LOTR Castmember Quotes
Andy Serkis
(Gollum) |
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Speaker |
Topic |
Quote |
| Andy BBC Newsround, 3/21/03 |
Actors | Once you get on set you just get on as mates and you get on with the job and there's no real kind of rank or anything like that, you're just all making a story together. In actual fact, as I was saying earlier about the story lines, I never actually acted with Ian McKellen or Christopher Lee and so many of us were, because of our story lines, didn't act with each other. So we just all got together afterwards and had a drink in the evening. |
| Andy BBC Newsround, 3/21/03 |
Children | They're very young actually, in fact Sonny, my youngest child, he's two and a half now, he wasn't even born when I started shooting. But Ruby, my daughter, who's four, four and a half, she came - they all came down to New Zealand and she watched me on set. They've not actually seen the full film but they've seen parts of it and they know Gollum and they love watching - there have been a lot of hoardings on buses with Gollum on the side and they keep pointing at the buses going oh look there's daddy so they're quite into it. |
| Andy BBC Newsround, 3/21/03 |
Fame | It's quite surprising, I didn't think I'd get recognised as much as I do but because the animators designed the facial structure of how Gollum actually looks on screen to be very close to mine and it moves in the same way that my face does and of course all the coverage, all the press coverage, that I've had about the making of Gollum since the film's release I do actually get recognised quite a lot on the street both at home in the UK and here as well, in fact more in the USA than at home. |
| Andy BBC Newsround, 3/21/03 |
Favorite Part of Middle Earth | I think Ithilien is really beautiful, I think that's really gorgeous with the forbidden pool and the lush greenery in the forest. I think Ithilien. |
| Andy BBC Newsround, 3/21/03 |
Favorite Prop | I think it would have to be the precious. |
| Andy | Gollum | Andy on Gollum's appearance, "I never thought of E.T., actually, but other people have mentioned that he's a bit like E.T. on crack. |
| Andy BBC Newsround, 3/21/03 |
Gollum | I think that Gollum is really the character who is a very human character and he's very flawed, like most humans are and has good and bad sides. As Gandalf says to Frodo in the first film and in the book - be careful who you deal out judgement to. And he describes Gollum as having a chink of light in his soul that is kind of redeemable or saveable. And so I've always approached the role of Gollum as a character who can be - because he needs to be pitied by Frodo and Frodo needs to make a connection with him because Frodo is going to be corrupted by the Ring as well. So Gollum, for me, is a character who should be pitied and also hated. |
| Andy BBC Newsround, 3/21/03 |
Gollum | He's not just an evil snivelling monster, that it's important for the audience to be able to connect with him and for an audience to be able to connect with a character they have to some redeemable qualities. So I think just to remember that really. And also to really go through the whole book and look for all the descriptions of how Tolkein describes Gollum's movements. |
| Andy | Gollum | During the process Jackson made a decision that threw everything into chaos: Gollum should resemble Serkis. The edict came as a shock. Artists at Weta Digital had spent years laboring over Gollum's look, creating so many statues of the emaciated being that they filled one room and threatened to spill into the hallway. Scrambling to satisfy Jackson, mounds of clay were carved to marry Serkis' face with the froglike appearance of Gollum. One day, Richard Taylor, head of the practical effects house Weta Workshop, brought a sculpture to Jackson for review. When Jackson said the ears were too pointy, Taylor reached for a bread knife and hacked down the tips. Moments later, Serkis entered the room."It was like seeing my father and my son in the same face," Serkis said. "It was uncanny." |
| Andy BBC Newsround, 3/21/03 |
Gollum's Personalities | Basically I wanted to find a way of making the Ring speak to me really because it's such a powerful symbol for the whole film and is a symbol of enormous power. I wanted to make it more personal to me and so I tried to find a metaphor for the Ring, if you like, a comparison for the Ring and for me I thought of it as addiction in the sense that the Ring could have a real hold over this character, much like any sort of drug addiction or alcohol addiction could have over a human being. Tolkein writes Gollum as speaking to himself but we decided to make that into much more of a two sides of his personality and so that's bound up really with the psychological conditions of addiction. |
| Andy BBC Newsround, 3/21/03 |
If Gollum Got The Ring | I think Gollum would probably want to try and turn back time so he could go back to being Smeagol before he killed his cousin for the Ring. |
| Andy BBC Newsround, 3/21/03 |
Missing Gollum | Oh most definitely, I mean he's been such a part of my life for, it'll be, four years all in all, over fours years, until we've done the final extended DVD on the Return of the King, which will be about this time next year, really he's been such a huge part of my life that yes it'll be very strange. But also it will be nice to have it as a great memory and move on to other characters. |
| Andy BBC Newsround, 3/21/03 |
Preparation | I spent a lot of time on my own working out the physical vocabulary for how Gollum moved. As I say I drew on a lot of Tolkein's descriptions of how he moves but also the conceptual artist sketches. But also what I used to do was I'd just go off jogging in the morning when we were filming. I remember when I was first started with filming in Ruapehu, which is a volcano in the centre of the North Island, and I'd go off and just get into character by crawling around these rocky streams and just on my own for hours and hours, just trying to sense that isolation really. So it was really important to do that, to be able to take that into the scenes. |
| Andy BBC Newsround, 3/21/03 |
ROTK | I don't want to give too much away actually but obviously Gollum's fate is very much bound up with that of Frodo and Sam and the Ring of course. And so you get to see them continue on their journey and it reaches an enormous climax in Mordor. |
| Andy BBC Newsround, 3/21/03 |
Seeing Gollum | I don't think it was strange because I'd done all the physical work in fact because most of the movement, nearly all the movement, that I've done is translated into the CG character it's not weird. And even people like my wife and people who know me, my friends, they all see a lot of me up their on the screen - it's quite weird really. |
| Andy BBC Newsround, 3/21/03 |
Time in New Zealand | The original photography of all three films took a year and a half and I was down there for most of that but I've spent a lot of time since in what's called post production - doing all the motion capture work, which if you're not sure what that means it's going back and repeating every single scene with me wearing the suit with the dots on and controlling the computer generated image. So I've been back a lot of last year and I'm just about to go down again for a few months of this year to finish the third film. But in my time off I love to go - there's great walking and climbing to do and I go horse riding and canoeing, the scenery's absolutely stunning and so much varied scenery, it's just a wonderful place to explore. |
| Andy BBC Newsround, 3/21/03 |
Voice | I wanted to find somewhere where - because Gollum is called Gollum because of the way he sounds, the voice that emanates from his throat, and I wanted to find somewhere where he carried his pain the most and I thought that his throat would be the right area. And I was looking for an involuntary action coming from the whole body, like a convulsion, and I was looking at my cat and I saw that when they got fur balls in the back of their throats their whole bodies convulsed and then they made this kind of coughing sound and that seemed to be right for the way that Gollum says - when he actually says Gollum, Gollum, it absolutely fitted it perfectly. |
| Andy BBC Newsround, 3/21/03 |
Voice | When I went in for the audition I had worked on a particular version of the voice but when I got out to New Zealand it became apparent that the relationship between Smeagol and Gollum, in the script, was going to be much more defined. So I had to work much, much more closely on separating the voices between Smeagol and Gollum. So that took quite a long time to arrive at the final voice because we didn't actually lay the final voice tracks down until two and a half years after we started. |
| Andy BBC Newsround, 3/21/03 |
Voice | A lot of people have asked me to do answer phone messages for them. |
| Andy BBC Newsround, 3/21/03 |
Voice Strain | It did at first but I used to drink a lot of this juice which we all made up called Gollum Juice, which was made of honey, lemon and ginger. So we used to make up big jugs of it with warm water and I used to drink that on set everyday, lots of it everyday. |
| Philippa | Gollum | I would watch a whole film of Gollum. I interviewed him! We motion captured Andy, he's sitting in a suit with all these sensors on him and you watch him on a screen. What we call a silverfish character, which is a very crude rendition of Gollum. We sat him in a high director's chair and he had a cigarette and he was drinking and he was taking phone calls from his agent. But he did it all as Gollum! He took a call from Jar Jar, actually. |
| Sean A | Filming | Andy Serkis was there, every single day that we were filming, and he was wearing this green Lycra suit, so he looked kind of retarded. |
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