There and Back Again (34 page)

As I've said, this was my problem, not Peter's. It's funny. I'm so emotional sometimes. My feelings get hurt so easily. Maybe I need to toughen up a bit.

The dull ache of frustration was often a result of letting my exuberance get out of hand. I'd throw myself out there to Peter and compel him to take a natural step back and sort of qualify me in his mind as someone who needed to be
handled
, which is just about the worst thing you want to do as an actor, especially if you're an actor whose career has been built on a foundation of professionalism. I didn't want to be handled. I wanted to be patient and quiet and trusting. It just sometimes didn't work out that way.

Part of the problem, if you can call it that, is cultural. In general, the Kiwis are a reserved, almost stoic people. And Peter is a true Kiwi. He embodies a lot of the New Zealand mindset. If his feelings are hurt, he internalizes it, and if he wants to express himself, and it's not met in the right way, he's visibly but not hysterically disappointed. He's had to find a way to guard and shepherd his own vision. I've watched Peter hundreds of times take a deep breath when things weren't going quite right. There's a particular look he gets: his chin drops, almost like he's looking through his forehead, and he seems to be thinking,
I don't like the way this feels right now, so I'll have to figure out how to make it stop
. If you're a person who wants to be near Peter or to work with him, you find a way not to provoke him. It's not callous or mean. He's a gentleman. He's polite and thoughtful and generous. But he is formidable in a quiet sort of way.

I was raised differently. In our family, everybody talked about everything. We were a talky family. We'd have family meetings where we'd spent hours clearing the air until the air was so clear there wasn't enough oxygen left to breathe. We were clumsy and dysfunctional in so many ways it's almost comical, but one of the things that helped us survive was that we talked.
Talk-talk-talk.
Even now, when we get together for the holidays, there's no shutting us up. The sun goes down and comes up three times, and the wives' heads are splitting because the husbands are still in the living room, talking endlessly, torturing each other with laymen's psychoanalysis. It's sweet, it's endearing, and it's absolutely insane.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Some people came to
The Lord of the Rings
without the weight of expectation, as a virtual blank slate. Andy Serkis was one of them. It seems strange to say that now, for if any single actor is likely to be associated with the trilogy for the remainder of his career (and perhaps well beyond), it's Andy, the man who so vividly and brilliantly portrayed the doomed hobbit Smeagol and his duplicitous, computer-generated alter ego, Gollum.

“Portrayed” is precisely the right word, for while Andy's face appears only in the prologue to the third film,
The Return of the King,
it would be unfair to say that he did not contribute as much to the development of his character as the other actors on the project did to theirs. Indeed, he may well have contributed more. Certainly his wasn't simply a “voice-over assignment,” as such performances are too often described. In many ways Andy's was the most demanding and rewarding role in the trilogy, and there's no question that he earned the adulation of fans and the critical acclaim that came his way in the wake of the final film. But I don't know if anyone expected him to be quite as good as he was. In fact, I'm not sure anyone even thought he'd be that important a player in the grand scheme of things.

The story often told is that Andy was originally hired for three weeks of work, that he received a call from his agent asking him if he was interested in providing the voice for Gollum in a new adaptation of
The Lord of the Rings
. Andy's response? “There must be a lot of proper parts in there; can't I get one of those instead?”

An understandable sentiment really, since Andy is a classically trained actor. I mean, if you heard that
The Lord of the Rings
was being made into a movie, Gollum wouldn't necessarily be the role you'd want to play, now would it? Sure, he's one of the best characters in the book and one of my favorites, but how do you bring him to life? Andy couldn't be faulted for wanting something apparently more substantial and serious. As it rather famously turned out, however, Gollum was the flashiest role in the franchise, providing Andy with the star vehicle of a lifetime and not just three weeks of employment, but three years! He returned to New Zealand on several occasions, far more frequently, in fact, than did the rest of the cast.

While Gollum is a computer-generated (CG) creature, he is very much based on the movements and expressions of Andy Serkis. This was apparent to Andy from the outset, and so he quickly became a powerful and emphatic ambassador for the character. I'm sure the CG animators would cringe if they read here that they somehow contributed less to the character of Gollum than Andy did, or that they were less enthusiastic about the character. I know they worked tirelessly and looked at Gollum as a great literary character and scene-stealing cinematic creation. Nevertheless, I'd be shocked to discover there has ever been a moment in the history of movies when an actor has gone to the workstations of the animators—some two hundred in all!—hunched over their computers for hours on end, and talked through the emotional nuances of each and every scene. Andy did that, and he was demonstrably frustrated and disappointed if he met even one animator who seemed not to match his own level of commitment, or who failed for some reason to grasp the real drama of the performance. Without Andy there—flopping about in ice-cold streams, rolling down the sides of mountains, and torturing his body and voice for the sake of a performance that would not even reward him with the actor's most profound currency, face time on screen—Gollum might have been little more than a two-dimensional foil for Sam and Frodo. But Andy wasn't about to let that happen. Nor was Peter.

We were deep into the production process by the time Andy arrived in New Zealand, or at least by the time I first met him. A lot has been written about how Andy was with us (and by “us,” I mean the hobbits) every step of the way, but that's not really true. Because of the intense nature of his postproduction work, it's quite possible that if you added up the total number of days on location, Andy spent more time in New Zealand than we did. But there were great chunks of time when we did not see him and did not work with him. In terms of scheduling and shooting, the films were approached in roughly chronological order, but then a lot of things were added and moved to take advantage of locations and travel schedules. By the time Andy arrived, the
über
-movement of the production had gotten roughly to the second film, although that didn't really mean anything. For example, I met Andy at the Grand Chateau, a spectacular hotel at the foot of Mount Ruapehu in the Tongariro National Park. We usually stayed at the Grand Chateau while we were filming scenes set in and around Mordor. Such was the case on this day, when we were scheduled to shoot a scene involving Gollum, Frodo, and Sam—a scene intended for the third movie. I don't even remember the precise scene, but I do recall quite vividly the impression made by Andy.

For one thing (in stark contrast to my portly self), he was in terrific physical condition. Andy is an avid and accomplished rock climber, so he's extremely sinewy and strong, and really intense. Shaking his hand, feeling his grip, staring into his wide and expressive eyes, I couldn't believe how focused he seemed to be—it was almost like he was ready to explode. While Gollum provides a good deal of comic relief as well as pathos to
The Lord of the Rings,
the man behind the character is not exactly a laugh a minute.

“Pleased to meet you, Sean,” he said, his face inches from mine, so close I could feel the heat coming off his skin. It wasn't just a normal business introduction. It was an
interaction.
“Looking forward to working with you, mate!”

Whoaaaaa. I'd better say something good here, because this guy is paying attention.

It was clear that Andy was extraordinarily fired up about being part of the production, which I found somewhat fascinating, because after all he was only Gollum. The way I saw it (incorrectly, of course), the poor guy was doomed to be disappointed, for he was going to be replaced by a digital image. Little did I know—little did
anyone
know—just how impressive an actor Andy would be, and what a groundbreaking performance he would achieve. What I did know was this: he had come to work. He understood that this was a big, important project, and he wanted to make it clear that he was equal to the task.

Although there was an element of mystery surrounding the computer-generated effects so heavily employed in
The Lord of the Rings
, I thought I had a reasonably good handle on how these things were done, at least on a fundamental level. I knew there would be blue screens and a stick with a tennis ball attached to the end (simulating what would later become a computer-generated image). I felt in my gut that I was probably better equipped to adapt to the circumstances than most other actors. Not because I had a wealth of experience in similarly effects-laden projects—I did not—but simply because I had a pretty good imagination and I'd seen enough movies to know how it was supposed to be done, or at least how it was
not
supposed to be done. You can tell when an actor is uncomfortable playing alongside a CG image—he's never looking quite in the right direction. I knew that much before the start of principal photography, and I quickly figured out how to be a part of the technology, instead of struggling against it. I liked doing mime work, which is basically what CG work is. So I was confident about what we were going to do.

As it turned out, none of the actors, including me, had any idea about how it was going to work, or how much of our trust was placed in the hands of the animators and the tech wizards (and the editors, and the composer, and so on). By and large, it was a lot of fun, and I felt privileged to be there, to be a part of something so revolutionary that it would change the way movies were made. I think we all felt that way, including Andy, who seemed in the first few days content with doing dialogue off camera. But then it became clear that Peter wanted us to rehearse, to make the scenes stronger, and to work out any kinks in the story or dialogue exactly as we did in other scenes.

In theory, this was fine; in practice, it dramatically altered the level of participation expected of Andy. Suddenly he was no longer just a guy standing off to the side, out of the frame, shouting lines of dialogue for a computer-generated Gollum. Now Andy was in the scene, rehearsing the part of Gollum. Andy naturally enjoyed this, but the intense nature of his personality and his relentless pursuit of artistic perfection eventually caused a strain. A horribly awkward dynamic developed wherein Andy looked at his work in the movie as the definitive portrayal of Gollum, as opposed to merely a model of what Gollum was supposed to be like. He was passionate about it and committed to it, and he wasn't going to let anybody be dismissive of it.

Andy was no wallflower, either. He wasn't about to just sit quietly, playing cards or napping, waiting for someone to call his name so that he could step up to a microphone and deliver his lines off camera. Not at all. He advocated for his character and for himself as an artist. Andy felt the best way to bring Gollum to life was to act out each and every movement, to give the animators as much ammunition as possible. The voice might have been enough, because the voice is absolutely stunning, so raspy and haunting and tortured. So utterly creepy. (By the way, that
is
Andy's voice. It's not a technological trick. It's all him. I've said to him, “Andy, you may get sick of it, but no one else does. How does it feel to know you can kill in any room the rest of your life?” Long after the rest of us have stopped signing autographs at science fiction and fantasy conventions, Andy will still be getting invitations to do Gollum. The split personality is perfect for functions like the MTV Awards—“Smeagol
loves
MTV; no, MTV
sucks!
”—where he can insult people and then apologize for insulting them. He's got a built-in gimmick, applicable to any setting, any routine.) But Andy wanted to provide more than just a voice; he wanted to embody the character, just as I had embodied Sam or Elijah had embodied Frodo. Even more so, in fact, given the psychological complexity of Gollum.

You can't blame him for feeling that way, and you can't possibly dispute the results. Gollum is an unforgettable character, and Andy deserves an enormous share of the credit for that accomplishment. Getting there, however, was a clunky process. For one thing, there was no comfortable lexicon for how to communicate. So we'd rehearse a scene—we'd shoot it with Andy—and the director would call that shot, the one with both Andy and another actor, the “reference pass.” The original motivation for shooting Andy on-screen with us was simply to give the animators something to watch and then recreate on their computers. It was beneficial for the other actors, too, because it facilitated the performance to have another actor standing in front of you. In most movies, though, that approach is cost-prohibitive. You have a crew on the clock, and with each take, each rehearsal, resources are diminishing. Time, after all, is money. But the truth is, the performance is infinitely better when you rehearse the action before miming it. Elijah and I would have the scene choreographed and coded in our minds when Andy would step off, and we were grateful for that. Unfortunately, Andy's feelings would inevitably be crushed because Peter or one of the assistant directors would say something like, “Okay, nice job on the reference pass. Now let's do a real one.”