'Kong' actor a table-thumping smash as a gorilla

NEW YORK -- How do you follow up the historymaking creation of an animated character that can act and seamlessly interact with real- life actors? By performing the title role of one of the grandest of Hollywood's icons -- "King Kong."

Movie fans and journalists who knew Serkis played Gollum in "The Lord of the Rings" think they know all about what it took to create "King Kong." After all, they have watched extensive DVD material on the subject and have seen television specials about the trilogy, and they may have even read the actor's book on the subject.

In this case, fans and journalists are wrong; they don't know, and Kong isn't Gollum.

So how was it playing Kong, compared to Gollum? "Immensely more difficult," Serkis told the Deseret Morning News. "So much of Gollum was his voice and the way he spoke. The character kind of emanated from this. He's called Gollum because of the way he sounds, and the physicality came out of the voice. How were we going to convey that range of emotions with a so-called mute character like Kong?"

Serkis spent four months at the London zoo spending time with four gorillas, making an especially strong bond with one of the females. He then traveled to Rwanda and studied mountain gorillas in the wild, all to make his performance as the head monster at Skull Island believable. "Of course, once I started researching gorillas, I found out that they use a lexicon of vocalizations -- they sing, they chuckle, they have very specific ways of communicating."

But can they act? Watching the movie, it is clear that Serkis -- and Kong -- pulled it off.

Kong, like Gollum, is an emoting member of the cast, interacting with subtlety and range, despite not speaking human language. While he spends a good deal of the film in a rage, there are plenty of quiet moments too, primarily with Naomi Watts, as the iconic Ann Darrow, who makes a social connection with the solitary creature. It is the interaction between the two actors and characters that gives the film much of its heart.

"It was as if he was a character, like playing opposite any other man," Watts said. "He didn't have any words, but he had a huge amount of expression -- be it physical or emotional. I just was reacting to him the whole time, and in as truthful a way as possible."

Watts said she couldn't imagine managing her performance without Serkis on the set to help her. "Everything that you see on the screen is Andy Serkis. Yes, there's been some magical stuff happening in the post-production and special effects, but all the emotion, all the movement -- you know how you see that ferocious face turn from that to sort of a smile and a light in his eyes -- that's all Andy. And that's what I was reacting to."

Jackson agrees. "Naomi was also hugely helped by Andy Serkis," the filmmaker said. "Every single shot in the movie -- and I don't think there's an exception -- every close-up of Naomi when she's looking at Kong, she's actually looking at Andy. (He) would get himself into her eye line, so that whenever she looked at Kong's face, that's where he was. He was acting his heart out as Kong."

When Kong fights a trio of meat-eating dinos intent on making Ann a snack, Serkis said he turned the role over to the animators except for the giant's facial expressions. But when action isn't the main focus, Serkis is.

Oscar award-winning visual-effects supervisor Joe Letter said that Kong was a significant advancement over Gollum because the technology allowed more of the performance to be captured. "We really built on what we had learned from Gollum," Letter said. "Rather than have to sculpt it all by hand like we did for Gollum, we were able to build a more solid biomechanical foundation for the (Kong) face.

"We could create a behavior that looked and felt like a real gorilla, but you could also understand what the emotions were underneath it. We walked a fine line between wanting it to look as real as possible but to not make a documentary. It was more of a performance-driven breakthrough in a sense than a technical achievement."

Now the leading name in CGI acting, Serkis said he approaches it like any actor. "I don't see the difference between flesh-and-blood and motion capture. For me, acting is acting. What I have done with Gollum and Kong is no different than any other character I have ever played."

E-mail: LC@desnews.com

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