulated in the air to obscure the on-set action. Safety concerns, however, led to production later switching to walnut dust. Although Rousselot and crew focused primarily on the principal players, they did have to capture action that included apes on cable rigs. He shot the massacre on four separate Panaflex cameras fitted with varying optics — two using 180mm lenses, one with a 75mm lens, and another with a 40mm or 50mm, and occasionally he snapped on a zoom for tight shots. In this instance, Rousselot filmed the Trona Pinnacle panorama without the customized Cokin filtration. “Once the battle starts, we do this dust cloud that provides the ‘look’ in and of itself. Because it’s just one big dustbowl, there’s no reason to add any of that crazy filtration.” Even though shooting in the bright desert sunlight, Rousselot had to fill-in the ambiance around the apes with an additional kicker, using silks to bounce sunlight or the aura from small HMIs. “Once in a while, we’d put a Par edge on somebody just to match what the Sun had done,” notes gaffer English. “Whenever you leave the apes alone outside, they go too dark — especially the gorillas. Figure that the backlight or light on the sand is very bright on a light surface. But if you don’t light the apes and the Sun’s not hitting them, the apes become masses of black-on-black, with everything in the faces getting lost pretty easily. It’s hard when you want to keep it dark, because you’re always right on the edge.” Rousselot also had to contend with reflections cast off the colorful, ornate armor fabricated by Oscar-nominated costume designer Colleen Atwood (The Handmaid’s Tale, Little Women, Beloved) who has decked out Burton’s peculiar protagonists with apparel in Edward Scissorhands, Ed Wood, Mars Attacks and Sleepy Hollow. “Sometimes, I let the armor get very, very shiny,” the cinematographer concedes. “At some points, there are suddenly flares exploding with light and I thought that added a lot of dramatization to the image. Other times, I just moved the lights around until I got rid of the problem. But the apes are moving along, so there’s no way you can completely avoid that [occasional reflection.] It’s not that I ever made a conscious decision about it. But I quite liked the fact it’s really contrasty — sometimes those costumes either disappear into the dark or get highlights.” Much of Apes was shot on Steadicam to track the agile, incalculable tracks of apes in motion. He reserved handheld for fast action moves, POV shots and instances of one character getting within a hair’s breadth of an adversary. “It’s certainly not a Dogma feel, but sometimes handheld is better than Steadicam because it gives a swifter reaction that can follow more rapidly,” rationalizes Rousselot. “The Steadicam has an inertia that sometimes doesn’t allow you to do fast pans.” With the Steadicam, however, he often turned to unorthodox means of catching kinetic energy. On the jungle set, the grips attached the Steadicam to a makeshift, two-man operated rickshaw with narrow wheels “so we could go through the plants. One problem with Steadicam is that it’s very difficult and very dangerous for the operator to run backwards, especially when you’ve got to go over roots and plants.” In the desert, Steadicam operator Neil Norman sometimes did shots from a three-wheeled all-terrain vehicle. “It has a system of springs that proved very efficient with the Steadicam because it could go very fast on rough terrain,” the cinematographer says. “Because it’s small, compared to an insertcar, it’s great because you can go along with horses. You don’t have to move this humongous train — it’s just a Steadicam operator, the driver and one camera assistant.” Half-a-mile away from the Calima site, second-unit cinematographer Jonathan Taylor (Independence Day, The World is Not Enough, The Fast and the Furious)shot much of the additional stunts, such as cabled-apes pouncing upon prey and apes loping on all fours across the sandy terrain. This crew also shot background plates of the marching ape armada so ILM’s artists could multiply their ranks with CGI effects. After completing production, first-unit relinquished the Calima so that the ancillary unit could continue capturing the carnage. True to tradition, Planet of the Apes ends with a kicker that sees Davidson pilot back through a timeslip in Pericles’ spacepod. Encountering Earth, his erratic trajectory drops him into Washington D.C., soaring past the Washington Monument and slamming into the Lincoln Memorial’s steps. Craning his head upwards, a horrified Davidson sees the monument topped by the head of General Thade, and finds humanity’s homeworld once again overrun by damn, dirty apes. Though the Internet was rife with rumors of multiple-filmed endings — including a primate pictured on the Statue of Liberty or Mount Rushmore — Burton limited his twist ending to the stone statue of old Honest Abe. But with rules of shooting on national monuments being so prohibitive, a unit recorded plates of the towering tribute. The final scene was done on a set with digital depictions of the greater D.C. area in the background and the monkey-modified monument composited behind the faux marble steps. Offering his artistry to this cult classic remake allowed Philippe Rousselot, ASC the freedom to indulge in experimental images on a big-budget, studio feature.Though the cinematographercould not fathom any preconceived notions of working with Tim Burton, hedidavoid viewing the original Apes pictures prior to their 80-day shoot. That blank canvas approach freed him up to preserve afresh perspective. “I didn’t want to be cornered into one of two ways,” he contends. “The first is to try and do something within the genre, even if it’s a much more modernized version of Planet of the Apes. The other is topurposely do something completely different. But more than that, I wanted to do a Tim Burton film. The style of Planet of the Apes comes from its story, the fact that there are humans wearing ape masks and its whole subterranean feeling. You don’t have to push that with some sort of forced visual. But I certainly did want to copy the first Planet of the Apes because that belonged to a different time. No, all that I knew [before heading into this project] was that Tim was not afraid of darkness, and that is always very reassuring!” • |
That
call for a coup d etat by chosen chimp Caesar (Roddy McDowell)
brought closure to Conquest of the Planet of the Apes (1972),
the penultimate picture in a five-film legacy spawned by the success
of Planet of the Apes. As a loose allegory on 1965’s Watts riots
by way of The Battle of Algiers’ underground tactics, Conquest
brought the series full-circle with a time travel loop that revealed
how apes came to dominate Earth. The 1968 original (adapted from Pierre
Boulle’s book by sublime Twilight Zone master Rod Serling) treated
moviegoers to a sci-fi yarn positing a world of upside-down evolution.
A band of American astronauts — commanded by intrepid cynic Colonel
George Taylor (Charlton Heston) — crash-lands onto a desolate alien
orb overrun by an intelligent civilization of damn, dirty apes that
enslaves mute human beings. Catching audiences off-guard with its curveball
cliffhanger, the $6 million futurist fantasy racked up $34 million —
a small fortune by late-Sixties standards — and lent new cultural significance
to the term “guerilla warfare.”
To
depict this so-called re-imaging of Planet of the Apes, Burton
enlisted the talents of Philippe Rousselot, ASC. The French cinematographer
has earned endless recognition in his homeland and stateside, most notably
for Diva, Therese, L’ Ours, Too Beautiful for
You, The Emerald Forest, Hope and Glory, Henry
and June and A River Runs Through It. As Rousselot had never
collaborated with the director before, he viewed Beetlejuice
and Sleepy Hollow before preproduction as an abrupt baptism into
Burton’s baroquevision. Though a stranger to science-fiction as a genre,
Interview with the Vampire did see Rousselot dabble in a Burtonesque
mood of dark, Gothic gloom.