Pierre Boulle

And if you can go ahead and put that sort of spin on it, have fun with it.

And one of the greats was how Rod Serling and Michael B. Wilson, I think it was, who took Pierre Boulle's book and created Planet of the Apes.

Yes, yes.

And that's, again, just really dealing with so much civil rights unrest during that period of time and be able to present it like that.

I can do this.

Planet of the Apes, beloved acclaimed novel, Pierre Boulle, you know, is being adapted for film.

Rod is brought in because obviously you take the Twilight Zone guy and you do it.

Statue of Liberty, all that twist is not in the novel.

He left.

Michael Wilson is brought in.

He'd already adapted a Pierre Boulle novel with Bridge on the River Kwai.

And he basically throws out everything Rod did, at least in terms of the dialogue.

Oh, yeah.

So let's look at the film Stephen Holland ranks at the absolute bottom of the pile coming in at number seven, the 2001 adaptation of Pierre Boulle's French sci-fi novel, Planet of the Apes.

Okay, we really have to unpack the sheer weight of what Burton was stepping into here.

It was a massive undertaking.

[instrumental music] It's nineteen fifty-two in a small apartment in Paris, a decade after Jack Bridger Chalker sketched two men in the forest.

Forty-year-old writer Pierre Boulle sits at his sturdy wooden desk.

The sounds of the city hum outside his window, but inside, the only noise is the rhythmic clack of Pierre's typewriter.

Recently, Pierre was inspired to write a book about British POWs working on the Burma Railway.

Even though he now lives a peaceful life, he's still haunted by his experiences during the war.

Like many other returned servicemen, he can barely sleep at night without dreaming about what he went through during his captivity.

So when the buzz around Pierre Boulle's novel reaches him, Jack is excited to get a copy of his own.

Maybe the success of Pierre's novel will help communicate the horrors that Jack and others like him experienced.

Great many people worked long and hard to answer the question of what a civilization would be like where the evolutionary process has been reversed and apes were the superior species.

Hundreds of technicians and the largest number of makeup artists ever assembled assisted the producers, the writers, the director, and the cast.

Dr. Cornelius, Roddy McDowell.

Dr. Zira, as played by Kim Hunter.

You have an odd little novel by a French writer, Pierre Boulle.

You have producer Arthur P. Jacobs discovering it, falling in love with it, and then having...

The writers, Rod Serling and Michael Wilson, adapting it into its own little thing, totally different from the novel, with really only the concept of intelligent speaking apes and interaction with human astronauts.

And it's just very different from the source material.