Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes: Director Wes Ball on despotic leaders, the war on truth and ‘the soup we’re all swimming in’

In a fine 2013 episode of Mad Men, Don Draper, priapic advertising renegade, is minding his son Bobby while the rest of the family attend a vigil for the recently slain Martin Luther King. What else would the pair do in April of 1968 but go and see Planet of the Apes? Don and Bobby, hard though this may be to credit 56 years later, have no idea that that Charlton Heston has crash-landed on Earth of the distant future. They watch gape-mouthed as, in the final moments, he encounters a crumbled Statue of Liberty on the lapping shore. “You want to see it again?” Don asks. “Can we?” Bobby replies in assent.

The folk behind Mad Men knew how to wield their pop-cultural references. Not everyone got it at the time, but Franklin J Schaffner’s film, soon to spawn an entertainment empire, was loaded with sociopolitical allegory. The ruling apes treat the humans as simple-minded creatures, capable of taking on only rudimentary tasks. One hardly dares suggest how that scenario might relate to the United States’ most shameful original sin, but the subtexts are there for the viewer to disentangle.

The Apes have, through the intervening decades, had at least one enormous hiatus, but they have always come back to press home the ingenuity of the high concept. Four sequels of gradually diminishing quality emerged in the early 1970s. I first encountered the franchise in the short-lived TV series from 1974. There was a pretty good Marvel comic book. Then little for a quarter of a century. Tim Burton’s reboot film from 2001 was a modest hit, but it is not remembered with enormous affection. In contrast, the triptych of films that began with Rise of the Planet of the Apes in 2011 – a radically reworked origin myth – garnered stronger reviews than any Ape project since Don and Bobby got their first glimpse of gorillas on horseback.

Now, six years after War for the Planet of the Apes closed off that “Caesar trilogy”, Wes Ball, director of the Maze Runner films, brings us the engaging Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes. Set a full 300 years later, the film posits that the humans have again reverted to a primal state. While the apes enjoy rudimentary civilisation, we are grunting in the bushes. (Or are we?)

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This is a good time to chew over what this franchise means and why it has refused to die. Bell, an amiable Floridian in his mid-40s, connects with the Draper family experience.

“Mine was the 1968 version of the movie,” he says of his earliest awareness of the series. “I was born in 1980, so I don’t even know when it was I saw it. My dad was probably watching it on TV or something. I’m sure the ideas of it were way over my head. But I do have distinct memories of that horse on the beach – and the Statue of Liberty. So that’s been imprinted on my brain forever.”

It certainly has. About half way through Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, apes on horseback advance through the surf towards another wrecked reminder of human civilisation.

“We are both a sequel and a prequel in a weird way,” Ball says. “We have this unique opportunity to step away from the Caesar trilogy and use it as setup for a new chapter of stories and movies that could start heading towards that 1968 version.”

It seems unlikely the Apes franchise will ever again experience such an eerie mesh between content and surrounding political ambience as they did in 1968. There was never a better time to produce a skewed take on the United States that cast orangutans as the intellectuals and gorillas as the military class. Robert F Kennedy was murdered just two months after Martin Luther King. It was the year of the Tet offensive in Vietnam. The 1968 Democratic National Convention, in Chicago, was soaked in tear gas as police moved in on anti-war protesters. Two years later, in Beneath the Planet of the Apes, we find telepathic humans worshiping an atomic bomb in the ruins of St Patrick’s Cathedral in New York.

Yet Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes will certainly set some cultural antennae tingling. The amiable chimpanzee hero finds himself captured by a despotic gorilla who, to spur on his army of slaves, delivers endless semi-lucid tirades from a raised podium. Reference is surely being made here to the rise of the “strong leader”. There may even be specific reference to a current presidential candidate in Ball’s own country.

“I agree with you that these movies – and good sci-fi in general – does hold up a mirror to the times in which they were made,” he says. “There is an element where you reflect on this stuff, even though it’s in this fantastical setup. It was not intentionally an allegory for today. These characters maybe show some similarities to other things that we’re going through. But they have existed for thousands of years. It’s more of a cautionary tale of figures that are charismatic and who can bend truth. I’m not saying, ‘This is Donald Trump.’ But it’s the soup we’re all swimming in.”

It is, perhaps, as well they didn’t make the despot an orangutan. What with those beasts being orange and all. If you know what I mean.

“We did talk about it,” Bell says, amused. “We just said, ‘We’ll save that for future movies!’”

Drawn from a 1963 novel by Pierre Boulle, who also wrote the source book for Bridge on the River Kwai, the Planet of the Apes franchise has forever worked with two interwoven metaphors. There is something here about race. Closer to the surface, the stories are also concerned with our relationship to other species. Rise of the Planet of the Apes is particularly good on the barriers we construct to shut off empathy between ourselves and our closest relatives in the animal kingdom.

“Because they’re apes acting like humans, you’re able to look at yourself, in an interesting way – with some distance,” Ball says. “It is about how we coexist with others. Even though they’re apes, it’s very much a human story.”

It has been reported that the producers of the 1968 film didn’t see the racial overtones until Sammy Davis jnr pointed them out. “He embraced each of them and congratulated them on what he declared was the most profound film Hollywood had ever made about racism in America,” Matthew Hays wrote in an article for Literary Hub last year. “The producers all looked at each other, dumbfounded. They had no idea what he was talking about.”

Those connections now seem obvious.

“We try never to be preachy about it,” Ball says. “But obviously that’s an element of these stories from the start. Like you said, racism was a key idea for the 1968 version. In our case it’s more about this war on truth in the world we live in. We talked early on about this idea that knowledge is power. Knowledge can be like a virus that you catch and that you spread. That was one of the Post-it notes we put on the wall.”

If Ball and the team have their way the Apes legend will extend deep into the current century. The new film, a nifty quest flick that owes something to The Searchers, ends with gestures towards future sequels. Yet so much has changed. Twentieth Century Fox, which controlled the whole package from 1968, has now lost the “Fox” in its title and become part of the wider Disney empire. The Apes are on the same team as Marvel, Avatar and Star Wars. Strange times.

“Disney was involved, but my real bosses were my old friends from Fox,” Ball says. “Disney had their thoughts on things, but not in any kind of overbearing way. They know this isn’t a Disney movie. It’s a 20th Century movie.”

One last nerdy question about the Apes heritage. Is it a gag that the new film’s second half looks to be occupying a similar place to the other Pierre Boulle story. Our heroes find themselves enslaved and working on a grand project for a despotic enemy. They plot sabotage. It’s Boulle’s Bridge on the River Kwai. Right?

Ball perks up.

“I never thought that,” he says. “But it wasn’t a conscious thing. I can see what you mean.”

No one has mentioned that?

“No. But go for it. Use it!”

It all ties together.

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes is in cinemas from Friday, May 9th