Andy Serkis is currently in New Zealand taking on orcs, wizards, elves and boney-fingered ring fanciers in one of the highest profile films now in production: “The Lord of the Rings: The Hunt for Gollum.”
Serkis’ grand return to the franchise — due for release by Warner Bros. at the end of 2027, just shy of 25 years since Peter Jackson concluded his all-conquering LOTR trilogy with “Return of the King” (and Gollum’s demise in Mount Doom) — sees the multi-hyphenate in the director’s seat for the first time in Middle-earth (he served as second unit director on all three “The Hobbit” features). At the same time, of course, he’s still covering himself in little dots to play Smeagol.
But while Serkis juggles stepping into Jackson’s illustrious shoes and his motion-capture duties alongside returning faces (Ian McKellen, Elijah Wood) and new (Kate Winslet, Jamie Dornan, Anya Taylor-Joy, Leo Woodall), his previous movie as director is landing on home soil.
“Animal Farm,” the long-in-the-making animated adaptation of George Orwell’s classic novella and with a starry voice cast including Seth Rogen, Glenn Close, Kieran Culkin and Woody Harrelson, hits cinemas in the U.K. on July 24 (with Vue’s Lumiere distributing), some two-and-a-half months after it released in the U.S. A more family-friendly take on the allegorical tale warning about the corruptive nature of absolute power, even Serkis admits it didn’t have the U.S. launch he was hoping for, sparking “outrage” over what people perceived to be its political leanings (“anti-capitalist” and “not anti-communist enough” were some of the critiques, he says) and struggling at the box office.
But he’s hoping “Animal Farm” will fare better in Orwell’s native U.K., where there’s a “real love for the book and it’s really valued.”
Speaking to Variety from New Zealand after wrapping a day’s shoot, Serkis discusses his return to “The Lord of the Rings” and the decade-long process it took to get “Animal Farm” off the ground.
As someone who has long worked at the cutting edge of technology, he also delves into AI and the minimal way he plans to use it in “The Hunt for Gollum.” “If we teach AI well, then it can help us across many industries,” he says. But he notes that AI can’t — at least not yet — replicate the sort of “authored performance” put into motion-capture. With this in mind, he asserts that motion-capture work is long-overdue being embraced for creating characters just as much as any other form of acting — and this includes landing its first Oscar nomination in the main performance categories.
How’s “The Hunt for Gollum” looking
We’ve literally just completed a week. We’re finally up and running, so it’s great. It’s really exciting.
How does it feel being back in New Zealand with Peter (Jackson), Fran (Walsh) and Philippa (Boyens) and the gang?
It couldn’t be better, and it’s not just those guys who obviously I adore and love and have spent so many years working with, but the entire crew, practically from 25 years ago. So it’s great. And there are generations of their kids too. So it is a big family affair.
You’ve got returning characters and new ones joining Middle-earth, and then new ones stepping into the shoes of old ones, like Jamie Dornan playing Aragorn. Is it strange seeing someone else playing one of cinema’s most iconic roles?
I’ve got to say, Jamie’s doing extremely well. He’s fantastic.
I hope Peter’s getting another cameo.
Well, we’ll have to see about that.
Your “Animal Farm” is coming out in the U.K. following its U.S premiere. I remember writing about that film a good 10 years ago, when it was set to be one of the first out of your Imaginarium Productions company. I know animated films take a long time to make, but this really has been a while.
It’s been an age. I feel like I’ve been making this film all my life. I obviously was going off and doing other things in between, but it really was a passion. And it came on the back of making the first Planet of the Apes. There was a moment where Caesar breaks out of the facility that he’s in with this disparate group of apes and leads them to freedom, and it suddenly occurred to me that 1) no one had made a version of Animal Farm for the screen for a while, and 2) it was a technology that could now be employed to anthropomorphize the characters. My producing partner Jonathan Cavendish and myself, we’d just recently founded the Imaginarium and thought this was going to be our first film. But we had no idea it was going to be such a difficult, difficult film to get people interested in making.
“Animal Farm”
Courtesy of Aniventure
Why was that?
There’s obviously the political content of it. Being considered was whether it was too dark, could families watch it? Originally we were going to make it using performance capture, but that would have been dark — there would have been live action and it would have necessarily been a darker film. But Jonathan and I were very very keen that this would be a version of the story that spoke to a broad audience — particularly young inquiring minds who would be able to debate the story with their parents and grandparents. We worked closely with the Orwell estate, and we said, look, if we’re making it more relevant to this generation, to the younger generation, and not about totalitarian Russia in the 1930s and 40s, it would be much more contemporary. So I hit up on this idea of adding a central character that was this young piglet who sees himself as equal to any other animals after the rebellion but who then becomes morally corrupted by the power and swagger of this particular leader, who is less of a fascist dictator and more of a populist.
As you say, the original book was talking about a very different time from today. How do you think its central message and what Orwell was trying to get across now fits into today’s world?
Well, I think if you played this film in any country across the globe, people would draw their own conclusions. But we didn’t want to be partisan, politically. We weren’t saying it’s an attack on the left or the right. It’s about power. It’s absolute power corrupting, it’s misinformation and disinformation, it’s the value of truth being completely torn to shreds. And so, thematically, I don’t think we’ve drifted from Orwell’s original intentions. We’ve just created a more accessible range of characters. The only real thing I think thematically that we’ve changed is not making an ending that is bleak — and that allows a young audience to go, “Well, how can we make it better next time round.”
Talking about power and truth — it does feel particularly timely given what’s going on in the U.S.
Again, without being partisan and leveling it at any one particular leader, around the world it seems to be this. And it comes from bad leadership. If you have parents that teach their children to be mean and cruel, then they’ll be mean and cruel. So America does have a huge part in it, but it’s not the only regime around the world. We weren’t just pointing it at Donald Trump, for instance. It was very much about whichever country you live in that is oppressed. At the end, there’s a message in the credits which says that this film is dedicated to those who are oppressed and that your time will come. So that’s the message of the movie.
It was released by Angel Studios in the U.S. They’re largely considered to be quite conservative with their films, with many having Christian elements. Obviously they’re best known for ‘Sound of Freedom.’ Were you surprised that they were the ones to pick it up?
They just showed such an interest. I think they’re slightly changing the messaging of who they are and are backing films which bring light to the world. I think that’s the way they like to talk about it, or of films that hopefully affect some sort of change. And they really loved it.
But we wanted to debate and boy, did we get a debate in the States. It was from both left and right, and they each had their own particular reason for reviling it. It was criticized for being anti-capitalist. It was criticized for being not anti-communist enough. It seemed to do what we wanted it to do, which was cause a debate, but what it didn’t do was encourage parents to take their children to see it. It literally got something like 60 million hits on the first trailer — and of outrage. It was a very very strange outing.
How do you feel it’ll go down in the U.K., given that it’s Orwell and if kids haven’t already read the book, probably their parents will have been taught it. Do you think there’ll be a different reaction?
I think so. I do. I think there is a real love for the book and it’s really valued. I truly hope that that parents do go and take their kids, because I don’t think there’s anything in it that’s so dark that a six-year-old could not watch. I have this vision of families really enjoying it, and when we tested it with kids they’ve really loved it. But of course they’re not the ones buying cinema tickets!
Coincidentally, you’re currently appearing in another Angel film — “Young Washington.” This has been reported on, but the director used AI to augment a number of shots in the film. You’ve spoken about the use of AI, so I wondered how you felt about that.
I think AI as a creative tool is, as long as it’s not exploitative and as long as it’s not harming anybody or defaming anybody or telling mistruths, is valuable. If you’re looking for reference material, say, in the old days you get reference images for something. Well, now you can prompt something and get a result. And I don’t have any problem with that. When it becomes exploitative and people are not remunerated for the work that they’ve done, or it’s used in nefarious, or mean-spirited or pornographic ways, then of course, that’s terrible and we’ve only brought it upon ourselves. I’ve said this before and I mean it — we are the parents of AI, and we have to be good parents and teach AI well. And if we teach AI well, then it can help us across many industries.
Peter Jackson said something very similar in Cannes. Do you have any plans to use AI in the making of “The Hunt for Gollum”?
Not at present, other than some of the de-aging. There’s a little bit of de-aging for some of the characters and machine learning is part of the process. When you think about it, in the original “Lord of the Rings” films, Peter created MASSIVE, which was a program which allowed 1000s of orcs to all have their own individual mindset. So that is a brilliant example of an incredible use of AI. But we’re not creating AI shots in our movie, every shot is created in a traditional way. One of the things actually that I really wanted to do with this film was to bring back all of the great filmmaking skills, from miniatures to prosthetics and marry them up, because that’s my taste. I like it when you mix up different filmmaking techniques.
Who’s being de-aged?
I’m not telling you!
Do you think AI would ever replace motion-capture performances, like Gollum?
You look on TikTok and there are 1000s of images, and of all of “The Lord of the Rings” characters and many others, and you see something extraordinary. So ‘yes’ is a version of the truth, but it’s not authored by a performance. So there are elements of the character that could work, but at the end of day we’re talking about storytelling, and storytelling and drama is what happens between actors, and performance capture, obviously, is an actor’s authored technology. So I don’t think you’ll be able to replace performance… not as yet. For small prompted moments, I think it stands up. But the whole notion of a script, from a to z, page one to 120 and the minutiae of actors’ decisions that author their characters, I don’t believe that that could be completely replaced.
On that note, do you think the Academy might ever embrace performance capture work?
I’ve never seen performance capture as anything other than an actor’s performance, because you doing everything that you would do to create a normal character on screen. When you act with someone who is wearing dots instead of prosthetic makeup, they’re still creating the character.
Up until now, this hasn’t really been recognised in the Oscars
I don’t think there should be any special kind of award.
But do you think it’s time we saw someone nominated in the acting categories?
Yeah, absolutely. I really do. I think it’s been a long time coming and have never thought any differently.
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