Tim Burton’s adaptation of Pierre Boulle’s novel “Monkey Planet” may have been inspired by the 1968 classic “Planet of the Apes,” but Burton’s film is a whole new barrel of monkeys — courtesy of Oscar-winning makeup artist and ape specialist Rick Baker (“King Kong,” “Greystoke,” “Gorillas in the Mist”).
Baker first became involved with the project in 1995, when it was to be directed by Oliver Stone. At that time, he debated whether to build mechanized heads, which would have looked absolutely real, or to follow the lead of the original film’s Oscar-winning makeup artist, John Chambers, who had designed prosthetic makeup for each character. “I wanted the look to be realistic,” Baker says, “but that’s not ‘Planet of the Apes.’ Part of the charm of the original movies was that they had such actor-driven performances. Maintaining that [ethic] meant that we had to take a makeup approach.”
Baker was determined to address certain limitations in Chambers’ original designs, particularly the fact that the teeth were glued into the prosthetic mouths, making it impossible for the apes’ lips to move independently over their choppers. Baker’s solution was to create as large a set of false teeth as possible, distorting the actor’s mouth into a rudimentary muzzle that projected out to be nearly even with the tip of his nose. Baker then applied a very thin prosthetic ape face over the actor’s altered features. “The idea was to try to get as much of a muzzle out of their faces as I could before we applied any makeup,” Baker recalls. “When I tested that on myself six years ago, I made the biggest pair of teeth I could possibly plant in my mouth so I would have as little rubber on me as possible. I have a good-sized nose, so I needed to make a huge set of teeth and really push my lips out just to get it to the tip of my nose. The problem was that my lips kind of flapped down to the floor when I took the teeth out! After I did the first test on myself, I thought I should do a test on someone with a better face — a smaller nose and a longer upper lip. That test was much more successful!”
By the time Baker was hired to work on Burton’s project six years later, he knew exactly what facial characteristics would best suit the prosthetic makeup. “I told Tim in the very beginning that casting would be really important, because the physiognomy of the actor’s face would greatly affect how well the makeup worked and how convincing it looked,” he explains. “But then they cast Tim Roth as Thade, a chimp who’s the villain of the piece, and he has a bigger nose than I do! I said, ‘This is about as bad a face as we can possibly get for an ape, but he’s a good actor, so we’ll make it work.’ Tim probably had bigger dentures and more foam on his face than anybody else, but I think he turned out to be one of the more interesting apes in the movie. The fact that he has a bigger nose makes his character look different right away.”
Once the actors were selected, Baker’s crew made dental castings of their mouths and created positive casts over which they sculpted upper and lower ape dentures, which they then molded and cast. When the dentures were fitted over the actor’s own teeth, they pushed their lips out into the muzzle-like orientation Baker desired. Next, a lifecast was made of each actor wearing the dentures, over which Baker and his crew sculpted the actual ape makeups. Baker then made prosthetic pieces by injecting foam latex into molds — essentially the same material and technique Chambers pioneered for the original film. “My approach was very similar to his work in many respects,” Baker acknowledges. “There’s a major face piece for most of the apes that includes the brow and the upper muzzle, and there’s a lower chin. Because the teeth are independent from the muzzle, the noses don’t protrude as much as the original film’s makeups did, but I think the performance is really what’s important. The idea was ‘less is more.'”
