Andy Serkis captivates viewers anew–as an ape

SERKIS. The power of his portrayal lies in his expressive eyes. RUBEN V. NEPALES

LOS ANGELES—Making yet another “Planet of the Apes” spinoff movie sounded like one more bad Hollywood idea when we first heard about it. But, now that we’ve seen “Rise of the Planet of the Apes,” we take our hat off to director Rupert Wyatt, screenwriters Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver, and the cast for pulling off a surprisingly appealing movie.

James Franco, Freida Pinto, John Lithgow and “Harry Potter’s” Tom Felton turn in engaging performances, but the film is fortunate to have Andy Serkis, in the crucial role of Caesar, the chimpanzee who grows up to lead an uprising.

Andy benefits from the tremendous advances in performance-capture technology. But, we think that even if Andy had to wear the elaborate wig and make-up that Roddy McDowall and company did in the first “Planet of the Apes” movie in 1968, he would still be very effective, because the power of his portrayal lies in his expressive eyes.

Without the benefit of dialogue, Andy is compelling in this prequel as the chimp raised by James’ character.  Eventually locked up in a primate sanctuary that’s more like a prison, Caesar leads a coup that soon grips all of San Francisco.

Technology

In an interview, Andy explained how he approached the role while working with the performance technology devised by Peter Jackson’s Weta Digital.  “There’s a lack of understanding in the acting community about performance capture. They think you have to over-pantomime emotionally, that you have to over-explain what you’re thinking and feeling.”

“But, actually, performance capture is very subtle in terms of what it can capture, as long as you’re internally thinking and feeling it,” Andy clarified.

We asked Andy how the performance-capture technology has progressed. “When I portrayed Gollum in “Lord of the Rings,” we shot on live action sets and I acted with the other actors,” the British actor began. “There’s nothing different to what we’re doing now. But, the key thing is that the performance-capture elements had to be done separately, so I had to go back and re-shoot all of Gollum’s close-ups. At the time, only one actor could work in performance capture. The computers were always breaking down. You could only shoot very short segments of scenes, and so on.

“The facial performance of Gollum was derived from my performance that was shot on film. With side-by-side footage of Gollum’s face and mine, the animators would literally copy my facial expressions.

“When we shot ‘Kong,’ it was facial markers that drove the digital puppet. All of Kong’s facial expressions were literally driven directly from my face.

Transition

“In ‘Avatar,’ it was moving this peripheral activity to center stage, where multiple actors worked together in a CG environment. The biggest transition for ‘Rise of the Planet of the Apes’ was taking all of that, shrinking it down, and making the technology much more transparent, and bringing it onto the live-action set. Now, we are able to shoot the performance-capture actors with the live-action actors, so there’s a complete connection.”

The 47-year-old stressed that it’s “all about becoming a character,” whether he’s wearing a performance-capture suit or not. “It’s all about getting inside the character’s mindset, physicality and emotional construct.”

Viewers who watch “Rise…” will find themselves rooting for Caesar and his fellow primates. “Caesar begins to take on the mantle of leadership,” Andy said. “I don’t think this film is saying that apes are good, and that humans are bad. It’s saying that whatever species takes over, it has the responsibility to make a good job of connecting with this planet that we all live on.”

The ending suggests a sequel. “I hope we do get to make a sequel, because it’s an incredibly fertile territory in terms of how the apes would organize society,” Andy enthused. “The original ‘Planet of the Apes’ is set roughly 2000 years from now. Apes evolved into the humanoid apes that we see Roddy McDowall and Kim Hunter play in those versions.”

Asked about the thorny issue the movie raises—the practice of animal testing by pharmaceutical companies—Andy answered, “It’s a complicated issue. If you’re going to test on chimpanzees, you should be prepared to test on human beings, too.”

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