Serkis breaks down the next Lord of the Rings movie, including recasting Aragorn.
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Do you have maybe a favorite Lord of the Rings meme, potentially
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just because we love the internet here and I love to hear about it. Oh my gosh, there's, actually I do
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I mean, these are completely, I think, created by AI, by the way
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But there are some amazing, have you seen One Funk to Rule Them All
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No, what is that? It's an extraordinary, extraordinary. What is this? I can also find it
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You will not believe what you're watching. I'm curious because the technology, I would assume, has evolved since you first performed as Gollum in Lord of the Rings
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And now you're going to be reprising the role in Hunt for Gollum. How has the technology changed
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Are you going to be in a different suit? I'm just curious about how the actual shoot for that is going to look
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There's no difference between performance capture acting and conventional live, you know, acting on screen in the conventional way in costume and makeup
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Obviously, the technique as a director and directing it is very different because what you're watching in a live action shoot is what you see in the camera is what you get
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And so you can make adjustments. what you get when you're watching a performance capture driven film on set is you're seeing an
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actor with a head mounted camera and dots but but you're watching performance you're not really
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and you're you're imagining what the avatar might might look like later on but you but you're
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watching the actor's performance and because that's if you don't get that on the day then
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no matter how much animation is put on top of that that won't have the emotional integrity
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so that that is that is something but then of course if you're directing say uh actors on a
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motion capture stage you can actually in real time see the the video game engine version of that
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avatar so you're looking at the actor's performance and the avatar of that character
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move completely in sync and not not with facial expressions but physically so you can compose
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shots and using using the video game engine you can put the lights where you want it to be and
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so it's more like live action shooting yeah i mean really since the planet of the apes movies
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the technology is pretty similar but up to that point there was a huge in the first in the first
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movie i was in a very skin tight suit but it there was no on set capture as such it wasn't
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They didn't have motion capture cameras around capturing the dots and, you know, try retargeting those to an avatar
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That wasn't happening. So I was literally filmed and then the animators copied my they rotoscoped which was a technique of painting over every frame to actually get the physical movement
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And there was no facial capture then. And so it was called motion capture
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What I'd have to do is we'd shoot, I'd shoot the scenes with the actors on set, and then I'd have to go back to a motion capture stage
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and then reshoot my elements separately in a motion capture suit so that we could get the physicality
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There was no facial capture then. But then when we started working on King Kong, which is the next film I did with Peter Jackson, we had facial markers driving one to one as a digital mask of King Kong
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So, you know, whatever facial expressions I would make, it would, you know, come directly through
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By the time we got to Planet of the Apes, it was full on what we'd call performance capture because you're capturing audio, facial capture and physical capture on set in all sorts of environments
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whether it was in studio set or whether we were in the rainforests of Vancouver
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or up in the mountains in Whistler. So that was full-on performance capture
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And you only shoot it once then. You only shoot those scenes once and it's one and done
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Then it's like shooting live action normally. So go back to your point
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going back now 25 years later um that that will be the process that we use when we're making the
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hunt for golem nice so you don't have to do the double you're like one in one go yeah yeah yeah
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that's really cool i'm this is a prequel and or it's set within the chronology of fellowship of
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the ring it sits between the hobbit trilogy and the lord of the rings yes and i i mean i'm someone
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who can sometimes be skeptical of prequels like for andor which you were also involved and i was
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like I don't know how this is going to fit we know how this story ends and then that was proven so
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wrong I adored that and the Narkina 5 arc is a huge part of that and I'm curious in your time
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working on Andoran you know seeing how they're shaping a prequel that fits into the Star Wars
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universe but also carries its own meaningful story did you learn any lessons about shaping a prequel
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like Hunt for Gala? Well I mean certainly from from Tony Gilroy's amazing writing I mean it was
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all laid out for you as a performer. I mean, he had a very clear intention about, you know
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about creating a story talking, which talked about fascism set in the Star Wars universe
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that felt very grounded and real. And so that was preordained in a sense. And I was, you
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know, and I loved the character that I was playing, although I was slightly concerned when I came into it that some people who was already were worried about Snoke and not knowing
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the origins they might think that this character was some kind of weird cousin of his or something He went on a very different journey Yeah yeah yeah exactly But once I sort of accepted the fact that people would be okay with the fact that I was playing another character
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in the Star Wars universe, it was a joy to play. I mean, it was just great
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It was amazing working with Diego and everyone on a really incredible set
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which had everything all for real, working pieces of the elements that we realized later down the line
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were building, we were building pieces of the Death Star. Yeah, heartbreaking realization
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Yeah. Like incredible work. The joy of this is that it's entirely its own story
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but it fits into, perfectly fits into the lore, the tone, the feel of the Middle Earth films
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that were created by Peter Jackson, you know, 25 years ago and 15 years ago
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the two trilogies. So it will seamlessly feel like it's part of that world, but the story and therefore how we see the story is different and unique to this particular tale
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So it's not just a sort of nostalgia film, you know, and we're seeing plenty of those, you know, we're seeing, you know, and laying heavily into the nostalgia and the things that we loved about those movies of 25 and 30 years ago
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it adheres to that world, but it certainly has a freshness and a newness
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in terms of the actual story. Yeah, I like that you mentioned the newness
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because last week we got the official casting and we know Jamie Dornan is taking over the role of Strider
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which that has to be so difficult to recast someone in a role that is so iconic with Viggo Mortensen and Aragorn
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You think of them as one and the same. Can you tell me about finding Jamie as a replacement
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and why he's going to work? Yeah, I mean, I don't want to talk too much about this
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because I know I'm going to be talking about it for a long time to come. But just to say that, I mean, all the casting decisions for this
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we're calling him Strider in our movie and he is at a different point in his journey
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So he is slightly different to the Aragorn that we see later on
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It's a version of himself that's been out in the wilderness as a Dunedin ranger
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And I'll leave it at that for the moment. But Jamie is perfect for this part of that journey of the character
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Awesome. I mean, thank you for even saying that. Sure. And, I mean, you mentioned it's been 25 years since Fellowship
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What has been an element of the legacy of these movies that has, like, surprised you as we've seen it
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Well, people, it's so interesting because prior to The Lord of the Rings
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there were very few sort of fantasy films for want of a better word because I don really see it as a fantasy film and it wasn treated as a fantasy film It was always treated by Peter as a historic It felt like a piece of history in a way
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And the way that Tolkien wrote it and created the language and the lore
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and the worlds and the cultures around that felt like real events, you know, historical events
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So I think that's why they've endured, because they felt that they were
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sort of fantastical stories, but they were grounded in such emotional truth
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And the characters, all of the characters, mean a lot to people
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And across the spectrum of characters, and speaking from personal experience, and I've been to many conventions
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and seen this to be true, it's the character of Gollum, for instance
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that really connects with people because we all have an inner voice
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we all doubt ourselves, we all have a dark side. And because the notion of addiction
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was very much part of the entrance into the character for me
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being addicted to the ring and how powerful that was, I've come across so many people who have been through hard times
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and have found Gollum a character that has helped them in some way
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So it's really interesting, and this is across the board. People relate to all of the characters in Lord of the Rings in their own way or see themselves in those characters
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And we look to mythologies like the Lord of the Rings in times like these that we're living in, where going back to the truth and the lack of it, there seems to be essential values and truths in those stories which are worth hanging on to, you know, about the small person being able to make the difference and things like that, which are so, so important
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and tie back into Animal Farm, which is why we've made this as an animated movie
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so that we cannot, you know, the rebellion went wrong that time for the animals
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and they ended up back at square one. And it's like the world now. We keep going around in circles
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History does repeat itself. Yeah, a great needle drop. Sorry, at the very end, I was like, okay, yeah
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You know, but it does. And all we can do is question
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how we can make it better next time around. We probably will, it's not
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we don't come up with an answer it's not a Hollywood ending
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we don't neatly tie up Animal Farm with a bow but we do say
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that we are going to be handing over this planet to the kids
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you know, the young generation and it's such a complicated world we're passing on
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and why not listen to what they've got to say about what they're feeling at the moment
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and so that was, you know, just sort of tying it back into that
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One small hobbit, one small pig Exactly, it's like What have they got to say about that
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