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Only Burton wasn't so sure. "The first rule of remakes is never remake a great movie," he says. "But that's part of what appealed to me. I guess I'm kind of perverse that way." Exactly how the visionary plans on putting his signature on the film is hard to say: Plot points are being kept top secret, even from visitors to the set. Still, a few details can be divulged. This time, there's no Statue of Liberty; the planet Wahlberg lands on doesn't turn out to be a future Earth, although producers promise a different surprise ending. Also, on Burton's Planet, the resident humans speak. In fact, here's one chatting away right now.
"It's sort of a slave/master world," offers Estella Warren, the 22-year-old synchronized-swimming champion-turned-SPORTS ILLUSTRATED swimsuit model who costars as a rebellious human named Daena. "Some of the humans are angry and some have sort of reverted to becoming slaves. I'm very aggressive, but at the same time I've been taught never to look apes in the eye because they're so powerful and can hurt us. So there's this combination of anger and fear..."
There is also, of course, lots of hair. Originally, Fox chose Stan Winston (Edward Scissorhands) to design the ape makeup, but Burton ended up replacing him with Rick Baker (Ed Wood). "I have a relationship with both of them, so that decision was hard," he says. Finding actors willing to endure the painstaking devolution process, however, turned out to be a snap. "I had no qualms about the makeup at all," says Paul Giamatti (Man on the Moon), who plays an orangutan slave trader named Limbo. "My agents asked me, 'You want to play a human, right? So people can see your face?' And I said, 'No way! What's the point of being in Planet of the Apes as a human?'"
Helena Bonham Carter was a bit worried about how her combustible chimpanzee makeup might affect her smoking habit, but the producers solved that problem by giving her an elegant 1920s-style cigarette holder. "Oh, I'm still highly flammable," says the Merchant Ivory mainstay, puffing away in her trailer while covered in latex, "but I look fabulous." In fact, the only actor who seemed seriously concerned about his wardrobe was Wahlberg. "The last thing I wanted was to wear a loincloth," says the onetime underwear model. "It would have been hard for me to walk out of my trailer with that thing on." (Mercifully for him, he gets to wear long pants.)
But clothes alone don't make the monkey: All the actors playing simians were required to attend a six-week course in ape behavior. (Incidentally, Bonham Carter initially flunked: Her ape breathing needed work.) Even so, the five-month shoot was not entirely without incident. During filming at the Pinnacles--where Roth's ape army clashes with Wahlberg's human legion--more than a few clubs and spears went awry, with on-set medics periodically rushing to attend to the injured. Burton himself busted a rib demonstrating how he wanted some extras to roll down a hill.
