Bryan Alexander

USA TODAY

Primates seize the spotlight in Dawn of the Planet of the Apes.

The follow-up to 2011's Rise of the Planet of the Apes, opening Friday, thrusts viewers into what seems to be an ape-only world led by alpha ape Caesar.

"In my fantasy, this movie is like The Godfather of the ape world, with this civilization and Caesar as the Don Corleone of the apes," says director Matt Reeves. "It's about establishing this world where the apes are central."

This required great human performances from the core actors, wearing motion capture suits to play primates onscreen. Andy Serkis returns as Caesar after his widely acclaimed performance in Rise, and Karin Konoval is back as the orangutan Maurice.

Former Cirque du Soleil performer Terry Notary plays Rocket and was also the primate-movement choreographer — a position so key that Reeves involved him in casting decisions.

Judy Greer (star of the upcoming Jurassic Park) passed her simian-movement audition to play Caesar's wife, Cornelia. Nick Thurston is Caesar's son, Blue Eyes, and Toby Kebbell is the ape lieutenant Koba.

The actors and five parkour expert stuntmen honed their primate technique in a four-week intensive training session led by Notary. Serkis then joined for three days of pure group ape role-playing before shooting.

"We were not even doing scenes from the movie. It was literally behavioral stuff. It was fascinating," Reeves says. "It was improvisation of an ape day-in-the-life, seeing what this kingdom would look like."

"That was the best work for everybody," Notary says. "We'd have these little confrontations and then go groom. We found our own ape hierarchy."

Filming outdoors in Vancouver forests and sweltering New Orleans presented more challenges in the unitard motion-capture suits, which include helmets and facial cameras to record every expression. Most of the times, the actors were able to lock into character despite the odd-looking outfits.

"But there was one moment in the humidity of New Orleans that Terry and I just went into giggles. It was hard to keep it inside," Serkis says. "We caught each other's eyes and saw the funny side of it."

An impressive Dawn scene features 1,000 apes, many of them on horseback, outside a human compound. But all the ape sounds made the real horses skittish.

"In actuality the scene was really 10 guys in suits on stepladders. It looked really cheesy and cheap," Reeves says. "But none of those apes were created without a human performance. It was an incredibly complicated process."

Notary and the parkour stuntmen completed the ape tableau, laboriously filling each primate background character for the scene to make it appear to be an impressive army. "I literally played hundreds of characters in that scene," Notary. "Every single one is a motion-capture character."

Then the New Zealand-based visual-effects company Weta Digital painstakingly completed the transformation into the highly detailed apes seen onscreen. The end results were worth it.

"It takes so long to create one ape shot," Reeves says. "But when those first shots started coming in, you realize this movie was going to be something special."