12.15.02
By Devin Faraci
There is a lot to love in The Two Towers, but for my money it's easy to pick out the best thing in it: Gollum. An amazing creation of pixels and personality, Gollum is the first CG character that has character. He stole every scene he was in, and not through flashy animation but through the brilliant work of actor Andy Serkis.
The Two Towers is Serkis' first big role and ironically he is never really seen in it. But that isn't stopping New Line from pushing his performance as best of the year in the Oscar race.
Q: There's been talk of you being pushed for an Oscar nomination. Do you think that's plausible?
Serkis: That's a bit of an awkward one to start off with. I'll tell you what though, we were just talking about this. For instance, John Hurt was nominated under all that make-up for The Elephant Man.
Q: But he was onscreen. The Academy voters are - well, they're old farts. Do you worry that you are paving the way for the next digital character to get a nod, without getting one yourself?
Serkis: The way I look at it is: It's an acted role. I created the voice and the physicality and it's not latex stuck all over my face, it's pixels. It's like wearing virtual prosthetics.
Q: And you can see yourself in the character?
Serkis: Oh, majorly. The whole facial structure of the character is based around mine. I went through a long process - and that's the best way to go about it, I'll talk you through the whole thing. It is kind of a long thing, but if you bear with me it might demystify it all a bit.
It started with Peter's vision of Gollum as a CG character with an otherworldliness about him, but he wanted it to be completely actor-led. None of us knew how we would achieve that. It was going to be he wanted an actor playing him emotionally, psychologically, physically, making all those character decisions as an actor. We shot every single 
scene conventionally. I was there, you have the reciprocal energy you have as actors working off each. Which is something that had never been done before, I mean truly. Not just standing there being an eyeline, but real acting. We'd always shoot two versions - we would shoot a version with me in, and a version with me out, which left avenues to work on with the animators. One was that they rotoscoped, which is painting over me, frame by frame. So for instance, all the interactive stuff, me holding a cloak or pulling Frodo out of the water or the fight coming down off the rock, we did. They literally painted over every move.
In the version where I stepped out and did the voice off, there's this kind of void that they act to, which I then fill, in post-production - which I have been doing all this year - in the motion capture studio. Which is putting a suit with dots all over it; the dots refer to joints and whatnot, anything that can move. Those dots are picked up by cameras and fed into computers. We had the plates, the footage of what we shot, with the hole where I was, with Sean and Elijah looking down at me, and then onscreen I could see a computer generated image of Gollum. A very simplified mannequin of him which moved in real time to my movements. It could pick up incredibly sensitive movements. So if I moved my right arm the puppet on screen would move it at the same time. I redid every single scene, putting myself back into the void, acting off of Sean and Elijah.
Q: It's a very athletic looking role, did you have to train for it?
Serkis: As an actor I tend to play physical roles. That aspect was kind of there. I'm a rock climber, which is incredibly useful. And I have done a little bit of dance. In Topsy Turvy I played a choreographer, which I had to train a few months to do that. So there's a combination of a couple of different things. But mostly it was done kind of there, really. It's more to do with how he moves, it was kind of to do with the pain that I found in him. I wanted to find the kind of wear and tear on his body, and that's what motion capture can do versus key frame animation, where it kind of skates over. In motion capture you can just slip a bit, and that's real. It gives it that extra level of reality. It's quite subtle. If you're crawling 
along, which Gollum would be, and you trip over a rock, an animator might not think to put that in, but an actor gives it that kind of a weight, and he reacts to the environment much stronger.
And also the whole thing was that I played him like an addict. He's tortured and wrecked by this addiction, which is the ring. It's left him and he has that craving and lust, the desire to get it at all costs. He's a compulsive liar, he has the pathology of an addict. He's kind of schizophrenic.
Q: Is he one character in your mind or two?
Serkis: He's one character but he has different sides of his personality. It's like I'm schizophrenic, I know I am. I mean, most of us are, there are lots of little sides of our personality which rear up at different times of our lives. You know, get behind the wheel of a car and get into traffic and you're Gollum, and when you're home with your two year old child, you're Smeagol. That's something I really felt strongly about, from an audience point of view. You're going to spend a lot of time with this guy, you're going to need to not just think he's a black and white villain, you have to think that he's a real human being who is just tortured.
Q: Is doing the voice rough on your throat?
Serkis: I got used to it. My vocal chords are pieces of leather now. That was born out of a desire to find where his pain is trapped. Gollum is called Gollum because of the sound he makes. It's a constriction in his throat, and I wanted that constriction to be like a muscle memory. It's a sense memory of him killing his cousin to get the ring. I started thinking about the animal connection to that, because Tolkien describes him in animal terminology. I don't know if you have cats, but when they get furballs their whole body sort of convulses. [He makes a series of choking hairball sounds that morph into the "Gollum" sound]
Q: When you look onscreen and look at Gollum, do you see yourself?
Serkis: Totally. I think people who know me will know because they're all my expressions. Like my wife will know. It's modeled on my face.
Q: What role do you see Gollum playing in the films?
Serkis: He's an every man character in a way, he's the dark side of an every man character. In the way that Frodo that becomes the hero, he's inextricably linked to Frodo. As Gandalf said, one day Gollum will play a big part in the fate of the ring. Frodo's necessity to understand him is because Gollum is like this guy with a terminal disease and Frodo sees that's where he is going. They become very strongly linked. He's like a fallen angel, he's a Lucifer character. And in more Biblical terms, Cain and Abel. He killed his brother and is kind of almost rejected from Eden. The dark side is like the flip side of Frodo.
Q: We heard about a little film you did with Gollum being interviewed?
Serkis: Yeah, this is motion captures early this year. I can't wait to see it. It was like an E! interview. They talked about how Gollum prepared each day for work and then the phone rang and it was his agent who was just offered a reality TV program. Then Jar Jar phoned up, and he said [Gollum voice] "Hey Jar Jar, how're you doing?" And then Dobby popped up. He said he auditioned for Dobby but didn't have big enough ears.
Q: Were you familiar with the character before you started the movie?
Serkis: Yeah, I read the Hobbit when I was a kid. I remember him being terribly mysterious, Riddles in the Dark. He was sort of this slimy creature. But I hadn't read Lord of the Rings.
Originally the first phone call I got from my agent was, "Andy, do you want to do this voice over thing for three weeks in New Zealand?" That's how it worked. I go, "God this sounds pretty boring, what does an actor have to do to get a decent role?" And of course it was Gollum.
Q: When did you see Gollum? When did you know what he would look like?
Serkis: It's been kind of incremental. It's evolved. The whole face is now like my face. I had input in his skin being rubbed to shreds. I said, "He's crawling around all the time, you've got to see the wear and tear on his body, you have to see the callouses on his elbows and knees. I was influenced by Alan Lee's drawings. Plus they had all the conceptual art before I started principal photography. So there were whole rafts of prototypes of how he looked. But as I say that evolved along with my physicality and the voice.
Q: Peter told you right up front that you would never be seen on screen.
Serkis: Right. Except the transformation and that wasn't originally going to be in it.
Q: Did you have to give up some ego?
Serkis: One thing as an actor that you do, to get into a role, you have to assume total ownership of the character. When you're working in this way, it's much more collaborative. Forty animators are working on it, a whole load of other technicians are working on it. It isn't just coming from me - although it is coming from me - it's being massaged by other people, and not just the director. That was my main concern. But that has been a great lesson, because I've learned a huge amount of stuff. About the process of animation, about the whole motion capture thing.
Q: Speaking of the transformation, Gollum's origin was supposed to be in this movie, but has been cut. Are you annoyed at that?
Serkis: If I didn't know it was going to be in the third movie I would be. You get to see me onscreen, transforming into Gollum. He kills Deagol and then there's this whole descent into madness and you see him getting more and more decrepit until he turns into the CG Gollum. When Peter and Fran told me it wasn't going to be in this film, they thought it would fit better in the third one. In a way it's quite nice. It's almost like it will be a great reveal.