Andy Serkis Quotes

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.

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.

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'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.

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.

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 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.

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

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

'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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

[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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

I play saxophone, I play tenor sax.

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'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.

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.

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.

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 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.

Mountaineering has always been a huge hobby of mine.

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.

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.

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.