'Kingdom Of The Planet Of The Apes' Director Explains His View On The Franchise Timeline Between The Caesar Trilogy And His Movie

Interview with Wes Ball

Transcript

00:00You are non-specific in the beginning of this movie as far as, like, when exactly the movie is set.

00:04But for yourself, how detailed did you get as far as just the timeline of events between war and kingdom?

00:10Yeah, a couple hundred years is what we keep saying, you know.

00:13It's just a thing where, you know, some people are like,

00:16oh, the world doesn't look old enough, or the world doesn't look too old, it looks too old, or whatever it is.

00:21So it's like, it's better just to, like, do many generations later,

00:24and let them kind of think what that means for themselves.

00:26But for us it's hundreds of years.

00:28Enough time that kind of dark ages have happened, enough has been lost, eroded, you know,

00:33and transformed, manipulated, you know, all that kind of stuff.

00:36So, yeah, that's kind of where we went.

00:39And we have ideas for, like, what sort of brought us to this point,

00:43but it's really kind of fun just to drop right in the middle of this thing, and there's so much we don't know.

00:47It just puts us in a good place to where we can just kind of rediscover a world along with these characters, you know what I mean?

00:53Rather than just doing that kind of direct sequel thing, that was the choice, really.

00:56It's to get some distance. It gave us a lot of opportunities, actually, and freedom, I guess, to kind of do our own thing.

01:01You know what I mean?

01:02Well, even, like, talking with the actors, like, I mean, they are such rich characters,

01:06but you don't kill us with exposition.

01:08Like, you don't give us everything.

01:10We'll see if that works for people, but I chose to kind of do two plus two instead of four, right?

01:15To give people, maybe people lean in and kind of do their own interpretations of things.

01:19And partly that is just there's too much damn movie in it.

01:22There's too much stuff, you know?

01:24So hopefully we found that balance where there's enough to get you interested,

01:27because we've got ideas where we can keep expanding all this stuff in the future, if we're lucky enough.

01:32But you're right.

01:33We tried hard not to, you know, to go and hold your hand too much.

01:38We'll see if it works.

01:39Sure.