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 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.

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.

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.

When you come out of the other end of a long process, working with a character [you realize] this character has really shaped my ideas.

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.

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.