In an exclusive interview with MrFactBook, the film’s movement coach Alain Gauthier spoke about the challenges of shooting the scenes and how his prep for this juggernaut was likeread more
The first trailer and teaser poster for “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes,” 20th Century Studios’ all-new action-adventure spectacle is here! A new entry in the studio’s global, epic franchise, “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes” will open exclusively in theatres nationwide this Friday.
And in an exclusive interview with MrFactBook, the film’s movement coach Alain Gauthier spoke about the challenges of shooting the scenes and how his prep for this juggernaut was like.
You have been working in the film industry for more than 40 years now. And now we have VFX, we have great technology available. All these things have made the medium of cinema, filmmaking easier; what are the challenges that they impose?
Well, actually, they’re becoming more and more precise. And what happens is the final process of going from a human performer to a digital representation has become so elegant and so realistic that I think the level of performance of the actor now in a system of motion capture has to be very, very pushed to a higher limit than it might have been a long time ago. I remember doing my first motion capture clip as a special skill stunt performer for a movie back way back when in the end of the 90s or something like that. There was only six capture points on me and that was it. And so if you can imagine now that they have incredible amount of capture points on the body plus the dots to get the facial expressions. We’re talking about the actor, anything the actor does to the very minute detail will translate into the VFX process and will show up in the end product. So obviously the actors have to take this very seriously. They have to be very precise in what they do. It’s interesting because in the whole process of filming, all we could see as reference are the actors in a gray suit and with the facial camera on them and all that. But they were so good at performing their creatures, their apes that at some point you wouldn’t see the suit anymore. You’re watching the performance of an actor and that as a standalone was impeccable and was excellent. And so obviously when you get the actors to that level, then you’ll know that the end product will be impeccable. And that’s what you’re looking for really.
How was your prep for the project like?
Well, the thing is, what we did is we had an ape school. So I had these actors come in. They were chosen, they were cast for these specific parts. Some were different types of primates. And what I did is like any school, we start with the basic. And my first part was to teach them movement and movement. My movements are always designed to increase the body awareness of the human being that is practicing. And once that is achieved and we start bringing in the attributes of the ape, the physiology of the ape, how they walk, how they move, their facial expressions, what are their limitations, what are the things that we humans can’t do but can emulate. And then as this process keeps going, then slowly we introduce the character itself. Then we start improvising a lot. So in relation to your world, I would be going through the rasas. Each actor would have to go through the different levels and intensities of the different emotions that can exist in any human. And we would play that as the ape, not anymore as the human. So that the character becomes very realistic and has his sets of attributes (5:07) to better portray the character that is written. And then we start working on scenes and then the characters really appear. And then we start tweaking. And in the process, we also had help from a master that we all know who is Andy Serkis, who played in so many of these motion capture productions. And he was able to come in at the very end and see that the actors had done their work and then help them just further the understanding of their character, develop their voice, their way of expressing themselves vocally. It was really a nice process, all in all. We just went through a very nice linear curve to getting to the final product.
