Making Faces on a Wild New ‘Planet’

Even though he’d just come off another grueling shoot, “How the Grinch Stole Christmas,” and was faced with an attenuated lead time if he joined “Planet of the Apes,” Rick Baker says, “I just couldn’t pass this one up.”

There were three types of simian makeup for “Planet.” The lead characters, Helena Bonham Carter, Tim Roth, Paul Giamatti and Michael Clarke Duncan, had to be completely lifelike, requiring the longest daily application. Secondary characters wore flexible rubber masks that took less than an hour to put in place. The ape extras--mostly soldiers--wore what Baker refers to as “Halloween masks.”

Molds were taken of all the principals and replacement parts for each day of their shooting schedule had to be baked one at a time. Because large ape dentures altered the alignment of their ape mouths, the actors learned to eat while looking into a mirror so as not to ruin their makeup.

Using a burnished red as a predominant color, costume designer Colleen Atwood (‘Sleepy Hollow”) mixed asymmetrical Asian design (Bonham Carter describes her outfit as “a bit Kenzo, a bit Issey Miyake”) with everything from Incan to ancient Turkish influences. “The beauty of creating your own culture is that you can draw from all kinds of primitive influences,” she says. She coordinated with Baker by adding hair and skin to the footwear (mostly sandals) and around the neck area to reduce the amount of makeup required and scaling the costumes up to complement the oversized simian heads.

The humans are more monochromatically dressed, especially Mark Wahlberg, who made it clear he would not be stepping into Charlton Heston’s loincloth or doing any nude scenes, as the hero does in the original. Having already bared more than most male actors for Calvin Klein on giant billboards around the nation, Wahlberg has moved on. “I prefer to be clothed,” he says. “I’ve been on the other side, and I can sympathize with women in movies [who are asked to wear skimpy outfits].”