While critics haven’t been favorable to James Franco’s work in Rise of the Planet of the Apes, they have singled out the work down by Andy Serkis in motion capture for praise. Since the movie opened, there’s been a buzz saying that it could be time for Hollywood to recognize the work done by Serkis and give his work in the movie an Oscar nod.
Serkis has come out and said he’s in favor of that–though he admits he’s a bit biased on the matter.
“I am a bit evangelical, I know, but performance-capture is still misunderstood,” he tells the UK Daily Guardian. “Ten years down the line, people say, ‘Oh, so you did the voice of Gollum?’ Or people go, ‘You did the movements for [King]Kong?’ It’s frustrating, because I play Gollum and I play [King] Kong. It is acting.”
“The emotional content of these performances live and die by what the actors bring to the roles on set. I never approach a live-action role any differently to a performance-captured role. The process of acting is absolutely identical,” he added in a second interview with the BBC.
“It should be recognized that there are two parts to the process. The first part is capturing the performance. Only later down the line do you start seeing the characters being painted over frame by frame using pixels,” he said.
Serkis does not think a special category should be created at the Oscars.
“Performance-capture technology is really the only way that we could bring these characters to life,” he said. “It’s the way that Gollum was brought to life, and King Kong, and the Na’vi in Avatar and so on and it’s really another way of capturing an actor’s performance. That’s all it is, digital make-up.”
I want to see Mr. Serkis win an oscar just so he can scramble onto the stage, seize the statuette and proclaim, “My Preciousssssss!”
I agree. His performance as Caesar was actually something to behold. It was a really good flick, mostly because of the great acting chops of several chimps and one hunkish gorilla.