When Austin-based screenwriter William Broyles was first offered the chance to tackle a 21st-century version of the 1968 sci-fi classic Planet of the Apes, his first instinct was a firm thanks, but no thanks. At the time, Broyles was in the middle of writing Cast Away, and Apes was drifting around Hollywood with neither a producer nor director yet attached. “Tom Rothman at Fox phoned,” recalls Broyles, “and said, ‘You can do whatever you want with it.’ So I went out and thought about it and came to the conclusion that you could really have some fun with this. The idea of having a blank page and no collaborators appealed to me, and with science fiction, you can do things that you can’t really do with other types of movies. You can deal with issues like what it means to be conscious, issues of race and what makes a human being, and just ideas you might not normally be able to work with.”
The original — directed by Franklin J. Schaffner from a script by Michael Wilson — was a hippified riff on Pierre Boulle’s novel, Monkey Planet, which played both the race and class cards as well as touting a very Sixties anti-establishment message. Politically speaking, Roddy McDowell’s chimp (m)anthropologist Cornelius wasn’t the only shrill thing in Ape town. Still, the film has become a veritable touchstone of post-Boomer nostalgia in the interim. Who hasn’t growled Charlton Heston’s classic “Get your stinking paws off of me, you damn, dirty ape!” to a startled Sixth Street bouncer come closing time? Well, okay, maybe not, but you get the idea. The new film, helmed by Tim Burton and featuring Apier-than-thou makeup effects by Oscar winner Rick Baker, is being touted as less of a remake than a complete reimagination of the whole apes-versus-human template. Broyles admits to “not really” being a fan of the original franchise (which eventually numbered five films, two television programs, and a host of action figures and simian ephemera), though he did go back to and view the source material again.
“I thought it was a movie of its time,” he says, “and very interesting in that way, but when you watch it again, it’s definitely a B-picture. I don’t mean that in a bad way, really, but they took a gamble on it, and it paid off big because it was so fresh and original, and it had ideas. It’s so rare to have a movie that has ideas in it these days.” Fans of the original expecting star Mark Wahlberg to replay Heston’s final, strangled outburst as he sags before a shattered Statue of Liberty in the original’s Rod Serling-esque denouement will wait in vain, though. Broyles says he’s modeled much of the film’s style and tone on ancient Rome rather than Boulle’s time-travel story line. The new film deals with “more universal issues of what it means to be human and what it means to be conscious” than the original, says Broyles. “And it’s really not all that different in structure from either Apollo 13 or Cast Away, in that it’s about a guy who gets stranded far from home in a strange place and has to find his way back, and in the process discovers all these things about himself. The dynamic is more or less the same.” Except, of course, for the talking monkeys.
Planet of the Apes opens July 27.
This article appears in May 25 • 2001.