Before the newly released Dawn of the Planet of the Apes film, there was a long franchise going back to the first Apes movie - the 1968 classic with Charlton Heston. But before that there was the book, reports BBC News.
Today few people have heard of Pierre Boulle. He was the French author who first had the brilliant idea of humans travelling in time and stumbling on ape civilisation. It was in his 1963 novel La Planete des Singes (Planet of the Apes).
But there's more. It turns out that Pierre Boulle was also the man behind another cinema great - none other than The Bridge on the River Kwai. A book on the face of it so quintessentially British - about a British colonel and his conception of duty and honour. How on earth could it have been written by a Frenchman? And how did that same Frenchman then move from wartime adventure to the world of science fiction for his second Hollywood triumph?
Pierre Boulle died in Paris in 1994, after a writing career that spanned more than 40 years and resulted in some 30 novels and collections of short stories.
But it was his life before taking up the pen that shaped his literary outlook. From the mid-1930s he was a rubber planter for a British company in Malaysia. And in World War Two he served as an undercover agent for the Special Operations Executive (SOE).
For The Bridge on the River Kwai he was writing of a world he knew well.
"Pierre Boulle was profoundly Anglophile," says Jean Loriot, who heads the Association of Friends of Pierre Boulle.
"In the Far East he worked alongside English people. He was impregnated by English culture. He admired the English greatly. And when he came to write he made many of his heroes English."
The Bridge on the River Kwai was Boulle's third novel. The first two - William Conrad, and The Malay Spell - were named in deliberate homage to his two literary inspirations: Joseph Conrad and Somerset Maugham.
For this third book, Boulle wanted to explore the psychology of the ultra-correct Col Nicholson (played by Alec Guinness in the film), but also to raise questions about the relative value systems of the Japanese and British minds.
The opening words are: "Maybe the unbridgeable gulf that some see separating the western and the oriental souls are nothing more than a mirage?... Maybe the need to 'save face' was, in this war, as vital, as imperative, for the British as it was for the Japanese."
Much later, Boulle wrote a short autobiography called The Sources of the River Kwai in which he described his own experience in the war.
In Singapore in 1941 he signed up to the Free French, and was seconded to what became known as Force 136. This was the British SOE operation in South East Asia.
At a place called The Convent, he was put through a training course in which "serious gentlemen taught us the art of blowing up a bridge, attaching explosives to the side of a ship, derailing a train, as well as that of despatching to the next world - as silently as possible - a night-time guard".
After various missions in Burma and China, Boulle - now with the English covername Peter John Rule - was told to make his way by river to Hanoi, in Vichy-controlled Indochina.
With help from villagers he built a raft from bamboo and floated downstream. At a place called Laichau he was spotted and brought to the local French commander. Deciding on the spur of the moment to come clean, he told the commander he was from the Free French with instructions to make contact with sympathetic Vichy officials.
Unfortunately the commander was not one of them. Boulle was sentenced to forced labour for life. He spent the next two years in jail in Hanoi before escaping near the end of the war.
"The experience was seminal for Boulle," says Loriot. "When he came to Indochina he thought he was on the good side. But then a Frenchman arrested him and said, "No you are not."
"It drove home a point about the relativity of good and evil, which is the theme of all his works. What is good is good only in a certain context. Not necessarily universally."
The Bridge on the River Kwai is also noteworthy for having a different ending from the film. In the book, the bridge is not blown up. It survives as a monument to Col Nicholson's doggedness. It was the Americans in Hollywood who insisted on a more dramatic - and uplifting - end.
Read more of this feature report from BBC News.