Andy Serkis famous quotes

Be magnificent. Life’s short. Get out there. You can do it. Everyone can do it. Everyone.
-- Andy Serkis

#Magnificent #You Can Do It

My agent told me they were casting for the voice of Gollum. I hadnt read The Lord of the Rings, but I read the script and realized what an amazing role it was. I developed a voice for the audition tape, then met Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh at the auditions and fell in love with them both.
-- Andy Serkis

#Voice #Tape #Roles

The learning curve is 'The Hobbit' is being shot in 3D.
-- Andy Serkis

#Curves #Shots

Gorillas are still wild creatures. That's made very clear when you observe them in nature. They charge and perform other displays that are terrifying by design. But they don't attack unless they feel threatened.
-- Andy Serkis

#Design #Gorillas #Made

More and more good actors are now transmigrating into the videogame space and playing roles there because it's where my generation of kids get stories from.
-- Andy Serkis

#Kids #Space #Generations

But I think there's something wonderful and extraordinary about climbing on your own and just that kind of relationship to the environment. I'm very addicted to the mountains. You know, so, I do like that solitude.
-- Andy Serkis

#Thinking #Climbing #Solitude

I can get on with all different sorts of people, and I never feel homesick, particularly, or I've never felt kind of patriotic towards any one country.
-- Andy Serkis

#Country #Patriotic #People

For me, I've never drawn a distinction between live-action acting and performance-capture acting. It is purely a technology.
-- Andy Serkis

#Technology #Acting #Action

As long as you have the acting chops and the desire to get inside a character, you can play anything.
-- Andy Serkis

#Character #Play #Long

I play saxophone, I play tenor sax.
-- Andy Serkis

#Play #Saxophone #Tenors

I'm definitely moving more towards directing now.
-- Andy Serkis

#Moving

Performance capture is a technology, not a genre; it's just another way of recording an actor's performance.
-- Andy Serkis

#Technology #Actors #Way

I love acting and certainly won't give it up, but it's part of a bigger canvas for me now.
-- Andy Serkis

#Giving #Acting #Canvas

I've been writing and wanting to direct for a long time.
-- Andy Serkis

#Writing #Long #Direct

My first job when I got my equity card was acting in 14 plays back-to-back. Playing that many roles, you look for ways of differentiating the characters physically, which goes hand in hand with understanding them psychologically.
-- Andy Serkis

#Jobs #Character #Hands

When I was in theater I was forever trying to inhabit a space which puts yourself under the microscope as an actor and your personality and your take on life, but actually through another portal of a character.
-- Andy Serkis

#Character #Space #Personality

I'd like to think that we strive in film and theatre to tell great stories, and I believe in the power of storytelling in our culture.
-- Andy Serkis

#Believe #Thinking #Theatre

I'm in the early stages of a film called 'Freezing Time' about Eadweard Muybridge, the Victorian photographer who was really the forefather of cinema. Digital animators still treat his images like the Bible. He was a very obsessed man.
-- Andy Serkis

#Men #Cinema #Digital

The whole chameleon thing about acting. That's why I'm moving towards directing - it's a much more healthy occupation.
-- Andy Serkis

#Moving #Healthy #Acting

Gollum is Gollum - though in 'Lord of the Rings' he's 600 years old and in 'The Hobbit' he's 540, so he looks a little bit more handsome.
-- Andy Serkis

#Years #Looks #Littles

I'd already started directing short films when we were doing 'Lord of the Rings,' then videogame projects.
-- Andy Serkis

#Film #Lord #Projects

When I played Gollum in 'Lord of the Rings,' if I was climbing up the side of a mountain, which I physically did, you know, I was on every single occasion swimming through streams, all of that, that wasn't captured. That was filmed on 35 millimeter, and for certain of those shots, it was rotoscoped and painted over.
-- Andy Serkis

#Swimming #Climbing #Mountain

We've never had nannies. We've had great grandparents, great support from family, and the kids have been on every set: they've seen me play Gollum, King Kong, Captain Haddock, the lot. They totally get it, and they want to go into the business. Ruby, my daughter, is very keen to become an actress.
-- Andy Serkis

#Daughter #Mother #Kings

But that's not what an actor does. An actor finds things in the moment with a director and other actors that you don't have time to hand-draw or animate with a computer.
-- Andy Serkis

#Hands #Directors #Doe

I never felt totally, 100%, patriotically English... I'd seen a lot of the world by an early age - sort of spent a lot of time traveling around Lebanon and I'd seen Babylon, and Damascus, and all sorts of places in the Middle East by the time I was ten. Then we'd return to Ruslip in West London... Done a fair bit of traveling really.
-- Andy Serkis

#Age #Middle East #Done

A lot of actors on film sets... very often they're not paying attention to the physical world around them. I think through studying art, I've always had that awareness and that's something that I've wanted to bring in to go beyond acting... As a form of expression, they are intrinsically linked.
-- Andy Serkis

#Art #Thinking #Expression

Motion capture is exactly what it says: it's physical moves, whereas performance capture is the entire performance - including your facial performance. If you're doing, say, martial arts for a video game, that is motion capture. This is basically another way of recording an actor's performance: audio, facial and physical.
-- Andy Serkis

#Art #Moving #Games

Every age has its storytelling form, and video gaming is a huge part of our culture. You can ignore or embrace video games and imbue them with the best artistic quality. People are enthralled with video games in the same way as other people love the cinema or theatre.
-- Andy Serkis

#Games #People #Age

Gorilla tourism is vital to Rwanda's economy: It's the third highest source of income.
-- Andy Serkis

#Tourism #Income #Gorillas

Yeah, I mean, climbing's always been a massive hobby of mine up until, kind of, recent times when I've had family, but no, it's been a driving passion in my life and, uh, I've always wanted to climb the Matterhorn. It was the mountain that, sort of, inspired me to climb, as a youngster. So, it was great to be able to get to do it.
-- Andy Serkis

#Passion #Mean #Climbing

I do listen to myself sometimes and think, 'Is my moral compass so easily swayed by the characters I play, or is it me growing as a human being?'
-- Andy Serkis

#Character #Thinking #Play

I'm quite contrary. If people agree on something, I tend to gravitate the other way by my nature. I don't like to be told what to do. I think it goes back to school. I like to do things I want to do and I really don't like doing what I don't want to do.
-- Andy Serkis

#School #Thinking #People

I don't see a difference between playing a performance capture role and a live action role, they're just characters to me at the end of the day and I'm an actor who wants to explore those characters in fantastically written scripts. The only caveat is a good story is a good character.
-- Andy Serkis

#Character #Differences #The End Of The Day

I've always thought of acting as a tool to change society. I watch a lot of actors and I see panic in their eyes because they don't know why they act and I know why I act. Whether I'm a good or a bad actor, I know why I do it.
-- Andy Serkis

#Eye #Acting #Watches

Originally when I went off to work on 'The Lord of The Rings' I got a call from my agent saying that I was just going to do a voice. But I couldn't really approach it like that. To get Gollum's voice I had to play the character.
-- Andy Serkis

#Character #Play #Voice

People think, 'Oh, well how can 'The Hobbit,' which is one book, become three films?' But you can take one line from an appendice and it turns into a whole sequence.
-- Andy Serkis

#Book #Thinking #People

That's why I ended up going to Lancaster University, because they had a visual arts course, and in the first year it was like a broad visual arts course in sculpture, painting, graphics - all of that.
-- Andy Serkis

#Art #Years #Sculpture

I wanted to be a painter, really, when I was growing up as a kid. It was one thing that really took a grip on me.
-- Andy Serkis

#Growing Up #Kids #Painter

I think even back as far as 'Lord of the Rings,' there was always the chance that 'The Hobbit' would be made, even way back then. Of course at that point, Peter Jackson didn't probably think at that point that he'd be directing it.
-- Andy Serkis

#Thinking #Would Be #Way

In 'Tintin,' it's like a live-action role. You're living and breathing and making decisions for that character from page 1 to page 120, the whole emotional arc. In an animated movie, it's a committee decision. There are 50 people creating that character. You're responsible for a small part.
-- Andy Serkis

#Character #Emotional #Breathing

At the moment, my trajectory isn't to think about acting. I'm absolutely devoted to The Imaginarium, our projects and directing. And watching and enabling other actors do their thing in our studio is hugely rewarding. I expect at some point I'll probably want to go back on stage and do some theater, because I've not done theater in 10 years.
-- Andy Serkis

#Thinking #Years #Acting

The wonderful thing about 48 fps is the integration of live action and CG elements; that is something I learned from 'The Hobbit.' We are so used to 24 fps and the romance of celluloid but at 48 fps, you cannot deny the existence of these CG creations in the same time frame and space and environment as the live action.
-- Andy Serkis

#Space #Romance #Elements

In terms of animation, animators are actors as well. They are fantastic actors. They have to draw from how they feel emotionally about the beat of a scene that they're working on. They work collaboratively.
-- Andy Serkis

#Actors #Scene #Fantastic

I understand why people went nuts for 'The Artist.' We use words so much, it's nice to be able to explore a different way of communication, to be able to express silently what someone - or something - is thinking or feeling.
-- Andy Serkis

#Nice #Communication #Artist

My take is that acting is acting. A performance is a performance. With performance capture, if you don't get the performance on the day, you can't enhance the performance.
-- Andy Serkis

#Acting #Capture #Performances

After 'Kong,' my knuckles have never recovered because I had to wear very heavy weights on my forearms and around my hips and ankles to get the sense of size and scale of the movement of the character You are telling your body that you are these things and that you're feeling these thoughts and that you're experiencing these experiences.
-- Andy Serkis

#Character #Feelings #Ankles

Playing a character in a video game is different to other performances because your character can't lead the audience of players in one direction.
-- Andy Serkis

#Character #Player #One Direction

And 'Sex Drugs Rock Roll' was a very transitional film for me in that I was one of the producers and you know, came up with the idea with the writer and the producer, as well. But, it was a very collaborative event. You know, I really love working in that way.
-- Andy Serkis

#Sex #Rocks #Ideas

Acting is a sort of pressure cooker that allows the fizz to come out the top. God knows what I'd be like if I didn't have that.
-- Andy Serkis

#Acting #Pressure #God Knows

Mountaineering has always been a huge hobby of mine.
-- Andy Serkis

#Hobbies #Mountaineering

For film and games, there is now a fantastic method of actors portraying characters which don't necessarily look like themselves. And yet you've still got the heart and soul of the performance.
-- Andy Serkis

#Heart #Character #Games

I think there will always be a particular generation of actors who think that they're going to be replaced by robots. But certainly the emerging actors understand that that's part of the craft.
-- Andy Serkis

#Thinking #Robots #Generations

I expect at some point I'll probably want to go back on stage and do some theater, because I've not done theater in 10 years.
-- Andy Serkis

#Years #Done #Want

Performance capture is a tool that young actors will need in the next 10, 20 years. It's on the increase, as you say. It's not going away.
-- Andy Serkis

#Years #Going Away #Needs

I remember kind of doing early acting and thinking, 'God, they don't paint behind the sets.' It's a bit of a shame, really - 'Oh, what's on the other side of this wall? Oh, you can see the plywood.' I was really disappointed. I just thought that these things were real, from watching things as a kid.
-- Andy Serkis

#Wall #Real #Kids

In the same way 'Lord of the Rings' was an interpretation of the book, 'The Hobbit' is being treated the same way. It will be faithfully represented with a fresh interpretation.
-- Andy Serkis

#Book #Way #Lord