From Gollum, to King Kong, to Caesar, DAWN OF THE PLANET OF THE APES star Andy Serkis has mastered the art of performance-capture characters and taught the world that it is performance, not just visual effects. Here’s how he does it!
STUDYING HARD
Serkis always does thorough research. For example, when playing King Kong he “went all out to play the psychology and the DNA of a pure gorilla,” studying the behaviour of real gorillas. For Caesar on RISE OF THE PLANET OF THE APES, he closely looked at Oliver, the ‘humanzee’, a real-life chimpanzee with a rare genetic mutation that appeared to be a chimp-human hybrid
FINDING THE PHYSICALITY
Working closely with celebrated movement choreographer Terry Notary (who also plays chimp Rocket), Serkis made sure on both RISE OF THE PLANET OF THE APES and DAWN that every gesture and movement would ring true as that of a real chimpanzee. On RISE especially, this particularly involved the mastery of quadrupedding (moving swiftly around on forearm extenders). Serkis has to be at the peak of physical fitness for this, which was something of a challenge on RISE, given he joined the production at short notice and hadn’t had time to train; “it was a real shock to the system,” he admitted, “my body was broken after the first week!”
TOTAL IMMERSION
Typically, performance-capture gear involves Serkis wearing a grey unitard covered in sensors, which are picked up by specialized cameras and fed to the animators at Weta Digital. Then he wears a head-rig which has a facial-capture camera mounted on it, and reference-marker dots painted all over his face. It isn’t particularly comfortable, or flattering; Serkis has joked that it makes him look like a character from TRON. Despite all that, though, he totally immerses himself in his performance — he becomes the ape — and that’s not just body and facial movement, it’s also vocalization. Even when Caesar isn’t speaking English, all the grunts and whoops are Serkis’ own. “The whole point of using performance capture is that you’re using all aspects of the performance,” says Serkis. “When you get the breath, the sound of the vocalization, that is our dialogue. It’s the way chimps behave. If you took that away, you’d take away half the performance”
CAPTURING THE SOUL
When Serkis was recently brought in as a consultant on Gareth Edwards’ GODZILLA, it was to, as the director said, “help find the soul” of his monstrous creations. So too with Caesar in DAWN OF THE PLANET OF THE APES. It goes far deeper than the physical and vocal performance, and was the element of making DAWN that Serkis found the most profoundly challenging. “This was immeasurably more difficult [than RISE],” he says, “because of the complexity of Caesar’s journey. Caesar is the most philosophical of the apes. It was a conundrum!” For Serkis, it’s important that we understand there is no division between performance-capture acting and regular performance: “I am playing a character in a movie which has a different set of cameras filming me in order to achieve the aesthetic. That’s the difference. That’s all it is”
TRUSTING IN WETA
As an actor, Serkis says he has no more or less control over the final performance in the APES movies than he’s had in any of his non-performance-capture films — “all performances are enhanced in some way,” he insists. “The only difference is putting a costume on beforehand or putting [digital] costume and make-up afterwards.” Still, his collaboration with VFX wizards Weta Digital extends all the way back to THE LORD OF THE RINGS: The Two Towers, and the team at Weta are, he says, the best in the world at interpolating every little facial detail into the finished character. He says there’s “a qualitative difference” between DAWN and RISE’s apes, “and that’s as much to do with more expertise and a refinement in the software of texturing and assimilating the data into how the final image looks. With the data in the wrong hands it doesn’t matter how great the performance is on the day, if it’s not wrangled right and assigned to the right muscle groups you can be wildly off what the original emotion is”
DAWN OF THE PLANET OF THE APES from 20th Century Fox is out today! Our 5-star review is here.
