With his wife, Cornelia, he has a teenage son and a baby. Caesar is now a leader of a troop of apes living in a redwood forest north of San Francisco. “I had to explain that this is how Caesar speaks,” says Serkis.ĭawn of the Planet of the Apes, which opens in the UK on July 17, picks up a decade after Rise of the Planet of the Apes. (Gollum’s voice was entirely Serkis’s – there was no computer enhancement.) During the shooting of a scene with James Franco in Rise of the Planet of the Apes, a sound recordist asked Serkis to keep his “monkey noises” down because he was trying to record Franco’s dialogue. This isn’t the first time that a Serkis performance has caused confusion: when The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers was released in 2002, he had to remind journalists that he didn’t just voice his character, Gollum: he had physically played the slimy ring-addicted former Hobbit. It was just that Andy is such a great actor.” I realised that there was no visual-effects secret for that performance. In the pre-visual effects footage, you see Andy dressed in this strange grey unitard, with dots on his face, pressed against the glass. “There’s one scene where Caesar is being abandoned at the sanctuary and he’s pressing his face to the glass as his adopted father leaves him behind.
“I wanted to understand what he did to make Caesar such an emotional character,” he says. So before meeting Serkis, Reeves asked Weta Digital, the New Zealand-based company responsible, to show him footage of the performance without computer-generated effects. “I’d never felt that level of emotional connection with a computer-generated character before.” Reeves had no experience of performance capture, the technology used in Rise of the Planet of the Apes to translate the performance of human actors into photo-realistic apes. “The crazy thing about that story is that the most relatable character is not a human, but an ape,” says Reeves. Reeves couldn’t work out why Serkis’s performance had been so affecting. In the film, Andy Serkis plays Caesar, a chimpanzee with enhanced intelligence who is adopted as a baby by a scientist and, in later life, leads a rebellion against humans.
Matt Reeves, the director of Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, was blown away when, in 2011, he saw the film’s predecessor, Rise of the Planet of the Apes.
0 kommentar(er)
