Hairy Styles: How ‘Planet of the Apes,’ ‘Better Man’ and ‘Sasquatch Sunset’ Got All Hirsute on Us

Ever since King Kong swatted biplanes from the top of the Empire State Building in 1933, hairy creatures have occupied a place of honor in the cinematic pantheon. And in many cases, the Academy has recognized that fact: The original “King Kong” was shamefully overlooked at the Oscars, but the second-ever special award for makeup was given out in 1968 to “Planet of the Apes” — and the first time the award existed as a regular competitive category, the winner was Rick Baker for “An American Werewolf in London,” with subsequent winners including “Quest for Fire” (hairy cavemen!), “Harry and the Hendersons” (Bigfoot!), “The Wolfman” (another werewolf!) and, um, “Frida” (unibrow!).

On the visual effects side, meanwhile, the “Kong” successor “Mighty Joe Young” won in 1949, Peter Jackson’s “King Kong” remake won in 2005 and the rebooted “Planet of the Apes” series won in… Oh, wait, it shockingly never won, though its astonishing motion-capture work arguably deserved to do so in 2011, 2014 and 2017. But it may have another chance this year with “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes,” which is one of three dramatically different 2024 films that created indelible and very hairy central characters. 

“Kingdom” takes place in a world dominated by talking chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans; “Better Man” is a music biopic in which the leading man, British pop star Robbie Williams, is depicted as a literal performing monkey; and “Sasquatch Sunset” is a low-budget indie movie that sustained its 88-minute running time without its main characters, a Sasquatch family, ever uttering a word.

Here’s how they created their hairy styles.

“Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes”

The fourth installment in the rebooted “Planet of the Apes” franchise that has been winning raves for the past 13 years goes back to a setting that hasn’t existed on screen since 1970’s “Beneath the Planet of the Apes”: a planet truly ruled by apes. Recent films have seen the apes led by Andy Serkis’ Caesar begin to fight back against and triumph over their human masters. But that fight hung in the balance throughout all the films, and most of the apes had yet to learn how to speak. “Kingdom” picks up 100 years after Caesar’s death, with apes firmly established as Earth’s dominant species.

“On the three previous films, we were able to essentially give our characters upgrades along the way,” said Erik Winquist, the film’s visual effects supervisor from Wētā FX.  “But on this one, we had an entirely new cast of ape characters that we had to build — and the fact that all the apes were speaking meant the complexity of the facial animation went up quite a bit.” 

Wētā wasn’t able to take advantage of recent breakthroughs in the company’s facial animation because those were specific to humanoid faces, so the company went back to the kind of work they’d done on previous “Apes” films while using AI to improve the workflow.

“This was the first “Apes” film to use two facial cameras, which gave us depth and fed into a much greater level of precision and fidelity in the data that we were collecting,” Winquist said. “And that data fed into a deep-learning facial solver that we souped up for this film.” That solver, he said, would learn the relationship between the dots on actors’ faces and the ape facial puppets that animators were creating. “The more we feed it, the more it learns, and the greater consistency we get in the baseline facial performance for all the ape characters.”

The motion-capture filming took place almost entirely outdoors in real locations rather than in controlled studio settings. “We relied more on what we call faux-cap, where instead of using full-blown mo-cap cameras and a mo-cap system, we use video cameras that are synchronized within a millisecond of each other,” he said. 

One particular challenge on “Kingdom” was the increased number of sequences that involved water — an area where it didn’t hurt that Wētā had just made “Avatar: The Way of Water.”  “I think we probably had two shots on the last film where Caesar goes over the waterfall, and those shots were quite tricky to pull off,” Winquist said. “But obviously we had years of research and development on water simulations for other projects, and that gave us the confidence to go forward.”

Still, the water work in “Kingdom” often involved throwing apes into a rushing river. “A new challenge was how many hairy characters were going to be in the water,” he said. “That gets very complex and requires very tight communication between departments.”

The effects department would run a low-resolution water simulation and give it to the animators so they’d know how the current and the waves were moving. They’d animate the apes using that information, then hand off to the department that would simulate the action of the apes’ hair. “When that was done, we’d feed it back to the effects department, which would run all the fine rivulets of water that were sheeting out of their hair.”

Other challenges included the environment, which had to be subtly treated to make it seem as if the apes were living in the ruins of an area once ruled by humans. “What I really enjoy about these films,” Winquist said, “is that so much of what we see on the screen is real, or at the very least anchored in some kind of reality that we physically photographed. We didn’t just punt it down the road and say, ‘Oh, we’ll build it all in CG.’”

“Better Man”

Talk about a big twist. Michael Gracey’s “Better Man” would be a spirited musical biopic of Robbie Williams, a hugely successful British pop star and former singer in the boy band Take That, except for one glaring departure from the norm: From the time we first see him as a child to his triumphant performance at the Royal Albert Hall and the Glastonbury Festival, Williams is depicted as an ape in human clothing.

The bold decision stemmed from a conversation between Gracey and Williams in which the singer said he felt like “a performing monkey,” which led the director to take him at his word and portray him that way. (Yes, Williams said “monkey” and the movie makes him look like a chimpanzee, which is an ape, but do we really need to nitpick about a movie in which that ape/monkey careens down Regent Street in a massive musical number?)

Visual effects supervisor Luke Millar, who worked on two “Planet of the Apes” movies for Wētā before he did “Better Man,” said that the simian simulation aside, the two projects were far apart. “In ‘Better Man,’ you’ve got one digital character among a whole lot of human beings,” he said. “On most of the ‘Planet of the Apes’ movies, it’s usually one human among a load of digital characters. But also, the characters in the ‘Apes’ movies are apes. In ‘Better Man,’ Robbie, for all intents and purposes, is a human being. He acts like a human being, his emotions are human. He’s just physically represented as an ape.”

But it took lots of trial and error for them to come up with a version of the character that would allow the audience to suspend disbelief. “There’s a scale,” he said. “On one end you’ve got a chimp and on the other end you’ve got Robbie Williams, and we’re gonna land somewhere along that scale.”

Initially, pressed by Gracey to make the character look more like Williams, they veered too close to human “and definitely fell into the uncanny valley.” So they went for a chimpier look, though the eyes were always Williams’ own scanned orbs. “There’s so much emotional connection in the eyes,” Millar said. “We went full Robbie in terms of eye color, shape, size and everything, and it was the first time we’ve ever put eyebrows on a chimp. And we went into the chimp more for the rest of the head. It ended up being a nice balance.”

But the eyes weren’t the only things that were Williams’. Before shooting began, Wētā scanned the singer and did a photo shoot that detailed every one of his numerous tattoos. “We tried to document when he got them as well,” Millar said. “We wanted to be period correct. And then to lean into the chimp idea, rather than inking them into the skin, we shaved them into the fur.”

On the set, actor Jonno Davies played Williams in a motion-capture suit. “The idea was to shoot this like it’s a regular movie. You act with Jonno like he’s a regular person, look him in the eyes and interact with him like he’s a human being. The last thing I wanted was for any of the technology to compromise the performance.”

The biggest challenges, he said, included clothes, with an estimated 225 costumes acquired or built by the costume department and then scanned by the VFX team. “He wears a different costume in every single scene,” Millar said. “And it’s not like ‘he wears a t-shirt.’ There’s the t-shirt, and then he puts a hoodie over it, and then he’s got a different hairstyle and he’s put a cap on top of that, and a different pair of trainers.”

And then there’s that other conundrum: How do you duplicate a human hairstyle on a creature who’s covered with hair? “We ended up making about 40 (hairstyles),” Millar said. “And there were a lot of different options. Like the peroxide — that was new territory for us. First pass, we peroxided it down to where a human hairline would be, and it looked kind of weird. Like, if you are covered in fur, why would you stop at your neck? So we ended up peroxiding the whole body.

“That was always the mentality: If you were a chimp and you wanted to look like Robbie Williams, how would you do that?”

“Sasquatch Sunset”

While “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes” and “Better Man” show the state of the art in the digital side of character creation, “Sasquatch Sunset” is something completely different and defiantly old school. In the grand tradition of the original “Planet of the Apes” and the ’80s Sasquatch comedy “Harry and the Hendersons,” the film from writer-director brothers David Zellner and Nathan Zellner is a remarkable concoction from actors in costumes and makeup, with not a pixel in sight.

“You couldn’t get a single CG shot for the budget of this movie as a whole,” said creature suit designer Steve Newburn, who worked with a small team to put actors Jesse Eisenberg, Riley Keough and Christophe Zajac-Denek (and in a smaller role, Nathan Zellner) in Sasquatch suits that covered everything but their eyes. “It was a micro-budget, independent thing from a lot of people who believed in it.”

Newburn, who had worked with “Sasquatch Sunset” executive producer Ari Aster on a number of films, counted himself in that true-believer number as soon as he got the screenplay, in which the lead characters speak only in grunts and squeals. “They sent me a 60-, 65-page script that was mostly descriptions,” he said. “It felt like a nature documentary more than anything. I go back to “Harry and the Hendersons,” which is one of my two or three favorite movie character creatures ever done. And so I was like, ‘I’m on board. I don’t care that you don’t have any money. We’ll figure it out.’”

For a couple of years, the film struggled to find financing and to hold onto the backers it did get. Newburn made plans for Sasquatch costumes that could let the actors be “more of a character as opposed to a creature or a monster,” figuring he’d have 12 weeks of prep before shooting began. But the actress who was going to play the female Sasquatch dropped out — and when Riley Keough agreed to step into the part, her busy schedule meant that they’d have to begin shooting in only six weeks for her to be finished in time.

“We had to try to figure out how to source the materials and the fur that fast,” Newburn said. “All of the hair on the face [of the costumes] is human hair knotted in one hair at a time, the way any wig would be built. So we had to make all these pieces and backups for all of the characters in a matter of a few weeks.”

It was always key to Newburn and the Zellners that the actors would not wear contact lenses, since their performances had to come from their eyes and from exaggerated gestures. Facial prosthetics were kept as thin as possible, with Sasquatch muzzles around the mouth providing the biggest trouble. “The pieces are as thin as you could possibly make them to allow movement and still get the forms you need,” he said. 

Because of the accelerated schedule, there wasn’t time for much testing. “We flew into Northern California, hopped off the plane, loaded our stuff into our trailer, met the actors one day, threw it on them to make sure everything would fit and made adjustments,” he said. “And the next day we were shooting.”  

The makeup team consisted of four people, and each actor had one main suit (the “hero set”) and one backup. “We stuck with the hero set all the way to the last week, and then we had to pull it out for a couple of the actors,” he said. “But that was part of the experience of this movie: Coming in and working for a couple of hours before the crew gets there, getting through the day, and then having to clean all the pieces and get the glue and the color off the hair pieces so we’d be ready for the next morning.

“It was 16-to-18-hour days, six days a week for the whole shoot. And our Sundays were spent trying to repair the suits and drying them out if they’d been in the river.” 

Of course, some days the actors put a little extra wear and tear on the suits. The day that springs to mind immediately for Newburn was the first day of shooting, when the characters played by Keough and Nathan Zellner engage in some rough, grunting sex. “They finish, and the first thing they do is find these ferns and take the leaves and start wiping themselves off,” Newburn said. “And it ripped all the hair off the chest area. Just pulled it right off.” He laughed. “So on Day 1, that night we were punching hair in like maniacs, trying to get it all back in.”

Similar scenes throughout the shoot caused similar problems. “We’d have them roll around in gravel on the ground, which would tear big chunks out of the suits,” he said. “It was like, ‘Oh, my God! Find the chunks! We have to glue those back in so you can’t tell!’ One beauty of having furry bodies is that the hair does hide some stuff. But it was a maintenance nightmare, to say the least.”

This story will appear in the Below-the-Line issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine.

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