If I hear someone say something, and they're 100 per cent about it, then it's almost inevitable that I'll take the opposite view. I guess I feel at odds with things like society. Absolutism is always a trigger for me.
Gollum was so interesting to me because he's morally ambivalent, and I love the notion of a quest that is to lose something. Not to gain, but to get rid of something.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
My livelihood depends on the art of animators.
I never felt totally, 100%, patriotically English... I'd seen a lot of the world by an early age - sort of spent a lot of time traveling around Lebanon and I'd seen Babylon, and Damascus, and all sorts of places in the Middle East by the time I was ten. Then we'd return to Ruslip in West London... Done a fair bit of traveling 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.
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.
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 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.
Put it this way: If I had to go back to 1968 and wear the makeup that John Chambers made for the original 'Planet of the Apes' series, I think I would rather wear a unitard.
The whole chameleon thing about acting. That's why I'm moving towards directing - it's a much more healthy occupation.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I had to relearn how to ride a horse like an ape. I had to change how I jumped off and how I gripped them with my thighs and distribute my weight differently.
