by David Hughes
Entitled Return of the Apes, the script opens in the present day with a plague that causes human infants to be stillborn — within six months, there won’t be a live birth on the planet, signalling the end of the human race. Geneticist Will Robinson discovers that the plague is a genetic time bomb embedded in human ‘mitochondrial DNA’ 102,000 years earlier. Hoping to save mankind, he uses a unique form of genetic time travel to journey back to a time when Palaeolithic humans were locked in a battle for the future of the planet with highly-evolved apes, one of whom plans to defeat the humans with the plague that will ensure ape dominance over Earth. Will and Billie Rae Diamond, a pregnant colleague who follows him back in time, soon discover that a young human girl named Aiv is the next step in Homo sapiens’ evolution, and they embark on a race against time to protect her from the virus, thus ensuring the survival of the human race 102,000 years hence. Hayes’ ending is bittersweet: Billie Rae ultimately gives birth to a healthy baby boy, Adam, whose future coupling with Aiv (pronounced ‘Eve’) will effectively found the human race; however, Will and Billie Rae are unable to return to the future. (“I never worked out how to get back,” Will confesses. “Give me
some credit,” Billie Rae retorts. “I’m a scientist — I knew that.”) The closing image riffs on the ending of the original film, as Will builds a replica of the Statue of Liberty’s head, “to make sure we never forget where we came from.”
According to Hamsher, Fox chairman Peter Chernin subsequently described Return of the Apes as “one of the best scripts he ever read.” Yet Dylan Sellers, one of the lesser executives steering the project through Fox, thought it could be improved. “What if our main guy finds himself in Ape land, and the Apes are trying to play a game like baseball, but they’re missing one element, like the pitcher or something,” he suggested. “And when our guy comes along, he knows what they’re missing, and he shows them, and they all start playing.” In a style which is customary in such meetings, everyone agreed that it would be a great idea, while secretly having no intention of including it, or anything like it. In the meantime, two 700-pound gorillas became attached to the project: one was Australian director Phillip Noyce — who had helmed Hayes’ Dead Calm and the Jack Ryan blockbusters Clear and Present Danger and Patriot Games; the other was Arnold Schwarzenegger, the kind of star the studio needed to justify the film’s considerable budget. Although he appeared better suited to the Charlton Heston role in a more straightforward remake of the original — a suggestion reinforced by his interest in reprising the Heston role in a mooted remake of The Ωmega Man — Schwarzenegger loved Hayes’ script; furthermore, he would only work with ‘A-list’ directors, and Noyce was one of them. “At one point,” Murphy recalls, “I was in the biggest meeting I’ve ever been in, with Peter Chernin, the head of the studio, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Phillip Noyce to direct based on a Terry Hayes first draft; me and my ex-partner Jane to produce and Oliver Stone to executive produce, and that was all looking pretty damn good.”
Sellers refused to give up his baseball scene, however, perhaps aware that he ought to put his stamp on the project, for better or worse, in order to justify his involvement in the process. (This tendency among executives is best exemplified by the clichè, “This script is perfect. Who can we get to rewrite it?”) Thus, when Hayes handed in his next draft — sans baseball — Sellers fired him, a move Hamsher described as “incredibly stupid”, not least because Hayes and Noyce had remained friends since they collaborated on Dead Calm several years earlier. As a result, Noyce moved on. Understandably, Fox became frustrated by the distance between Fox’s approach and Hayes’ interpretation of Oliver Stone’s ideas — as Murphy put it, “Terry wrote a Terminator, and Fox wanted The Flintstones” — and, perhaps feeling that they were not getting the full value of their million dollars from Stone, decided to
take back the reins. Suddenly, says Murphy, “it turned into a whole political thing, and before you knew it we were going nowhere.” Several events occurred in rapid succession: Stone went off to pursue projects of his own; Tom Rothman replaced Tom Jacobson as head of production; a drunken Dylan Sellers crashed his car, killing a much-loved colleague and earning himself jail time; and Murphy and Hamsher were paid off.
“After they got rid of us, they brought on Chris Columbus,” says Murphy, referring to the writer of Gremlins and Home Alone, and director of Mrs Doubtfire. “Then I heard they did tests of apes skiing, which sounded pretty ludicrous to me.” Having recently failed to get a film based on Marvel Comics’ Fantastic Four off the ground at Fox, Columbus teamed up with that project’s screenwriter — Batman scribe Sam Hamm — for a new, kiddie-friendly version of Planet of the Apes. As Hamm told Creative Screenwriting, “What we tried to do was a story that would be simultaneously an homage to the elements we liked from the original series, and would also incorporate a lot of material from [Pierre Boulle’s novel] that had been jettisoned from the earlier production. The first half of the script bears very little resemblance to the book, but a lot of the stuff in the second half comes directly from it, or is directly inspired by it.”
Hamm’s script borrowed Hayes’ device of the baby-killing virus, this time brought to Earth by an ape astronaut, whose spacecraft crashes in New York harbour. Nine months later, babies throughout the world are being born prematurely aged, dying within hours of their birth, and it is up to Dr Susan Landis, who works for the Center for Disease Control, and Alexander Troy, a scientist based at Area 51, to use the ape’s spacecraft to return to the virus’ planet of origin, hoping to find an antidote. Instead, they find an urban environment, similar to that described in Boulle’s novel, with apes in three-piece suits armed with heavy weapons, helicopters and the other trappings of civilisation — all used to hunt humans. Landis and Troy discover the antidote and return to Earth, only to find that in their seventy-four year absence, the apes have taken over the planet. Once again, Hamm puts an ironic twist on the Statue of Liberty ending, revealing a statue whose “once-proud porcelain features have been crudely chiselled into the grotesque likeness of a great grinning ape.”
Although Arnold Schwarzenegger remained attached to the new script, Fox was still not convinced that this was the version they wanted to make. And when Columbus subsequently quit the project following the death of his mother, James Cameron began talks (during the filming of Titanic) about the
possibility of writing and producing — but not directing — a new version, drawing on elements of the original film and its first sequel, Beneath the Planet of the Apes. “Schwarzenegger... is talking with Jim Cameron on 20th Fox’s Planet of the Apes,” Variety columnist Army Archerd wrote in January 1997. “Arnold tells me Stan Winston has already created amazing apes... and although [Cameron]’s banner, Lightstorm Entertainment, does not have a ‘formal arrangement’ with 20th on Apes, it’s anticipated he will produce it. He loves the project and the franchise.”
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 m
ovie 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,”
