Escapist from the Planet of the Apes

Apes are often characterised by their proclivity for faeces-flinging, which might provide at least part of the explanation why Hollywood feels such empathy for the hirsute primates, and why it remains eternally determined to make movies about them. There has been movement today on Fox's latest instalment in the Planet of the Apes saga, with a director apparently having signed up.

The film-maker engaged to follow Franklin J. Schaffner, J. Lee Thompson and Tim Burton J. in mastering the fine and noble art of wrangling body-wigged extras is Rupert Wyatt, who has made one prior feature, the 2008 British jailbreak flick The Escapist. News of Wyatt's directorial ape-gagement has been announced in the most of succinct of succinct posts by Deadline Hollywood, who state that although there is no production start date as yet, 'Wyatt's come aboard to develop to direct.'

So a further few gruelling circuits of the development sprint track are required for what is set to be the seventh occasion that the Planet of the Apes mythos has been unfurled across the cinematic canvas. As we previously reported, screenwriter Scott Frank (Get Shorty, Out of Sight) had been the happy dude entrusted by Fox with the onerous responsibility of developing a new Apes project; effectively a franchise enema, to flush forth the tomato skins and nuggets of sweetcorn left clogging up and stinking out the collective audience gut by Tim Burton's 2001 toxic ape-chuck.

Bearing the title Caesar, Frank's script supposedly served as a series prequel, with its story focusing on a genetically-modified ape who uses his heightened intellect to lead his furry friends in a popular uprising against the humans. Boo! Down with humans! Frank was also in line to direct, but Fox decided to part company with him, due to his vision for Caesar being 'too expensive and dark' (rough translation: 'we need more characters who can be turned into toys'). The project did not die though, with Frank's prequel screenplay subsequently passing through the frantically rewriting hands of Jamie Moss and the duo of Amanda Silver and Rick Jaffa. And now Wyatt has waded into the fray, no doubt equipped with his own ideas on where Caesar should be headed.

Ideas that will have to dovetail with those of Peter Chernin, the ex-News Corp bigwig (he was Stiletto to Rupert Murdoch's Baron Greenback) turned Fox producer, who is also the driving force behind Caesar. Chernin has clearly cherished the idea of doing an Apes film for a long old while now, having tried to get a remake going when he was with Fox Filmed Entertainment back in the '90s. And though it is a little odd to think that all the time he was stalking the corridors of power in his position at News Corp, whispering in the ears and greasing the palms of politicos, his head was entirely populated by little monkey men running around and getting up to seven shades of movie mischief, it does at least once again indicate that underneath all that reptilian puppet-master ridiculousness, those at the apex of the modern power pyramid are just a bunch of overgrown schoolboys (always boys).

Still, while the deal that took Chernin to Fox may grant him the power to drive his Apes movie into production, he has struggled to attract a director. In early February, the Vulture blog reported that Kathryn Bigelow, Robert Rodriguez and Tomas Alfredson (Let the Right One In) had all passed on the project, before going on to colourfully describe studio and producer as being forced to trawl through 'the next level of meat-and-potatoes action directors'. This description seemed to basically equate to 'people who have had a critically unloved, CGI-heavy generic actioner released in the last three months', with the mentioned names being the Hughes Brothers (The Book of Eli), Pierre Morel (From Paris With Love), Scott Stewart (Legion), James McTeigue (Ninja Assassin), and Dennis Illiadis (whose Last House on the Left came out a year ago, therefore slightly spoiling the theory. Naughty Dennis!).

Not quite sure where Rupert Wyatt fits into all that, but he is apparently now the man first in line to be calling the shots when the new Apes picture finally goes before the cameras. Having studied film in Paris and tinkered with scriptwriting in New York, UK-born Wyatt got a major break when Brian Cox agreed to appear in his 2004 short Get the Picture. This director-star relationship was continued when the erstwhile Hannibal Leckter took the lead role in The Escapist, which went down great guns at Sundance two years ago, and you have to wonder if Cox could be tempted to re-team with Wyatt on Caesar. After X2 and The Bourne Supremacy, it is not a gargantuan vault of the imagination to picture the actor as a scheming lab boffin, who soups up the main ape's peanut-sized brain, before falling foul of his own creation. Or he might just prefer to get wigged up and start throwing poo everywhere.