|
|
|
ANDY SERKIS on 'KING KONG'
Contributed by Michael J. Lee, Executive Editor
for Radio Free Entertainment
December 1, 2005
In Peter Jackson's 2005 remake of the film classic King Kong, the team behind The Lord of the Rings pulls together all the tricks of the trade to create a spectacle of story and effects. Naomi Watts stars as Ann Darrow, the iconic beauty to King Kong's beast. An out-of-work actress in Depression-era New York, Ann meets up with fast-talking filmmaker Carl Denham (Jack Black) and writer Jack Driscoll (Adrien Brody) and lands the lead in their latest production, a shadily financed project shot on Skull Island, a mysterious land that time forgot filled with prehistoric creatures and unspeakable dangers. It is in this perilous domain that Kong first falls under the spell of Ann, and is eventually captured and brought to New York, where he meets his tragic fate at the hands of mankind.
In this interview, actor Andy Serkis, whose performance is digitized into the Kong of the big screen, talks about the making of this motion picture epic.
|
The Interview
|
MEDIA: The scene with Kong and Ann on the ice was your idea?
ANDY: The true way that it happened was, we were experimenting with how Kong reacted to being put in the middle of Times Square...When he bursts out of the theater, he's suddenly in this envrionment which is freezing cold, and he's got this slippery stuff that he's never encountered before having come from a tropical rainforest. And so I started experimenting with him slipping and sliding...And it was Pete's idea to actually take that and make it into a scene between. He always had this intention of creating a scene between Ann and Kong which turned into this magical sort of moment in Central Park, and it was originally going to be a Christmas tree and him playing with the lights...an innocence about it. So we transposed my idea and had Kong slipping on this ice with the Ann Darrow character, and that became the fleeting moment of reprieve before the attack ensues.
Can you talk about how you did research for your role by observing real gorillas?
Sure. I spent a lot of time at Regents Park Zoo with the four gorillas there. There were three females and one male, and one of the females was called Zaire, who I particularly formed a relationship with. And you know, the thing about gorillas in captivty is that they reflect human behavior a lot more than gorillas in the wild. That's one of the things I was to discover, because they're surrounded by human beings from birth. But Zaire, this gorilla...She chose me. She beckoned me over and we got on very, very well. The male of the group, Bob, didn't like me at all. He intimidated me on a number of occasions. He had been brought up in a circus with chimpanzees, and so he didn't have the social etiquette to know how to be an alpha male with these three females. So they found it frustrating, he found it frustrating, and I was in the middle. And so he'd take it out on me a bit. He threw a whole pile of rubble right at me when I had my video camera on him, and it scratched the lense of my camera. So anyway, I spent two months at London Zoo, and then I had the chance to go to Rwanda, and seeing them in the wild is just another thing all together. It was quite magical really. And to have nothing between you and them is phenomenal. They spotted me immediately as the odd man in the group because they hadn't seen me before and were very curious with me...So they would come up and be very curious with me and then one or two of them who were a bit more cheeky, kind of the young adolescents.
Did you ever feel in danger?
I didn't feel so much in danger because I had been grilled in etiquette and how to respond, but there was a charge by one silverback that took me so by surprise because they're so fast and there's very, very little warning. And it's all in the eyes. They avert their gaze, and then suddenly they're off. [snaps fingers] And it's like naught to sixty in nothing. And then they stand their ground and they're very rigid and they strut and then they rise up and they beat their chests. And they beat their chests with open hands as opposed to clenched fists, which is what they did in the original King Kong, because they have inflated chest sacs, which, when they hoot, opens up. And it sounds like a drum. Then they beat their hands 17 times a second. And that can be quite scary. But you're supposed to not move. You're supposed to defer. But it's all bluff. It's all display, unless you transgress that. And then you're a fool. [laughs]
As sort of a pioneer in motion capture acting, what do you think of the competition?
Well, Lord of the Rings...Gollum and Kong are both photo-real characters. I, Robot was as well. But Polar Express was slightly differnent. It was a much more animated style, so it was slightly different to what we were doing, although I think that was the first film to use facial motion capture for capturing actors' facial performances. But with this, obviously, it's not trying to replicate a human face. The difference between the way we captured the facial expressions with this and Gollum was, with Gollum, my performance was shot on 35mm film and the animators copied my facial expressions and key frame animated that. With this, it was directly from 132 markers on my face, which then drove the CG face of Kong. And of course with some, the animators then enhanced that and augmented...Particularly a lot of muscle movement, because that's very hard to do as a human being, the way that the jaw moves. But the eyes particularly represent the acting choices that I made. And the whole physicality of the way that Kong is and his personality is portrayed through performance capture.
Did actors play the dinos?
Well, the T-Rex fight sequence is, I would say, predominantly an animator's domain. What we did was to facially motion capture the entire fight, and then they basically took off my face and stuck it onto the key frame animated fight. I did some sequences with stuntmen, but very little for the actual T-Rex fight. Some for when he's hanging, to get the physics of him actually hanging and trying to get back up. And also the dramatic beats through a fight. Obviously, a fight sequence is also telling a story and there's a progression through that, so all the closeups of the face when he's being bitten...all those performance moments. But the actual physics of fighting with the three dinosaurs, that was one area that was particularly key frame animated because of the interaction with other CG characters.
Did they give you a little Naomi Watts doll to toss around?
Yeah, I had several different Barbie dolls which were weighted with lead shot, and then a rag doll weighted with lead shot that I could actually push with my fingers and pick up. The motion capture phase...There are two stages to creating the character. One is obviously the on-set performance and working opposite Naomi, and that was crucial for her performance and for synchronizing our performances so that we were playing very specific moments together. That everything that I was doing she was able to respond to, everything that she was doing I was able to respond to. In the same way that any acted performance would be, working with someone on the other side of the camera. Peter's prime aim to have an actor play Kong was so that the actress playing Ann Darrow didn't have to imagine what Kong would be like. She wouldn't have to make decisions for what he might be doing. I was doing those things, and Naomi could respond to it. And she, being the actress that she is, was phenomenally adept. She's an amazing, amazing actress and wanted the connection. I mean, had it been any other actress who wasn't interested in forming a connection but just wanting to do a performance by herself, I think it wouldn't have worked, because it is all about the connection between the characters. And Naomi's one of the best actresses of her generation as far as I'm concerned. It was a pleasure and an honor to work with [her]...But the second part was then, having shot the scenes on set with Naomi, was to then...When we came to the motion capture, I got a chance to experiment with the personality and the character of Kong. So I would then work off her shots, her closeups. I was looking down at monitors and for the less physical scenes where I could be static, sat down. When Kong is sitting down a lot and he's got Ann in his hands or he's looking down at her. I would play specifically to her shots. And that's how we synchronized the performances.
As the crewman Lumpy, you get to have a glorious death scene.
Yeah. Of course, I had to imagine all of that. I didn't have the six-foot maggot thing there to play with, but I had some actors holding my arms and pulling me down and pulling me in. And then I just had to imagine this huge Freudian [laughs] thing suck the life blood out of me. But Lumpy's a sort of character who'd keep fighting to the last.
Was playing Kong more difficult than playing Gollum?
Immensely more difficult. So much of Gollum was his voice and the way he spoke. And the character kind of emmanted from this. And the physicality came out of the voice. I had to get myself into a certain physical position to make that voice really work. And he explains about himself to other people, his predicament, and he talks to himself. And that was one of the biggest challenges, was how we were going to convey that range of emotions with a character like Kong. Of course, once I started researching gorillas and found out that they use a lexicon of vocalizations, that was the key into it. They sing, they chuckle, they have very specific ways of communicating within a group.
How would you characterize Kong?
Someone described him--and I think it's quite a cool way of looking at him--as an old psychotic hobo. I mean, he really is. Although it's in a gorilla's innate desire to connect with other beings, he's just not used to it. The only contact he has is with creatures that are trying to attack him or threaten him, or creatures that are screaming at him. And then he doesn't know how to deal with them. And so we found that Ann Darrow's strength is humor. Her character is an actress, is used to entertaining people and making people laugh, and that's her way of surviving. And that's the way that she engages Kong. And gorillas have a sense of humor. They do. They have a huge range of emotions. And finding the humor there was a big, big key into their relationship.
What was your reaction when you saw the completed movie for the first time last night?
I'm still recovering from it, really. I've lived and breathed every single moment of that character for such a long time now, and I've seen it change incrementally from the CG, the motion capture puppet, and then the slight renderings and the layers and the levels. Three weeks ago, it still wasn't finished and I was recording the final vocal tracks. And then last night seeing...I have to watch it again. I was so overwhelmed. That was such an assault on the senses all around. And I'm really dying to see it again as quickly as possible...Because you just pick everything apart when you're watching your own performances. It was very hard last night to get really emotionally carried along by it, because I was being a bit analytical, I suppose.
Was there a particular scene you were excited to see?
Yeah, the scene in the lair, which is a very quiet scene between [Ann] and Kong, where he's brought her back to his lair, and there's a slight unease about their relationship and she tries to attract his attention and then he's looking out and she says it's beautiful. And just the way that scene plays out and the way that she engages him, and that he eventually welcomes her. That I remember being very powerful on the day when we shot it and when I recreated it on the motion capture stage. So that lived up to my expectations, I think. I was pleased with that.
Do you see more motion capture acting in your future?
Well, I don't see the difference between flesh and blood and motion capture. For me, acting's acting. And what I've done with Gollum and Kong is no different to any other character I've ever played. It's acting. I don't like cut out a chunk of my flesh and blood mode, put it on a hanger, and insert ones and nots and do a different type of [acting]. It's just acting to me. So it's all to do with character and script. If someone came up and said, now here's a great CG role, and I read it and I thought the script's amazing, it wouldn't make any difference to me.
What kind of monkey suit did you wear while performing?
There were two suits that I wore. One on set, which was a gorilla muscle suit, and that was for performance for me, really, just to make me feel weightier and heavier. And I used arm extensions sometimes, and I wore gorilla dentures. And I had a full kind of crest. But it was the muscles as opposed to the fur. I wasn't wearing a furry monkey suit. And then on the motion capture stage, I had a very, very skin tight fitted suit, because you need it to be for all the markers to stay in one position and not move as all the markers transmit that information to the cameras.
Thanks for your time.
Thank you.
|
|
|
