Planet of the Apes Poster $12.95

BY DANIEL BAIG | Here is part two of my interviews, this time with Helena Bonham Carter, Tim Burton, Estella Warren, and Tim Roth:

Helena Bonham Carter, unlike all the other folks we interviewed who got by with just one assistant/publicist, was preceded into the room by a pair of helpers. At first we didn't actually see Helena herself, but just heard her voice call out to us that she was going to use the loo first if we didn't mind. While she was thus occupied, one of her modern day handmaidens set down a glass of water on the table in front of the seat waiting for her, and the other one then put there an ashtray, cigarettes, and a lighter.

When the Academy-Award-nominated star emerged from the bathroom, I was somewhat startled to see she was wearing what rather appeared to be a black nightie. Her hair was a much lighter shade than we're used to seeing in her films, and she was also almost shockingly thin, especially after having seen her in Planet of the Apes the night before, where her costumes – baggy pants suits and embroidered short coats over, of course, her fur – disguised this svelteness. Her eyes had dark circles around them, which was probably what prompted one of the other journalists to comment to her about how tired all the actors were seeming today.

"We're all tired. We did sixty-six interviews [for television] yesterday."

The reporter who had made the original comment joked with her, "Sixty-six? Is that all?"

Helena shot right back, also joking of course, with a veddy British "Fuck off." But then she more seriously added, "It is ridiculous. I mean, it's not coal mining . . . but that's why we're tired."

She then proceeded to admire that same reporter's nifty gadget, what appeared to be a PDA but was also a recording device. And THEN, in a further forestalling of the beginning of the questioning, "I wouldn't mind a cup of tea. Do you mind if I get a cup of tea?" and she got up from the table to go make herself one. [note: try to work in non-clichéd comment here about the English and their tea] However, before she got too far across the room, a Canadian reporter sitting on the side of the table closer to where the beverages were volunteered to get it for her. [note: try to work in non-clichéd comment here about how nice and polite Canadians are] "Do you mind? Oh, thanks. With some skim milk?"

The solicitous gent from Toronto offered the choice of "English breakfast or organic green?" No surprise as to which one was chosen.

Helena, unlike some of the other actors, was NOT signed up in her contract to do the sequel. She started to try to tell us why, but stopped herself, saying, "I could get myself into real trouble." She did allow that if she were to do a sequel, she'd "want to have rights over [her] action doll [sic]." She didn't have any control over the action figure made of her character this time. She explained, clearly disagreeing with the concept, that "they don't think it's your likeness."

She spoke about some of the more whimsical aspects of working on Planet. "It was perpetually surreal. I think that's what kept me awake. Because I was up at two o' clock in the morning. I knew that there would be a perpetual climate of absurdity. And there was. Of course, then it became even more absurd, because it all became seemingly like normal, to wake up at two, and have people, you know, restick one's upper lip, or to say, 'Oh god, my chin's falling off, or how're my teeth?' or hear people across the way saying, 'Oh, we need to get Tim Roth's feet . . . .'"

Helena described for us in detail the four hour process she had to undergo each morning to be transformed into Ari the progressive chimpanzee of privilege. "I get there. They stick back all your hair. Put the bald cap on. Stick your ears on. Then they cover your face with all sorts of preparations, things like sweat-stop and all sorts of other things, potions and things. Then they'll put, painstakingly, and that takes a long time, the first big piece, which is like one [here she indicated one side of her face to the other] comes all over, not the chin. That is like glued every sort of millimeter, they want to make sure there aren't any bubbles or air. It's not great to have glue, it's excruciating to have wet glue on you, it's horrible. Once that's over that's a bit better, but it is feeling like you're being buried, to have this thing on. You do sensationally get used to it . . . . I think different people depending on how sensitive they are react very differently to having it, because if you're very claustrophobic, it can be as if you're being buried alive, actually."

At this point another journalist started to ask a question, but Helena interrupted him – "I've only got halfway." She continued. "We do that, then they stick on the chin, THEN, lay me down, oh, then they have to paint underneath your eyes too, okay, then they'd lay me down, then they'd paint me. Each day I was repainted, because each day you had a new appliance, because when you take it off it would break. Then I'd be painted, which is lots of airbrushing [here she mimed airbrushing and made airbrushing sounds]. I was out for that. I fell asleep at that point. I could. And then they'd stick the facial hair on, which was pretty disgusting. They didn't wake me up at that point. Facial hair was always sleep time. And then wake up, and then they'd want to do my beauty makeup – they'd stick on my eyebrows, do my eyeliner, lovely lips. All throughout this I've been wearing my teeth. I can take my teeth out once they've stuck all the main bits on to get the right shape. The teeth we could take in and out.

"In fact, it was good that we could take them in and out, because frankly we were unintelligible when they're in. So when you could, you'd take them out. And that was about it. You just had to stick on the wig, finally."

She made herself comfortable in the interview. In addition to the tea, she put up her knees on her chair (cutely doing a brief ape-like arm move when she first did so), and halfway through, after asking if we minded, lit up a cigarette. (At the end of the interview, I recommended she try Zyban in combination with the patch. She seemed to appreciate the advice – "I've GOT to give it up.")

I asked her if she looked at the original Planet to pick up anything from the performance of Kim Hunter, who played a rather similar role. "I did. I sort of went specifically to crib from Kim, yeah."

When Helena told us about the "Ape School" all the actors with simian roles had to attend prior to shooting, I wondered if they actually observed live animals as part of the process. "We did. We visited the actors, Jonah and Jacob, who played Pericles [the REAL chimpanzee seen early in the movie in the space station scenes] . . . and watched them."

I said I thought it was interesting that she referred these actual chimpanzees as "actors." "Yeah, probably because I'm a fellow chimp now. I think he's very good in it too." Though actually she meant "they," because the role was indeed played by both Jonah and Jacob, "because of the hours. And they WERE only four."

Tim Burton is perhaps best described as HIGHLY CAFFEINATED. I have no idea if he actually had any caffeine that day, or if it was just a natural phenomenon. Regardless, this man was WIRED. This was accentuated by his wild, unruly hair. He was dressed all in black (as, come to think of it, were Mark Wahlberg and Helena Bonham Carter as well), and wore enormous blue-tinted sunglasses the entire time. He also very politely when he entered the room shook everybody's hand.

Tim's answers tended to be in the form of one long, meandering sentence, which would occasionally lead somewhat afield from whatever the original question had been.

I first asked him why, when Fox approached him about the project, he thought it was something which he wanted to do. After all, the original Planet of the Apes is a classic. He agreed, but said that he and the studio had been in accord from the beginning that this was not going to be a "remake." Instead, he considers it to be a "reimagining."

So then I wanted to know why they bothered using famous lines from the first movie ("Get your stinking paws off me, you damn dirty ape," "Damn them! Damn them all to hell!"), albeit in different contexts. I told Tim they seemed to me like winking at the audience; if this was, indeed, a reimagining, why bother with these obvious riffs on the original?

"Yeah, but here's the thing. Those kind [sic] of things – we never put anything in it that -- like, cause, you know, I don't expect, I'm a fan of the original movies, but I don't expect, you know, and some people I know are, but there's a whole group of people out there – I just talked to a guy who didn't know, who'd never even heard of the movie Planet of the Apes, so, anything we did, we just tried to say well, people, you know, that see the movie, fine, people that haven't, it's just a line in a movie, that's, in the movie, you know what I mean, didn't go out of our way to throw something in that, that was just that, it had to do – in my mind, it had to work just on its own, if you never knew that movie, it would be a line that went by and it was just appropriate for what that moment was at that time."

(I have to disagree. To me, these lines of dialogue as 'clever' nods to the original were blended into the action about as subtly as Barney was into Jurassic Park III -- though that juxtaposition was actually funny.)

So then I asked Tim, since both Charlton Heston and Linda Harrison, who played Heston's human love interest in the 1968 film (interestingly, Harrison's character then was named Nova; this time around, Nova is the name of an ape character played by Lisa Marie, who happens to be Tim Burton's girlfriend; Harrison in 1969 married Richard Zanuck, then the head of production of Fox who greenlit that first Planet, and now the producer of this film!), had cameos in this 2001 edition, if he had also tried to get Kim Hunter to make an appearance. After all, I pointed out, she's still working. (Indeed, she was nominated just this year for a Best Actress Genie – Canada's version of the Academy Awards).

Tim smiled. "Yeah, no, I mean, again, I didn't want to go – I mean, again, it was a personal choice of going, wanting to do a few things, but not going too far, because that's why I also didn't have a whole bunch of other people, like cameos as apes, because I didn't want it to turn it into that, either, you know what I mean, it's like, I see movies where it becomes about that, and you're kind of going, [like] Dick Tracy, 'Who's that guy? Who is that? Al Pacino. Is that duh-duh-duh? Is that so-and-so? Is that so-and-so? That -- I didn't want that to be the overall energy of it."
But you did, I clarified, seek out Linda Harrison to do the movie?

"Oh yeah! Yeah yeah yeah.yeah. [this said very agreeably] But, I mean, that's little, tiny things. And those things, again, they're either for people who see it, they see it, people don't see it, it doesn't matter."

One wouldn't be too surprised to find that actors might in person be not quite as attractive as they appear in their work – after all, there they have the benefit of expert makeup, lighting, etc. Occasionally, however, you meet a performer – Jet Li is an example -- who is actually better looking in person than on screen, and that was the case with Estella Warren, who, in the flesh, was stunningly beautiful. Although, in keeping with the day's trend in attire, her tank top (which made manifest the fact that if Tomb Raider's producers had cast her instead of Angelina Jolie as Lara Croft, they would have saved money not only on her salary but also by not having to invest in all that padding) was black, below that she wore a long, down-to-her-feet turquoise and white batik skirt. She got her own drink (a water). This made sense, since she's Canadian.

This is her second big movie of recent months; she also starred in April's Driven. I asked her about the synchronized swimming sequence she performed in that movie, which served as an amusing interlude between racing scenes.

"That's a funny story, because Sly [who wrote and produced it in addition to starring in it] and Renny [Harlin, Driven's director] came up to me and they were coming up rather sheepishly to me, and I was kind of going, 'Renny Harlin and Sly Stallone coming up to me sheepishly, hmmm, something is definitely going on,' and they go, 'You know, Estella, we're thinking about putting in a pool scene,' and I'm like, this is so inevitable, that I knew this was coming, this was not in the script when I signed on, and I was like, 'Well, if you want to do a pool scene, then you have to let me . . . then I have to be able to do synchronized swimming in the scene and you have to keep it in.' And he said okay, and I thought he would never would do it, but he said okay, so it was really funny."

Estella talked about how great it was to work in "this huge set that Tim made, the biggest studio at Sony, it was the studio where they shot The Wizard of Oz, and it was just kind of magical to walk in there."

The most memorable moment of the entire day came when I asked Estella what her interpretation of the ending of the movie was. She said she hadn't seen the film yet, so she really couldn't comment on it. The Canadian reporter summarized the "shocker" ending, thinking he was just reminding her of what she had read. Estella stared at him. "Did you just tell me the ending? Seriously? No. You were kidding." When assured that the scenario he had just sketched was indeed the ending, Estella appeared stunned. Then, quietly, she said, "I didn't know the ending." At which point we all tried to reassure her that she could still enjoy the movie when she saw it, that the ending was in many ways completely separate from the rest of the film, etc. We also asked her about the ending she had read in the script given to her. But she just stared at us, shocked into silence – for 45 extremely awkward seconds.

Tim Roth, thankfully, didn't wear any black. Instead, he was very casual in blue jeans and a tie-dyed T-shirt, the inside of his right arm decorated with an elaborate tattoo, which he declined to explain, telling me it was like "a diary."

Tim revealed that it wasn't actually him doing the extreme jumping around his character General Thade engages in at times, but rather a "high-wire guy" specialist. And for a few of the scenes involving "quadruped movement" – moving on all fours – Tim had Terry Notary, the acrobat and stunt player who led the pre-production "Ape School," stand in for him.

Tim also told us that he severely injured his back doing the film, fusing discs in his spine together, for which he was supposed to be operated on, but didn't have time; consequently, he performed much of the time in great pain. However, the pain went completely away upon the completion of the shoot.

Another reporter said that it must have been cool for Tim to get to work with Charlton Heston – Heston's cameo comes opposite Tim. Tim hesitated before replying, and said that he supposed in some ways it was cool, but that it was also very UNcool. Why? Because he is very much on the other side of the gun issue from Heston, the president of the NRA. He said that he originally wasn't sure he was going to be able to do the scene, but the night before shooting, Tim Burton and he had a long chat, and Burton "told him some very cool things," and convinced him to do it. A reporter asked him what exactly the director had said to him, but Tim just replied, "That's private stuff."