Top 235 Quotes & Sayings by Andy Serkis - Page 2

A lot of people have asked me to do answer phone messages for them.

The fact of the matter is I have done so many parts.

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.

In performance capture roles, it's not a committee of animators that author the role, it's the actor. I think that's a significant thing for people to understand.

I think my mum wanted me to join the army or something, or become a surveyor - something with good career prospects.

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.

I think the actors in 'Greystoke' were amazing. They had a really good performance coach called Peter Elliott who's, of his time, one of the greatest simian performance coaches for actors.

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.

Certain gorillas are more evolved than certain human beings I know.

Thank God for Skype!

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.

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

When I'm working on the scripts or working with the other actors or rehearsing with the director, and when the director is cutting the movie, and we've shot the scene, the director is not looking at the visual effects.

If 'The Hobbit' happens - and there's reason to believe that it will - then I think I'm in with a chance! Gollum is very much part of 'The Hobbit,' after all.

I do have anger management issues. Not clinical. Probably no more than most people.

It was a fairly happy childhood. My father was working away, and my mum brought up five kids all on her own.

As I started to research gorillas, I began to understand that they're all totally individual and idiosyncratic, and they have their own personalities.

I think I have a lot of internal energy, which does need to come out.

Both my parents are Catholic and staunch believers. I'm not a Catholic now, but I still carry part of it with me.

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

The great thing about performance capture is you can go off, and then, without changing costume, you can become another character.

You never really know why you become an actor: it's a visceral thing, an emotional thing.

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.

What you can do with visual effects is enhance the look of the character, but the actual integrity of the emotional performance and the way the character's facial expressions work, that is what is going to be created on the day with other actors and the director.

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

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.

I would love to direct an 'Apes' movie. It would be in the spirit of where I'm going with my career - avatars played by actors to say something about the human condition.

Gollum's never really gone too far away from me because he's indelibly kind of printed into my DNA now, I think.

Over the years, people have asked me, 'Do you think there should be a separate category for acting in the digital realm? Or hybrid sort of awards for digital characters?' and so on. And I've always really maintained that I don't believe so.

Our family were outsiders, and I've always had a sense of the outsider, the underdog, and a strong sense of justice towards people who are excluded.

I guess I just tend to feel at home wherever I go.

The art of transformation is a very important thing to me, and I always believe I can say something more truthful through characters that are further away from me.

Looking back, when I was Gollum, I suppose I did break the mold to a certain extent. I'm proud, and very thrilled, to be a part of that.

Actors' performances in films are enhanced in a million different ways, down to the choice of camera shot by the director - whether it's in slow motion or whether it's quick cut - or... the choice of music behind the close-up or the costume that you're wearing or the makeup.

People used to say, 'Andy Serkis lent his movements to Gollum,' and now they say, 'Andy Serkis played Caesar.' That's a significant leap.

I love the ability to transform because that, for me, is a liberation.

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.

You could go so wrong with a 'Planet of the Apes' reboot; you could make it melodramatic, you could make it campy, you could fall into so many traps with it.

The reason that some motion-capture films don't work is if the scripts are not good, and the characters aren't engaging, then you don't believe in the journey, and you're not connected to it. It's not the technology's fault.

Originally, I thought, 'Gollum's such a fantastic character, why are you doing him CG? Surely you need to be able to humanise him as much as possible - he's so full of pathos and real emotion.'

Before I became an actor, I was a visual artist, and I've always hankered for the storytelling behind the camera.

My father was interested in justice, always working for people who needed to be supported.

You'll very rarely find that you can enhance a performance to give it a real emotional centre and truth... after the fact.

You're watching your kids playing football, and you're not present. It's like the worst... it's horrible. I despise myself for it. I think it's a particularly male thing. Being present and in the moment with your kids is something a lot of men struggle with.

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

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.

Actors' performances do not stand alone in any film, live action or whatever.

I enjoy high-speed about-turns in thought.

People find it hard to get their heads around nominating a computer-generated character, but every time you see Gollum on the screen, that's me who is acting up there - even if it is behind a mass of pixels - and it's my voice you hear.

What's fantastic is that there's a real growing appreciation for performance-capture technology as a tool for acting.

It has been great portraying Gollum, but it will be great to see my face on screen for a change.

I've been told that some guy wrote something like, 'Andy Serkis does everything, animators do nothing.' Of course I never in a million years said that, wouldn't ever say that. It's not within my understanding of filmmaking to ever say anything like that.

Any sort of role requires a certain amount of research and embodiment of the character and psychological investigation.

I think I spend most of my time not living in reality, actually.

When you do animation - well, straightforward animation, although it's not straightforward - the voice for a character or something, they're always singular experiences, really.

I stayed in Baghdad every summer until I was 14. My dad's sister is still there, but many of my relatives have managed to get out. People forget that there are still people there who are not radicalized in any particular direction, trying to live normal lives in a very difficult situation.

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.

I think when actors run away from their work that they're slightly crazy, really!

Nowadays, there's no such thing as a stable job.

If I hear someone say something, and they're 100 per cent about it, then it's almost inevitable that I'll take the opposite view. I guess I feel at odds with things like society. Absolutism is always a trigger for me.