In March 2000 Burton went to Prague to shoot two commercials for Timex I-Control watches. Produced by LA-based commercials company A Band Apart, the two ads were Matrix-like in tone, with fight sequences choreographed by Andy Armstrong. The first, ‘Kung Fu’, featured a man in a suit pursued by patent-leather-clad villains well versed in kung fu. It premiered in cinemas in the US with Mission: Impossible II in May 2000, before being shown on television. The second, ‘Mannequin’, starred Lisa Marie in a skin-tight black cat-suit pursued through cobblestone streets by a man in a stitched-together mask and dark glasses. At one point she tries to evade her pursuer by diving into a puddle, before finally hiding out in a warehouse filled with mannequins. The commercial aired in the autumn of 2000.
It made me realise that it’s best if I don’t do commercials, I felt. I don’t find it easy. People say, ‘Try commercials, it’s fun, it’s quick!’ But I didn’t find it that quick, and I found it quite difficult – it’s as if a studio were hanging over you at every second. You have a client, and you’re basically serving whatever product it is. I worked with A Band Apart as a production company and it was a concept they had, though there was nothing about the look of the characters, so that’s where I tried to have a bit more input. It was fun to do it, though – it was interesting to go to Prague, and to make those kinds of costumes. But I haven’t done one since, put it that way …
In October 2000, the first of six animated episodes of Stainboy appeared on www.shockwave.com. Based on characters from his Melancholy Death Of Oyster Boy And Other Stories, each three-minute long episode was written and directed by Burton and created by Santa Monica-based Flinch Studio using Burton’s watercolour drawings as guides. The music for the series was composed by Danny Elfman and Lisa Marie and Glenn Shadix provided some of the voices. The final episode, ‘The Birth Of Stainboy’ featured a host of new characters, including Brie Boy and The Boy With Nails in His Eyes, who later appeared alongside Stainboy, Toxic Boy and Match Girl as part of the range of Tragic Toys created by Burton in conjunction with Dark Horse.
A sketch by Burton for his Timex I-Control commercials.
It was right at the beginning of that dot-com boom and it was an interesting time, like the gold rush – people were made billionaires in a couple of days, and the next year it all comes crashing down. But it was interesting because at the time I didn’t really work a lot with computers, and all these companies were asking me to do something. So I just got the opportunity to try something in a different medium – that was about the only real reason to do it. In reality, what I would have loved to have done with those characters was make it more stop-motion – that’s what I would do now, because those characters seem to lend themselves more to that kind of form. So I don’t think it was necessarily the right medium for those characters, but it was fun to try and to play around with them, and worth exploring. It was pretty simple, very minimalist animation. Flinch Studio did the actual production of the animation, and I did some story boards and some key-frame kinds of things. But I’d rather – and I maybe will, at some point – try to do those characters in stop-motion.
Based on a novel by Bridge On The River Kwai author Pierre Boulle and adapted for the screen by Michael Wilson and Rod Serling, Planet of the Apes was released in 1968. Directed by Franklin J Schaffner, who went on to helm the Oscar-winning Patton, Planet of the Apes told of four American astronauts – Taylor (Charlton Heston), Landon (Robert Gunner), Dodge (Jeff Burton) and Stewart (Dianne Stanley) – whose spacecraft enters a time warp, is propelled years into the future, and crash-lands on an unnamed planet on which man is the primitive, mute, and physically inferior species ruled over by intellectually superior talking apes. After their ship goes down in a lake, Taylor, London and Dodge (Stewart died in space) trek across a desert wilderness looking for food, and come across humans scavenging a cornfield, whereupon a group of gun-toting gorillas on horseback charge from the woods, hunting them down. While Dodge is killed, Landon – who’s later lobotomized – and Taylor – who’s shot in the throat, rendering him speechless – are captured and taken to an ape city. Eventually, Taylor is befriended by a pair of sympathetic chimpanzees, scientist Zira (Kim Hunter) and her archaeologist husband Cornelius (Roddy McDowell) who, intrigued by Taylor’s speech and ability to reason, posit that he could be the missing link between man and higher primates, although their theory is dismissed by the ruling ape council who consider him a threat and schedule him for cranial surgery. With the aid of Zira and Cornelius, Taylor and a female companion, Nova (Linda Harrison), escape and together they set off for the Forbidden Zone – an uncharted area of land where apes are prohibited – in an attempt to prove that intelligent man existed before simian-kind. There they discover a secret that has earth-shattering implications for them all.
Planet of the Apes (1968): Zira (Kim Hunter) and Cornelius (Roddy McDowell) reason with Taylor (Charlton Heston)
Long considered a cinematic milestone and a classic of the sci-fi genre, Apes also proved to be culturally significant as well, tapping into the social and political climate of the time (notably Vietnam, the civil rights movement, racism, the Cold War, and the nuclear threat) and went on to spawn four sequels, a television spin-off that ran for two seasons, and an animated TV series.
The idea of resurrecting the franchise and returning to the planet of the apes had been floating around Twentieth Century Fox for almost a decade before Burton became involved. Several filmmakers, among them Oliver Stone, James Cameron, Chris Columbus, and the Hughes Brothers, had at one time flirted with the project, while various screenwriters, including Terry Hayes (Dead Calm) and Sam Hamm (Batman), tried unsuccessfully to crack the script. But it wasn’t until Apollo 13 co-writer William Broyles Jr picked up the challenge in 1999 that the project finally found its momentum. In an attempt to differentiate it from what had gone before, Broyles decided not to set his story on Earth, ‘to remove the thought that this is a repetition of the first’, and also jettisoned the original’s cynical human protagonist who, so embittered and disenchanted with mankind, hurls himself out into space, in search of something better than man. Instead, Broyles’ hero was not only written to be much younger than before but would also be on a journey of self-discovery.
When Burton responded to Broyles’ draft (which had the working title ‘The Visitor’) and signed on to direct in 2000, Fox’s president of production Tom Rothman put the film on the fast track for a summer 2001 release. ‘To inaugurate a franchise like this and to re-energise an idea there’s a familiarity with, you need a unique, individualistic, iconoclastic filmmaker,’ Rothman told me. ‘Tim has that uncanny ability to walk the line between making very commercial films and yet very individualistic and distinctive films.’ Fox were keen not to term Burton’s take a sequel or a remake, but rather a ‘re-imagining’.
It was another one of those situations where a project’s been floating around for years and they want to do it, they want to do it, they want to do it … and finally they give it to me. I’d probably say that it’s the first project I’ve been involved with where I knew it was … not a mistake, as such, but that it was the most dangerous, because it’s based on a movie I loved growing up. And it’s a classic, and that’s like the first rule of thumb – ‘Don’t try to remake a classic. If you’re going to remake something, pick something that was bad, so you can make it better.’ At the same time, I had an affection for the material and I had that thing that I sometimes get on a project, which is a perverse fascination of attempting something you probably shouldn’t do. But that’s part of my personality, I guess. I often feel that way …
Obviously, you do something based on something else and that’s your immediate target comparison. There was a pressure on this that was probably even worse than Batman, in that it’s a known thing where people have expectations. But any movie is a risk, and any movie I do I always try to treat it like it’s new to me, somehow. If I thought it wasn’t, then I don’t think I would be interested.
I saw Planet of the Apes as a kid and loved it. It had a lot of impact. And I saw pretty much all the sequels. So I was a fan, but at the same time one of the things that made me feel it was okay to do another version was that it wasn’t a remake – because you can’t remake that film. If people like it so much, like I do, then you just go back and watch it – that’s that movie. And I feel in a certain way you can’t really beat it. But knowing that this wasn’t necessarily a remake was helpful – because then you just focus on the material. And there is something very strange about talking apes …
What was intriguing to me about it was the simplicity of the idea – the reversal. I’ve done a lot of stuff with masks and makeup, but there was something about the ape/human thing that was primal. And it was intriguing to see these great actors sort of being apes – it’s kind of absurd but there’s also something kind of classical about it, it kind of goes back to an older style, before films, of mask-acting. And makeup sometimes has a tendency to take the person away, but in this case, with apes, you could still feel the person in there somehow …
Although Burton signed on to direct Broyles’ script – which was very science fiction oriented and featured three huge battle sequences – Fox declared it prohibitively costly. And so in August 2000, two months before shooting began, screenwriters Lawrence Konner and Mark Rosenthal, who had penned The Jewel of the Nile (1986) and the remake of Mighty Joe Young (1998), were hired to do a page-one rewrite. Sets were being built even as the script was being retooled.
The other problem with a project like this is that’s been around for so long that it gets into a kind of weird state of ‘Okay, we want the project, and we want it out at this specific time, and this is the script that we want to do.’ You’re like, ‘Oh, okay.’ And then you get involved and you get it budgeted and it’s something like $800 million and you go, “Wait a minute, of course it’s too much …’ But it was one of those projects that got into that unfortunate Hollywood spin cycle where there’s a release date and a script that the studio likes but it’s too much, and so you spend months and months not really working on a project but trying to cut a budget. You hear of it happening all the time in Hollywood – why I don’t learn my lesson I don’t know. I hope I have now, finally. And it only seems to happen on big budgeted movies – it happened on Batman.
In analysing it, I think I was more intrigued by the idea of it than I was by the thing in itself. And if I searched deep down in my soul, if I had to start all over, I would probably do a completely different kind of movie with it. If somebody came to me and said ‘Do you wanna do a version of Planet of the Apes?’ and I’d started the whole thing from scratch, it would have been a completely different movie with completely different types of characters. Maybe. I don’t know …
Again it’s a Hollywood thing. There’s a momentum going, and it’s so hard to get projects going that you get caught up in the groundswell of it. And then I started to get into a kind of angry-mode, because the studio would say, ‘Just cut the budget’ and I kept saying to them, ‘You guys are a movie studio, you have a huge production team, I know you do your own budgets, you know how much a movie is roughly gonna cost.’ So there was a lot of that going on which, again, was counter-productive to making the movie. It started to turn into something else, it kind of mutated in a way.
We were supposed to shoot in November and I don’t think we got the green light until the week before. So it’s extremely frustrating. You give your best, but it’s my own fault for going down that route. I guess that I felt – and it’s not necessarily a positive thing – that I’d done it before with Batman. But it’s really not a good way to work and you don’t end up saving money, plus you end up aging and wasting time and energy and your health declines, so it was tough that way. I felt like I was spending so much time fighting these conflicting forces that by the time I was doing it, I was just ‘doing it’, in a way. Which isn’t to say that every day I didn’t try to find something in it for me, because otherwise I couldn’t do it. But by that point you feel like an athlete that gets the shit beaten out of you before a race, and then you’re expected to go win.
I wanted to keep it serious, but you couldn’t do that. The point is not to make it the same. There was room for other explorations of ape mannerisms, while still trying to keep it kind of serious, not jokey. And you need it to be serious to some degree, because it’s somewhat absurd anyway – talking apes. I remember seeing production photographs from when they were filming the first movie, an ape sitting at a chair reading Variety, that kind of thing. We did a few twists on lines from the original, which you might consider to be jokey. But it probably had more to do with casting people like Paul Giamatti, who are naturally funny – even if he’s doing a dramatic thing he has humour about him. Same with Tim Roth, there’s a certain kind of intensity. Not that they’re trying to be funny, it’s just that there’s something inherent in those people.
The intention was never for it to be jokey-jokey. But that’s maybe me. My love of 50s horror movies turned out like Mars Attacks! – it didn’t turn out like Independence Day. So there’s a certain retro thing inside me, and why it comes out in a certain way, I’m not sure.
The producer of Planet of the Apes was Richard D. Zanuck whose father, Daryl F. Zanuck, had founded 20th Century Fox. As president of production at Fox in the 1960s, Zanuck Jr. had given the green-light to the original Planet of the Apes (and was married to Heston’s co-star Linda Harrison at the time.) Later fired from Fox by his own father, Zanuck continued as an independent Oscar-winning producer, often in conjunction with his long-time partner David Brown. His credits include Jaws, The Sting, Cocoon, Driving Miss Daisy, and The Road To Perdition. He and Burton connected immediately, and Zanuck remains his producer, of choice.
A sketch by Burton for the character of Limbo, incarnated on screen by actor Paul Giamatti
I love Richard – he’s fantastic. The other night I was watching a biography on his father and it was like, ‘Jeez …’ I’m surprised nobody has done the biography on that whole story, because it’s like one of those Harold Robbins novels for real.
He amazes me. For somebody who’s done and seen so much, he’s not jaded and I admire that. I’m a lot more jaded than he is, and if I’d been through what he has I don’t know if I could still do it. But he still maintains a certain innocence when something stupid happens, which I find amazing, and which is probably one of the things that keeps him able to keep doing it. This guy was hired by his father, then fired by his father, and he’s got a sense of humour about it, he’s hilarious about it. His observations about things are quite amazing. You can learn so much from these people. When I met Vincent Price I was so grateful to see somebody who’d been around and to see that they’re nice, they’re interested in lots of things, they’re not jaded – and you learn from that, and you should always keep learning, and I feel grateful for that. I see the way of certain studio executives, they don’t even know who people are. But Richard has got a wealth of information, is fascinating, has seen it all, and people are missing out on something when they don’t delve into that a little bit.
When I first met Richard I was actually kind of scared of him, because this guy is very intense. But he’s extremely funny when you get to talk to him, and extremely knowledgeable. He’s incredibly wise and he’s got the most incredible stories. They’re like those tell-all books in which people are being really bitchy and mean about people. Well, he can do that without being mean. They’ll be great stories but without one mean bone in his body, and there’s something really amazing about that.
And the idea that he ran the studio, then he comes back to the studio to do a movie and they don’t even know who he is … it’s surreal. But he’s seen it all and therefore he’s somebody who has what I think is lacking these days – he’s completely supportive of the filmmaker. He’s there every day but not in-your-face. He understands the process, and because it’s such a business it’s just such a pleasure to be around somebody who knows what the process is and has respect for it. To grow up with a father who was one of the people who started the whole business, to be the head of the studio, then get canned, then become a successful producer and kind of span generations – he’s really seen it all.
Despite his initial reservations, Burton was drawn to film’s theme of reversal, of the topsy-turvy world, of the outsider thrust into an alien landscape – familiar motifs that echo throughout his world. In this case, however, it’s not just Mark Wahlberg’s astronaut Captain Leo Davidson arriving on an alien planet, but also Helena Bonham Carter’s liberal chimpanzee Art – who, with her sympathetic tendencies, calls for humans to be released from subjugation and slavery – who can both be seen as outsiders.
I think that’s what I liked about it – you see reversals on so many different levels. But I haven’t looked at the film recently. Usually it takes me a few years to process, and I’m still not at that stage. This one’s taking me a little longer, maybe it’s still a little too painful, so I’m still in the zone. But there were a few things I liked – there was the juxtaposition of the ape-outsider and the human-outsider. But I also wanted to explore a bit more of the ape-like aspects of it, and their movement.
While the central premise of an astronaut crash-landing on an upside-down world where apes enslave humans remained essentially the same as before – although the ape planet definitely isn’t Earth; the script refers to it as Ash far – Burton was adamant that his apes should be substantially more animal-like than the shuffling men in makeup present in Schaffner’s film. Burton’s apes would fly through trees, climb walls, swing out of windows, and even go ape-shit when angry. The concept was 80 per cent ape, 20 per cent human, and so his actors were schooled how to move and behave like apes for two to three days a week over two months at a special Ape School.
I like people who act like animals or visa versa. Pee-Wee acts like an animal, Beetlejuice, Penguin, the Catwoman … Batman is an animal. I like animal people somehow. I don’t know if it’s an emotional response to things versus an intellectual response, but there is something about it I feel is important or is something I relate to somehow. It’s just that primal, internal, animal instinct of people and I did enjoy that with the Penguin character and the Bat. So this was a juxtaposition of that, along with the flip-flopping of my brain that doesn’t necessarily have a conscious or verbal reasoning.
There were also some technical things that I was interested in exploring: just doing a little bit of ape research and trying to give them a bit more of a weird mixture of ape mannerisms, and weave that into the reversal. You start to think not just what that reversal would be like, but how we are with apes, how we anthropomorphise them and make them kind of cute in a certain way, when, in fact, they’re quite scary – especially chimps. Although most people would consider gorillas more frightening, chimps have a very hidden quality – they’re very open on some levels, but they’re much more evil in a certain way, and to me, much more scary. They’ll rip you to shreds. But I’m fascinated by them. One of the first things we talked about was the unnerving quality that chimps have, because it was originally written that Thade was a gorilla and we changed his character to a chimpanzee.
When we were shooting some of the spaceship scenes there was a chimp there and one day all it wanted to do was hump me – my foot, my leg, my arm, my face, my back. And the next day it was spitting on me, and you just don’t know. And it’s because as humans we’ve treated them as cute, performing monkeys, and at the same time they can kill you. So I find that disturbing. Tim Roth really captured part of the weird energy that chimps have, he really tapped into that scary quality.
Although there was talk initially of the apes being created using CGI, Burton insisted on using actors and make-up under the supervision of Rick Baker, a multiple Oscar-winner widely considered to be the king of cinematic apes having created the realistic primates in Greystoke (1984), Gorillas in the Mist (1988) and Mighty Joe Young (1998) among others, as well as having transformed Martin Landau into Bela Lugosi for Ed Wood. Because of his reputation, Burton found there was no shortage of actors willing to endure up to six hours a day in the make-up chair, with Tim Roth, Helena Bonham Carter, Paul Giamatti, and Michael Clarke Duncan among those who would arrive at the studios between two and three in the morning to begin the process, and then often working until nine at night.
There was an early thought that they should be CG because that’s the modern way of thinking. But Richard and I felt very strongly that part of the energy of this material is the good actors behind it. You get good actors, kind of hidden, but doing this stuff, When I first saw the first one I didn’ know who Roddy McDowell was, but you got the vibe from him, his performance gave it a gravity that it wouldn’t have had otherwise.
‘They’ll rip you to shreds’ – sketches by Burton for the more warlike ape characters
I have to hand it to these actors, they didn’t have it easy. I mean, it was like being buried alive every day. I tried as best as I could beforehand to tell if people could take it, because it’s like torture, and some people flourish under that stuff and some people hate it. Imagine waking up at 2 a.m. and having three people poking and prodding you, it’s like a nightmare, it’s like going to the fucking dentist at two in the morning.
In the Charlton Heston role, Burton cast Mark Wahlberg, formerly known as Marky Mark, a rap star turned actor whose breakout performance in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights was followed by roles in Three Kings, The Perfect Storm and Rock Star.
I found him to be just very impressive, really solid, in the films I’d seen him in, and what this needed when you’ve got talking apes was somebody who’s solid … I don’t know how to describe it, it’s a certain kind of acting which is very hard to do, just a simple, solid ‘What-the-fuck-is-going-on?’ quality, to ground it against all this other weird shit …
Unlike Heston in the original, Wahlberg’s astronaut barely reacts to what’s going on around him. His headlong charge through the film in search of an escape from his predicament seems to reflects Burton’s own feelings about the production period.
It’s possible … Let’s put it this way, I wouldn’t say no. Because it is something I talked to Mark about the character. As I’ve said before, I do work from the subconscious, and as I go on and look back at the films, I do see myself more in things than maybe I thought. But I certainly did talk to Mark and asked him to play it real straight and ‘Get-me-the-fuck-out-of-here.’ And he did play it with that Steve McQueen straightness, kind of barrelling his way through. That’s what we were going for. And that is perhaps my psychological problem …
Burton cast Charlton Heston in a small cameo role as an elderly ape, the father of Tim Roth’s chimp Thade who, on his deathbed, tells Thade a dark secret: that in the ‘time before time’, apes were slaves to man. When Thade refuses to believe his words, his father has him break open a vase, inside of which lies the proof of man’s power and technology – a gun. It was both a deeply iconic and highly ironic piece of casting, since Heston is president of the National Rifle Association (NRA).
Captain Leo Davidson (Mark Wahlberg) and Daena (Estella Warren)
Richard and I talked about having him play a role, but it wasn’t until we thought of the right thing that it dropped into place. He scared the living daylights out of me as a kid and I loved him for that, because I was of the era of Soylent Green and The Omega Man. He had an intensity about him, and I guess when you’re smaller the screen seems bigger, so he seemed bigger and scarier than real life. I’ve always been fascinated by him because he has a gift that’s very rare, to make that kind of stuff work, and he did and was so compelling and sort of scarily believable, in a weird way. And he had that thing that I have always liked in some actors, like Vincent Price – that tortured quality, that quiet sort of internal pain. These people are amazing because you really do soak up an energy and a feel of people that have been through this forever, that they are kind of beyond human. I felt it with Christopher Lee too. They’ve been in it a long time and they’re still cool and doing stuff.
Not everyone was so enamoured: particularly Tim Roth who was neither a fan of Heston nor of his politics.
With 90 per cent of people, I don’t necessarily agree with their politics, but for me that’s the thing about making a movie or any artistic thing. Part of its joy is its purity. I won’t work with convicted murderers … but I like to find the good in whatever; For me this person had a lot of impact so that’s what I focused on. And I think it gave the scene a real energy.
Filming began on November 6, 2000 and although the production was based in Los Angeles, using soundstages on both the Sony lot in Culver City and the LA Centre Studios in downtown LA, Apes also shot on the black lava fields in Hawaii, as well as Trona Pinnacles at Ridgecrest in the Californian desert, and at Lake Powell, a man-made lake on the border of Utah and Arizona where parts of the 1968 film had been shot. Due to the complexity of the production, the tightness of the filming schedule – 17 weeks shooting, 16 weeks post-production – and an immovable release date, Burton often shot with several units at once and had a mobile editing suite on location with him.
In some ways I’d rather have not much time. Or you should be able to take a month off and look at it again, because there seems to be sort of a middle-ground process where you almost fuck it up even more, where you get a little bit too much time to think but still not enough time overall. So, in some ways, doing it quickly is not such a bad thing. Because these things take years, so any kind of quickness is almost good on that level – at least it’s momentum, it’s movement. In fact, the quicker these things are, the better it is, because people have been in make-up since 2 in the morning, and on these kind of films where it takes an hour-and-a-half between setups, you crash and the energy dissipates. That’s where the quickness of energy is probably more helpful than hurtful. So I never felt any compromise in that way. It’s just more of the overlapping nature of all the stuff surrounding it. I remember the same on Batman, but that’s why I was happy to be in England – because it was a little removed. Even though I have a pretty strong shell and can kind of not let that stuff bother me when I’m doing it, I noticed it then. And I know that aspect of the film world has gotten more intense that way.
During filming, Burton broke a rib.
It was in the last week in Trona. I was showing somebody how to hit the ground and I showed them exactly the right way, except for the part where I broke a rib … I’m lucky that’s the only thing that happened, because I don’t really focus where I’m walking, climbing up rocks or walking off a platform. You try and keep those moments to a minimum on any film. It’s amazing more things don’t happen sometimes.
At the same time I got a cold, and I thought I had pneumonia because my chest hurt so bad, but I had to keep going anyway. You have to do that, you can’t take time off to go get better. There’s nothing you can do about it anyway: you’re going to feel excruciating pain for six weeks and then it’ll go away.
Burton was not the only one hurt. Wahlberg was hit by a fireball during a stunt, while Michael Clarke Duncan, who played the gorilla Attar, injured himself falling while running.
Running in an ape suit covered in armour, and being a big guy … I wish I’d gone to the hospital with him, because seeing them wheeling him in, as an ape, was maybe the best thing about the film. We should have been shooting that. For a while after, we had to move him around on set in a chair in full makeup, rather than having him stand.
Michael Clarke Duncan as Colonel Attar
The ending of the original Planet of the Apes – Heston and Harrison on horseback on the beach, coming upon the half-buried remains of the Statue Of Liberty revealing that this is indeed the planet Earth – presented Burton with a tough act to follow.
It’s one of the strongest endings ever. In some ways people know that ending more than they know Planet of the Apes. And people are looking for you to either top it or do the same thing. But you can’t do the same thing. And you can’t top it, that’s the thing you realise. So if you do something else, in the audience’s minds it’s not doing what they want you to do.
So we just went back to the overall mythology of Planet of the Apes, of the book, even the other movies. For me the whole thing has got a sort of circular structure to it, it goes around on itself somehow – parallel universes, time travel, man/ape, evolution, religion. Where do we come from? Where are we going? Do we just keep re-evolving? There was a feeling of wanting to do something where it was a parallel world but it was all apes, and there was something about that I liked – I had this image of a weird twisted parallel universe. I thought about in a big picture – even though I couldn’t give a shit about sequels, but if you do something like this you think about a bigger picture of the material. So there was the idea of going back in a sort of twisting of time, and again going through this juxtaposition of human/animal, and coming back into a world where you think it’s normal but something has happened. The original series of movies always did that in some way, shape or form, though they had the luxury of going through several movies to map that out. At the time, I wasn’t ready to have a three-hour discussion on the art of time travel …
Throughout the shooting of Burton’s film, the crew’s scripts didn’t include an ending in an attempt to preserve the secrecy of his climax. As such the ending became the subject of much speculation on the Internet, with rumours that Burton had filmed several different versions.
Our original idea was that we wanted to do the same thing as we eventually did but at Yankee Stadium, and it would all be apes – and I don’t know if it would have been better. There were different talks about different ways of doing it but again it was lot of budget bullshit. But we didn’t shoot five different endings – we may have talked about different types of things, but we didn’t shoot five different things.
Burton’s Planet of the Apes was released in the US on 3,500 screens at the end of July 2001. While the critical reaction was less than enthusiastic, the film went to number one at the box office in its first weekend, grossing more than $68 million, eventually taking $180 million in the US and almost $360 million worldwide. Nevertheless, the perception remains that Apes was a box office flop.
It fell off but it still kept going, and it made a lot of money. To be honest, if you look at the box office of the movies I’ve made, it’s up there, it’s probably one of the higher ones. The reviews – as always, I don’t really look at them, I just assume they were like every review of every movie I’ve ever done, some okay and some really bad: you know, ‘It’s a crass remake of a classic movie, a big Hollywood mindless summer movie. Don’t monkey with the classics …’
I haven’t seen it in a while but I bet when I do watch it in a couple of years there will be some things that I’ll get very attached to and find interesting. If I go emotionally back to it, I can analyse feeling as intense as you do on anything that you do. Shooting the scene with Tim Roth and Charlton Heston was a weird, amazing experience for me. I did enjoy it, because it’s a really perverse scene – having Charlton Heston and the weird juxtaposition of him as an ape, with the whole gun issue … that was a surreal day and an amazing day. So I had some moments. It was a hard movie to make, but just seeing apes standing around talking, or apes in the desert … you’d find things in it that kind of keep you going throughout the whole thing. And it’s the first time I’d worked with Richard and Katterli [Frauenfelder] who has worked as my first AD since, and has probably been the only person to keep me on time and budget in my entire career, so that’s been kind of a good thing. All the actors, too. There’s always something positive, no matter what.
I didn’t particularly enjoy the studio experience. After doing it a couple of times in a row you get kind of tired of it. You’re sitting there working on the movie and there are posters and trailers and people talking about it like it’s done and out, and it’s just an uneasy feeling, like an out-of-body or after-death experience. Part of the thing I enjoy about the process is that moment of doing it, the unknown of doing it – and that kind of gets zapped out of it somehow. In this kind of quick schedule, you never completely finish something before all this other stuff starts. I understand that, but there’s a real pre-emptive nature to it, it’s a feeling that I don’t like. I don’t pretend to know what’s best to sell something all the time, but as the world gets more corporate I guess you just want to protect that artistic feeling as much as you can. I don’t want to create a Me-versus-Them, because that’s not what it’s about. I actually take it to heart. It’s a large operation, it’s a lot of people, it’s a lot of money, so I take that seriously and I try to work with people that way. I feel like I’m in the army sometimes – it’s kind of scary.
I think the real problem with the film was that the script that they wanted to do, I couldn’t do, and I don’t know anybody who could have done for the budget that we had to do the film for. So that’s where the deconstruction begins. You have a release date and you are deconstructing the script for mainly budget reasons, and very quickly the whole thing deconstructs. I don’t know how better to say it.
A few months after Apes’ release, Burton broke up with long-term girlfriend Lisa Marie and moved to England.
I’ve always liked it. When I first came here to do Batman I loved living here and when I did Sleepy Hollow I loved it. I do feel more at home, I can’t explain it. I don’t think I came over with the idea of ‘I’m moving’, because I’m semi-nomadic – I had a place in New York, didn’t have a place in LA anymore. But England has always been a place I’ve gravitated towards and loved being here.
Soon afterwards he began dating Helena Bonham Carter, which gave rise to many tabloid stories.
It was a tough time, and that was the other thing that made me have bad feelings about the Apes experience, because I was sort of in the midst of some personal issues at the time. And then after Apes came out there were all these news stories that I’d had an affair with Helena on the set, which was complete fabrication. So that made it unpleasant. It really tainted that experience for me in that way, because it was not fair to anybody. It didn’t have anything to do with the movie, just with the other stuff surrounding it.