Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The art of transformation is a very important thing to me, and I always believe I can say something more truthful through characters that are further away from me.
I've always been a huge fan of Charles Lawton's performance in 'The Hunchback of Notre Dame,' so somewhere along the line, I've always wanted to play that character.
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.
Gollum was so interesting to me because he's morally ambivalent, and I love the notion of a quest that is to lose something. Not to gain, but to get rid of something.
If you are not moved by the character, no amount of CGI will give you a performance that is emotionally engaging or devastating - what a live-action performance does.
I'm a Mac user. I think it depends on how you were brought up, and I was introduced to Apple quite early. They're certainly the best for visual stuff and film-directing.
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.
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.
Recently I read that half the world or more has read 'The Lord of The Rings,' but then I found out that something like 75 per cent of the world knows the 'Tintin' books.
I would love to direct an 'Apes' movie. It would be in the spirit of where I'm going with my career - avatars played by actors to say something about the human condition.
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.
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.
Gollum is entirely based on the notion of addiction. The way that the ring pervades him, makes him craving, lustful, depletes him physically, psychologically and mentally.
I think Caesar is one of the most empathetic characters that I've played. I think that's the key to a successful leadership. Being able to keep your ears open at all times.
Put it this way: If I had to go back to 1968 and wear the makeup that John Chambers made for the original 'Planet of the Apes' series, I think I would rather wear a unitard.
When you do animation - well, straightforward animation, although it's not straightforward - the voice for a character or something, they're always singular experiences, really.
People will come up to me and try and be secretive and say, 'Can you do the Gollum voice for me?' And I'm like, 'Are you kidding? It's 8:30 in the morning on the Victoria Line.'
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.
Great actors like Willem Dafoe and Ellen Page and Samuel L. Jackson will go and do a videogame, because they understand that storytelling isn't just necessarily about filmmaking.
If James Franco's wearing a costume, and I'm wearing a motion capture suit, we don't act any differently with each other because of what we're wearing. We're embodying our roles.
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.
If you're in a motion-capture studio, you have spherical, reflective markers, which are picked up by cameras that emit infrared - it reflects it, and then the cameras pick up the data.
I think the actors in 'Greystoke' were amazing. They had a really good performance coach called Peter Elliott who's, of his time, one of the greatest simian performance coaches for actors.
'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.
I've done a lot of films that are purely live-action roles, and even if I hadn't come across performance capture as a technology, I think I'd always consider myself a sort of mercurial actor.
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.
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.
Originally, I thought, 'Gollum's such a fantastic character, why are you doing him CG? Surely you need to be able to humanise him as much as possible - he's so full of pathos and real emotion.'
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 spent a lot of time on my own working out the physical vocabulary for how Gollum moved. As I say, I drew on a lot of Tolkein's descriptions of how he moves, but also the conceptual artist sketches.
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.
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.
When I first did 'The Lord of the Rings,' I was acting on the set with the other actors, but then I had to go back and repeat the process on my own to do the physical capture on a motion capture stage.
The fact of the matter is that an actor, if I'm playing a performance capture role and you're playing a live action role and we're having a scene together, there's no difference in our acting processes.
Gorillas have a belch vocalization, which is sort of like, 'I'm OK, you're OK.' They do a pig grunt, which is reprimanding. They sing, they laugh, and they hoot, which grows into a chest-beating display.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If I hear someone say something, and they're 100 per cent about it, then it's almost inevitable that I'll take the opposite view. I guess I feel at odds with things like society. Absolutism is always a trigger for me.
When I'm working on the scripts or working with the other actors or rehearsing with the director, and when the director is cutting the movie, and we've shot the scene, the director is not looking at the visual effects.
(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 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.
The reason that some motion-capture films don't work is if the scripts are not good, and the characters aren't engaging, then you don't believe in the journey, and you're not connected to it. It's not the technology's fault.
[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.