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.
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.
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.
It was a fairly happy childhood. My father was working away, and my mum brought up five kids all on her own.
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.
I'm a Mac user. I think it depends on how you were brought up, and I was introduced to Apple quite early. They're certainly the best for visual stuff and film-directing.
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.
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.
I love the ability to transform because that, for me, is a liberation.
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.
J.J. Abrams and I met, and we just had this incredible kind of vibe between us.
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.
When I first did 'The Lord of the Rings,' I was acting on the set with the other actors, but then I had to go back and repeat the process on my own to do the physical capture on a motion capture stage.
Any sort of role requires a certain amount of research and embodiment of the character and psychological investigation.
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.
'How To Train your Dragon 2' is an amazing film. I think it's an extraordinary film. The animation in it is fantastic.
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.
The thing is, I don't just take roles because they're performance capture.
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.
'Macbeth' is an amazing story.
I'm definitely moving more towards directing now.
Over the years, people have asked me, 'Do you think there should be a separate category for acting in the digital realm? Or hybrid sort of awards for digital characters?' and so on. And I've always really maintained that I don't believe so.
I play saxophone, I play tenor sax.
Gorillas have a belch vocalization, which is sort of like, 'I'm OK, you're OK.' They do a pig grunt, which is reprimanding. They sing, they laugh, and they hoot, which grows into a chest-beating display.
As long as you have the acting chops and the desire to get inside a character, you can play anything.
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.
You'll very rarely find that you can enhance a performance to give it a real emotional centre and truth... after the fact.
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.
Climbing's always been a massive hobby of mine up until, kind of, recent times when I've had family, but no, it's been a driving passion in my life, and, uh, I've always wanted to climb the Matterhorn. It was the mountain that, sort of, inspired me to climb, as a youngster.
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.
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.
I don't want to play a voice.
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.
If you are not moved by the character, no amount of CGI will give you a performance that is emotionally engaging or devastating - what a live-action performance does.
Thank God for Skype!
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.
Great actors like Willem Dafoe and Ellen Page and Samuel L. Jackson will go and do a videogame, because they understand that storytelling isn't just necessarily about filmmaking.
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.
When we, as humans, articulate, our tongues tend to hit the back of the teeth.
Mountaineering has always been a huge hobby of mine.
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.
I think Caesar is one of the most empathetic characters that I've played. I think that's the key to a successful leadership. Being able to keep your ears open at all times.
Gollum has a weak personality and isn't able to cope with the power of the ring.
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.
I think parenting is very different now. We're totally governed by our children!
People will come up to me and try and be secretive and say, 'Can you do the Gollum voice for me?' And I'm like, 'Are you kidding? It's 8:30 in the morning on the Victoria Line.'
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 do love nature, but I don't suppose I'd spent more time in zoos as a child than anyone else!
You don't really think about 3D when you're acting. As a director, you do.
