io9 spoke with Weta VFX Supervisor Erik Winquist about his fourth Planet of the Apes movie, now in theaters.
When Weta’s Erik Winquist heard Fox was making another Planet of the Apes movie, he was initally skeptical. “It was presented as ‘Hey, there’s another Apes film, are you interested in working on that?’ And I was like, ‘Oh. I don’t know.’” he told io9. “Part of it was… where is this going to go? Because if it’s just going to be ‘And then…’ [I wasn’t interested.] Caesar’s dead. Where’s this gonna go?”
Winquist was a VFX Supervisor on each of the three previous Apes films so he didn’t want to just do the same thing again. Thankfully, when he read more about it, he realized Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes wasn’t that at all. “The biggest thing for me that pulled me in was just this notion of like, what are the possibilities of a world that’s this far beyond the end of human civilization when nature is taking over?” he said. “You start imagining all these visuals in your head and the possibilities of that were fascinating. It was a really nice, fresh, new beginning to the next chapter of the franchise.”
Before the film can be that next chapter though, it has a crucial prologue linking the two together and Winquist contributed to it in ways both expected and very, very unexpected. [This is a minor spoiler so here’s a warning just in case.]
Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes picks up almost immediately after the end of War for the Planet of the Apes with the funeral of Caesar, and the scene instantly gave Winquist lots of thoughts.
