Top 235 Quotes & Sayings by Andy Serkis

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.

If it was a great script and a great character, I would love to do a romantic comedy.

Mountaineering has always been a huge hobby of mine.

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.

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.

My dad was working abroad, in Iraq, and he was a doctor. We used to go and visit him, in Baghdad, off and on. For the first ten years of my life, we used to go backwards and forwards to Baghdad, so that was quite amazing. I spent a lot of time traveling around the Middle East.

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.

If you're in a motion-capture studio, you have spherical, reflective markers, which are picked up by cameras that emit infrared - it reflects it, and then the cameras pick up the data.

The fact of the matter is that an actor, if I'm playing a performance capture role and you're playing a live action role and we're having a scene together, there's no difference in our acting processes.

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.

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.

'Macbeth' is an amazing story.

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

I am a bit evangelical, I know, but performance-capture is still misunderstood.

I'm definitely moving more towards directing now.

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?'

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I'm a Mac user. I think it depends on how you were brought up, and I was introduced to Apple quite early. They're certainly the best for visual stuff and film-directing.

I think parenting is very different now. We're totally governed by our children!

I do love nature, but I don't suppose I'd spent more time in zoos as a child than anyone else!

Be magnificent. Life's short. Get out there. You can do it. Everyone can do it. Everyone.

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

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.

My very, very first moment on set on 'Lord of the Rings' in 2000 was me in a lycra suit, six and a half thousand feet up on a mountain in New Zealand, standing in front of 250 crew who were all wondering what I was doing - myself included.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I play saxophone, I play tenor sax.

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.

'The Hobbit' was one of the first biggish books I ever read. I remember vividly the 'riddles in the dark' passage, and it meant a lot to me to finally get to play it after all these years.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Just being an ape is a workout.

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.

I've always been really in touch with my primal instincts. In my profession, you have to be.

Working with and collaborating with and for Peter Jackson was an incredible experience because he is such a phenomenal filmmaker.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Gollum has a weak personality and isn't able to cope with the power of the ring.

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

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.

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.

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.

Not a day goes by where I'm not reminded of Gollum by some person in the street who asks me to do his voice or wants to talk to me about him. But because 'The Hobbit' has been talked about as a project for many years, I knew that at some point I'd have to reengage with him.

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.