The Film Forum

Return of the 'King': Q&A With Andy Serkis

By Tom DiChiara

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Unless you're a devotee of '13 Going on 30,' in which Andy Serkis plays Jennifer Garner's gay boss, chances are you wouldn't recognize the English actor if he sat on your lap. And yet Serkis has portrayed two of the most memorable characters to grace the big screen this millennium: the scenery-and-raw-fish-chewing Gollum in Peter Jackson's 'Lord of the Rings' trilogy and the titular 25-foot-tall gorilla in 2005's 'King Kong,' also directed by Jackson. Although both are CGI characters created in virtual reality, the performances are all Serkis. Using motion-capture technology, Jackson harnessed the actor's mannerisms, facial expressions and even the sound of his voice to create inhuman creatures that evoke undeniably human emotions. Exhibit A: A tender look shared by Serkis' super-sized simian and Naomi Watts is enough to make a grown man weep. We talked to the man behind the ridiculously large ape to find out how he prepared for the role, what the biggest challenges were, and what Peter Jackson's idea of "monkeying around" really is.

What was your response when Peter Jackson came to you and asked you to play a 25-foot gorilla?
Well, we were still shooting 'Return of the King' when rumors started flying about Peter doing 'Kong,' and I thought, wow, that would be great. I was hoping, but I didn't hear anything for awhile. Then Peter called me up one day and invited me over his house. It was my birthday, actually -- April 20th, 2003, to be exact. And he said to me, "How would you like to take everything we've learned with Gollum -- with the CGI and the motion capture -- and apply it to Kong?" And I said, "Well, of course." I'm not going to turn that down. But I was scared, you know. A big part of Gollum's character and his agenda is revealed through his dialogue, and we weren't going to have that here. So I was a little worried that we'd be able to pull it off, that we'd be able to convey the relationship with just the CGI expressions. Peter convinced me that we could.

Did you have any specific sources of inspiration for Kong's very realistic ape-like mannerisms? I understand you based Gollum's cough on the sound of your cats hacking up fur balls, but I'm assuming you didn't have any gorillas running around in your backyard to use for inspiration?
Ha. No, that was my neighbors. Well, I knew nothing of gorillas at the time. So over the course of three months I watched every documentary I could and just looked at their habits and their mannerisms. One of the first things I said to Peter was that in the 1933 version they had Kong walking on two legs. I thought that to be more realistic we should have Kong walking on all fours. I also worked with trainers at the zoo for a while and observed the gorillas' daily habits, how they ate, slept, picked the bugs off each other. I sank myself into gorilladom for a number of months. And that was a wonderful part of the job. It was a very exciting experience.

You said that not being able to express yourself through dialogue was very tough. Was that the biggest challenge in playing 'Kong' or was it the fact that you had to do a lot of the acting in a motion-capture suit away from other actors?
The great thing about Peter is that he realizes there's no point in making these films with CG characters like Kong if the audience doesn't believe the central relationship between Kong and Anne. You've got to have two actors playing opposite each other to create the real dramatic impulses in the film. Otherwise, if the audience doesn't buy that, there's no point in spending time on anything else. So every single scene was shot, acted opposite Naomi Watts on set for real. And all the subtle shifts in their relationship, all the changes, the way it happens, the action between them we played for real. I was lifted up on cranes and scissor lifts. I used this big sound system, which projected my voice through these massive speakers, to give Kong's kind of vocalizations presence on set. And then, after principal photography ended, I went to the motion-capture stage and reworked ... Basically, I was off-camera for like four-and-a-half months and then went to the motion-capture stage and put the suit on with the dots -- 132 facial markers -- and then we shot Kong's close-ups, in essence, or experimented with his side of the story. And it was all very linked. The relationship was the thing we strived to make most real. To answer your original question: Yes, the most difficult thing was, I suppose, deciding how much we humanize him and how much do we keep him as a gorilla, so we didn't spoon-feed the audience into having to understand every single emotion. That rather left it open, allowed them to do some of the work, to understand the relationship themselves by projecting their own set of emotions onto it.

Do you have a favorite Peter Jackson story?
He's a wonderful prankster, Pete. He actually did this great thing when ... Sam Neill was being given a tribute in Australia, I think. And Sam Neill's house is just kind of up from where Peter lives in Wellington, New Zealand. Peter actually had a tape sent over to the tribute in Sydney, where it was being presented, of Sam's house on fire -- which was created by WETA Digital. And it had been broken into by all these guys. Peter had all his furniture taken out, and WETA Digital put all these flames in -- and had Sam Neill kind of watch his house on fire. That's kind of classic Pete, really. He likes to play around.

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