Tales From Development Hell (7 page)

Given their history together — two
Terminator
films and the mega-hit
True Lies —
it seemed more likely than ever that Schwarzenegger would remain aboard, but in the wake of
Titanic
’s critical and commercial success, Cameron began to re-think his future. “I’m forty-four,” he said in November 1998. “I make a movie every two or three years — it should be something that I create. I’ve always done that, with the exception of
Aliens. The Terminator
was my creation, so were
Titanic
and
The Abyss.
With the amount of time and energy that I put into a film, it shouldn’t be somebody else’s [idea]. I don’t want to labour in somebody else’s house.” Of his possible interpretation, “I would have gone in a very different direction,” is all Cameron would say. With Michael Bay, Roland Emmerich and a pre-Lord
of the Rings
Peter Jackson all declining a proffered place in the director’s chair,
Planet of the Apes
was back to square one.

By the summer of 1999, the studio that had revived the science fiction genre in the early nineties with
Independence Day
and
The X-Files
was busy ruling the planet with
Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace,
and the prospect of a new
Planet of the Apes
reared its head once again. At around this time, American-Armenian producer-director twins Allen and Albert Hughes
(Menace II Society, Dead Presidents)
became intrigued by the idea of making a new version of
Apes.
“The original movie is about race in America,” Albert told
Empire
later. “[Ours] would have been more socially significant and would have been more reality-based [than the 2001 version].” Added Allen, “We wanted to take the premise and revamp certain elements. But
From Hell
had a green light and we hadn’t worked in five years. I think they didn’t really want us to do
Planet of the Apes
anyway.” (“I don’t think the Hughes brothers had anything more than a conversation with Fox,” says Don Murphy, who produced
From Hell,
which was written by Terry Hayes.)

In the meantime, the studio hired screenwriter William Broyles Jr, who marooned Tom Hanks in space in
Apollo 13
and on a desert island in
Cast Away,
to write what amounted to a third story about a man stranded far from
home. As Broyles told
Creative Screenwriting,
“[Fox president] Tom Rothman called and said, ‘Look, would you like to do
Planet of the Apes?’
And I said, ‘No.’ And then he called back and said, ‘Well, you could really do whatever you wanted [with the project].’ And I said, ‘No.’ Then I went outside. I was looking at the stars and thought, ‘You know, this could be fun!’ Because with this kind of imaginative science fiction, you can deal with themes that are hard to deal with in a more realistic movie. And there was no producer. There was nobody to tell me anything I had to put in or not put in. It was an interesting act of faith on Fox’s part just to give me a blank piece of paper and say, ‘Go for it.’” Aside from a projected release date — the summer of 2001 — there were, he said, “zero parameters. That was the fun thing about it. [They said,] ‘Don’t read any of the earlier scripts. Don’t feel limited by the previous series. Just follow your imagination.’ It was a completely blank slate.” At one point, Broyles called Rothman, demonstrating the extent of his departure from previous versions with a single question: “Does it have to be apes?” He was only half joking.

Broyles sent Fox an outline and a chronicle of the fictional planet that would be the setting for his version, before beginning to work on a first draft. Entitled
The Visitor,
and billed as “episode one in the Chronicles of Aschlar,” it was conceived as the first of three movies in a whole new cycle. Although it was pointedly not set on Earth, in other respects his story — in which an astronaut crash-lands on a world of civilised apes and enslaved humans — remains faithful to the basic structure of the original, although Broyles ups the ante by having a powerful chimpanzee named General Thade (an anagram of ‘death’) plotting the genocide of the human race. A subsequent draft grabbed the attention not only of original
Planet of the Apes
producer Richard D. Zanuck, who signed on to produce the new version, but also director Tim Burton, fresh from the sleeper hit
Sleepy Hollow.
“I wasn’t interested in doing a remake or a sequel of the original
Planet of the Apes
film,” Burton said later. “But I was intrigued by the idea of revisiting that world. Like a lot of people, I was affected by the original. It’s like a good myth or fairy tale that stays with you. The idea of re-imagining that mythology [was] very exciting to me.” This “re-imagining” would, he said, “introduce new characters and other story elements, keeping the essence of the original but inhabiting that world in a different way.” After more than a decade in Development Hell, Zanuck suddenly felt that Burton was the right director to bring
Planet of the Apes
to a new generation of moviegoers. “When you say
‘Planet of the Apes’
and ‘Tim Burton’ in the same breath, that idea is instantly explosive, like lightning
on the screen,” he said. “All of Tim’s films are highly imaginative and highly visual. I can’t think of a more perfect pairing than Tim Burton and
Planet of the Apes.
It spells magic to me.” Burton’s box office credibility, which had taken a knock with
Mars Attacks!,
had bounced back with
Sleepy Hollow;
equally importantly, he was available, having spent a year developing a Superman film for Warner Bros which failed to materialize.

Under Burton’s direction, Broyles wrote another draft which, the writer says, was much closer to the finished film. “Some of the more complex themes of time and destiny that I had in the original draft [were lost],” he explained. “But the heart of them is still there. They were the same things, just more complex versions of them. Riddles of time and destiny that I had to the third power are now just to the second power.” When budgetary concerns began to intrude — Burton famously stated that, as scripted, Broyles’ version “would cost $300 million” — Fox brought in Mark Rosenthal and Larry Konner, who had previously scripted another ape-related remake,
Mighty Joe Young.
“[Broyles] came up with the characters pretty much as they are,” said Zanuck, “but his script was impractical in many respects. It had monsters in it, all kinds of other things. We wanted to go back to the basic element — the upside-down world.” As Burton said in his sparse DVD commentary, “We did some work on the script after I got it, basically because of budget, but also because it helps the script. Because you read things, and it’s kind of like a radio programme — if you actually were to see it, it would be too much. So therefore that process of bringing it down, I think, was actually good for it in some ways.” Rosenthal and Konner worked with Burton throughout pre-production, and share the final writing credits with Broyles. “I have a lot of respect for the work they did,” Broyles said of Konner and Rosenthal, “and think that given what I’d done and given what Tim wanted, they navigated the right course.”

This is more than can be said for astronaut Leo Davidson (Mark Wahlberg), who crash lands his egg-like spacecraft on a strange world in the distant future, where intelligent lower primates, evolved from chimpanzees, orangutans and gorillas, have enslaved humans, who now live like neanderthals. Tim Roth, Paul Giamatti, Helena Bonham Carter, Michael Clarke Duncan, David Warner and Burton’s then-girlfriend, Lisa Marie, were among those required to don Rick Baker’s ape make-up, yet none had quite the frisson of original
Planet of the Apes
star Charlton Heston’s cameo as Thade’s father. “I was so happy when Heston said yes to this, because the circular nature, or the reversal nature of the material that he came to do this as an ape was amazing.
He’s so much a part of the
Planet of the Apes
mythology, he was a part of what made that movie work, the intensity and weirdness and strength.”

Despite the thirteen years, manifold drafts and numerous directors which came and went between the unproduced Adam Rifkin version and Tim Burton’s interpretation, Don Murphy denies the notion that the film was in Development Hell. “I suppose it was, in a way,” he allows, “but it really wasn’t. What happened was they tried to reboot it with Rifkin. Then some years later they tried to reboot it with us. Our reboot led them to believe they had something big there, and that led to trying to get other directors interested. Looking back,” he adds, “at the time we may have been a little bit over our heads. It became a really big thing pretty freaking fast. Everybody started to try to grab onto it. And we were soon out! I would do things differently today, but... that’s just the way it is.” Like many, Murphy was disappointed with the final film. “I thought it was gonna be fantastic,” he says, “like
Star Wars
or
Lord of the Rings.
The movie they actually made was a bad
Twilight Zone
episode.”

By all accounts, including his own, the production of
Planet of the Apes
was a bruising experience for Burton, largely because the targeted release date, July 2001, meant that everything from pre-production to editing and effects work was rushed. “Tim had three months to edit the film where he’d normally spend a year, so there were a lot of elements that were shot that were missing,” actress Estella Warren told
Arena.
Yet problems began long before shooting started. “I’m fascinated by the studio technique that sort of leaves you bloodied, beaten and left for dead right before you’re supposed to go out and make a great movie for them,” Burton told
The Independent
newspaper. “They give you a script,” he added, “and you do a budget based on that, and say, ‘This movie would cost $300 million to make,’ and then they treat you like a crazy, overspending, crazy person! It’s like, ‘Well, you gave me the script!’” Asked by the same interviewer whether he’d like to make a sequel, Burton’s response was simple: “I’d rather jump out of the window.” Nevertheless, despite withering reviews, the film grossed a record-breaking $68.5 million on its opening weekend, the second highest opening of 2001, with a total worldwide gross of $362,211,740. For one summer, just as the tagline suggested,
Apes
really did ‘rule the planet’.

Heston’s casting was one way in which Burton attempted to recapture the magic of the original 1968 production; he also needed a killer ‘twist’ ending — which were, after
The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable
and
The Others,
fashionable again in the period Burton’s
Planet of the Apes
was made. “We always hoped for something like that, and I did a version of it which they then expanded on,”
said Broyles. Thus, when Captain Davidson escapes the planet of the apes at the climax of the story and returns to Earth, he finds that apes now rule the planet. It was cool, but it didn’t make a lick of sense. “Can I explain the
Planet of the Apes
ending? No,” admitted Tim Roth, who played General Thade. “I’ve seen it twice and I don’t understand anything.” Commented Broyles, “The ending [should] be viewed in proportion to the rest of the movie, not as some huge, big pay-off, but as fitting with the story itself.” “I thought it made sense. Kind of,” Helena Bonham Carter told
Total Film.
“I don’t understand why everyone went, ‘Huh?’ It’s all a time warp thing, isn’t it? He’s gone back and he realises Thade’s beat him there. Everyone’s so pedantic,” she added. “You start bringing logic to an ape film, it’s always dodgy.”

If audiences had difficulty getting their heads around the ending, trying to make sense of Burton’s explanation would prove equally tricky. “Let’s say Fox wants to make another movie. If I explain this ending, it kind of screws up other things. It’s thought out enough to where it could be explained, but if I want to start explaining it, it might damage things. Even not wanting to do another movie, I wouldn’t want to ruin it for somebody else that might. So I can just say that it’s been thought out, there’s a thought to it, but... you can figure some things out through the film, but... Part of what happens is... Part of it for me was ending up on an image that has a big question mark on it. Sometimes I like to do something, and I think it’s sometimes as a reaction to other things... To me, somebody going back and landing in a place he thinks he’s at, and then finding out he’s not there, that to me is logical. There’s a logic to that. There’s less logic to exactly know what he’s going back to, so I actually had no problem... I’m not quite sure what people were responding to because I had no problem with the ending. There were several elements that needed to happen, one of them was an image I had of complete reversal, which I felt was somehow weird and compelling to me, so if they do another movie, the movie is about sort of finding things out, sort of...”

Burton’s view proved quite prophetic: within five years, Fox was developing a new
Planet of the Apes
film which was neither a sequel nor another re-imagining, but a prequel to the entire story, based on an imaginative pitch by husband and wife screenwriting team Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver, the latter best known as author of the smash hit
The Hand that Rocks the Cradle
(1992). “Rick has always kept a file of articles and ideas to look at for inspiration,” Silver told the
Planet of the Apes
fan site The Forbidden Zone, “and when we were in between projects, in 2006, Rick had some articles about chimps that had been raised as humans at home, and how that had
always come to trouble, for the chimps and the humans. He knew there was some kind of thriller there, and all of a sudden he had this light-bulb moment, and he said, ‘Oh my God, it’s
Planet of the Apes!’
He had an idea to re-boot
Planet of the Apes...
and he started talking about this chimp raised at home as if he was a little boy, and before we knew it, we were both in love with this little chimp named Caesar.” Jaffa and Silver had no idea of Fox’s plans for the
Planet of the Apes
franchise, but pitched the bare outlines of the idea to their friend, Fox executive Peter Kang, who pitched it to president of production Hutch Parker. Jaffa and Silver subsequently wrote two years’ worth of drafts, before Scott Frank, screenwriter of three Fox films
(Minority Report, Flight of the Phoenix
and
Marley & Me),
came aboard as director. “We did two drafts for Scott,” says Jaffa, “and then he told Fox he’d like to take a crack at the script. So then he went off and did a draft as writer-director, and that subsequently did not work out and they moved on and ultimately came back to us. We brought the story back to where it was before Scott started writing.”