Remaking, Not Aping, an Original

Zanuck, who left the studio ranks soon thereafter to become a producer (including the Oscar-winning "Driving Miss Daisy"), had kept tabs on Fox's intention to remake the film. When he read last year that it was going ahead with Tim Burton as director, he thought about calling Fox studio head Tom Rothman to tell him what a good selection he'd made, but never did. A few weeks later, Rothman phoned Zanuck and asked if he wanted to produce the film.

The intention from the start was to make a remake that wasn't a remake, says Burton. "You can't really remake 'Planet of the Apes,' because the whole vibe and feeling of the original movie was very '60s. You have to look at it from a different perspective, and I saw something oddly compelling about the concept of talking apes. When you do primate research, you start thinking how weird our perception of apes is, that they're kind of close to us, yet they can rip you to shreds. That's kind of frightening. Even when they smile at you, they don't really mean it" in the way humans do.

You mean they smile the way Hollywood executives do? Burton is asked.

The director begins to laugh until he comes close to choking. "Anyway," he continues, "you put all that into the mix and sometimes things that don't seem like a good idea become exciting because there's something risky about it.

"And besides," he adds, "'The Beverly Hillbillies' had already been remade and the 'Gilligan's Island' script wasn't ready." From anyone else that would obviously be a joke, but with Burton you wonder. This is the man who brought "Batman" to the big screen, and earlier, "Pee-wee's Big Adventure." Think of it. Johnny Depp as Gilligan and Jack Nicholson as the Skipper. The mind reels.

"Tom [Rothman] told me to start with a blank page," says William Broyles Jr. ('Apollo 13" and "Cast Away"), who shares screenwriting credit. "And I thought it would be very intriguing to create this movie from scratch."

Since Boulle's book had been heavily mined for the 1968 original, Broyles kept only the premise. He never read any of the previous remake scripts and only heard about them vaguely (one reportedly involved a virus that drives humans underground). The new version does not take place on Earth, which provided the surprise ending of the first film, and the characters and locations are all new. Broyles presented Fox with an outline based on his research of Roman history. "What I described was a structure and class system on the ape planet, how its economy worked, what their religion was like, and how humans fit in as the slave culture. I had a great deal of fun with it."