One of the most interesting things about the new Planet of the Apes films is we all know where they’re going. Eventually in this story, maybe thousands of years down the road, a human astronaut will land on the planet and eventually realize he has come home to a very changed Earth. Dawn of the Planet of the Apes director Matt Reeves knows this. He also thinks the concept is incredibly far off from where his last film left off and where the next film, scheduled for July 29, 2016, will go.

In a new interview, Reeves talked about the importance of this next chapter in cementing that history and hypothesized about the story eventually reaching the point of the original movie. Would he do a remake of the 1968 original, or how would they handle that in this new version of the films? Reeves has thought about it. Read the Matt Reeves Planet of the Apes remake quotes below.

Reeves talked about the next sequel, and the original film, in an interview with JoBlo. Head there to read the full thing. Here are the two quotes in question.

First, the reporter asked Reeves about how excited he is about where Caesar goes in the next installment:

Well it’s interesting because Mark Bomback and I are working on the next story, and I have to say given the trajectory of how his arc has gone from the first movie through DAWN so far, what is so exciting to us is that this is sort of his biggest arc yet. We are going to take him to places that test him in a way that is more painful, and in ways that he has never been tested before. [We will] really test his leadership, and more than that his heart and soul. There are ways in which the experience he had with Koba in the last film, really create a context in this story that is going to be, in a way, his greatest challenge yet. We are very excited about it you know. You have to keep in mind that he is such a unique character and the world he comes from is a human background. He was raised by humans and in a way he sort of thought he was human, yet an outsider, but he is also an ape. And when he was thrown in with the apes who he later led to a revolution, he was quite different than they were because he hadn’t been brought up as an ape. He was both ape and human and also neither. That made him a unique character to be a bridge between these two worlds in the story. As this story continues, we know that war is not avoided by the end of DAWN. That is going to take us into the world of what he is grappling with. Where he is going to be thrust into circumstances that he never, ever wanted to deal with, and was hoping he could avoid. And now he is right in the middle of it. The things that happen in that story test him in huge ways, in the ways in which his relationship with Koba haunts him deeply. It’s going to be an epic story. I think you’ve probably read that I sort of described it where in the first film was very much about his rise from humble beginnings to being a revolutionary. The second movie was about having to rise to the challenge of being a great leader in the most difficult of times. This is going to be the story that is going to cement his status as a seminal figure in ape history, and sort of leads to an almost biblical status. He is going to become like a mythic ape figure, like Moses.

The director has said some of that in previous interviews. But it’s kind of the most detail he’s gone into talking about Caesar’s mindset. That he doesn’t want to be at war, that he connects with the humans yet he has to fight them. It’s very interesting stuff.

Which leads to the next question, would he remake the 1968 film if the story got that far? Reeves’ answer is very intriguing:

To me the idea is that the 1968 films stands as trajectory in that, what is so exciting is that the world of that film is so different from where things started in RISE, and the way they are in DAWN and now will be in the next film. There is a huge distance to cover between here and there that is all about Caesar and future generations, and how this world has transformed into that world, and the struggle that they’ll have to go through and how we create the world that we know from that. I think once you’ve gone through all of those chapters, you’ve gotten all the richness of those stories, you could very well find yourself going into that story again, but I think it would be from a new perspective. The idea would never be to remake the ’68 film. There might be some of those events from another perspective, and obviously to also see them as events that grew out of everything that we’ve been watching from this new iteration. They wouldn’t be exactly the same either. So if, and when, we ever get there, which I think is an exciting notion, it would definitely not be a remake but it would be sort of a re-telling of those events from a new perspective. And the events themselves would probably be a bit different since they will have grown out of these films.

I think the key phrase here is “once you’ve gone through all of those chapters, you’ve gotten all the richness of those stories.” Meaning, there are a lot of movies to be made in this story before ever flipping the focus onto the humans again. Then again, he also thinks retelling some of that story is “an exciting notion” so maybe, at some point, 20th Century Fox kind of forces the hand. I guess we’ll know more for sure come 2016 when Reeves’ next Planet of the Apes prequel/sequel is released.

How many movies do you think the franchise could sustain before tying into the original film? Would you like to see it remade?