By This Summer sees “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes” hitting cinemas, a follow-up to the modern ‘Apes’ trilogy that ran from 2011-2017 and a potential new film series launcher of its own.
“The Maze Runner” trilogy director Wes Ball helms this entry in which numerous ape societies have grown from when Caesar brought his people to an oasis.
At the same time, humans have been reduced to a feral-like existence. In the years since some groups have never heard of Caesar, while others have contorted his teaching to build burgeoning empires.
Just how far the film takes place after the prior ones has never been entirely clear, that is until recently when Ball told ComicBook.com about the movie’s time period:
“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.”
Ball also talked about the film’s setting, confirming it unfolds on the U.S. west coast and it’s being deliberately done in a way to try and avoid people focusing on landmark spotting:
“Honestly, the big thing for me… you will not see any Statue of Liberty in this movie, but I kind of didn’t want to do the whole… ‘Oh, I know that.’ But I’ll say this. We do think about those things and the people who notice it fishes from LA, we probably notice some things, but the journey is, it’s a journey movie.
So we travel quite a lot here. But there is a kind of thing, especially with that first 1968 movie they shot at Malibu. So there’s kind of like a California thing to these movies where they shot on the branch up there. So we kind of wanted to set it there.
Of course, the film wasn’t shot in California but on the other side of the Pacific Ocean in Sydney, Australia – a city that boasts a strong resemblance to California in many ways and offers a much more sun-drenched look than the Canadian filming locales of the prior films:
What’s interesting, even though we had to shoot in Australia, the whole reason we kind of chose that because mainly because when we had to shoot it was winter here and… whatever, that’s a part of movie making, but chose Australia because you go around Los Angeles, there’s a ton of eucalyptus trees everywhere.
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” stars Owen Teague, Freya Allan, Kevin Durand, Peter Macon and William H. Macy star in the film which opens in cinemas on May 10th.
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