“Caesar starts to lose his empathy. He starts to, in a way, become Koba. And, so, what ends up happening is, things get so bad for the apes, that Caesar decides he’s going to go and find the Colonel [Woody Harrelson]. The Colonel and his men respond with true cruelty. He’s really, really brutal. Caesar goes on this mythic, almost ‘Apocalypse Now‘-like journey where he’s gonna go up the river. But in our case, he’s going to go up into the Sierras. And it’s snowing. So, the movie starts, and it’s a straight ahead war movie, but when Caesar decides he’s going to go on personal vendetta against the Colonel, it becomes almost like a western. Because he’s going to go on his own, and he feels like it’s too dangerous for the apes. His ape companions basically see that as a suicide mission.”
-Matt Reeves