'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 nonspecific 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, or whatever it is.

00:21So it's like it's better just to like do many generations later and let them kind of think what that means for themselves.

00:26But for us, it's hundreds of years, enough time that kind of dark ages have happened,

00:30enough has been lost, eroded, you know, and transformed, manipulated, you know, all that kind of stuff.

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

00:52you know what I mean, rather than just doing that kind of direct sequel thing.

00:55That was the choice, really, to get some distance.

00:57It gave us a lot of opportunities, actually, and freedom, I guess, to kind of do our own thing, you 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, like you don't give us everything.

01:10We'll see if that works for people, but we chose to kind of do 2 plus 2 instead of 4, right?

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

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

01:22There's too much stuff, you know, but hopefully we found that balance

01:25where there's enough to get you interested,

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

01:30if we're lucky enough.

01:32But you're right, we tried hard not to, you know, to hold your hand too much.

01:38We'll see if it works.

01:39Sure.