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.
Andy Serkis
Be magnificent. Life’s short. Get out there. You can do it. Everyone can do it. Everyone.
Andy Serkis
I believe that when people experience an event as a community, it can transcend and change people’s lives.
Andy Serkis
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.
Andy Serkis
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.
Andy Serkis
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.
Andy Serkis
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.
Andy Serkis
I have a road bike and a mountain bike, and I tend to use them both a lot. They help you keep your balance and your stamina.
Andy Serkis
Our family were outsiders, and I’ve always had a sense of the outsider, the underdog, and a strong sense of justice towards people who are excluded.
Andy Serkis
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.
Andy Serkis
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.
Andy Serkis
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.
Andy Serkis
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.
Andy Serkis
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.
Andy Serkis
I do love nature, but I don’t suppose I’d spent more time in zoos as a child than anyone else!
Andy Serkis
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.
Andy Serkis
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.
Andy Serkis
Mountaineering has always been a huge hobby of mine.
Andy Serkis
Gorilla tourism is vital to Rwanda’s economy: It’s the third highest source of income.
Andy Serkis
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.
Andy Serkis
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.
Andy Serkis
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.
Andy Serkis
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.
Andy Serkis
I enjoy high-speed about-turns in thought.
Andy Serkis
Thank God for Skype!
Andy Serkis
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.
Andy Serkis
Performance capture, for me, is finding the essence of a performance.
Andy Serkis
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.
Andy Serkis
Just being an ape is a workout.
Andy Serkis
Working with and collaborating with and for Peter Jackson was an incredible experience because he is such a phenomenal filmmaker.
Andy Serkis
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.
Andy Serkis
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.
Andy Serkis
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.
Andy Serkis
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.
Andy Serkis
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.
Andy Serkis
Performance capture is a technology, not a genre; it’s just another way of recording an actor’s performance.
Andy Serkis
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.
Andy Serkis
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.
Andy Serkis
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.
Andy Serkis
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.
Andy Serkis
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.
Andy Serkis
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.
Andy Serkis
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.
Andy Serkis
I love acting and certainly won’t give it up, but it’s part of a bigger canvas for me now.
Andy Serkis
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.
Andy Serkis
I’d already started directing short films when we were doing ‘Lord of the Rings,’ then videogame projects.
Andy Serkis
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.
Andy Serkis
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.
Andy Serkis
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.
Andy Serkis
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.
Andy Serkis
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.
Andy Serkis
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.
Andy Serkis
I’m definitely moving more towards directing now.
Andy Serkis