Words matter. These are the best Andy Serkis Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
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?’
Be magnificent. Life’s short. Get out there. You can do it. Everyone can do it. Everyone.
I am a bit evangelical, I know, but performance-capture is still misunderstood.
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.
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.
The great thing about performance capture is you can go off, and then, without changing costume, you can become another character.
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.
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.
Both my parents are Catholic and staunch believers. I’m not a Catholic now, but I still carry part of it with me.
I think parenting is very different now. We’re totally governed by our children!
I think I’d like to be a lion tamer, actually. That – that would provide the most audience entertainment if something went really badly.
I had a body wax. It’s the most painful thing I have ever done in my life. I had every single hair on my body pulled out, and I really bruised.
The whole chameleon thing about acting. That’s why I’m moving towards directing – it’s a much more healthy occupation.
I think I spend most of my time not living in reality, actually.
When you have children, you realize that at the end, it’s all about passing on, about handing down.
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.
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.
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.
Gollum is my picture of Dorian Gray. He will be with me for the rest of life, and I will grow to look more like him as I get older.
It has been great portraying Gollum, but it will be great to see my face on screen for a change.
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 think that Gollum is really the character who is a very human character, and he’s very flawed, like most humans are, and has good and bad sides.
The thing is, I don’t just take roles because they’re performance capture.
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.
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.
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 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.
Thank God for Skype!
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.
The fact of the matter is I have done so many parts.
When we, as humans, articulate, our tongues tend to hit the back of the teeth.
I’ve been writing and wanting to direct for a long time.
For me, I’ve never drawn a distinction between live-action acting and performance-capture acting. It is purely a technology.
I believe that when people experience an event as a community, it can transcend and change people’s lives.
As I started to research gorillas, I began to understand that they’re all totally individual and idiosyncratic, and they have their own personalities.
Gorilla tourism is vital to Rwanda’s economy: It’s the third highest source of income.
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.
Nowadays, there’s no such thing as a stable job.
Any sort of role requires a certain amount of research and embodiment of the character and psychological investigation.
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.
Middle-earth is a universe I know very well.
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.
You don’t really think about 3D when you’re acting. As a director, you do.
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.
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.
If ‘The Hobbit’ happens – and there’s reason to believe that it will – then I think I’m in with a chance! Gollum is very much part of ‘The Hobbit,’ after all.
As long as you have the acting chops and the desire to get inside a character, you can play anything.
I enjoy high-speed about-turns in thought.
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.
Mountaineering has always been a huge hobby of mine.
I’ve always been really in touch with my primal instincts. In my profession, you have to be.
Games aren’t going to go away. BAFTA’s got a category for games as an art form. The Academy should think about that, too.
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.
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.
I play saxophone, I play tenor sax.
Working with and collaborating with and for Peter Jackson was an incredible experience because he is such a phenomenal filmmaker.
Looking back, when I was Gollum, I suppose I did break the mold to a certain extent. I’m proud, and very thrilled, to be a part of that.
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.
On ‘The Avengers,’ I’ve been working closely with Mark Ruffalo.
‘How To Train your Dragon 2’ is an amazing film. I think it’s an extraordinary film. The animation in it is fantastic.
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.
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.
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.
As soon as you do it, actors realize there is no difference playing a performance-captured role or a live-action role.
In performance capture roles, it’s not a committee of animators that author the role, it’s the actor. I think that’s a significant thing for people to understand.
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