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" Andy Serkis reprises his role as primate revolutionary Caesar in this summer&amp;#039;s Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, which moves on the story started in its 2011 predecessor. This time around there&amp;#039;s no James Franco or Freida Pinto, but master of performance capture Serkis is back (with Jason Clarke and Keri Russell on human co-star duties) to drive the hotly-anticipated sequel. Digital Spy spent some time with Serkis on the New Orleans set of Dawn to discuss the Matt Reeves-directed blockbuster. Where does this film pick up from its predecessor? At the end of Rise of the Planet of the Apes, we were left in a situation where the virus had taken hold. We got the impression that humanity was under a great deal of threat - which is what happens. The virus spreads and we&amp;#039;re imagining that about 90% of the world&amp;#039;s population is decimated. There are surviving pockets of humans. Our story picks up where Caesar has led the apes into Muir Woods and he&amp;#039;s started a community there. It started off with about a thousand, maybe, and has now reached a capacity of about 2,000 apes. The film starts about ten years after the virus, after the end of the last movie, and there have been sporadic sightings of the humans by the apes down in San Francisco. Over the course of the last two years, as the apes have built their communities, they&amp;#039;re not sure that the humans have survived. What is the story about? The inciting incident of the story is the arrival of a small group of human beings who suddenly come into our territory. A character called Malcolm, played by Jason Clarke, and a team of human beings. The apes aren&amp;#039;t sure why they&amp;#039;re there. It transpires that they&amp;#039;re there to locate a dam. It&amp;#039;s situated in the forest, and it can provide some power for the humans. There are varying responses. Caesar is the king, and he has a very natural authority and leadership; he&amp;#039;s not a regal king, he&amp;#039;s very much an ape&amp;#039;s ape, and is very egalitarian in his way of thinking.  Where do we find Caesar now? How is he communicating? We&amp;#039;re introduced to Caesar&amp;#039;s world and what he&amp;#039;s done with those apes, their community, how it&amp;#039;s evolved technologically using language, how he&amp;#039;s tried to really find what works as a way of galvanising all of the different species of apes. Him being brought up as a human, he&amp;#039;s trying to extrapolate the best things about humanity and how he can bring that into the ape world.  At the same time, he&amp;#039;s really falling back and learning how to be an ape himself. It&amp;#039;s quite an evolved community. There are codes of living and codes of ethics. Language is a combination of signing, which is something Caesar was brought up with as a child, a combination of grunts and gestures and also speaking and words. There&amp;#039;s obviously a new generation now that have learned signing, much like our children who have learned how to use computers very quickly. It&amp;#039;s the same with apes; the younger ones are much more adept at signing and using speech.  Now Caesar is older, what is his family life like? Caesar has a partner called Cornelia. They&amp;#039;ve been together for some time. They have a son called River, who&amp;#039;s about 15 in human years. Early on in the story, his wife gives birth to an infant. They&amp;#039;re very much at the beginning of a new generation.  Basically, Caesar&amp;#039;s journey throughout is a very complicated domestic situation, in the sense that once the humans arrive he has to make a choice of how he&amp;#039;s going to deal with them - whether he rejects them or tries to build an accord with the surviving humans. It&amp;#039;s a tricky balance. On the one hand he has to look out and protect his own, but he sees that the humans are struggling. They&amp;#039;re suffering to a great degree. And he doesn&amp;#039;t want them to be wiped out. He wants the apes to live with peace and security. This is like a Godfather movie. This is Caesar as Don Corleone, and Caesar coping with all of the machinations of a politically difficult early foray into creating a regime. We see you as sort of the godfather of performance capture. Can you talk about how you use the technology? There are two things about performance capture; how it&amp;#039;s used within the film industry at large and how it&amp;#039;s been accepted by the acting community to a great degree now. I&amp;#039;m directing Animal Farm, and we recently went to the States and did a big casting session. Say, three years ago, there isn&amp;#039;t one actor we met who wasn&amp;#039;t very keen to be involved with the project. Mainly because it&amp;#039;s a great project, but performance capture as a method of transforming an actor&amp;#039;s performance into an avatar, and the understanding that this technology is becoming more transparent, so it is about returning to pure acting. There&amp;#039;s a greater understanding of that.  How does this technology assist your performance and your relationship with the director? Directors respond to performance capture in lots of different ways. You can of course embellish it. You can break the performance if you&amp;#039;re not careful. Or you can do it like Rupert Wyatt or Matt Reeves. They&amp;#039;re all about wanting to honour the performances they get on the day. That means the visual effects side of it, in effect, is digital costume and make-up. That&amp;#039;s how it ought to be thought of from an actor&amp;#039;s point of view. The authorship of the performance happens with the directors and actors on set and in the moment. It doesn&amp;#039;t happen anywhere else. If you don&amp;#039;t arrive at that moment, if you don&amp;#039;t have that drama happening there and then, you can&amp;#039;t fake that. You can&amp;#039;t add that on. Is a lot of this movie shot on location this time as opposed to being in a studio? Yes, it&amp;#039;s been amazing. This film is probably the most ambitious performance-capture film to date, more than Avatar, more than The Hobbit. Everything is location. There&amp;#039;s very little set work. We&amp;#039;re capturing outside in very difficult circumstances. In Vancouver, we had the weather to deal with; it was freezing cold and raining every single day. We&amp;#039;re putting cameras up in trees, covering large areas. We have amazing head-mounted cameras now to capture facial expressions, which helps the back-end of the process. We&amp;#039;re wearing live markers, which we had on the last project, but they&amp;#039;re refining and becoming more practical. They don&amp;#039;t break. The system is very robust.  Did you continue your ape research from the last movie? It&amp;#039;s interesting. For me, I have a very singular journey in this. We all studied apes of course, it&amp;#039;s almost like learning choreography. You go and see them in zoos or you watch endless amounts of footage. That part of behavioural study is very important. I always approached Caesar as a human in ape&amp;#039;s skin, and I based him in the last movie on a real ape named Oliver, who was known as the humanzee in the 1970s. It was believed he was a progeny of man and ape, and there were lots of studies and DNA tests and finally it was proven that he wasn&amp;#039;t, but he walked bipedally and sat in chairs. He had facial expressions that no other ape to date had. So for me, the interest in the character lies in this terrible tension of knowing he&amp;#039;s an ape but feeling like a human. This is at the beginning of the movie, he&amp;#039;s obliterated the human part of himself and he&amp;#039;s trying with all of his might to return to his inner-ape. But by coming into contact with Malcolm, the reverse happens. It draws out all of the conflicting human instincts. That&amp;#039;s Caesar&amp;#039;s drama in this movie, the complexity of the role is really about that. How much is the community of the apes rebelling against Caesar when he shows the humans some compassion? That&amp;#039;s what a large chunk of this movie is about, the reactions to that. There are different ways of going. Everyone respects Caesar as a leader and he has a natural form of authority, but nevertheless, there will be some in the group he think he&amp;#039;s wrong, and some who absolutely back him. Without telling you too much, that&amp;#039;s really the dilemma for Caesar in this film.  How does Matt Reeves compare as a director to Rupert Wyatt? Matt&amp;#039;s an extraordinary director. I can&amp;#039;t express enough how ambitious this project is. Not only is he coping with that on getting the movie shot, but he&amp;#039;s creating an extraordinary amount of space for the actors to explore. That&amp;#039;s a real rarity. Much like Rupert Wyatt, who was insistent on it all being about performance and finding those moments. Dawn of the Planet of the Apes will open in cinemas on July 17. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.digitalspy.com/movies/interviews/a563741/andy-serkis-on-dawn-of-the-planet-of-the-apes-caesar-is-don-corleone-now/>