THE TRANSFORMER
TERRY MOTARY IS HOLLYWOOD'S GO-TO MOVEMENT GURU, INSTRUMENTAL IN THE CREATION OF EVERIYTHING FROM AVATAR'S NA'VI TO THE CALL OF THE WILD'S DOG. HE TELL IS EMPIRE HIS CHAMELEONIC SECRETS
IN THE BASEMENT CONFERENCE ROOM OF an upmarket West London hotel, a dozen actors and stuntpeople are charging around on all fours like damn dirty apes. The smell of sweat hangs in the air as they pound the carpet with the short, black crutches they’re using to extend their arms to simian lengths. Their teacher, a square-jawed man of 5’ 7” with expressive eyes, raises himself upright. “Now you’re tapping back into your roots,” says Terry Notary, encouragingly. “This is how we were designed.”
When he’s not running movement workshops like this one, Notary is one of the world’s leading performance-capture performers. Having started as an acrobat with Cirque du Soleil, he gracefully tumbled into acting when he was cast alongside other circus artists in Ron Howard’s 2000 film How The Grinch Stole Christmas. Notary took it upon himself to ensure all his fellow Whoville inhabitants moved in a consistent way. “Ron walked past and said, ‘I like what he’s doing,’” remembers Notary. “That’s how I got started as a movement coach.”
From there it was just a hop, skip and a performance-captured jump to providing the movements for a string of animals, aliens and monsters in Hollywood blockbusters ranging from Planet Of The Apes and Avatar to Kong:
Skull Island and Avengers: Infinity War. Usually cloaked behind CGI, Notary’s most visible onscreen role to date came in Ruben Östlund’s 2017 art-world satire The Square, in which he played a performance artist whose gorilla impersonation terrorises a gallery dinner party. “We never even rehearsed,” he says. “I just looked for the weakest people in the room, and I tortured them.”
That would have been extremely out of character for Notary, an observant and enthusiastic teacher. The day after his workshop, Notary meets Empire again for a shoot where he recreates some of the remarkable physical transformations he’s pulled off during his two decades in film. He switches effortlessly from a graceful Na’vi to an imposing Kong, and even without the assistance of CGI he so convincingly embodies lovable hound Buck, star of his most recent film The Call Of The Wild, that at one point our photographer instinctively lets slip a, “Good boy!”
Here Notary reveals how he pulled off some of his most memorable performances.
BUCK THE CALL OF THE WILD (2020)
Harrison Ford is no stranger to going off on adventures with a hairy, taciturn companion. For this adaptation of Jack London’s classic novel he was joined by Notary, whose on-set performance capture was used as the basis for a CG version of man’s best friend.
“On day one, Harrison Ford said to me, ‘I’m going to treat you like a dog,’ and I said, ‘Well, I’m gonna be your dog. Let’s do this!’ It didn’t feel weird at all. He just looked at me like a dog and that was it. Bam! I had six months of him patting my head and rubbing my belly. The biggest reward I got from that film was working with Harrison. I became a listener, like a dog would listen. I wanted to listen to his energy, because that’s what they do. They read inflection and they read facial expression and tone. There’s key words that kick in that they know, but really they’re reading the energy in your voice.
We had a really fun time together. I loved working with Omar Sy as well. It was fun to be really present as an actor for both of them. I studied my own dogs, videoing them on my iphone then putting it into slow motion and breaking down their movements. They run with the same arm and same leg together but when they trot it’s completely different. The biggest challenge for me was to drop into this big, sloppy puppy in the beginning, then to become this defeated, broken kid of a dog, then finally to grow into this dog who becomes the equal to this man, and they save each other. Those moments of growth were the best parts of the film for me.”
ROCKET RISE OF THE PLANET OF THE APES DAWN OF THE PLANET OF THE APES WAR FOR THE PLANET OF THE APES
Notary’s first involvement with Planet Of The Apes was as movement coach for Tim Burton’s 2001 iteration, but he made a greater impact a decade later with his performance-captured CGI role as Rocket alongside Andy Serkis’ Caesar in the rebooted franchise.
“On the Tim Burton movie I started off mimicking apes, going to the zoo and watching videos to study them, but I soon learned that’s exactly what not to do. One day two chimpanzees, Jacob and Jonah, came to the set because they were performing in the movie. One of them ran up, hugged me and looked me in the eyes. He scared me to death because he looked right into my soul. It made me rethink the whole thing. You don’t play an ape, you just undo the human.
The way apes move is incredibly economic. They’re incredibly grounded. It’s like shaking hands with a cool jazz musician. An old-school dude. You shake hands with him and he’s like, ‘Hey brother, how you doing?’ Straight away you’re down and in it. You feel this deep connection. That is how apes are. They’re living at a lower frequency. They’ve also got all those strong emotions, so they can bring it up and lose themselves in this high-frequency thing. They can become volatile in a second, which is cool because you’ve got this huge range of emotions that you can rip through. You can go from super-grounded and cool with a deep keel to, ‘RAHHH!’ in a minute. Andy [Serkis] is a dear friend. We’ve done ten films together, and we became family on the Planet Of The Apes films. It was seven years of bonding and learning. We all became better actors on those films.”
THE NA’VI AVATAR (2009)
Early in the production of James Cameron’s Avatar, the director approached Notary to help him figure out how blue-skinned Pandora natives the Na’vi should move through their lush jungle world.
“When I met Jim he showed me what the Na’vi were going to look like and the first thing I said was, ‘Oh, they’re gonna be so sinewy.’ I knew that everything they did had to fit with nature. When they land, for example, they roll and don’t leave a footprint. I went crazy studying lemurs. The way lemurs leap is amazing because there’s no stop and start. Everything is fluid, and I wanted the Na’vi to have that as well so they’d contrast with the humans. When the humans arrive it’s all angular, with lots of breaking and crushing.
“I trained with Zoe Saldana for about a month before I trained with everybody else. She got super into it. We developed all these beautiful ways of landing and continuing our movements so everything flowed. It was cool working with Sigourney Weaver too because she went from this clunky scientist character to her avatar. I got a pole with a piece of bungee on it and had her attached to the end. I was following her along and lifting her up, and she’d go, ‘This is amazing, I feel so light!’ I studied films of birds so I could play the banshees. I basically got some pool noodles and held them out while I was laying on a table. Jim had my feet and he would rudder them as we were flying, going, ‘Bank left! Bank right!’ He’d grab my legs and go, ‘Ready? Start flapping!’”
THE ALIEN ATTACK THE BLOCK (2011)
Unlike the performance-capture work for which he’s best known, Notary’s role as the lead alien in Joe Cornish’s South London sci-fi romp required him to don a weighty physical costume, which appeared on screen, albeit with added post-production effects to make the creature seem even more otherworldly.
“Joe and I met on The Adventures Of Tintin. Spielberg teamed us up to come up with gags, then Joe told me he was writing this film. He didn’t tell me at that point how uncomfortable it would be! That was one heck of a suit, with a big animatronic head. The whole thing was made out of yak hair, which I constantly had stuck to my face. I couldn’t see or hear anything. It was a big deal to take the head off, so they just got a beanbag for me to crash on. People would come by and go, ‘Are you okay in there?’ and I’d lift my right hand for, ‘Yes.’ ‘Would you like some water?’ Lift the right hand. The straw would come through this little slit and poke me in the eye. ‘Lower!’ Finally I’d fish the straw into my mouth and suck down as much water as I could, but then I’d never pee! That’s how much I was sweating. I’d put the suit on the next morning and it would still be soaking wet. Glamorous!
“It was a fun movie, though, it really was. For the way the aliens move, I decided that the same arm and leg should move together because it gave you a moment of suspension. It gave the aliens this stealthy look, as if they were pulling the ground beneath them.
“I remember watching John Boyega and turning to Joe and saying, ‘That kid is going to be the next Denzel Washington.’ He just had the gravitas, even at that young age.”
THE CLOWN THE CABIN IN THE WOODS (2012)
For Drew Goddard’s meta horror mash-up, Notary took on a dual role. He worked as a movement coach for all the nightmarish characters that are unleashed at the film’s conclusion, while also personally playing the terrifying clown with a rictus grin.
“I never really knew about coulrophobia, the fear of clowns, until I worked on that film. I was in the make-up chair and then came out and walked through this big group of people. I was doing movement coaching with all the extras, but I was already in make-up as the clown. This extra saw me and dropped to her knees and just started freaking out. I was like, ‘Oh my God!’ and started to go to her to help her. Of course that was the worst thing I could do. People were going, ‘Get away! It’s you she’s afraid of!’ I was like, ‘Oh my God, I’m so sorry!’ She had to leave the set, it was that big of a deal. I was just walking by, I wasn’t even doing anything.
“That film was crazy. We had so many extras and I only had a few minutes with each of them. There’d be a ballet dancer dancing in this giant pool of blood and then people with severed heads, all this kind of stuff. I was running around like a one-eyed dog in a meat shop, going nuts because they’d brought me in two days before we were shooting. The thing about the clown is that there’s just complete and utter tension everywhere in his body. You could see it etched across his face. It was truly a tortured existence where you’d keep getting caught in these little corners of yourself. It was like a bad trip.”
KONG KONG: SKULL ISLAND (2017)
In Jordan Vogt-roberts’ Vietnam War-era monster reboot, Notary finally got the chance to play the king of all movie monkeys.
“The most exhausting scene I’ve ever done in my life was the scene where Kong is covered in napalm and burning. I had to pretend to burn 12 times in a row, with all the thrashing around and screaming. I was so sore the next day. I’ve done a lot of physical stuff, but that scene in particular was just wrenching. At the same time, it was really fun to get into the mo-cap suit and jam with Jordan. I could look at every shot as we were doing it and make adjustments. It’s all about the subtleties.
“For me, finding that character was about realising I should play him as a 14-year-old boy who was downtrodden and had the weight of the world on his shoulders, but he had this duty to protect. When I was preparing I watched all the previous Kong movies, and I saw what not to do as well as what to pay homage to. You want to pay homage to the icon of it, but you also want to come up with something new and original and for it to be your own thing. The biggest thing was the size. He’s 80 feet tall. I was walking across the floor and I suddenly realised: ‘I need little trees.’ They put all these little palm trees and little humans down so that I’d have a sense of scale. It was fun to play an 80-foot character, but there’s a lot of mass and gravitas that comes with that. There was a lot of bruising your chest all day.”
CULL OBSIDIAN AVENGERS: INFINITY WAR (2018), AVENGERS: ENDGAME (2019)
Every supervillain needs henchpeople, and it was Notary who brought to life the most physically imposing of Thanos’ adoptive children by providing a performance later overlaid with CGI.
“The best part about Cull Obsidian was jamming with him to discover who he was. We didn’t want him to just be this big, brutish guy. All of a sudden I said, ‘He needs to talk!’ I realised that he needed to have a language so that you can see he’s got some cognitive ability in there and he’s not just muscle. I was thinking about how he would speak and I just started riffing like [starts speaking in what sounds like the Devil’s voice played backwards]. I was just doing that, and from hearing his voice that’s how I figured out how he would move. I wanted to go for an alien feeling: a cutting, not-pretty language that had ‘malintent’ written all over it. And selfishness, even though as a character he was totally the right-hand man to Josh [Brolin] and his whole character as Thanos. The language was really the thing that shaped him.
“He was a similar character to Kong, because it was all about getting that weight. It’s all about the mass, the heavy weight and the thickness of his physicality. I find that the hardest thing to achieve with mo-cap when you’re playing a big, heavy character is not breaking out into pedestrian movement. You’ve got to move as if you’re dragging an anchor, and you’ve got to keep that anchor towed the whole time to give the character weight. That’s the big challenge. He wasn’t a very huge part in the movie, but he was fun to play.”