Episode 155: Transcript
Episode: 155: Secrets of the Planet of the Apes, with Josh Friedman
Transcription by Alexander
Charlie Jane: [00:00:00] So Annalee, I heard that you grew up on the Planet of the Apes.
Annalee: [00:00:05] Pretty much, actually. So little known fact, Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, which was the fourth of the original films, was partly filmed in Irvine, where I grew up. And it's filmed on the UC Irvine campus near the library. And there's a lot of legends about this area of the UC Irvine campus.
[00:00:31] So all of this was built, like, in the late 60s. So in the movie, we see, like all the enslaved apes as janitors, like, working in the area. But the rumor in Irvine was that this spot had been built specifically to discourage student protests because so many campuses were dealing with students gathering in the central part of campus near administration buildings, having protests. And UC Irvine's framers were like, “We are not going to let that happen.” So we're going to create an area near the administration building, which is really kind of small and cramped. And we're going to build gun bastions on top of the library.
[00:01:15] A little cement overhang at the very top of the library, jutting out from the roof are these weird kind of cement overhangs, where if you were a sniper, say, you could kind of lie down on top and, like, aim your gun really easily at anyone who's in the area where they're trying to discourage student protests.
Charlie Jane: [00:01:34] Yeah, nothing says, like, the life of the mind and, like, free inquiry and everything, like, having giant gun turrets looking down on you the whole time. That just screams academic freedom to me.
Annalee: [00:01:46] Yeah, but it does offer a really great location for a dystopian story.
Charlie Jane: [00:01:52] Yeah.
Annalee: [00:01:53] An animal uprising.
Charlie Jane: [00:01:55] Yep. I feel like there's a book to be written about, like, how dystopia in real life flows into dystopia and fiction and back.
Annalee: [00:02:02] So true.
Charlie Jane: [00:02:03] So yeah, I mean, I think that the Planet of the Apes movies have aged better than a lot of 1960s and 1970s architecture. So, you know, yay for that.
[00:02:12] So, OK, today we're going to be talking about the Planet of the Apes films, the whole series going back to 1968.
Annalee: [00:02:19] Woohoo.
Charlie Jane: [00:02:20] Also, later in the episode, we're going to be joined by the incredible Josh Friedman, who wrote the latest film, Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, as well as many of our other favorite things.
Annalee: [00:02:30] Yeah, I just love his work so much. And by the way, you are listening to Our Opinions Are Correct, the podcast that worships subterranean nuclear weapons and gives you psychic powers.
[00:02:42] I'm Annalee Newitz. I'm the author of Stories Are Weapons: Psychological Warfare and the American Mind.
Charlie Jane: [00:02:50] I'm Charlie Jane Anders, and my latest book is Promises Stronger Than Darkness.
Annalee: [00:02:57] On our mini episode next week, we are going to be talking about how you could go about rebooting Logan's Run: another movie and series from roughly the same era that nobody has managed to bring back. So could we maybe bring some Black Mirror to the city of Domes? Could we put some apes in there? I don't know. We're going to talk about it.
Charlie Jane: [00:03:19] Yeah. And by the way, did you know that, like, basically the reason this podcast still exists is because we have such a wonderful community supporting us on Patreon and like hanging out with us on Discord. It's really true. You can be part of it.
[00:03:31] You can join the Our Opinions Are Correct movement by going to patreon.com/ouropinionsarecorrect. You know, whatever you can afford to give us every month. A few bucks, 20 bucks, a million bucks. It all goes back into making this podcast like the juggernaut of correctness that we know it to be. And, you know, we just really love that community and having you all around talking to us. It just means so much to us. So think about it. Everything you give us goes right back into making your podcast more correct and you can find us at patreon.com/ouropinionsarecorrect. All right. Let's get into the apes.
[00:04:07] [OOAC theme plays. Science fictiony synth noises over an energetic, jazzy drum line.]
Charlie Jane: [00:04:40] So Annalee, I feel like you’re our resident ape-ologist. So when I have watched the original Planet of the Apes movies, I'm always just like, man, they're so campy. They're basically like in that sort of Barbarella zone of like extreme campiness and silliness. So, you know, why are we still so fascinated with this like silly, zany concept of like talking apes take over the world?
Annalee: [00:05:05] Well, OK, I would push back a little bit on the idea that it's Barbarella levels of campiness. I don't think that the original films were intentionally campy like that. One of the things that's weird about looking back at 1960s movies and TV in general is that it was a really campy time. And so there's a baseline level of campiness in almost everything, including stuff like James Bond.
Charlie Jane: [00:05:32] True.
Annalee: [00:05:33] Batman, obviously.
Charlie Jane: [00:05:34] Yeah.
Annalee: [00:05:35] And some of it is intentional. And I think some of it is just reflecting the style and aesthetics of the time. And I think Planet of the Apes is one of those stories that feels campy in retrospect, but was intended to be satirical, but not silly. I don't think the ape costumes were intended to come across as goofy rubber faces because that was the technologies they had at the time. You know, they didn't have really sophisticated CGI. They basically had people in ape suits. And...
Charlie Jane: [00:06:11] Yeah, so the suspension of disbelief has just kind of made it over time a little bit.
Annalee: [00:06:15] Yeah. I mean, it would be kind of like accusing Doctor Who of being campy just because the Daleks look like they're trash cans with toilet plungers attached. You know?
Charlie Jane: [00:06:24] How dare you?
Annalee: [00:06:25] I know. Right? But that's what I'm saying is that that's kind of what we're dealing with the apes. So that aside, I think that the reason why we're still obsessed with this story is that it's a really fungible metaphor for a lot of different social issues that humanity has faced.
[00:06:45] There are environmental aspects to the story, you know, the way that we relate to non-human animals. There's clearly issues around race and civil rights, especially in the 1960s and 70s stories. There's issues around deep time and evolution, because a lot of the stories deal with distant futures, time machines, alternate forms of evolution where different hominins become the dominant species on the planet.
[00:07:13] It also deals a lot with science itself and how science treats non-human creatures, you know, scientific experiments on animals. It's a really big theme in both the new series, but also the original series, too, because the apes kind of want to just experiment on the humans. And there's one good scientist who's like, actually, maybe no, like they seem like people.
Charlie Jane: [00:07:40] Oh, my God.
Annalee: [00:07:41] Maybe we shouldn't just like stick them in the oven and see how long it takes to cook them. That doesn't actually happen, but they're going to vivisect them. And she's like, maybe not.
Charlie Jane: [00:07:49] I mean, the one moment from like the classic Apes movies that just always sticks in my mind for some reason, like as I saw it as a little kid and it just was burned into my brain is that moment in - I think it's Escape from the Planet of the Apes where like Cornelius and like, what's her name? Go back in time to the present day. They get captured by humans. And like one of them says, yeah, we used to dissect the humans and like it becomes like this thing that gets recorded and the humans are just playing this back. We used to dissect the humans, dissect, dissect, dissect.
[00:08:17] And it was like the horror of like the role reversal, basically. I feel like that's like the moment that feels very raw and real to me of like, yeah, you know, what we do to others can be done to us. And like, here you go.
Annalee: [00:08:31] Yeah, it's a species flipping kind of story. And also, Planet of the Apes comes out initially at a time when a lot of people were doing experiments with trying to raise chimpanzees, like with human children.
Charlie Jane: [00:08:47] Right.
Annalee: [00:08:47] And so people were it was kind of in the air wondering, like, maybe the only difference between us and apes is just socialization, you know, that that you that you really could raise a human ape child. Yeah, actually, there's a fantastic novel by Karen Joy Fowler.
Charlie Jane: [00:09:06] Oh, yeah.
Annalee: [00:09:07] We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, which is about a family where they raise a chimpanzee as one of their daughters. And it's, oh, my god, it's such an incredible book. And it is kind of, it's not science fiction. It's fiction about science.
[00:09:22] But it actually deals with some of the same themes that come up in Planet of the Apes about what's the nature of family? Like, do you include nonhuman animals in your definition of family? Like, who gets to be a person? You know, what do you do when a person doesn't act the way you want them to? I think that that's a big theme.
[00:09:40] And, you know, in that movie Escape from Planet of the Apes, one of the things that people always forget is that the movie starts with a horrible pandemic that kills all dogs and cats on the planet. And so humans have lost their closest nonhuman animal companions. And so they turn to apes for companionship. And that's why they, for some reason, that's why they decide to uplift the apes and give them kind of human intelligence. Why they never did that with dogs and cats, I don't know, but for some reason, that's what they do in that movie.
Charlie Jane: [00:10:18] Yeah. My cat always insists to me that if he had human intelligence, he'd actually be a lot dumber than he is now. So…
Annalee: [00:10:25] Yeah. He'd be inventing like social media networks and stuff like that.
Charlie Jane: [00:10:29] He'd be coming up with apps. He's like: I'm so much smarter now that I'm not creating apps. But yeah, anyway, so let's talk about that. So you've got this bizarro back-story of like, oh, the reason the apes are intelligent is because the dogs and cats died out. You've got like mutants living underground. Like mutated humans. You've got a cult that worships nuclear weapons. You've got time travel just happening all over the place. There's just constantly time travel. There's a whole bunch of like wacky, wacky plot devices.
[00:10:57] And like, it feels like part of what is different about the new Apes movies, the ones that are, you know, started in 2011, is that they try to contain their plot devices to just a few. There's like a virus and that's basically the main thing. There's not a lot of wacky plot devices. And like, do we miss like the Apes movies just being like: let's throw every plot device at the screen. Let's just be like kind of gonzo about it.
Annalee: [00:11:24] I think again, this might be an aesthetic difference between the sixties and seventies versus like the aughts and the teens and the twenties. Sure. I guess we're talking about teens and twenties at this point, because I do think there's a lot of weird stuff that works its way into the modern Apes movies, which is one of the things I like about them.
[00:11:44] I think each of the films has a different kind of trope at its heart. So the first film in 2011, it is dealing a little bit with the pandemic, but it's mostly dealing with the question of intelligence and how science intervenes in thought. The main character is developing a drug for Alzheimer's, which accidentally causes a bunch of apes to become human equivalent intelligent.
[00:12:11] Then we start to get the second movie as a kind of post apocalypse. The third is a war movie, I would argue, but it's a weirdo war.
Charlie Jane: [00:12:21] It's trying to be a war movie, but it's also just about like imprisonment and incarceration. It's like the whole movie is about a prison camp, but like, yeah, escaping from a prison camp.
Annalee: [00:12:31] It's about the carceral state and it's a bit Escape from New York. You know, like I said, a kind of POW film, Bridge on the River Kwai, but with apes. And with a lot more angry fighting. And then I think the current film is really a quest narrative, among other things. I mean, it has a lot of stuff in it that's incredibly interesting and unique to that film.
[00:12:55] But I do think that there are a lot of weird things in the movies. Like, we get a lot of weird details. It's true that there's no time travel yet, although we don't know what the people in that weird silo are doing. But there is this idea that like there's been a pandemic that has all of these weird side effects. So there's like pandemic apocalypse.
Charlie Jane: [00:13:18] It mutates all the time.
Annalee: [00:13:20] And the pandemic apocalypse has killed off a lot of people, but also created this new group of, you know, kind of intelligent, resource-extracting, nation-building animals. So I think it has some of the same gonzo feeling, but the style of the modern movies is much more grounded. I feel like every film, especially the most recent film, the production makes an effort to try to evoke what the world would really be like if it had been abandoned by humans. There's lots of incredible world building around that.
Charlie Jane: [00:13:56] Yeah. It's the whole world without us thing that like the movie I Am Legend also leans into - which by the way, I Am Legend is also a grounded remake of like a Charlton Heston classic from that kind of that same era. I mean, it's interesting because basically the one widget in the new Planet of the Apes movies is the virus.
[00:14:13] You just get a little bit like the virus. It makes your whites whiter. It cleans your grout. It washes your car. It drives your kids to school. The virus does whatever we need it to do in the moment.
Annalee: [00:14:25] It's a MacGuffin, but also not. It's like a plot driver. Yeah, I like widgets.
Charlie Jane: [00:14:30] Yeah, it just it's an endlessly versatile plot driver because it just keeps mutating. So, OK, talking about like how this is a grounded remake. It's sort of the Christopher Nolan version of the Apes movies in a way. It's very much: let’s do to what the Apes movies, what Christopher Nolan did to Batman, kind of.
Annalee: [00:14:47] I see what you're saying.
Charlie Jane: [00:14:48] Yeah, his trilogy. And like I want to like return to this question of campiness for just a second, because you were talking about how like things in the 60s and 70s Apes movies that we think now are - can't be, were not intended to be, can't be. Is that what happened with Tim Burton? Did Tim Burton just be like, well, this inherently can't be? We're going to play into the happiness. Sort of like what he did with Dark Shadows in a way, I guess. Is that why the Tim Burton movie doesn't work?
Annalee: [00:15:13] Because he leaned into the campy part, but forgot about the realist plot. You know, that is possible for sure. You know, one of the problems with the Tim Burton movie is that the metaphor - the central metaphor in the movie - is completely incoherent.
[00:15:28] I think one of the things that I really like about the Planet of the Apes movies is that even when they're a bit bonkers, they are strongly allegorical and the allegories generally make sense.
Charlie Jane: [00:15:40] Yeah.
Annalee: [00:15:40] And in the Tim Burton film, the allegories are just all over the place to the point where there's actually a scene in the film where the apes sit down at the table to have dinner and start arguing over the welfare state.
Charlie Jane: [00:15:54] I remember that.
Annalee: [00:15:55] And it just feels super on the nose and like highly specific in a way that just doesn't belong there. And I feel like that was part of what got away from Tim Burton. I think stylistically, Tim Burton was the perfect guy to make that film. Like the visuals, the kind of weird, like gothic overtones. That actually works. But the plot was just not right.
[00:16:20] And he did actually try to go back to the original French novel and use that structure, which also, I think, made it even more incoherent because the original novel did not deal with the welfare state. It was much more straightforward.
Charlie Jane: [00:16:31] Yeah. I mean, as a counterpoint, I'm like the only person on the planet who doesn't like Tim Burton's Batman. So I feel like I'd way rather have Christopher Nolan's Batman than Tim Burton's Batman. I'd way rather have Christopher Nolan's Apes than Tim Burton’s Apes.
[00:16:44] I feel like there's just a thing - when he tries to take one of these classic franchises and update it - that he does that I don't really respond to or resonate with.
Annalee: [00:16:53] Well, the thing about Nolan, I will say, is that he knows how to run an allegory.
Charlie Jane: [00:16:57] He does.
Annalee: [00:16:58] That dude, sometimes to his own detriment, he is like, I know how to drive an allegory through this narrative. And I think Tim Burton is much more about style and aesthetics.
Charlie Jane: [00:17:08] So you said a little while ago that the first rebooted Planet of the Apes movie, which I think was Rise of the Planet of the Apes, is about intelligence and who is intelligent and stuff. And obviously, you've written a little bit about the question of intelligence and language. Can we tell how intelligent people are by their use of language? I feel like that might just possibly be a theme in the Terra Formers and elsewhere.
Annalee: [00:17:31] A little bit, yeah.
Charlie Jane: [00:17:32] I feel like you're probably uniquely qualified to address what is it with language in these films? These films are obsessed with who talks and who doesn't talk. And that's like the great divide. Is that really what we should be looking at?
Annalee: [00:17:47] Yeah, I mean, this is actually something that came up in our episode about AI when we talked to Alex Hanna and Emily Bender, where they were saying, “Why is it that when we talk about artificial intelligence, all we talk about is language? And we think that facility with language is the measure of whether AI is functioning or not.” And they were like, “Actually, that's a really narrow definition of intelligence. And it's actually unhelpful in a lot of ways to conceive of it that way.”
[00:18:19] And I think it's just, it's one of those things that gives us a false sense of superiority, because we've figured out all kinds of ways to measure human language and to talk about human language complexity, which also is full of bullshit, too. There's all kinds of assumptions about what kinds of languages are harder or not as hard. Which often somehow magically map onto colonial relationships, too, and power relationships.
Charlie Jane: [00:18:52] Gosh, I wonder why.
Annalee: [00:18:52] It's very much a human bias, because it's something that we can measure in ourselves. And the other axis that we often measure intelligence on is tool use. And it's interesting that as scientists have discovered more and more non-human animals using a wide variety of tools…
Charlie Jane: [00:19:11] Crows.
Annalee: [00:19:11] …building cities. Yeah, crows use tools. Many cetaceans have tool-like activity, I guess I would say. Octopuses use tools. Elephants use tools. There's a lot, and I'm like, that's just like scratching the surface.
[00:19:25] That's kind of faded back as a definition of intelligence, as we're discovering how much our tool use is actually not exceptional. But it does seem like, for now, we can have human exceptionalism when it comes to language. And language is tied into a lot of other stuff, too. Like I said, it's tied into notions of IQ and eugenics. How big your vocabulary is, is also tied into all kinds of gender norms. There's all of this pseudoscience around how many words women use versus how many men use, which is indeed complete pseudoscience. It's been debunked. The papers it was based on turned out to be based on actually the whimsical musings of a pastor, not a scientific study. And I'll link to that in the show notes so you can find out.
[00:20:13] The point is that I think language has kind of been weaponized. It's something that has all of this other meaning to us in terms of human hierarchy. And so it makes sense to me that that's something that gets projected into these stories, is that once the apes have language, then they can challenge our supremacy. And language being linked to supremacy and who owns the language - who controls the language; that's a part of politics.
Charlie Jane: [00:20:43] Yeah, and you know, part of me feels like there's still a lot that we have to learn about non-human languages on this planet. How much are octopuses and whales and other creatures using language, and we just don't understand what they're doing?
Annalee: [00:20:58] Well, you know, my opinion, which is correct, is that whales 100% have language. I think lots and lots of non-human animals, including many types of birds, have language. And again, we want to have this human exceptionalism and be like, oh, but we're the only ones.
Charlie Jane: [00:21:14] I think that what language allows us to do, for good or for ill, is cooperate better. Like, I think the one way in which having more sophisticated - or more kind of complex or nuanced - use of language does provide an advantage is that you can make plans. You could be like, I'm going to be in this place in three hours and you should meet me there. And like other people will understand that you're making a plan. And like, kind of bringing it back to the Apes, that allows you to cooperate and build stuff in different ways.
[00:21:45] It also allows you to oppress other people because you can gang up with a bunch of other language users and be like, yeah, we're going to all, you know, round up this group of people and put them in camps or whatever. And like...
Annalee: [00:21:57] Language is the basis of propaganda.
Charlie Jane: [00:21:59] It sure is. I feel like someone wrote a book about that recently, but also like language is the basis of more sophisticated oppression. And I think it like... I feel like the Apes movies are about, once you have language, you could start really, really oppressing other people in a way that you couldn't before.
Annalee: [00:22:16] Yeah, you can scale it up. It becomes mass oppression.
Charlie Jane: [00:22:20] Yeah.
Annalee: [00:22:21] Yeah. I think that's why so many people respond to the Planet of the Apes movies as being about civil rights and race relations, because - it's funny because I was talking about this on Mastodon and I was saying - I thought it was really interesting that both the new Godzilla X Kong movie and Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes talk about apes being the fascists.
[00:22:45] And I was sort of jokingly saying like, wow, I love how both of these movies say like, oh, but what if it was the apes who were the fascists, not us? And Adam Lawton, who I follow on Mastodon, said immediately like, yeah, well, as a black man, that doesn't actually surprise me at all, because of course, all of these movies are actually about black people. And it's kind of - he was like, it's basically racist science fiction.
[00:23:08] And I was like, of course, like that is, of course, what's going on. I mean, I think it's complicated. I think there's a lot more allegory and metaphor going on. But especially in the early films, I do think that that's true. And I think that the fantasy of what if it was the apes who were the baddies...
Charlie Jane: [00:23:24] Or the oppressors. It's, you know, it's not unlike that weird trope of like movies like White Man's Burden or whatever. It's like, whoa, what if there's a future where white people are oppressed and black people are the oppressors? It is a little bit of that. I think it gets complicated because this stuff is incredibly complicated.
[00:23:41] The way that this kind of racialized imagery around black people is deployed in a lot of science fiction is complicated and slippery because the moment you grab hold of it, you're like, this is a racial allegory. It can slip out of your grasp and be like, no, it's actually about this other. That's part of how they get away with it in a way is and you can look at various things in Star Trek and Star Wars that do this, too. We've both talked about this a lot in the past. You know, science fiction kind of tries to have it both ways on a lot of these. A lot of these kinds of racialized images.
Annalee: [00:24:13] That's what I think makes these stories really rich metaphorically is because they are about a bunch of different things and it's people trying to puzzle out a lot of different questions around hierarchy, including racial and gender hierarchy, but also hierarchies between humans and other non-human animals.
Charlie Jane: [00:24:31] 100%, yeah.
Annalee: [00:24:31] That's why I think we're lucky to have these movies because they really actually are quite complicated, but also fun and campy. And so we can have this kind of whimsical escapist adventure story that also, at its best, has very coherent allegorical and political messages.
Charlie Jane: [00:24:49] Yeah, that coherence is the key because I think that what I said about the slipperiness, if your main goal is to just avoid making any kind of statements about hot button issues, including racism or marginalization, you're going to come up with an allegory that is just a mess. That's going to be the thing. And I feel like when the Apes movies work, they know what they're doing and they know what they're saying. And I think Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, there are humans in the movie, but it tries to tell a story where the Apes are both the oppressors and the oppressed. And this is something that you'll hear me talking to Josh Friedman about in our interview coming up. But I think that that changes things a bit. That makes it a little bit more complicated and adds different layers of storytelling to it.
[00:25:32] But I also, I think that it is tricky. I think that with a lot of these venerable franchises that came along during a simpler or less aware time, there's a lot to kind of navigate there.
Annalee: [00:25:45] Mm hmm. That's really true. And so on that note, after the break, Charlie Jane, you'll be talking with Josh Friedman, who wrote Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes.
[00:25:54] OOAC session break music, a quick little synth bwoop bwoo.
Charlie Jane: [00:25:57] Now we're lucky to be joined by Josh Friedman, the writer of Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes. And Josh and I actually worked together on the TV show Snowpiercer for a while. And he's one of my favorite people in Hollywood. Thanks for joining us, Josh.
Josh: [00:26:09] Oh, my pleasure.
Charlie Jane: [00:26:11] Yeah. So, you know, the previous trilogy, which came out from 2011 to 2017, was all about like the rise of apes and like taking over from humans and kind of like overthrowing human dominance. And that kind of ended when Woody Harrelson kind of lost his voice in the third movie. So how do you how do you go from there? How do you know - what kind of story did you feel like needed to be told now that the apes are kind of supreme?
Josh: [00:26:37] Well, I think - We you know - I came into it and Wes Ball, the director, had been hired; and Wes had some kind of visual ideas that he was interested in, which were really suggestive of things. You know, he had some he - and he literally said to me, he's like: I don't want any humans around. And I want horses and I want eagles.
[00:26:59] He had some ideas, you know, and I said, oh, this sounds awesome. Like, I get to build a little culture - which I love doing all the time. You know, don't we all love to build a world when we can? And I think that for me, in terms of the ape side of it and not the kind of more global side of it - the ape side of it, I was really I kind of was challenging myself to do something that was more than just, “They can talk. Isn't that cool?”
[00:27:28] You know, because I feel like I mean, by the way, not that that ever gets old.
Charlie Jane: [00:27:33] No.
Josh: [00:27:33] ‘Isn’t it cool’ will always be part of the franchise. But...
Charlie Jane: [00:27:38] A key hook.
Josh: [00:27:39] It is a key hook. Talking animals is always a key hook. But I was also really interested in what now? How do they think? How do they how do they express themselves? Like, OK, so they use language, but how do they use language? Because everybody uses language differently, you know?
Annalee: [00:27:57] Right.
Josh: [00:27:58] So, you know, so I start poking around in those ways, you know. Like, okay, we have one kind of culture over here that, you know, to me, like the eagle clan, well, they're a very ritualized, kind of rigid, benevolent, but sort of tight, you know, kind of almost - not conservative in a political sense - but in a social sense, like there wasn't outside expansive thought going on in that community. You know, they were pretty much kind of local to themselves and all their truths were sort of handed down. There wasn't a lot of abstract thought, you know, and I was kind of interested in that idea and what happens when that - or someone who's a product of that - runs into something larger or different than that.
[00:28:43] And how does that individual - Noah, in this case - sift through what's real, what's not real, what's true, what's not true? You know, and kind of like get into challenging the apes to move their brains to another level or contemplate different things. You know, so I mean, that's where I start. Like, I started kind of in a very almost small place with something like this. And so...
Charlie Jane: [00:29:08] Interesting.
Josh: [00:29:09] OK, well, wouldn't it be interesting if that character - that person or whatever - was thrust out of a community where he could follow all the rules, did all the things, you know, and he's always saying, like: it's the law, we're going to do the law. And then he's sent off into a place where he's not allowed to go. He has no one around to enforce the laws. And in fact, others around him saying that's not all there is. Those aren't the laws. And you're going to have to break some laws to grow or survive or find your family. And how does that force somebody to grow or not?
[00:29:44] I was contemplating, what would it be to kind of not have your parent around, especially one who's approval you were always hoping to get and had never really held. You know, withheld it, you know, in not harsh ways, but tangible ways. And, you know, and that's where we kind of… You know, the eagle's son becomes an avatar for the father's approval or disapproval that he is haunting him and in a very kind of almost Disney movie familiar.
Charlie Jane: [00:30:13] I love that eagle just like following you around and being like, “What the fuck are you doing?”
Josh: [00:30:19] “Why are you constantly disproving me? Why do you follow me and then hate me?”
Annalee: [00:30:22] Oh my God.
Josh: [00:30:23] So, I mean, I sort of started… So to me it was sort of this combination of how do we move the apes minds forward and then also trying to tell this personal story, you know? Like this sort of picaresque, coming of age story, but also, you know, how can we poke around into larger ideas of the world - namely the legacy of Caesar and stuff like that? I also started writing this before, you know, before COVID.
Charlie Jane: [00:30:53] Oh, wow. I remember we talked about it like a million years ago.
Josh: [00:30:57] This is a Trumpian. This is a movie about lies and disinformation and leaders who lie. I mean, it's very much - has that political allegory component to it. And, you know, I mean, it's got a lot of, I think a lot of ideas in it. There's some more obvious than others and some that are just maybe for me.
Charlie Jane: [00:31:16] Yeah. So lies and disinformation. Actually, this is the thing I wanted to ask you about. Like a lot of the kind of propaganda in the movie is about Caesar and who Caesar was.
Josh: [00:31:25] Yeah.
Charlie Jane: [00:31:25] And like you have the one character whose name I'm blanking on right now, who kind of is like, no, Caesar was a pacifist.
Josh: [00:31:31] Raka.
Charlie Jane: [00:31:32] Raka. Right. Caesar was like, “Ape shall not kill ape.” And like, but then you have Proximus claiming that Caesar stood for imperialism. And like that feels really potent, especially right now, this thing of like these symbols or these kind of you know, these traditions or these like figures from history and what do they stand for? What do we make of them? And like, yeah, I'd love to hear you talk a little bit more about that.
Josh: [00:31:53] Well, I mean, I think that it… And it's interesting; it was not an idea. It didn't sit on top of the movie from the beginning. Like it very quickly became that. But I think in my head for a long time, it was sort of like, again, it kind of gets back to… It starts with for me coming of age - young ape loses his father who's basically told him everything that he knows.
[00:32:22] And now has these other father figures, parental figures who are telling him complete… Telling him basically that everything his other father said was limited or not true or you know, and so I liked this idea originally of sort of just an emotional sense of a competing father figure. Right?
[00:32:40] And this idea that there were apes out there that operated almost on faith, as opposed to sort of in the concrete way that I thought that Noah sort of operated. Noah was like, “I know my father told me this to be true, and I think it's true.” And then he's sort of forced to evaluate more abstract, dangerous ideas, you know, that he has to wrestle with, that he doesn't have proof of, or, you know, he doesn't - he can't you can't track the lineage of whether they're true or not true.
[00:33:13] So I liked it from a character side. And then obviously from the other side, you know, so much from the previous three movies was really this sort of, you know, was Caesar's story kind of growing into this almost religious figure. And I liked that. And I wanted to play with it, you know? And I think certainly trying to understand kind of on from all sides, not even just like, when people lie, but when people tell selective good things about people. I mean, just sort of the ways in which we are constantly rewriting these kind of icons, whether they are a Jesus Christ type figure or Martin Luther King or like any, you know?
[00:34:03] I feel like I remember I was writing one day and Martin Luther King Day happened to be somewhere in when I was writing. And as it happens every year on Martin Luther King Day, there's this arm wrestling match.
Charlie Jane: [00:34:14] Oh my God.
Josh: [00:34:14] Over what he was, right? You know, so there's like, so you have everyone saying, “No, no, no, no. He really was this kind of, you know, moderate centrist”, and then you have people coming up like “No, have you ever read this other speech where he basically is like, you know, blames everything, you know?” And I was like, right, we are constantly interrogating all of these people for our own benefit, and wouldn't that be what's happening? You know, and…
Charlie Jane: [00:34:42] Yeah, I mean, as soon as someone dies, we just start putting words in their mouth.
Josh: [00:34:46] Yeah.
Charlie Jane: [00:34:47] The minute, like they drop dead.
Josh: [00:34:49] Yeah. Yeah. You know, and whether they're big or whether they're like, my father, you know?
Charlie Jane: [00:34:56] Sure.
Josh: [00:34:57] I mean, it’s like, I'm constantly having an argument with my therapist about things that my father said, and whether or not I should be paying… Like, feel good or bad about them, or whether I'm rewriting them in terms of making them less painful or more painful. Whatever. You know, we do it with everybody.
[00:35:13] And so it seems like a natural… Like, I like movies that have where the, you know, if it's going to have a big political, quote unquote, message, or kind of this superstructure, as again, I think these - the Apes movies - have always done well having kind of big political, allegorical components to them. I think that if you can tie that to actual character, character struggle, and emotional stuff, it's just going to feel more organic; it's going to feel more emotional. And instead of it's just like, ‘oh, here's a message’, you know, I think it's much more like, ‘here's the thing that our character is struggling with’. And it also allows us - to me, it's the fun way of also interrogating kind of canon, you know, because I'm always dubious, I think, when I work on this IP stuff. I'm kind of leaning too heavily into fan service and kind of what I call like, Where's Waldo kind of storytelling where people are like, “Oh, I see this, and I see that, and that's a wink here, and a wink there.” And I just don’t want to do that.
[00:36:22] You know, I do like the idea of, “Well, Caesar is an important figure in this world. So let's talk about that”.
Charlie Jane: [00:36:30] He’s important in world, he's not just important to the fans, he's… He actually has the significance to the characters.
Josh: [00:36:35] Yeah, yeah. So it's worked out really well. I mean, you know me; I'm always trying to, you know, pile idea upon idea. Sometimes too many. But try to figure out ways to make these things that we work on feel, oh, responding to a time without feeling like it's ripped from the headlines. And I think...
Charlie Jane: [00:37:04] Sure.
Josh: [00:37:06] You know, I think the Apes franchise has always been among the best at kind of doing what science fiction does well. I think it's in that way we believe at least a thing that it does well - which is respond to the times in a slightly shifted kind of allegory or whatever, and allow us to explore some of these issues without feeling like we're being preached to as much. Although, maybe people feel preached to in this movie.
Charlie Jane: [00:37:31] Yeah, I haven't heard that from anybody, which is amazing. But why do you feel that is? Why do you think that the Apes movies have been better than some other franchises that just respond to this, whatever historical moment they find themselves in?
Josh: [00:37:43] I don’t know. I mean, I think I don't sound silly, but I mean, isn't it sort of like Animal Farm, to a degree, that we tolerate certain things? From hearing them from apes or aliens or whatever, you know, from others, that allow us immediately an opportunity to kind of rub up against our own humanity and where things are and aren't. And, you know, I think probably because it started in 1968; people were more political.
[00:38:12] They were writing more stuff. I mean, that interesting in that way. But, you know, one of the things that I wanted to do - I don't know how successfully at the end of the day it is in the movie, because these are just my own impulses that get washed over - which is that I never wanted them to feel like just furry humans. You know, I think that you're missing something if you think, “Oh, what they follow is simply a human track of development and that they are just humans.”
[00:38:50] And I was doing a Q&A at the Writers Guild and someone said to me, her premise, which I did not agree with was, “Well, aren't these basically just humans and other humans? Aren't these just two types of humans? And if you were suggesting that they can't get along or they can't live together, are you really saying that basically interracial relationships are broken?”
[00:39:15] I said, “I'm not saying that, because I don't agree with the premise, which is that humans and apes are the same - are just that apes are just furry humans.” I want to believe, like I said, I don't know the degree to which anyone else would see this. I do know that as a premise, I began by saying, “I want them to be apes. I want them to be animals. I want them to have animal behaviors that still are animal behaviors. I don't want to just assume now that they can do everything that humans do or that their brains are the same, that their emotional temperaments are the same, that all these things, like we shouldn't just turn them into that, because, it's just not as interesting.”
[00:39:52] And that's not what I think of, you know… Like their physiology is still their physiology. The way they walk, the way they talk whatever it is - what they eat or what their limitations are. You know, apes can't swim. They're terrible at swimming.
Charlie Jane: [00:40:07] Right? Oh my gosh. Yeah.
Josh: [00:40:10] You know, so the water and the rivers and things like that. And again, probably more in my earlier drafts, what we did, I really leaned into that in the early drafts - kind of like this idea that they're terrified of crossing water and that a lot of their boundaries with other communities were water boundaries because they just...
Charlie Jane: [00:40:29] Interesting.
Josh: [00:40:30] If I have one thing that bugged me in the movie, I had a disagreement - probably with everybody. I don't usually ever get into what I did or didn't do in the movie. Like, I don't buy that the apes built a bridge over that big, raging river. It bothers me where Raka dies is that there's a bridge. When I wrote it originally, what I wrote was that a skyscraper - like a crumbling skyscraper on one side collapsed and fell across the river. And in doing that, it allowed Proximus' group to cross over into this other land. And so there'd been complete isolation because no one could cross the river.
Charlie Jane: [00:41:14] Interesting.
Josh: [00:41:14] So, I did that and they - for reasons that I can't even really explain because I don't really know - people didn't want to do that and they didn't do that. So, they ended up with this bridge at the end, and I sit and watch the movie and go, “Well, who the fuck?” If I say, “Who fucking built that bridge”, they're going to say, “Well, Proximus’ people built a bridge.” And I think, “They can't swim. How do they do that?” I really liked the idea that they're animals; they have limitations.
Charlie Jane: [00:41:46] Yeah.
Josh: [00:41:47] They're different.
Charlie Jane: [00:41:47] And, you know, I feel like the movie isn't saying that they can't get along. It's just saying that there has to be mutuality and trust. And I don't know. I mean, as a political allegory. I think that part of what I like about the apes as a political allegory is that oppression is not set in stone. Like sometimes the apes are oppressing humans. Sometimes humans are oppressing apes. Sometimes the apes are oppressing each other. It's about who happens to be like, yeah, there's usually an oppressor because otherwise you don't have a movie, but, but the oppressor changes from, from story to story. And like, you know, do you think it makes it different having apes oppressing other apes rather than humans oppressing apes or apes oppressing humans?
Josh: [00:42:26] No, I don't, I don't think it makes it different. I think like you said; it sort of reinforces the larger idea, which is that entities will oppress.
Charlie Jane: [00:42:35] Right.
Josh: [00:42:37] You know, so I think it makes that point more so. You know, I think we could argue that Proximus and some of the things Proximus does aren't kosher, but I don't know that his take on the political landscape is incorrect at this moment in time. And I think, you know, Noah at the end says to Mae, “Proximus is right. You guys are never going to stop. You know, you just flooded a town of apes.” Who knows how many apes she killed?
Charlie Jane: [00:43:07] Right. Yeah.
Josh: [00:43:08] I think Noah would love to think that they could figure out some, like you said, some mutuality, some way, but he certainly hasn't seen any evidence of that.
Charlie Jane: [00:43:19] Yeah. I was going to ask you about that. Like, I think that I kind of came away from that movie, like thinking, “You know, Proximus was a jerk, but he had a point.” Like, living in these tiny little communities, you know, separated from each other with, like you said earlier, that total stagnation - no new ideas, no evolving culture - just doesn't necessarily seem like a sustainable way to live forever. Maybe sustainable in terms of like, environmentally, but communities can be wiped out.
Josh: [00:43:49] Yeah. Yeah, they can. You know, I think it's always nice to figure out a way to make the antagonist's points of view worth contemplating when you're driving out of the parking lot after the movie. I mean, I think people would say, “Well, Mae seems a little extreme, but I mean, if I'm a human, don't I want Mae on my side? I mean, don't I want someone who's willing to do that?”
[00:44:14] Or am I going to say, “Well, I want humanity to survive, but that's too much for a price to pay.” I don't know that there's a lot of humans stuck in the silo that would think that Mae made a mistake. And I don't know that there's a lot of apes that wouldn't think that Proximus had a point. I mean, maybe he goes about it in the wrong way or a harsh way or whatever, but that's what makes fun movies, right? I mean, it's like the battle of two rights, you know, in a flawed execution of those choices.
Charlie Jane: [00:44:46] Yeah, I mean, there's always something really compelling about a character who has a valid point, but just goes about pursuing it in a really horrible way. Their means are horrible, but their end is actually not necessarily bad.
Josh: [00:44:58] Right. I mean, what do we imagine Noah? I mean, you know, imagining the movie that isn't written or whatever happens next, like, what's Noah's point of view on all this? I don't know that Noah doesn't walk away from this going, “Well, that settles it.” I think he walks away going, “Well, we have some stuff to think about and maybe some preparing to do,” you know what I mean? It would be beneath his intelligence for him to walk away from that experience and think, “Yeah, I'm comfortable. I'm comfortable with where we're all at now.” And then once you realize you're uncomfortable, what do you do?
Charlie Jane: [00:45:35] Yeah.
Josh: [00:45:37] Do you prepare to play defense? Do you avoid or do you... And by the way, as I sit here right now, I haven’t been hired to write the next movie. I don't know the answer to that question, you know? But I know that it's a good question.
Charlie Jane: [00:45:50] Yeah.
Josh: [00:45:50] If you're a responsible intelligent and know that you've got this other group out there, you know, you've got to do something. You can't just sit around and carve flutes and play with eagles.
Charlie Jane: [00:46:05] Yeah. So you said the eagles came from Wes Ball originally, but like, how did you come up with that whole society where like the eagle clan - they have this symbiotic relationship with the eagles and they raised them. And I just loved how like lived in and kind of complex and real that society felt.
Josh: [00:46:20] I think that, you know, again, when we started Wes was like, “I would love them to be kind of… I think we probably set a falconer kind of component.” I went, “Okay.” And he probably sent me a two minute video of a falconer, an eagle flying and picking up a fish. And we're like, “Wow, look at those talons on that thing.” And, you know, I don't know. It's one of the things that I really love to do. It's something that like, besides just in my original work, I've done a ton. Like in Avatar, you know; that was always like my favorite part of writing Avatar - going off and like exploring weird subcultures and niches and world-building at a really micro level.
[00:46:55] And it's pretty challenging. And although I really think that they trusted the audience a lot in the first act of this movie, which is that there's not a lot of dumb exposition about how, you know, the whole culture works. We said the name [cross-talk] of this ceremony, but you kind of pick it up along the way and stuff like that. And so when you pick up, in retrospect, I love doing that. I love dropping, you know, and I think it's a very particular science fiction way of writing, isn't it? It's just like to drop people in the middle and let them start learning the language of your world and go, you know, and it unnerves studio executives because they're like, “Well, shouldn't we explain more, explain more?” And like, “People won't get it,” you know, and then you balance it.
[00:47:39] We usually end up overriding it and then shooting it and then cutting those lines once you realize that you don't need them. But I love that stuff. I just love building out those weird little - I know it's so weird, but building out these rituals - and it's a lot of fun. I can get very caught up in that.
Charlie Jane: [00:47:58] I know, I know you can.
Josh: [00:48:01] Yeah.
Charlie Jane: [00:48:04] So, you know, one thing I loved in this movie was William H. Macy's character just randomly being there, just like reading Roman history to Proximus and like, where did he come from? Where did this idea of like having a human who's just like, “There's the past of Caesar.” There's like the recent historical past, but then there's also this other kind of layer of history that is being repurposed for like the ape culture.
Josh: [00:48:24] So it's interesting. I speak specifically the Roman history thing, I didn't come up with. Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver, who had written the first couple of movies and I worked with on Avatar and then they were producers on this. They did some writing on this when I left. And the character himself is pretty much as I conceived it. But they added that he reads the Roman history.
[00:48:46] And it's funny, when I read their draft and I called up Rick and Amanda, we were talking about it and they're good friends of mine. I said, “You know, I like a lot of stuff you guys did.” I go, “I have to tell you, I don't like the Roman history thing. It feels too on the nose.”
[00:49:01] And then when I sat with it, when I watched it, I changed my mind. I was like, “No, I like it. I like it. It's good.” You know, if that's too on the nose, then I, my standards have become way too, you know. Like, that's allowed.
[00:49:14] Part of it came out of, well, what do they need Mae for? You know, how is Mae important? And originally, and it's funny cause there are still little bits of it in the movie, but it doesn't really make sense. There's occasional points in the movie where you see him, William H. Macy's character, like making tea and his hand kind of shakes. There's a few things. I had this idea that he was this guy who was almost like a, you know, Wizard of Oz kind of thing where he's behind Proximus and he's traded, you know, survival for helping Proximus send the power, but he's dying.
[00:49:45] Like it was this idea that he was dying. And that he needed to be replaced and that Proximus was hunting for another human who could speak - who would help explain the world and kind of help teach him about stuff like electricity and whatever it was, and that they needed to replace Trevathan and Trevathan was dying.
[00:50:02] And then she kills him anyway, but he was dying. And it's also great to have a character, a human character voice another really reasonable point of view, which is “This is an ape's world, now.” Like...
Charlie Jane: [00:50:15] Yeah,
Josh: [00:50:15] Get with the program and also in other drafts, and there are certainly a lot more. I never wrote a big speech for… It was more from Trevathan and there was some stuff from Proximus to Mae when Proximus was trying to convince Mae to kind of take his place - Trevathan's place - which was sort of like, “Are you really going to tell me that the humans are the best stewards for this planet?”
Charlie Jane: [00:50:38] Um, no…
Josh: [00:50:38] “Like, whatever you've seen, why do you think that they are?” There was that kind of argument. And I think that that's sort of, you know, where Trevathan came out of - someone who would articulate it.
[00:50:50] And also the idea, there's sort of two viruses, right, in this franchise. There's the virus that robs humans of their speech and helps the apes kind of be elevated, you know, linguistically in other ways. And then there's the more abstract one, which is the virus of human culture and how it infects the apes.
Charlie Jane: [00:51:12] Right? Interesting. Yeah.
Josh: [00:51:14] So to me, he was sort of the carrier of that virus.
Charlie Jane: [00:51:19] Huh. I like that.
Josh: [00:51:20] The degree to which Proximus is conniving, lying, with a little more flower to his rhetoric. I always thought of that as the human influence. That's being well-read. That's being read to. That's being educated by humans. That the human virus is one of deception and using language for a different tool. And that Proximus sort of became the expression of human rhetoric.
Charlie Jane: [00:51:51] Interesting.
Josh: [00:51:52] I didn't want to write them. It's very interesting when you write a screenplay: the things that you write that change completely and the things that you write in one draft, and they never change until you go to the movie theater and there they are. And you're like, “I remember writing that”, you know, and then never… You know, maybe there's five words, like the speech that Proximus gives, you know, is “What a wonderful day.” I wrote five years ago and it was the first thing he ever says.
[00:52:23] When I was trying to find the voice of that character, I said, well, I don't want to write like a tyrant. I want to write, I mean, a scarier P.T. Barnum.
Charlie Jane: [00:52:31] Or like Mr. Rogers. I was always like, “It's like an evil Mr. Rogers.”
Josh: [00:52:34] Yeah, you know, or Tony Robbins.
Charlie Jane: [00:52:37] It's a beautiful day in the neighborhood.
Josh: [00:52:39] Yeah, like there's this weird ritualized positivity that's just, you know, sort of bullshit. And again, you know things that we took out... I remember we had some dialogue where Bill Macy says to Mae, a version of, “These apes, they can't lie.” They can't lie. That's not what they do. I go, “But this one can spin it. This one can spin it.” And that he had kind of helped make him into this, you know, the salesman.
Charlie Jane: [00:53:15] Interesting.
Josh: [00:53:16] He had been infected with the human bullshit gene.
Charlie Jane: [00:53:20] Nice. Okay. So I should let you go. Where can people find you online?
Josh: [00:53:24] They can't.
Charlie Jane: [00:53:25] You're not on social media anymore or anything?
Josh: [00:53:28] I'm on Instagram, but I don't do anything on it. I really just follow food and…
Charlie Jane: [00:53:34] That’s the best use of Instagram - and cats. Food and cats.
Josh: [00:53:38] And then I'm on Twitter, but I haven't tweeted since COVID because I decided it was bad for me. It was literally bad for my career and I think it was bad for my soul.
Charlie Jane: [00:53:47] Oh my God, yeah.
Josh: [00:53:48] So I've stayed off and I don't know if it works or doesn't work for me. I miss it.
Charlie Jane: [00:53:53] Okay. Well, it was so awesome getting to talk to you.
[00:53:56] OOAC session break music, a quick little synth bwoop bwoo.
Annalee: [00:54:00] You've been listening to Our Opinions Are Correct. Thank you so much for tuning in. If you just randomly stumbled on us, you can always follow us on any of your favorite podcast apps.
[00:54:10] You can also find us on various social media places. We’re on Wandering shop on Mastodon. We’re Our Opinions Are Correct on Patreon. And we are Our Opinions on Instagram and Bluesky.
[00:54:22] Thank you so much to our amazing producer and engineer and conscience, Naya Harmon. Thank you so much to Chris Palmer and Katya Lopez Nichols for the music. And if you are a patron, we will see you on discord. Otherwise we'll talk to you in a couple of weeks.
Charlie Jane: [00:54:39] Bye.
Annalee: [00:54:39] Bye.
[00:54:41] [OOAC theme plays. Science fiction synth noises over an energetic, jazzy drum line.]