Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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 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.
People find it hard to get their heads around nominating a computer-generated character, but every time you see Gollum on the screen, that's me who is acting up there - even if it is behind a mass of pixels - and it's my voice you hear.
My very, very first moment on set on 'Lord of the Rings' in 2000 was me in a lycra suit, six and a half thousand feet up on a mountain in New Zealand, standing in front of 250 crew who were all wondering what I was doing - myself included.
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.
Over the years, people have asked me, 'Do you think there should be a separate category for acting in the digital realm? Or hybrid sort of awards for digital characters?' and so on. And I've always really maintained that I don't believe so.
My natural bent is to have an overabundance of energy, and motion-capture essentializes your every breath, your every move. Seeing yourself through that mask, you realize how far you can pull back and make the performance even more powerful.
Did you happen to catch the film I did between 'Lord of the Rings' and 'Kong?' It was a nice little Jennifer Garner comedy, '13 Going on 30,' and I play her boss. In my big scene, I get to moonwalk - pretty well, I thought - to Michael Jackson.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I've been told that some guy wrote something like, 'Andy Serkis does everything, animators do nothing.' Of course I never in a million years said that, wouldn't ever say that. It's not within my understanding of filmmaking to ever say anything like that.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Actors' performances in films are enhanced in a million different ways, down to the choice of camera shot by the director - whether it's in slow motion or whether it's quick cut - or... the choice of music behind the close-up or the costume that you're wearing or the makeup.
There are parts of New Zealand that I absolutely fell in love with that I will miss going back to, but I kind of think that is the part that can continue and will continue on. I don't imagine I'll stop going back to New Zealand, because I feel part of the fabric there, really.
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.
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.
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.
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 have a company in the U.K., a performance-capture studio. We're looking to push the boundaries of performance-capture technology in film and video games, but also in live theater, using real-time performance capture with actors onstage, and combining that with holographic imagery.
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.
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.
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 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].
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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'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!
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.