Andy Serkis, interview with actor and director about the return of Gollum

“I’m very excited to go back again and to revisit that world with my film-making friends, who I’ve known now for so many years. So, I’ll be going back in a couple of months and we start preparation and then we start shooting. The film will be released in December 27”. Andy Serkis is ready to come back to the Middle-earth of “The Lord of the Rings” saga for playing the role of Gollum and directing the movie dedicated to this character. Doing both it will not be a problem for him: “I know Gollum so well, you know. He’s a creature he owns me”, says Serkis to FredFilmRadio during the 8th edition of Filming Italy Sardegna Festival.

The British actor talks about how he started directing: “I was about to direct a small independent film when Peter Jackson asked me to come and direct the second unit on The Hobbit. So, we were just starting a company The Imaginarium. It was like, wow, this is a huge challenge to suddenly work with an enormous crew, shooting in 3D, 48 frames a second, in complicated fight sequences”.

About new technologies and AI

“Artificial Intelligence was used in the day on Lord of the Rings – Serkis says about how technologies change in these last years, using also AI – There was a programme called Massive which enabled all of the battle sequences, for instance, in Helm’s Deep, to have each individual character of thousands and thousands of orcs have their own minds, you know, walking around and doing different things to each other. So, that kind of technology has been used for some time. I mean, we, with every film of this scale, new technologies are being evolved constantly”.

The Batman 2

We’ll see Serkis playing again the role of Alfred Pennyworth in “The Batman 2” directed by Matt Reeves: “I worked with Matt in two of the Apes movies and we became very close friends. He said he wanted to write a character for me where we see my face. So he wrote the relationship between Alfred and Bruce Wayne as a very emotional relationship. The father that he could never be. He does not possess a parental bone in his body. He just doesn’t know how to do that. He can only teach skills. But he feels he ought to be the father for Bruce, but he just can’t be. So it’s a lovely dynamic and quite a painful dynamic between them”.