Note: This interview was undertaken the day after the London riots.

Its an interesting time for your film to be coming out.

Rupert Wyatt:I think so.

Hopefully, any films we do in the future will continue to explore more of that.

Ad content continues below

RW:No, Andy was the obvious choice.

Very early on we decided to go with performance capture rather than live apes.

RW:Yes, mainly because unlike the original films we were dealing with real apes.

Physically, chimps just dont have the capabilities of speaking.

Did you draw on any real life stories, such asProject Nim,for inspiration?

RW:We did.

There was one in particular,Oliver: The Humanzeethat became a great source of reference for Andy.

Thats well worth checking out on YouTube.

RW:Im sure it probably did, and Im sure [the studio] saw the connection.

Was the bigger scale of this film a freedom or a constraint?

RW:There were many freedoms.

But the key thing is to get the right people.

You get the wrong people and… well, the horse very quickly becomes the camel!

That would have been the death of us.

The same was true of the story.

We wanted to make it a real world that allowed the audience to buy into these characters.

Thats very different from other films in the franchise, which are more heightened and obviously science fiction.

So is there room for another prequel set in the years before the original Planet of the Apes?

RW:Weve got 3000 years to explore!

Theres so much you could do with it.

You could doFull Metal Jacketwith apes, which would be a great sequel.

And thats what were setting up, the conflict between two civilisations clashing for the first time.

Ironically, this film is much more of an escape film.

Its about the apes getting out of our world and into one they feel comfortable within.

RW:Its a good question.

I read it as a stand-alone story, and all of us approached it in that way.

At this point, the audiences sympathy is firmly with the apes.

Is it possible to maintain that, as we know that, ultimately, the apes will defeat humanity?

And are those stories you would like to tell yourself?

Rupert Wyatt and Dan Lemmon, thank you very much.