Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes: Karl Puschmann talks to the stars ...

The movie follows chimpanzee Noa as he journeys across an overgrown world where humans have become the primitive species in order to rescue his tribe from a ferocious rival group. Photo / Getty Images

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes is a solid continuation of the series that started in its preceding trilogy, with Wētā FX making the effects flawless.

It’s the day of the international premiere of the sci-fi blockbuster Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, and its stars Freya Allan and Owen Teague are feeling nervy.

“I’m feeling a little anxious,” Teague admits. “We’ve got the world premiere tonight. We’re on the edge of our seats.”

“Literally,” Allan jokes, tapping the awkwardly tall director’s chairs they’re both perched on. “It’s very strange. It hasn’t quite hit me yet, but the anxiety is definitely building.”

It’s not surprising they’d be feeling this way. Kingdom is a direct sequel and the next instalment in the Apes trilogy, one of the most popular and critically acclaimed movie series of recent years.

Set a few generations after the events of the trilogy’s Academy Award-winning conclusion, 2017′s War for the Planet of the Apes, the movie follows chimpanzee Noa (Teague) as he journeys across an overgrown world in which humans have become the primitive species in order to rescue his tribe from a ferocious, expansionist rival group. Along the way, he reluctantly teams up with Mae (Allan), a human who has somehow now succumbed to the virus that devolved the majority of mankind.

“We see so much action and visuals in films, but what really makes this an interesting movie is that it has a heart,” Allan says. “The characters have depth. It’s not just reliant on the visuals and the action. The first time we saw it was, for me, very emotional. I actually started crying.”

“In addition to being this visually immersive thing, it’s also an emotional, personal story,” Teague adds. “It’s a brilliant combination of spectacle and feeling.”

For his role as Noa, Teague says wearing the motion-capture suit and facial rig wasn’t too difficult. Technology has progressed so much that he didn’t need to exaggerate or pantomime to get across the dramatic moments of his performance.

“The technology captures every single thought,” he says. “So, it was ‘just play the truth’. It was a freeing experience, honestly.”

Capturing these human performances and transplanting them on to the digital monkeys, apes, orangutans and chimpanzees that make up Kingdom’s main cast was Wellington’s special-effects powerhouse Wētā FX.

When asked about giving these digital creations the realism to believably emote everything from heartstring-pulling emotion through to bombastic posturing and unbridled aggression, Erik Winquist, VFX supervisor and leader of the Wētā FX team, is quick to credit the actors’ original performances.

“It all goes back to what the actors give us on the day,” he says. “That’s the soul of the performance right there. The blueprint is laid out for us, and it’s then on the animators to look at what moments convey the core of that emotional change. Is it a little eye twitch? An asymmetrical brow raise? Those are what really sell the moment. All those little cues tell an audience, ‘This is a real creature I’m watching, not a visual effect’.”

A lot of the tech used on Kingdom had been developed for use in another of Wētā FX’s big projects, James Cameron’s 2022 smash sci-fi blockbuster Avatar: The Way of Water. Instead of a single camera attached to the actor’s head, the rig now contains a set of vertically stacked stereo cameras recording at 48 frames per second.

This gives Wētā's animators a highly detailed 3D mesh of the actor’s face from which they can extract all the minute nuances of performance and apply it to the CGI actor puppet. However, Winquist notes it’s not a 1:1 transfer.

“It’s not a technical thing. It’s about an animator who’s a specialist at knowing how faces move, assessing what they’re seeing on the actor’s face and knowing what we need to do to sell the moment,” he says. “It’s a creative partnership to create a singular performance. There’s this perception that computers do the work. No. Artists do the work. People do the work. That’s the artistic side.”

Teague says that rather than hinder his performance, working with the tech-enhanced it, giving him “more to work with” within his character. Subsequently, he was able to bring a lot of himself to Noa.

“When we were in pre-production, I had been quite overwhelmed with the fact that I had to lead this movie,” he says. “There was a moment where I realised that I am Noa, in a way, and that Noa is me. We’re very, very similar. There’s so much of me in him. More of me is in this character than any character I’ve played before. Even though he’s a chimpanzee.”

For her part, Allan had different concerns. As one of the only humans in the film, she wanted to be sure Mae wasn’t one-dimensional.

“My concerns were that she was just going to be the character that’s always pretending to be something. I needed to find more than that, because that just felt empty to me,” she says. “I created a whole backstory with Wes [Ball, the movie’s director] and made it far more of a personal journey. I wanted it to feel like even if she is lying and you don’t know what the truth is, there’s always some kind of truth there. You can see that she’s grappling with something internally.”

The film was shot mostly on location across the ditch in Australia, although Winquist does point out a minor connection to Aotearoa.

“There are two shots in the movie that were photographed way down south in the Catlins,” he laughs. “Just because I managed to find a beach down there that was a spitting image of a beach that we shot a scene on near Sydney Airport and we needed some additional photography. So we did a two-day shoot way down south for the movie.”

That most of it was filmed outdoors really adds to the movie’s atmosphere, giving it a tangible sense of scale and place.

“I came into this very much stressing to everybody that this is a live-action movie,” Winquist says. “It’s not animated fare and we should be looking for opportunities to shoot things for real everywhere we can. It gives us a richness in the frame that we can build upon and not have to come up with from scratch. It gives everybody the context to surround themselves in the space.”

The film is a hugely fun watch. As you’d expect from Wētā, the effects, whether environmental or affecting characters, are flawless and the story is a solid continuation of the saga started in its preceding trilogy. There’s a lot of big action set-pieces, but the film also invites you to think about bigger issues like humanity’s impact on the planet and our closest cousins.

“Humans get so swept up in power and want more and more. Curiosity is a brilliant thing and can be so positive but can also lead to this craving for more,” Allan says. “I think that that’s where a lot of our issues lie.”

For Teague, the movie has literally been a life-changing experience.

“I spent a week with chimpanzees at a sanctuary in Florida before we started shooting,” Teague says. “I was interacting with them. I had a conversation with a chimpanzee in American Sign Language. It forever changes how you view humanity and view yourself. I’ve become so much more of an animal rights guy than I ever was before this movie because of that experience and because of playing an ape.”

He sighs, and a look of genuine concern crosses his face as he says, “It’s appalling what we do to them. And what we have done to them.”

And then our time comes to an end and the pair leave to get ready for the glamourous premiere of a movie that sees man hiding in the forests of a world where nature has reclaimed all our worldly achievements.

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes is in cinemas now.