Why Harry Potter director David Yates decided to bring Tarzan back to life
Advances in special effects, popular male and female leads, and a strong conservation theme prompted Hollywood to take Tarzan out of mothballs
David Yates, the British director behind the final four Harry Potter movies, wasn’t immediately sold when he was pitched the idea of reviving the world’s most famous jungle hero. “When I got the script and it said, ‘Tarzan’, that was my first question: why?” he says.
Undoubtedly, it’s something audiences may also be wondering with the arrival of The Legend of Tarzan, featuring True Blood star Alexander Skarsgard as Edgar Rice Burroughs’ famous creation.
Having first appeared in the 1912 story Tarzan of the Apes, Burroughs’ character has endured for more than a hundred years. Made popular by the black-and-white Tarzan movies of the 1930s and 1940s, when he was played by former swimmer Johnny Weissmuller, the Lord of the Apes has appeared in TV serials, radio plays, comics, video games and stage productions.
But recently? There were only Disney’s 1999 cartoon Tarzan and a 2013 little-seen live-action movie, starring Twilight’s Kellan Lutz. Arguably, the lack of modern-day interpretations is one reason why Tarzan has returned.
“The take on it felt quite fresh to me,” says the Swedish-born Skarsgard, 39. “It’s not the origin story. It’s not the Tarzan you would expect. The journey is quite the opposite [to] the novel or the films, where he is the ape man who ends up in England trying to adjust to that. This is the other way around; he was born and raised in the jungle but when you first meet him, he’s Lord Greystoke and he’s been here for almost a decade.”