Andy Serkis Quotes

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

I play saxophone, I play tenor sax.

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

That's what I think is the biggest challenge, is just being still and learning how to just be present in that stillness and not over do it, not over act.

When you come out of the other end of a long process, working with a character [you realize] this character has really shaped my ideas.

Mountaineering has always been a huge hobby of mine.

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

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.

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

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

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 believe that when people experience an event as a community it can transcend and change people's lives.

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 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.

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

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.

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.

I'm definitely moving more towards directing now.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

When I first was offered the role on Rise [of the Planet of the Apes], I always played Caesar as a human being within ape skin.

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.

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.

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.

35mm film isn't ticking away so it's subconscious - performances are allowed to breathe in a much more real way I think.

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

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

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?'

'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.

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

You don't go - oh this is a motion capture role, I'm going to employ this method of acting. We don't have anything to hide behind when we're doing this.

Working from home is so, so hard because I want to be present for them and yet there's so much to do work-wise. That's the biggest challenge for me.

On lower budget things you're still working collaboratively, but the investment and your level of creative importance is higher on something like this.

Second films are, you know, like 'difficult second albums', so it's a tricky position to be in but I think he's made a highly accomplished film.

I just directed The Jungle Book with Cate Blanchet and Christian Bale.

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.

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.

Where as you go into playing something like Ulysses [on Black Panther], you go - I'm going to have this haircut and this cloth, you draw from different stimulus.

I love playing real characters... if they're not around anymore it's helpful because you won't get sued! But there's so much research involved and I love that part of the process.

No matter how extreme things get, it still has that ring of truth about it that backs the characters - even though they're despicable and what they're doing isn't right you still care for their fate.

The process of acting is no different [playing human or ape]. You're embodying the character. You're creating the psychology and the physicality. You're living the moment.

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.

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!

People will come up to me and try and be secretive and say, 'Can you do the Gollum voice for me?' And I'm like, 'Are you kidding? It's 8:30 in the morning on the Victoria Line.'

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.

'Macbeth' is an amazing story.