HESTON RETURNS TO PLANET OF THE APES
By Vanessa Thorpe
From The Observer, 12.03.2000
The veteran Hollywood star and gun lobbyist Charlton Heston is to return to the
screen in a remake of his 1968 hit, Planet of the Apes. But the actor,
aged 76, will not reprise his role of astronaut Colonel George Taylor, the hero
of the original cult film. Instead, he plays an aging ape who, on his deathbed,
speaks of his despair at human nature.
The big- budget remake - or 're-imagining', as 20th Century Fox which is making
the film is calling it - started shooting last month in Arizona and is being
directed by Tim Burton.
Details of the plot and cast have been closely guarded by Burton's team, but
the film is known to star British actors Helena Bonham Carter, who will play
an ape princess, and Tim Roth, who is cast as an evil chimpanzee general. The
leading male human role will be played by Mark Wahlberg, the former rap star
who
appeared in the action adventure, The Perfect Storm.
Heston's visit to the set of Planet of the Apes will be something of a
reunion. The actress Linda Harrison, who appeared with him the first time around
as the beautiful savage Nova, will play a lady ape and the film is being produced
by Richard Zanuck, the man who ran 20th Century Fox when the first film was made
more than 30 years ago.
Speaking to an American newspaper about his return to the ape world, Zanuck said
that the film will not stick to the original story. 'Mark Wahlberg is not playing
the Charlton Heston character. He's playing a totally new part, in this upside-down
world of ape and human,' he said.
The original screenplay, which was based on the 1963 book Monkey Planet by Pierre
Boulle, spawned a series of sequels and a television series and the remake has
been the subject of intense speculation among fans.
In the first film, Heston and his space crew wake from hibernation to find that
their spacecraft has crashed on an unknown planet ruled by literate orangutans,
chimpanzees and gorillas. The humans on the planet are pre-lingual and uncivilised.
Heston is captured and taken to the city of the apes, but cannot communicate
with them.
Speaking at Oxford Union Heston, the president of America's National Rifle Association,
told undergraduates that Planet of the Apes was one of his favourite films.
From an actor whose career began in the 1940s, and who starred
in Ben-Hur, in the 1959 spectacular, this is high praise.
Heston also said it had the best ending of any film he had seen. In its final
sequence Taylor realises that he is on earth when he sees the top of the Statue
of Liberty in the sand.
The new version, with the working title The Visitor, will not pick up
where the last film, Battle for the Planet of the Apes, stopped in 1973.
Instead, screenwriter William Broyles, who wrote Apollo 13, is thought
to have expanded the species to include baboons, mandrills, mangabeys and howler
monkeys. The all-star cast also includes Kris Kristofferson as a rebel leader
and the English actor David Warner as Helena Bonham Carter's ape father. Estella
Warren will play the human 'love interest' and George Clooney, a friend of Wahlberg,
is thought to have agreed to play a cameo role as an ape to fulfill his part
of a wager. Helena Bonham Carter's ape princess is an idealist who believes that
apes and humans could live together - so much so that there is the hint of a
groundbreaking, cross-species love scene with Mark
Wahlberg.
However, there has already been trouble creating the right simian look for Bonham
Carter. Early last month a hairdresser was flown in from Italy to try to improve
her appearance in costume.
The ape make-up has been designed by the oscar- winning Rick Baker, who has worked
on Gorillas in the Mist, Greystoke and this year's Christmas hit
in the United States, How the Grinch Stole
Christmas.
It remains to be seen, however, whether the new film will use the same publicity
slogan as the original: 'Somewhere in the Universe, there must be something better
than man!'
