'Dawn Of The Planet Of The Apes' Director Matt Reeves Admits Some Scenes Featuring Actor Andy Serkis Were Directed Over Skype

Dawn of The Planet of the Apes debuts this Friday, June 11. The state-of-the-art motion capture visual effects are nothing short of spectacular and allow actor Andy Serkis to bring head ape Caesar to life with an emotional range as genuine and powerful as his human counterparts. But did you know Serkis was directed from a distance by director Matt Reeves via Skype?

How was this possible? Matt Reeves explains via slashfilm.com: "This is the first movie where I've ever directed scenes over Skype. And mo-cap enables you to do that. And actually that last shot, when I realized that that was not the right ending, I went to Weta and I said, okay, so we gotta do something different. And they're like, well you're gonna need a performance. So we did a thing where Andy was in London and he was at [his performance capture studio] the Imaginarium. And we hooked up via Skype and I looked at a big plasma and I talked him through what was going on in that last sequence as he's coming down those steps. And we basically did it over Skype. And then I got the take that I liked and I gave it to Weta and I said, okay, here it is. Go get to work. And they very quickly brought it to life under, you know, that was a crazy crash course. I was getting worried about that. I was like oh God, this is so late. And, you know, can you guys do this? And they're like, we think we can do this. Our pipeline is set up and we have enough familiarity with how to do Caesar that we think that if you can get us the performance you want, that we can give you the shot that you want. And literally the final shot of the movie was the final shot that was finalized."

The final shot wasn't the only scene directed over the internet. Miller explains he and his actors were sometimes thousands of miles away from each other: "There were other scenes, too, where I went back and wanted to change things that we'd already shot. And so Jason Clarke was in Rome shooting this Everest movie and he was in a hotel room after a day's shooting. And we were on the Volume [in Manhattan Beach California] and he was performing the new version of the scene to Andy who was in a fluorescent room and he was on Skype. And they played off of Skype and then a few weeks later I went back and shot, I got Jason here in L.A. and I shot him and Keri Russell against greenscreen. And then I had Andy over Skype and they played to Andy on Skype. And I got that. And then we put that whole sequence together and that's all been in the last six weeks. So it's crazy what you can do."

No one is sure if this is the first instance of long distance movie direction done by a major studio via the 'net, but one things for sure, there is no more hotly anticipated summer movie!