Andy serkis quotes

After 'Kong,' my knuckles have never recovered because I had to wear very heavy weights on my forearms and around my hips and ankles to get the sense of size and scale of the movement of the character You are telling your body that you are these things and that you're feeling these thoughts and that you're experiencing these experiences.

Basically we're puppeteers and if you're there and you're in the character, the puppet is going to look good. It's going to breath life and I think once they find out how to trust this system, you just forget about it and just perform, then it's just second nature, it just becomes easy.

Everybody thinks performance capture is about thrashing around and doing a lots of movement, but it's actually about being able to contain and think and be believed in a close-up, as much as anything else.

Where as you go into playing something like Ulysses [on Black Panther], you go - I'm going to have this haircut and this cloth, you draw from different stimulus.

I expect at some point I'll probably want to go back on stage and do some theater, because I've not done theater in 10 years.

I love, first of all, reading and discovering what the common perception is and then trying to figure out... well, how does your life cross over into that character, or what's an angle on this that might challenge the status quo? It's just a great journey as well as an education. You're constantly being educated - it's like I'm back at school and making up for lost time.

I never felt totally, 100%, patriotically English... I'd seen a lot of the world by an early age - sort of spent a lot of time traveling around Lebanon and I'd seen Babylon, and Damascus, and all sorts of places in the Middle East by the time I was ten. Then we'd return to Ruslip in West London... Done a fair bit of traveling really.

Second films are, you know, like 'difficult second albums', so it's a tricky position to be in but I think he's made a highly accomplished film.

Acting is acting, as far as I'm concerned and, you know, how you manifest it is, at the end of the day, not the point. It's how it affects the story & how it affects the audience. And if people are hungry to be told stories, using, using this form then there's a reason for that.

I stayed in Baghdad every summer until I was 14. My dad's sister is still there, but many of my relatives have managed to get out. People forget that there are still people there who are not radicalized in any particular direction, trying to live normal lives in a very difficult situation.

I love acting and certainly won't give it up, but it's part of a bigger canvas for me now.

I love the whole kind of notion of transformation for me is (what) excites me about not only acting, but storytelling. I love, I love that notion of a slightly larger-than-life artistic truth, you know, magnifying real emotional truth (or) finding something about human condition (which), you wouldn't necessarily think you can learn from characters such as Kong or Gollum, but actually they are, you know, these huge amplifications of a human psyche and I suppose those kind of roles have always attracted me definitely.

When I was in theater I was forever trying to inhabit a space which puts yourself under the microscope as an actor and your personality and your take on life, but actually through another portal of a character.

I think even back as far as 'Lord of the Rings,' there was always the chance that 'The Hobbit' would be made, even way back then. Of course at that point, Peter Jackson didn't probably think at that point that he'd be directing it.

We're live in a world that has, in many ways, become desensitized and unable to empathize with other cultures and species. The dangerous part is that we objectify others and have somehow removed ourselves, mentally, from the very planet we inhabit.

When I played Gollum in 'Lord of the Rings,' if I was climbing up the side of a mountain, which I physically did, you know, I was on every single occasion swimming through streams, all of that, that wasn't captured. That was filmed on 35 millimeter, and for certain of those shots, it was rotoscoped and painted over.

I'm in the early stages of a film called 'Freezing Time' about Eadweard Muybridge, the Victorian photographer who was really the forefather of cinema. Digital animators still treat his images like the Bible. He was a very obsessed man.

What's wonderful about Tolkien and Shakespeare is that they show up your own individual microscope. They're so infinitely vast. You can reinterpret them in so many ways. Each age will have its own resonance with Lord of the Rings.

I'm working from home a lot. That's very unusual because I'm away a lot, sometimes working on the other side of the world for long periods of time. So, it's hard to manage in the sense that I want to be the best dad I can be but it's almost harder when you have your kids outside the door.

I was thinking about that. I was thinking, this is like our Boyhood; this is like our getting together over 12 years to make - this our Apehood! I mean, this is it! For me, the relationships, all of those things, over such a long period of time now with actors, but also seeing the characters grow, develop, and change, and go through different situations.

My first job when I got my equity card was acting in 14 plays back-to-back. Playing that many roles, you look for ways of differentiating the characters physically, which goes hand in hand with understanding them psychologically.

No matter how extreme things get, it still has that ring of truth about it that backs the characters - even though they're despicable and what they're doing isn't right you still care for their fate.

In terms of animation, animators are actors as well. They are fantastic actors. They have to draw from how they feel emotionally about the beat of a scene that they're working on. They work collaboratively.

The difference between the big budget films I've done is the length of time. But in terms of the day-to-day, you're still going on to set, you're getting into character, and you're going and doing your job, so there's absolutely no difference. It's just the structure around it and the length of time. But in terms of budget and money, it doesn't really manifest itself.

Be magnificent. Life’s short. Get out there. You can do it. Everyone can do it. Everyone.

But the first time I had to stand up and sing with them was when we did the pre-record for the movie and it was that moment where I sort of said to myself: "S**t, now I actually have to do this and I have to stand up and do my stars in your eyes moment!" Wake Up and Make Love With Me was the first song and I thought: "Here we are with Chaz and all the boys..."

I just directed The Jungle Book with Cate Blanchet and Christian Bale.

I've always thought of acting as a tool to change society. I watch a lot of actors and I see panic in their eyes because they don't know why they act and I know why I act. Whether I'm a good or a bad actor, I know why I do it.

A lot of actors on film sets... very often they're not paying attention to the physical world around them. I think through studying art, I've always had that awareness and that's something that I've wanted to bring in to go beyond acting... As a form of expression, they are intrinsically linked.

But I think there's something wonderful and extraordinary about climbing on your own and just that kind of relationship to the environment. I'm very addicted to the mountains. You know, so, I do like that solitude.

Hoodwink is a product of his environment. He grew up in Belfast, he was part of the UDA and he fought for what he believed in - or was brainwashed into believing - because of the people that surrounded him.

it's a weird thing with acting and it happens to a lot of actors, not just myself - it's like you're giving off an I really need to be loved today vibe. My worst moment recently is I fell asleep on the tube in London on the Victoria line 8:30 in the morning and I woke up and there were about five people with iPhones taking pictures.

In a personal way, to do with family and the father-son relationship, in a kind of artistic way with regard to him being an art student. I also studied the visual arts at Lancaster University. I then decided to become an actor as he was becoming a musician. And then as an actor/performer, we have similar sort of interests - music hall and that whole world. So, there's a lot that I felt connected with.

I suppose the biggest strain was that Hoodwink is a high-octane character and he's up there like all the time. Once he's on his journey there's no let up for the man, so I actually found it a massively exhausting job to keep that level up.

(The) process of acting is no different to conventional screen acting, in that it's providing a perfect interface between the director and the performer. So there's no sort of long way around a viral committee of animators.

I'd already started directing short films when we were doing 'Lord of the Rings,' then videogame projects.

But that's not what an actor does. An actor finds things in the moment with a director and other actors that you don't have time to hand-draw or animate with a computer.

I do listen to myself sometimes and think, 'Is my moral compass so easily swayed by the characters I play, or is it me growing as a human being?'

I'm definitely moving more towards directing now.

My dad was working abroad, in Iraq, and he was a doctor. We used to go and visit him, in Baghdad, off and on. For the first ten years of my life, we used to go backwards and forwards to Baghdad, so that was quite amazing. I spent a lot of time traveling around the Middle East.

The matter is - we are actors playing roles [in Planet Apes] and they happen to be in this instance apes but there's no difference. In the scenes that we're playing, if we were to block out the scenes as actors in costumes, it would be no different.

The wonderful thing about 48 fps is the integration of live action and CG elements; that is something I learned from 'The Hobbit.' We are so used to 24 fps and the romance of celluloid but at 48 fps, you cannot deny the existence of these CG creations in the same time frame and space and environment as the live action.

I can get on with all different sorts of people, and I never feel homesick, particularly, or I've never felt kind of patriotic towards any one country.

I play saxophone, I play tenor sax.

When you have children, you realize that at the end it's all about passing on, about handing down. The process of letting go, not attachment, but appreciating the beauty and value in the change, the transformation.

In 'Tintin,' it's like a live-action role. You're living and breathing and making decisions for that character from page 1 to page 120, the whole emotional arc. In an animated movie, it's a committee decision. There are 50 people creating that character. You're responsible for a small part.

There are no rhymes or reason, actually. Having said that, you know, cause there are people who are absolutely single-minded about their process and they can still come up with great work. But (what) I enjoy and it's the same, I suppose, as I became more of a family man, I enjoy, I enjoy an atmosphere where it, you know, doesn't have to be about conflict to get good results.

On lower budget things you're still working collaboratively, but the investment and your level of creative importance is higher on something like this.

What you can do with visual effects is enhance the look of the character, but the actual integrity of the emotional performance and the way the character's facial expressions work, that is what is going to be created on the day with other actors and the director.

Playing a character in a video game is different to other performances because your character can't lead the audience of players in one direction.

I'm quite contrary. If people agree on something, I tend to gravitate the other way by my nature. I don't like to be told what to do. I think it goes back to school. I like to do things I want to do and I really don't like doing what I don't want to do.

When I first was offered the role on Rise [of the Planet of the Apes], I always played Caesar as a human being within ape skin.

More and more good actors are now transmigrating into the videogame space and playing roles there because it's where my generation of kids get stories from.

It's really up to the acting community to be willing to be educated about what performance capture is in order to fully appreciate it as acting. It's not a type of acting, but rather the use of technology to harness an actor's performance and translate it into an ape, another animal, or an avatar of some kind.

Performance capture is a genre of acting which is not going to go away, it's going to proliferate more and more. I'm passionate about it, and I love it. It's the most liberating tool an actor has, because you are not limited by your own physicality, look, or color of your eyes.

I think we can be very narrow-minded in this country; you see something that someone's done and immediately want them to do the same thing again - but if they don't, they're criticised for not doing the same thing again, but if they do they're just repeating themselves.

That's what I think is the biggest challenge, is just being still and learning how to just be present in that stillness and not over do it, not over act.

What I'm saying is people like Hoodwink are not kind of evil villains, they're part of humanity. We can choose to disassociate ourselves from them and we can choose to pretend they're not there, but they are. We're all together in this.

There's this whole grey area seemingly every time it's talked about animators and who takes ultimate responsibility for the characters [of the Planet of the apes] but without question and I'll go down saying this year after year, these characters are authored by what we do on set. They are not authored by animators.

It's a really unique situation where you just - you make independent films or you make big blockbuster movies, but it's very rare when all of those ingredients come together, and you can really tell a story that you care about with a character you absolutely love with the people you love making movies with.

Yeah, I mean, climbing's always been a massive hobby of mine up until, kind of, recent times when I've had family, but no, it's been a driving passion in my life and, uh, I've always wanted to climb the Matterhorn. It was the mountain that, sort of, inspired me to climb, as a youngster. So, it was great to be able to get to do it.

Working from home is so, so hard because I want to be present for them and yet there's so much to do work-wise. That's the biggest challenge for me.

Gollum is Gollum - though in 'Lord of the Rings' he's 600 years old and in 'The Hobbit' he's 540, so he looks a little bit more handsome.

At the moment, my trajectory isn't to think about acting. I'm absolutely devoted to The Imaginarium, our projects and directing. And watching and enabling other actors do their thing in our studio is hugely rewarding. I expect at some point I'll probably want to go back on stage and do some theater, because I've not done theater in 10 years.

I love playing real characters... if they're not around anymore it's helpful because you won't get sued! But there's so much research involved and I love that part of the process.

Performance capture is a technology, not a genre; it's just another way of recording an actor's performance.

[Greek] Theater started off and used masks and Kabuki, in the East, they used mask-work. And then, Commedia dell'arte in Italy and then, you know, we're part of an acting tradition and, and performance capture is no different.

I'd like to think that we strive in film and theatre to tell great stories, and I believe in the power of storytelling in our culture.

35mm film isn't ticking away so it's subconscious - performances are allowed to breathe in a much more real way I think.

There is always that potential in the same way - Roddy McDowall ended up playing Cornelius to Caesar [in the Planet of the Apes]. Two different characters. That's the joy of the craft. Bring it on I say.

Gorilla tourism is vital to Rwanda's economy: It's the third highest source of income.

Every age has its storytelling form, and video gaming is a huge part of our culture. You can ignore or embrace video games and imbue them with the best artistic quality. People are enthralled with video games in the same way as other people love the cinema or theatre.

I think what traditional studios probably don't understand is that it's a genuine advancement in the actor's tradition. And you know, the tradition and craft of acting. And it's the latest step. You know, we, we tend to find forms of delivering stories that fit our times.

I'd already started directing short films when we were doing 'Lord of the Rings,' then videogame projects. So Peter's known that I've been heading towards directing for a long time. But I always thought my first outing would be a couple of people and a digital camera in the back streets of London somewhere!

I don't see a difference between playing a performance capture role and a live action role, they're just characters to me at the end of the day and I'm an actor who wants to explore those characters in fantastically written scripts. The only caveat is a good story is a good character.

My belief about performance capture is that it's a technology which allows actors to play extraordinary characters. But from an acting perspective, I've never drawn a distinction between playing a conventional, live action character and playing a role in a performance capture suit. And from a purely acting point-of-view, I don't believe there should be a special Oscar category because I think it sort of muddies the waters in a way.

My agent told me they were casting for the voice of Gollum. I hadnt read The Lord of the Rings, but I read the script and realized what an amazing role it was. I developed a voice for the audition tape, then met Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh at the auditions and fell in love with them both.

I remember kind of doing early acting and thinking, "God, they don't paint behind the sets." It's a bit of a shame, really - "Oh, what's on the other side of this wall? Oh, you can see the plywood." I was really disappointed. I just thought that these things were real, from watching things as a kid.

I have a great interest in Victorian musical & cabaret performances and Weimar artists so the references are there, to Cabaret and also All That Jazz and other films where, where there's a kind of (influential German playwright Bertolt) Brecht-ian approach, almost to the character standing outside of himself or, in this case, he's "self-séance-ing."

The whole chameleon thing about acting. That's why I'm moving towards directing - it's a much more healthy occupation.

Mountaineering has always been a huge hobby of mine.

Animators do amazing working translating and interpolating the characters [in the Planet of the apes], the facial performances. What we're creating on set - if you don't get it on the day, in the moment, on set, in front of the camera, with the director and the actors. The emotional content of the scene and the acting choices.

Gorillas are still wild creatures. That's made very clear when you observe them in nature. They charge and perform other displays that are terrifying by design. But they don't attack unless they feel threatened.

It's a different rhythm than most movies. For a lot of the actors, you're 12,000 miles away from home. It becomes a way of life - getting up at five in the morning, shooting every day, day in day out, for 270 days. The new cast playing the dwarves were carrying incredibly heavy weights in their suits, they sat through hours of make-up every day. So it's quite challenging from a stamina point of view.

Motion capture is exactly what it says: it's physical moves, whereas performance capture is the entire performance - including your facial performance. If you're doing, say, martial arts for a video game, that is motion capture. This is basically another way of recording an actor's performance: audio, facial and physical.

I understand why people went nuts for 'The Artist.' We use words so much, it's nice to be able to explore a different way of communication, to be able to express silently what someone - or something - is thinking or feeling.

Not a day goes by where I'm not reminded of Gollum by some person in the street who asks me to do his voice or wants to talk to me about him. But because 'The Hobbit' has been talked about as a project for many years, I knew that at some point I'd have to reengage with him.

When you come out of the other end of a long process, working with a character [you realize] this character has really shaped my ideas.

I am a bit evangelical, I know, but performance-capture is still misunderstood.

I think there will always be a particular generation of actors who think that they're going to be replaced by robots. But certainly the emerging actors understand that that's part of the craft.

I wanted to be a painter, really, when I was growing up as a kid. It was one thing that really took a grip on me.

In the same way 'Lord of the Rings' was an interpretation of the book, 'The Hobbit' is being treated the same way. It will be faithfully represented with a fresh interpretation.

As long as you have the acting chops and the desire to get inside a character, you can play anything.

My take is that acting is acting. A performance is a performance. With performance capture, if you don't get the performance on the day, you can't enhance the performance.

I remember once, I read in a horoscope, because I'm an Aries, I read this terrible thing, which really affected me, which said, "You will never be original. You will always be an interpreter." (Laughs) I thought, "Oh my God." You know, I had to live with that on my back for [all my life].

Originally when I went off to work on 'The Lord of The Rings' I got a call from my agent saying that I was just going to do a voice. But I couldn't really approach it like that. To get Gollum's voice I had to play the character.

For film and games, there is now a fantastic method of actors portraying characters which don't necessarily look like themselves. And yet you've still got the heart and soul of the performance.

For me, I've never drawn a distinction between live-action acting and performance-capture acting. It is purely a technology.

Caesar [from the Rise of the Planet of the Apes] was brought up with human beings and because of the drug he had pretty much grown up with his whole life, he felt like an outsider, he felt trapped in an ape's body but he didn't really feel like an ape and that was my way into the character. So he's always had this duality playing him from an infant all the way to now as a fifty-five year old ape.

I believe that when people experience an event as a community it can transcend and change people's lives.

That's why I ended up going to Lancaster University, because they had a visual arts course, and in the first year it was like a broad visual arts course in sculpture, painting, graphics - all of that.

I mean, in many ways, you know, I felt very connected to Ian (Dury) on, on a lot of levels. I mean, politically, & sort of, socially, our, kind of, social backgrounds are quite similar in many ways, as well as our kind of artistic endeavors. So there were many, many things that sort of chimed in for me, and kind of made me feel very instinctive about playing him, and, and although, there was sort of a certain amount of impression involved, actually, there's a lot of myself in the role.

Working with people you adore and love. There's just a sense, all the way through all of the movies [Planet of Apes], that you're very rarely in a position where you have great material that you're passionate about and a big audience who love it, and the detail and nuance, and the exquisiteness of the fantastic actors and director with great writing.

The process of acting is no different [playing human or ape]. You're embodying the character. You're creating the psychology and the physicality. You're living the moment.

You don't go - oh this is a motion capture role, I'm going to employ this method of acting. We don't have anything to hide behind when we're doing this.

You're watching your kids playing football and you're not present. It's like the worst... it's horrible. I despise myself for it. I think it's a particularly male thing. Being present and in the moment with your kids is something a lot of men struggle with.

The learning curve is 'The Hobbit' is being shot in 3D.

I'm not a big gamer myself. I've (become) increasingly interested in games. And I certainly am passionate about, about storytelling in gaming. And, and the marriage of, you know, immersive characters, with gaming.

And 'Sex Drugs Rock Roll' was a very transitional film for me in that I was one of the producers and you know, came up with the idea with the writer and the producer, as well. But, it was a very collaborative event. You know, I really love working in that way.

People are mystified by it and so they kind of think, the acting community thinks they're gonna be replaced by CG characters and animators think they're gonna be replaced by performance capture (and) a lot of directors, particularly European directors, who have no experience of it.

I've done a fair amount of that stuff... when we did 'Lord of the Rings' the transformation sequence from Smeagol to Gollum was a 19-hour make-up job. You have to have a kind of zen button that you press and allow the mind to be focused in a certain way.

I've been writing and wanting to direct for a long time.

Performance capture is a tool that young actors will need in the next 10, 20 years. It's on the increase, as you say. It's not going away.

Acting is a sort of pressure cooker that allows the fizz to come out the top. God knows what I'd be like if I didn't have that.

When you start to do research into gorillas or any kind of apes, if you're going to play them, that's one of the biggest misconceptions. And when I did Kong, you're not doing gorilla movements, you're not doing ape movements, you're looking for a personality. It's like saying okay I'm going to do human movements.

Rather than something like King Kong where I really went after studying gorillas in the wild and captivity. I based Caesar [ from the Rise of the Planet of the Apes] on a real chimpanzee and I worked with Terry [Notary] on a lot of chimpanzee movement.

People think, 'Oh, well how can 'The Hobbit,' which is one book, become three films?' But you can take one line from an appendice and it turns into a whole sequence.

'The Hobbit' was one of the first biggish books I ever read. I remember vividly the 'riddles in the dark' passage, and it meant a lot to me to finally get to play it after all these years.

My sons have to learn that you take the rough with the smooth and they've seen a lot of smooth in the years that they've been around. They didn't see the early years. But both my mum and myself are actors and we constantly tell them it's not easy. But they understand that.

We've never had nannies. We've had great grandparents, great support from family, and the kids have been on every set: they've seen me play Gollum, King Kong, Captain Haddock, the lot. They totally get it, and they want to go into the business. Ruby, my daughter, is very keen to become an actress.