The Big Picture

• Wes Ball enlisted Josh Friedman, who worked on Avatar , to write the script for Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes .
• The film did not use The Mandalorian 's volume technology but employed mocap volume instead.
• Ball aimed to make the film feel real and wanted to create a lush, lived-in world similar to Avatar , although on a smaller budget.

Wes Ball has taken on an epic task by directing Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes. And to make something epic, it's best to bring in someone who's worked on epics before. Well, it doesn't get much bigger than Avatar. That's why Ball recruited Josh Friedman as the ideal scribe to write the script for the story he wanted to tell. Recently, Ball spoke with a group of journalists during an edit bay visit, which Collider's Meredith Loftus attended. Ball revealed discussions with producers Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver, who had just finished working on Avatar with Friedman and suggested him as the ideal writer for the next Apes film. Friedman proffered that the film Ball wanted to make was akin to an Akira Kurosawa film, which Ball feels may have some truth.

"I guess kind of that's what it is. And so that's when he (Josh) said, no, it's not brothers. It's just three friends. And then that's when he came up with this. And so it becomes this kind of thing that movies do, you know, these kinds of collaboration of ideas you think it's going to be and rough kind of instincts or whatever it is. And then we take that long, arduous kind of task of like turning it into a story, a script that we can all kind of experience. So anyway, that's kind of where that came from."

One of the gathered journalists then asked if the film had made use of the Volume technology, made famous by the work done on The Mandalorian. However, Ball revealed that Avatar was more of a guideline for the production of the film, as the technology employed was distinctly different.

" We did not do [ The Mandalorian 3D, all-encompassing volume]. All we did was mocap volume, which is, that's the thing, it's gotten blurry. It used to be the volume was just mocap stage. And now Volume has become The Mandalorian 3D screen stage so now it's confusing. It's not that. We didn't do any of that stuff. We basically shot on location as you can see there or it's full CG, you know characters like the 'Avatar' did. We're closer to 'Avatar' than say what 'The Mandalorian' is doing. "

Wes Ball Wants 'Apes' To Feel Real

For Ball, the key to the film was employing CGI and visual effects against the background of greenery and make the world seem 'lived-in,' similar to how Pandora feels on Avatar, although he conceded they weren't quite on the budget level of James Cameron's magnificent achievement. Additionally, making sure everything looked as aged and weathered as possible while remaining mindful that certain materials would be gone but others would remain.

"I wanted to go back to that lush, beautiful world that underneath is haunted with the remains of our existence," he explained. "We wanted to consciously go there. You want to go visit this world. I said before, can we make this a little bit more like Avatar? We can't reach that far out. I'm not James Cameron. I don't have hundreds of millions of dollars. But can we make a movie where it's like, I want to go explore that. I want to climb that building. I want to go live in that place and the bugs flying around and just make it real. That was the thing that we talked a lot about." He went on to say:

"But we fudge a little bit on how far something survived versus not. But I think this movie, you kind of go with it. But we tried to be as honest as we could. There would be no glass on these buildings. But concrete probably lasts for a good chunk of time, and steel will last for a long time, and plastic will last forever. So there's a lot of that kind of stuff going on. But there's also, as we'll see in the movie, there are places where things have survived, you know, so we touch on some of those ideas too."

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes premieres in theaters in the United States on May 10. Be sure to check out Loftus' interview with Owen Teague today.

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes

Many years after the reign of Caesar, a young ape goes on a journey that will lead him to question everything he's been taught about the past and make choices that will define a future for apes and humans alike.

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