Interview (Written): Mark Bomback

Co-writer of War for the Planet of the Apes.

The Wrap interview with the War for the Planet of the Apes co-writer Mark Bomback.

When you finished “Dawn of the Planet of the Apes” three years ago, how much of the plot of “War” did you and Matt already have planned out?

We actually had next to nothing planned. We knew that we wanted to tell one more story that would bring us to some sense of a conclusion, but we had no idea what that conclusion looked like. So we took a break after “Dawn” and then reconvened and spent 2–3 weeks doing something people think screenwriters usually do but don’t often do: we just watched movies everyday.

We wanted this movie to resemble a biblical epic, but also maintain the western feel that “Dawn” started. And of course, we wanted to have a war movie, because the last film sent the message that we were headed toward a state of war. So we watched everything from “Bridge on the River Kwai” and “The Great Escape” to “Ben-Hur” and “The Ten Commandments.” We also saw “Spartacus” and “Braveheart” and “The Searchers,” too. And after every film we’d go to our office on the lot for a spitball session that was often colored by whatever we had just seen. We’d put together a wish list of all the things we wanted to see in the film, and almost miraculously that started to coalesce into a narrative. By the end, after organizing how each beat of the story would play out, we had the basic shell of the story.

The film starts with the humans and apes battling like the end of “Dawn” promised, but by the end it’s really about Caesar and the apes trying to survive while the humans are fighting each other. What led you to steer the conflict in that direction?

Well, we were interested in how the ’68 original has humans devolve into a simian state while apes become more sentient and articulate. So we realized that while “Rise” and “Dawn” show how this virus decimates humanity and gives apes their intelligence, we asked, “How did humans lose their speech”? So we started with the idea that the virus had mutated further and the idea that nature wasn’t done punishing humanity for breaking its laws.

From there we asked ourselves how humans might deal with this. Well, one way might be to try to tackle it in a scientific manner, but another might just be to chop off the arm before the infection spreads. Are humans becoming more ruthless in an attempt to save themselves than they have ever been before, and is this carrying over into how they’re dealing with the apes? So it started with that one idea with the virus and the one little girl and sort of expanded into the idea that the Colonel is fighting a battle on two fronts, with both the Apes and humans who disagree with how he’s dealing with this virus.

For the rest of the interview, go here.