James tries the untested

MANILA, Philippines - James Franco tries the untested in Weta Digital’s latest technology to create a new acting platform in Rise of the Planet of the Apes. A single act of both compassion and arrogance leads to a war unlike any other resulting to a CGI ape named Caesar that delivers a dramatic performance of unprecedented emotion and intelligence.

Set in present day San Francisco, the film is a reality-based cautionary tale, a science fiction/science fact blend, where man’s experiments with genetic engineering lead to the development of intelligence in apes and the onset of a war for supremacy.

Will Rodman (Franco) is a scientist working within a large pharmaceutical corporation, Gen-Sys, conducting genetic research to develop a benign virus that restores damaged human brain tissue. He is committed to finding a cure for Alzheimer’s, a disease that afflicts his father, Charles (John Lithgow). When management deems his research a failure, they shut down his program and Will eventually moves to his father’s house to take care of him. Amidst the confusion of the study’s sudden termination, Will finds himself charged with an overlooked newborn infant chimpanzee – a male, the newly orphaned offspring of his most promising test subject. That young chimp, destined for greatness, is named Caesar.

Franco says getting to work with the performance capture process was one of the draws of the project for him. “I feel like it is giving me a new acting experience,” he explains. “I’m getting to work with this performance capture process and I’m always interested in different kinds of acting experiences. And it’s also, in a distantly connected way, fulfilling a childhood dream because the Lord of the Rings books were some of the first books I read as a kid and then this team at Weta realised them and made them into these great movies. In a way I feel like I’m working with the people who realised my childhood images.”

Working with Andy Serkis has been a particular highlight, he admits. “I wasn’t quite sure how that would work before I started doing it, but I knew the end result would look like there was a chimpanzee there. Acting it with Andy, I didn’t know what that would feel like. But the first day that we did it, we really just fell into it immediately.”

Serkis, the forefront of performance capture technology and is probably best known as the man behind Gollum in Peter Jackson’s blockbusting Lord of the Rings trilogy concurs that Franco to his credit, took a whole new perspective on CGI-acting.

“James took about half an hour to get over it, but once you’re looking into the eyes of an actor who’s in character, the rest of it is irrelevant. And he totally got into it and believed in the scenario and the relationship and it just worked. I loved working with him; I just thought he was amazing,” Serkis shares.

Adds Franco: “Andy’s behaviour was so convincing that I, as an actor, was immediately able to just fall into that relationship and react to him as if he were a chimpanzee. I think it’s the same imagination muscle that’s used when I imagine that someone’s playing my brother or my mother. You just fall into that kind of relationship.”

Rise of the Planet of the Apes opens Aug. 4 in theaters nationwide from 20th Century Fox to be distributed by Warner Bros.