More to Caesar than a big ape
Andy Serkis tells why ‘motioncapture’ acting is just as good as the real thing.
‘What I plan to achieve is a re-establishment of the office and the role in a fit-for-purpose way in the new environment... we are in a different world and old models and attitudes aren’t really fit for that world, and we’ve got an opportunity to move things on.’
Provisions are culturally sensitive, so what is classified in Australia can be completely different in New Zealand.
Shanks says Kiwis don’t have a high tolerance for violence and sexual violence, unlike our Australian counterparts. Yet we have a higher threshold for obscene language, nudity and healthy portrayals of sexual relationships. It’s proved a bit tricky with movies rated M – meaning moderate content – or under that come in directly to the public because, as Shanks found out first hand, Australians are more lenient.
‘‘What we are now finding is that movies that are rated M in Australia say, are coming here, opening and people are going along to it and going, ‘eww, that’s not right’ and raising complaints,’’ he says.
‘‘And we will review it and sometimes re-rate movies.
‘‘I took my [12-year-old] son to Suicide Squad which was released as an M and I watched it and went, ‘oh that doesn’t feel like an M to me’, and then when I saw it at the DVD store it had been rated R13.
‘‘It had come through on the kind of automatic rating process – there had been complaints about it and it had been re-rated to R13.’’
When it comes to the digital era, New Zealanders can’t always be protected.
A report released recently by the censor’s office, Young New Zealanders Viewing Sexual Violence, revealed young people were viewing a concerning amount of media depicting sexual violence through nontraditional platforms.
More concerning than that, they were forming their opinion based on those media.
You Tube, for instance, has about 300 hours of content put up every minute.
‘‘No classification office can keep abreast of that,’’ Shanks says.
‘‘That’s part of the flip side of the internet. It’s fantastic, it’s immediate, it’s incredibly informative and granular but through sheer volume you’ve got those sorts of risk.
‘‘I think when you’ve got those sorts of issues the role of the office is in research and is in informing and educating and actually acting as the voice in the centre of all these issues going, ‘hey this is what is going on, this is a problem and it’s not something we can deal with through traditional regulation or oversight’.
‘‘If we join up agencies, if we get educators in the mix, if we have agencies like Netsafe, the Broadcasting Standards Authority, who are going to be taking an increasing role with streaming providers, we have a chance of getting a bit of consistent approach and messaging in ratings for people in this country that they can work with, that parents can work with and kids can be informed by as well.’’
When Netflix came to the country it wasn’t clear whether streaming content was covered by the classification office or some other regulatory regime such as the BSA.
Netflix voluntarily put a large volume of its content through the classification office to be reviewed, rated and classified.
In response to the ambiguity, a digital convergence discussion paper was launched two years ago by the Government that led to an announcement that streaming services would fall under a self-regulatory broadcasting standards model. While that model is constructed, streaming content is unregulated.
‘‘[That] meant for this office, the perspective of going ‘how this can work to make sure people are protected and we’ve got the right sorts of information and classifications for streaming services’.’’
Following the controversy around the teen-targeted show 13 Reasons Why, which depicted potentially dangerous themes such as suicide, self-harm, drug use, bullying, drinking and rape, the chief censor now has call-in powers.
‘‘I can essentially call in anything to classify it. I can call in a T-shirt. I can call in a book or magazine or a series.’’
IKevin Maher
t’s not often that you come out of a blockbuster movie buzzing excitedly from the political subtext. It’s not often that you want to discuss not the big-effects set pieces but the seemingly explicit references to Raqqa, Mosul and the Syrian refugee crisis. But, damn it, welcome to War for the Planet of the Apes, the latest $US100 million instalment in the longrunning franchise.
The film is so savagely current that it even features an eccentric American political leader (Woody Harrelson) who wants to build an enormous wall to protect his people from outside threats. ‘‘This wall is madness,’’ exclaims Caesar (Andy Serkis), the thinking, talking super-ape hero. ‘‘It won’t save him!’’
‘‘I know! The wall!’’ howls Serkis. ‘‘That was, I have to say, an incredible coincidence. It was part of the story a long time before Trump took to the stage. It wasn’t meant to be that specific, and yet it is.’’
The 53-year-old actor, born in London to an English mother and Iraqi father, is famed for his extraordinary ‘‘performance-capture’’ characterisations of Gollum from the Lord of the Rings films, King Kong and now Caesar. This film follows the troubled and grieving Caesar (his family are murdered in the opening scenes) as he leads his growing population of refugee apes into a clash-of-civilisations stand-off against the trigger-happy humans, led by Harrelson’s unnamed Colonel.
Along the way there are gentle moments and scenes of comic relief, but they’re always accompanied by a moribund, and often disturbing, sense that the film is shadowing the darker geopolitical events of our day.
Serkis is clear the topical references in the film aren’t deliberate. And yet he is equally certain that movies can have an ‘‘anticipatory’’ nature. ‘‘While we were making the movie the rise of Trump was happening. You were seeing the build-up of Isis in Raqqa, the break-up of Iraq and the horror of Syria and fleeing refugees. That was there, and we were very much aware of that as we were making the film. And yet none of that was touched upon in an overtly political way.’’
He says his duty as a storyteller and the duty of the director Matt Reeves is to make an entertaining movie. However, ‘‘this is a privileged position to be in’’, he says. ‘‘To be making a blockbuster movie and speaking to such a wide audience. It fills you with a great sense of responsibility, to have something to offer with meat on the bone, and with intelligence.’’
But enough of politics. What about the Oscars? Serkis is a renowned, if increasingly exhausted, champion of performance capture as ‘‘genuine’’ acting rather than snazzy specialeffects work. Pixar characters, for instance, are animated, whereas Serkis delivers a full performance range for the camera. Before playing King Kong in 2005, he spent weeks at London Zoo, observing four gorillas – how they moved, acted and interacted – before flying to Rwanda to see apes in the wild.
Then, on Peter Jackson’s New Zealand set, Serkis was filmed as Kong, but with tiny dots all over his face and body to capture the expressions and movements that would eventually appear, super-sized, on the king of beasts. It got even more intimate for Caesar. Here, Serkis is playing a similar-sized protagonist and acting on the same set, in the same frame, as actors such as Harrelson.
Serkis says that once you’ve done the ape research and been to the zoo, and are dressed up in the performance-capture suit with the dots all over your face, your job is to do nothing at all other than to act. ‘‘When actors come to me for advice about performance capture I have nothing to offer other than one thing,’’ he says. ‘‘Don’t pantomime it. Don’t overdo it.’’
‘‘I think there is a growing understanding that it is acting,’’ he adds, ‘‘... although Steve [co-star Steve Zahn] recently said to me, ‘I’m so f ..... off. I’m getting asked by journalists if I did the voice for Bad Ape. The voice?’ I said to him, ‘Welcome to my f ...... world! I’ve been doing this for the past 17 years’.’’
Serkis’ own directorial debut, Jungle Book, starring Christian Bale, Benedict Cumberbatch and Cate Blanchett, was shot in performance capture – only for Disney to swoop in with their 2016 musical version The Jungle Book, causing Serkis’ film to go on hold until 2018 (and Serkis to go direct the forthcoming Breathe.)
‘‘I saw their film, and it’s great, but ours is a completely different take. Ours is much more savage. There are no songs, and it’s not meant for young families.’’
Raised in northwest London, Serkis slid sideways into acting, via a painting degree at Lancaster University, which evolved into an acting degree, some bit parts on TV and work on the stage.
‘‘Because my background was IraqiEnglish I never felt fully that I belonged in one place,’’ he says. ‘‘I was brought up in the UK, but I also spent time in Baghdad, where my father worked as a doctor.’’ His parents were married, but they lived mostly in separate countries. His father was briefly imprisoned in Iraq in the 1970s, accused of being a British spy by the Ba’athist regime.
He had mixed feelings about the fall of the regime, but was appalled by the 2003 Iraq war and even unfurled a ‘‘No War for Oil’’ banner at the 2003 Oscars to prove a point. Did it harm his career? ‘‘It did for about five minutes,’’ he says. ‘‘The internet was awash with it. People telling me to, ‘Go throw yourself down the crack of doom!’ But that was all.’’
His mother died during the filming of the Apes movie. ‘‘I went through a really difficult time, to be honest,’’ he says. ‘‘I was far away from home and family, shooting in bleak conditions in a Canadian winter, and it became, for me, a really dark place. Just as Caesar was going down his own route to hell.’’ – The Times