Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes Director Reveals How Project Came to Be

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes is heading to theaters in May, and a new trailer for the film was released during the Super Bowl last weekend. It’s been confirmed that the new movie takes place hundreds of years after War for the Planet of the Apes, which was released back in 2017. ComicBook.com recently paid a visit to the film’s edit bay, and director Wes Ball spoke to members of the press about the project. He addressed whether or not moviegoers need to see all of the other Apes films first, and spoke about how the project came to be. Ball admitted that he initially turned down the directing job, but once he started thinking about the story, he got excited and changed his mind. 

“I was doing [Mouse Guard] with Matt [Reeves] and learning all the motion capture stuff,” Ball began. “And I had already done a bunch of movies with WETA, so I was really sharpening my chops on this mo-cap thing. And we even cast Andy Serkis as one of the characters in the thing. And so it was during that merger, it was kind of the victim of that merger, and it got canceled … But it was after that.”

Ball was then approached by the studio and recalls being told, “I know it sucks, whatever, but you’ve learned all this mo-cap stuff now and all this thing and you’re friends with Matt. It’s like why don’t you do the next Planet of the Apes?”

“Honestly? I said, ‘No thanks,’” Ball revealed. “The trilogy was fine? It was a perfect little thing. It is like, ‘Why do it? I’m not interested in doing a part four. It’s not really fun. It’s not very interesting.’” … “I remember talking to my producing partner, Joe … ‘I have to find something else,’ and then a week later… ‘I think I know how to do this.’ … It’s a big bold choice. We’re going to do a giant cut after Caesar has died, but we’re not going to abandon what has come before us, essentially. So we’re still in that same world. We’re still in that universe. And in fact, we get to play with the idea of what has happened with Caesar’s legacy, what has survived, the whole buildings are dissolving away.” 

“What has happened to his stories, his legacy, his teachings?” Ball continued. “A character who shows up who isn’t connected to Caesar at all. So it suggests across the globe there are other apes that are having their own awakenings. They’re having their own kind of journeying into intelligence.” 

“We talked directly to the producers of the previous three movies and the writers of Rise, and we brought him in… They’ll tell their own story, but I don’t think they were at very first interested in doing another movie … But then we talked about this idea and the opportunities here. ‘Oh, we could do something that actually is not just a cash grab,’” Ball recalled.

“So anyway, they kind of got involved and they said, ‘We can’t write this thing, but we just worked with Josh Friedman.’ … Josh is the perfect guy to write this thing. And so Josh came in and we kind of talked about this idea. He was like, ‘Oh, you want to make a Kurosawa film?’  … We just became a collaboration of ideas. You think it’s going to be rough instincts or whatever it is. And then we take that long arduous kind of task of turning it into a story script that we come off from experience.” 

Directed by Wes Ball, Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes stars Owen Teague (IT), Freya Allan (The Witcher), Kevin Durand (Locke & Key), Peter Macon (Shameless), and William H. Macy (Fargo). The movie opens in theaters on May 10th.