Wes Ball on the Responsibility of Planet of the Apes and The Legend of Zelda

There’s tackling a beloved franchise… and then there’s tackling The Legend of Zelda. Wes Ball has done the former a few times, most recently with his foray into the world of Planet of the Apes with Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes. Soon though, he’ll take that to a whole new level as the first director to make a live-action movie based on Nintendo’s iconic franchise. Ball knows what that franchise means to fans—it means a lot to him too—and he believes his previous work has set him up in the best possible way.

“It’s the same thing I learned on The Maze Runner movie on a smaller scale,” Ball told io9 this week. “I think it had sold like five million copies of books when we started that movie. But the fan base was loud and intense. And so I learned a little bit of that. Expectations came there and they told me when I got it wrong. Same thing on [Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes]. And I understood. I don’t have blinders on. I know what I’m going into. I would not have done it unless I thought I was capable of doing it. I wouldn’t have done this movie if I didn’t think I was capable of doing it. Hopefully I have. We’ll see. But I grew up playing Zelda, dreaming about Zelda, thinking about Zelda. It’s an important thing to me, so I will do my best to not mess it up.”

Ball wouldn’t say much more than that but, for a hint at his thought process, you need only look at his new movie. When Fox first approached Ball to make a new Planet of the Apes movie, he said no. “You didn’t need to continue the trilogy in a way, right?” Ball said. “It had a perfect little beginning, middle, and end. There was no reason to go back into it. I understand people wanted to see what would happen to [Caesar’s] son and those kinds of things, but I didn’t see how you would stretch a lot of story out of that, you know what I mean? And you don’t want to be a part four. Part fours don’t work, typically. Beginning, middle, end. We’re wired for that. One, two, three.”

But then Ball had an idea. What if we followed an ape centuries in the future who didn’t know about Caesar’s world? An ape who thought his kind was always the dominant species on the planet, then slowly discovered they weren’t? A story that featured Caesar’s accomplishments and beliefs as almost religious texts? The idea of approaching the franchise in that unique way excited him and excited producers—and that led into making Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes.

“The question was could I find a way to do our own thing but still not abandon the storyline [that] came before,” Ball said. “I think we found a way to do it. Hopefully fans will appreciate it [and] audiences who haven’t seen those movies will also still find value in it all and meaning in the story. But that was the goal for me. Can we do our own thing that was a story of its own that’s worth telling, that fits into not just the previous trilogy, but the full legacy of these movies? There’s been nine movies before us. How do we kind of fit into that DNA?”

Fitting into the DNA of Planet of the Apes is one thing. Fitting into the DNA of a video game franchise with almost 40 years of rich history is another. So, we wondered, did the same thing happen with The Legend of Zelda? Did Ball have a singular burst of inspiration that gave him the confidence to step up for such a massive task? “No,” Ball said. “I’ll say it’s been many years.”

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes opens May 10 and we’ll have more from Ball next week. The Legend of Zelda does not yet have a release date.

Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who.

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