SERKIS PERFORMER
Brilliant motion-capture actor turns to directing
Andy Serkis will forever be remembered as Gollum in The Lord
of the Rings trilogy. Not only did he originate the role of the classic villain, he helped break ground in the type of performance known as motion-capture, in which actors’ movements are digitized to create a non-human character. He has since done similar work in King
Kong, the Planet of the Apes trilogy and Star Wars, where he plays Supreme Leader Snoke.
But he’s more than a one-ring Serkis. The 53-year-old was at the Toronto International Film Festival this year for the world première of his directing debut,
Breathe, the true story of a polio victim (Andrew Garfield) who dealt with paralysis with the help of his wife (Claire Foy). There’s nary a moment of computerized trickery in the film, except for the clever digital doubling of Tom Hollander, who performs both of a pair of twin brothers.
“It’s just the most beautiful, powerful script I’ve ever read,” Serkis says of Breathe. “And it also happens to be the true story of my business partner ... his parents’ life story.”
Serkis and Jonathan Cavendish are co-founders of The Imaginarium, a production company specializing in motion-capture, although, like Serkis himself, it is branching out. It also produced another TIFF world première, the horror film The Ritual.
Cavendish’s father, Robin, was affected by polio in 1958 and spent the rest of his life able to breathe only through a mechanical ventilator. At the time, that meant a life lived in hospital, but Robin moved back home with his wife, Diana, and later helped develop a wheelchair with a built-in ventilator to give him even more freedom.
“Although it’s perhaps not what people might expect from me as my first movie, in fact that’s a good thing,” Serkis says. What people might expect as his first movie, an all-mo-cap version of
The Jungle Book, has been held back for additional post-production and to distance itself from 2016’s
The Jungle Book. The Serkis version opens Oct. 19, 2018.
“It’s not a straight-up documentary,” Serkis says of Breathe. “It has an artistic, cinematic umbrella over it to allow this story to percolate into a much grander idea, which is that when you’re living two minutes away from death, how much can you live? And that vibrancy is hopefully what I’ve brought to it.”
Serkis drew further, if more unusual, inspiration from the story of Philippe Petit, the Frenchman who walked between the Twin Towers of the newly built World Trade Center in 1974. “I was inspired by the Man
on Wire story, and the friends that enabled him to perform that heist. And it felt like this was a heist. This was a heist for life.”
Outside of his new producing and directing roles, Serkis has long been at the centre of a debate over whether motion-capture performances are awards-worthy. I and other members of the Broadcast Film Critics Association were recently sent a video from 20th Century Fox, showing before-andafter comparisons of Serkis’s performance as the ape Caesar in the latest Planet of the Apes movie.
The BFCA gave Serkis a best supporting actor nomination for the first film in that series, and the dubious one-off award of “best digital acting performance” in 2003, when Gollum faced off against Yoda from Star Wars: Episode II and Dobby the house elf from Harry
Potter. I ask Serkis if motion-capture will ever escape the suspicion that technicians have a part to play in the final performance.
“I think the perception is changing,” he says.
“Really the understanding now is that acting is acting, and if you’re doing a performance-captured role you’re working exactly the same way as if you were playing any kind of live-action character. You’re working with a director, you’re working opposite other actors whether they be in performance-capture suits and headmounted cameras or in costume and makeup.”
He continues: “The process in the edit is that (the director) then takes your performance — you are the sole author of the role, crucially, that is the nut of what we’re talking about — and they live with your face in the cut for months and months and months until the visual effects shots finally come in, and the director is trying to emulate exactly what the actor’s performance is doing by translating it to the face of the avatar. Performancecapture acting really is like having digital makeup applied to your face rather than working with a team of makeup artists beforehand. It’s all about the authorship of the role.”
It has an artistic, cinematic umbrella over it to allow this story to percolate into a much grander idea, which is that when you’re living two minutes away from death, how much can you live? And that vibrancy is hopefully what I’ve brought to it. Andy Serkis, discussing Breathe