ANDY SERKIS: In fact there was more because really (pause) How do I start? You’ll have to excuse me because you’re my prototype. This is the early days, so I’m just getting my pitch straight, okay.
CHRIS NEUMER: Well, hey, I like that. I might get something different than you would get on the red carpet.
ANDY SERKIS: (laughs) Exactly. Look, I mean, when he asked me to do it, asked me to do Kong, I think that one of the first things I said was that it’s gonna be tricky because Gollum was a very well realized, well written character and he speaks, he conveys thoughts and when he talks to himself, you get to know his personality. How are we going to do this? And I think really, that the only way into it for me was to research gorillas and one sparked off the other. The understanding of the studying of the language of gorilla behavior and psychology would then trigger off the idiosyncrasy of Kong as a character, his true character, his true nature. That was my way in and the fact that I needed to look at gorillas, one in captivity and one in the wild to really find out more about them, to see how they reflected human behavior. And I suppose that the journey which has kind of a bit ensued has been about deciding how we tell the story of Kong. Do we ask for more fighting do we make him more human so that the audience can read his emotions or do we go the other way and provide the audience with pure gorilla behavior and let them imagine, in the same way that we do when we watch them and what they are thinking and feelings because those are very enigmatic qualities that they have? And there’s something - we recognize ourselves in gorillas and they are genetically similar the same as us and you know, there are many behavioral aspects which are similar, but we never really truly know what they’re thinking in the same way you can never really tell these words that they communicate. You don’t really know what they’re thinking. You think that you know what they’re thinking, but...
CHRIS NEUMER: I usually just assume that it has something to do with food. That’s just my general opinion. What conclusion did you come to in that perspective?
ANDY SERKIS: Well, I think, what Kong is driving, or the thing that really drives Kong is, as with any gorilla, is a primal search for communication with another being and preferably one that isn’t going to attack him or kill him or you know try to do something bad to him. I mean, forgetting the fact that he’s a 25 foot gorilla on an island that’s populated by dinosaurs, he is the last of his species and gorillas are by habit social creatures and he is a lonely and isolated and pretty haunted gorilla because he has no group and gorillas are very social animals and that was one of the things that I observed and the difference between the gorillas in captivity and gorillas in the wild. You know, when you see them in the wild, amongst a group, they behave in a totally different way than in a lot of zoos. You see animals that are very introspective and quite depressed or quite tense and they’re reflecting the behavior of, whereas if they’re in their own group they’re very peaceful. I went to Rwanda and watched the African gorillas and just seeing them all together was extraordinary. It was like a living example of how a community should be. It was extraordinary. So, yes, Kong’s driving force is to find connection and that was what we discovered in the process of finding out who the character was and I say that because when Pete first started pre-visioning Kong, when he started designing Kong, you know how it should look and certain shots in the action sequences, it was a blocking for what the character would be he had a sense of his strong senses and who he thought he was and throughout the filming process he was working with Naomi Watts, who was extraordinary, and we would play our scenes out and of course we couldn’t speak to each other, but we still meant to get inside of each other’s heads basically through my physical body language and through her response to that and then at the end of that after principal photography, I spent two months solid doing the motion capture, just by myself and during that time we really found out who he was. And Kong, as a character, what we’ve arrived at is an alpha male gorilla who’s kind of lost his, uh, he’s out of shape, he’s like an aged boxer, who’s taken too many hits and he’s a bit out of shape really and you know, he’s quite closed off and in fact, his connection with Anne brings back his downfall in life. Because his way of dealing with any other living being is with violence. It’s being attacked by a dinosaur, or you know, or a T-Rex or a pterodactyl or whatever and it’s about defense in the jungle, but here’s this creature that he actually wants to take care of and it actually causes him confusion, but at the same time he wants to go away and it brings about his downfall, so there are elements of a very guarded male psyche really and an armored, sort of uber-male psyche and then what he becomes, is, he’s rendered defenseless by his will to connect.
CHRIS NEUMER: Funny though, how the beautiful woman has something to do with his downfall.
ANDY SERKIS: Oh yeah.
CHRIS NEUMER: Very true to life, I suppose.
ANDY SERKIS: The thing was, and I really do believe this, the way we’re doing this, the kind of conceptuality, it’s not really played up, it’s more of a connection to the human being. It could well have been, it could have been a man that he connected to, it’s not necessarily, and the whole kind of blonde girl, being different from the other girls, who are off there that isn’t something that plays in our film.
CHRIS NEUMER: I understand, although I must admit that my mind did drift to the sort of headlines of you know, The Washington Times or some of the more conservative-American papers, if Kong came out and was sort of attracted to say, Adrien Brody or Jack Black, as opposed to Naomi Watts.
ANDY SERKIS: (laughs) Well, you hear what I’m saying?
CHRIS NEUMER: Oh, no, I do, I do. And I just had this thought, which is sort of an interesting aside, imagine that the White House tries to actually create controversial movies so that they can release them at just the proper time to take away from some awful thing that’s happening, some new scandal. Changing subjects though, there was actually a film that came out a couple years ago, it was called Human Nature, with Tim Robbins and Rhys Ifans and a couple of other people and I don’t know if you’re familiar with it?
ANDY SERKIS: I haven’t seen it.
CHRIS NEUMER: Well, Rhys played a guy that was sort of a feral human, if you will…
ANDY SERKIS: Oh, yeah!
CHRIS NEUMER: And he had sort of just been raised in the jungle and didn’t speak and just sort of grunted and Tim Robbins is sort of a pseudo-anthropologist and brings him in and tries to teach him the manners of human nature I suppose and it all just degenerates down into him being this giant Id. So most of the time it featured him like humping waitresses and things like this. Did you ever toy with the idea of Kong being a big Id or was there something that you put into your performance so that that wasn’t the case? Delicately.
ANDY SERKIS: Yeah, very delicately. I think that I’d say that…God, (stammers) I don’t know how to answer that, honestly. I really don’t know how I’d answer that. Kong is representative of a true heart I think. He’s more like Lenny in Of Mice and Men.
CHRIS NEUMER: Okay, simply good hearted.
ANDY SERKIS: He’s savage and he’s wild and he’s capable of huge amounts of aggression, which is sort of how gorillas are. But, he at the same time is quite capable of slowing down the group if one of them are ill or if there’s a female in the group that’s dying, then he’ll slow the whole group down and make sure that that female can keep up, you know, they are socially minded in that way. I think somewhere in his deep memory, that is what drives him and so, it’s a desire to connect.
CHRIS NEUMER: Looking back at the other interviews that you had done, you used a quote and I thought that it seemed perfect for this. It was in reference to, I can’t remember if it was on 13 Going on 30 or Topsy Turvy, but you had said that your version on acting was normalizing the extreme and I thought, "Wow, if you’re playing a thirty-foot ape, that seems to do a very subtle job of communicating some of the stresses necessary. As an actor, was there anything conscious that you did--and this could have been while acting opposite like human actors on set or while you were doing motion capture--in order to normalize the experience of playing a thirty-foot gorilla for audiences?
ANDY SERKIS: Well, that’s a good question. I mean, during the motion capture process we spent so much time playing every single scene out in a very big spectrum, you know, so we’d play in completely gorilla, we’d play in very oblique, you know, it would be all of the mannerisms would be totally improvisations. Everything would be total gorilla and then in some scenes we’d play completely the opposite, I’d almost be like Mike Tyson, coming off of a fight, you know.
CHRIS NEUMER: Wait. What was the first one you tried? Totally gorilla?
ANDY SERKIS: Well, we would play the gorilla behavior card, right down to the true…
CHRIS NEUMER: Is there anything specific when you say that? Is it like dragging knuckles or heavy elbows or something?
ANDY SERKIS: I suppose it’s like, it’s a detachment or a sense of detachment, when they’re looking at you, they look at you like you don’t know…they look away, and they avert their gaze and they’ll flick an eye over or you know something like that. For instance, finding ways of looking at Naomi while we were working, rather than just staring at her all the time, you know, how much does he hold a gaze or how much does she look up at him, because really, there are moments where their eyes do meet, which should be powerful and if you can play that as a human, you can. If it were the Disney version, you’d have him looking into her eyes all the time, but actually it’s allowing the audience to experience what Anne is feeling and allowing them to do some of the detective work was my kind of big choice, really. When I was doing the gorilla behavior, to let the audience do the emoting really.
CHRIS NEUMER: Now, when you played it from a broad spectrum of perspectives, for lack of a better word, which particular way that you played it seemed to work best for you? Like when you understand the character, which way did you like when the character is played?
ANDY SERKIS: It was interesting because in certain scenes it would work in different elements of the spectrum would work better. In a sense, the most dramatically connected that Anne and Kong were, the more oblique I would play it.
CHRIS NEUMER: Now, when you say oblique, you mean what exactly?
ANDY SERKIS: Well, I mean detached. A gorilla doesn’t really express emotion in the same way that human beings do. They’re quite enigmatic, you know, you’re not quite really sure. Yes, they laugh and they smile and they sing, but those are an encoded language, and that’s why I learned all of their vocalizations. They do sing and they do belch vocalizations and they grunt when they…
CHRIS NEUMER: They belch as a way of communication?
ANDY SERKIS: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it’s a kind of (makes guttural grunting noise) kind of thing. That means, "I’m alright and you’re okay." And then when they’re reprimanding a gorilla, there’s a series of short staccato, (makes a few woofing noises), kind of thing that they do. (laughs) I’m giving away all of my trade secrets here.
CHRIS NEUMER: Good thing I’m not trying out for that next gorilla commercial, I could’ve been. Now, how close to did you actually get to the gorillas when you were out there in the wild?
ANDY SERKIS: Oh, like no inches away. You were supposed to keep a seven meters exclusion zone for their protection because gorillas can catch diseases because they’re so close, genetically, to us, but they would come up to you and they would habituate in groups, the ones that we were tracking.
CHRIS NEUMER: Did they ever give you the advice of like if they start charging you to either stand still or not make eye contact or any of that kind of stuff?
ANDY SERKIS: Yeah, act submissively. Yeah, like you must never try to run, which is very difficult to do, ‘cause there would be, on occasion, that they made a couple of bluff charges and you are rigid in spot and your instinct is so to turn and run for your life, but you don’t. So, it was the most extraordinary time really, just watching them.
CHRIS NEUMER: I had a friend who had done this and I’ve certainly done some reading on it, but I’m always impressed by, when you read anything about the way whatever it is, a pride of gorillas or flock of gorillas…
ANDY SERKIS: It’s a group.
CHRIS NEUMER: A group of gorillas, I like the alliteration. Whenever you read about it, you come up with like five things that they’re doing that you probably could be doing better in your own life. You’re like, "Man, this is just bothering me, that look at how well they communicate." Did you ever get a sense of anything like that watching the gorillas, that they’re doing something better than we as humans are currently doing?
ANDY SERKIS: Yeah, the whole kind of social grooming, it’s just fantastic. (laughs) It’s fantastic to watch. They do this, you know, you’ve seen it, you’ve seen footage of them doing it, but actually just seeing a whole bunch of them sitting around taking salt off the other’s backs or you know, getting rid of dust and dirt, fleas and bits and pieces. You know, just peeling back the fur and just getting in there. Their rhythm is, like mountain gorillas in particular, their rhythm is fantastically kind of relaxed and it’s like they’re having this big party in a huge salad bowl 14,000 feet up a mountain. You know, they get up, they have a wander around, they have a bit of lunch, they eat all of the time and then they have a siesta. (laughs) Then dad gets up and says, okay it’s time to move and they all move. And there’s a real flow to the day and it’s very relaxed. They’re a great similarity. It’s just like a perfect working society. And the clear hierarchy really seems to work. And then the natural order of things when the hierarchy is challenged and somebody moves up. I don’t know, I think the grooming thing, that really…and then the food, and like you said, the food, is a big part of it. They just sit there and chew away, but it’s just incredibly peaceful.
CHRIS NEUMER: Now, touching on something else that you said tellingly before, that you didn’t see any difference between doing CG acting work and non-CG acting work. At first, I was sort of on the fence. I don’t know, even though I’ve been writing about films for nearly ten years and talked to God knows how many actors, I don’t know how you guys do what you do. You know, I guess the closest that I would come to acting would be lying to my girlfriend on a rare occasion and it’s like, I freeze, I sweat, you know, it’s like I can’t do this on command. You say that and I can see it, but on the other hand it’s sort of like I could also understand how people could assume that they would be different from a work perspective of what you’re doing, you’re acting, you’re in character, you’re doing the same thing, it’s a repetitive action as one person, but on the other hand the end result on screen looks much different in certain cases than you would and I could sort of understand how it could go both ways. But, I was curious to know are you ever tempted to, or do you ever try to get into the post houses that are working on your characters and sort of look over people’s shoulders and be like, "No, no, no, no, get the shoulder up just a little bit more."?
ANDY SERKIS: Sure. That’s very much the process and has been with Gollum and with Kong, it’s not like a divorced thing. I mean, the acting of it, there is no difference. You’re inhabiting a character, you’re finding a psychology, a physicality, an emotional range for the part. You know, when someone calls, "Action," you’re in side it, and regard it for fact that you are using your imagination in a sense to a greater extent because you’re not aided by any externals. But, the actual manifestation at the end, the process is kind of back and forth with the team that’s surrounding it. I work very closely with the animators when I was doing the Lord of the Rings and with Kong too and with the motion capture team who are analyzing movement and capturing data. You know, "Let’s give his back slightly a bit more of sway back and see how that works." They, on the spot, can adjust the character map that you’re working in real time to. So, I can have the forearm straightened and made more rigid and then that becomes my new character puppet because in real time I can see what’s going on. It’s like altering your costume as you’re going along.
CHRIS NEUMER: That’s right, ‘cause you’d be wearing pixels and not latex.
ANDY SERKIS: That’s right.
