I sat down a few days ago with Dawn of the Planet of the Apes director Matt Reeves at the Four Seasons. Here‘s the discussion. Reeves has a kind of joyous intensity about him — you can hear that pretty plainly. He expounds about some of the ideas and elements that went into Dawn and that’s fine, but there’s a Reeves metaphor that tells you more about the film, in a sense, than what he might say about it. During the exhaustive editing of Dawn, Reeves said, he decided to become a dapper (dare I say fastidious?) dresser, specifically a wearer of bow ties. It’s understood that Reeves, also the director of Let Me In and Cloverfield, is quite admired by the ComicCon crowd and guys like Harry Knowles. But the bow tie and the black polka-dot handkerchief in his breast pocket [after the jump] should tell you Reeves is not really “of” that realm and that crowd. And so the many ingredients, noticable and perhaps not-so-noticable, that Reeves has put into Dawn in order to make it special and distinctive are not “ComicCon-ish” (whatever you might imagine that term to mean) or particularly aimed at trying to please those enthusiastic but nonetheless low-rent geeks who congregate in San Diego every July. Reeves, in short, is up to his own game and singing his own tune. That’s all I’m saying, really.
