Andy Serkis has played two of the most kinetically captivating creatures in recent film: the bounding ape Caesar, in the “Planet of the Apes” series, and the skulking hobbit Gollum, in the “Lord of the Rings” saga. Standing near Times Square the other day, digitally unenhanced, he resembled any other tourist—an amiable, bearded fifty-three-year-old Brit with a camera hanging from his neck. But his fans weren’t fooled. As soon as Serkis entered Gulliver’s Gate, a miniature-world exhibit, the requests for selfies began.
“The digital masks I wear have not prevented me from being recognizable,” Serkis said. “The Marvel generation have seen the behind-the-scenes footage of performance capture, and they get digital avatars.” He bent to admire the HO-scale subway cars running below Grand Central Terminal, then pointed to the Empire State Building and said, “I’ve already been on top of that as King Kong, of course”—in the 2005 film. The exhibit’s head of marketing trotted over, introduced himself, and said, “My entire model-making team is going bonkers! We’d love to scan you and put a tiny you in one of our exhibits!” Serkis bowed his head, consenting.
Serkis’s new feature, “Breathe,” is his first as a director. It’s based on the life of Robin Cavendish (Andrew Garfield), who contracted polio and became paralyzed from the neck down, seemingly doomed to live out his days in a hospital bed. But his wife (Claire Foy) brought him home, and soon, with the help of an inventor friend, Robin devised the Cavendish chair, a cozy wheelchair/ventilator, and began to explore the world.
Serkis strolled through Europe and stopped to examine London—Big Ben, Tower Bridge, a Thames bordered by grass and trees. “There’s a lot more greenery than I remember,” he said. “Perhaps it’s how British people imagine it will look after Brexit—a return to the good old days.” That’s also how “Breathe,” set largely in the sixties and seventies, feels. The larksome film, shot on location in England’s Chiltern Hills, is surprisingly reminiscent of another movie shot in the region: “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.”
He was drawn to the material because his business partner in the Imaginarium, his performance-capture studio in London, is Robin Cavendish’s son, Jonathan. Another attraction, he said, “was the whole notion of physicality. Climbing is one of my hobbies, and my route into a character is physical: the weight placement, the gait, where they trap emotion in their body. I thought of Gollum as an addict, addicted to the ring. All the pain was trapped in his throat, so that’s why he spoke like a cat coughing up fur balls. I approached Caesar as a human in an ape’s skin, and by the third movie I was wearing more and more weights on my arms and around my waist”—he began to stoop and labor—“to represent the burden he feels of trying to preserve his species.”
“For ‘Breathe,’ ” he went on, “we looked at home movies of Robin, and, being a rag doll from the chin down”—he bulged his eyes and stiffened—“he had to express everything with his face. Andrew was amazing at showing how Robin’s laugh became extreme, his smile became enormously wide, and his eyes were almost trying to look around the corner, behind him.”
Serkis poked his head into the model-making room, and several women with nose rings dropped their tiny paintbrushes. “It’s my birthday today, so this is fucking incredible!” one said, as she placed a trembling hand around Serkis’s shoulders for a photo. The actor murmured that the adulation probably stemmed from the fact that Peter Jackson, the director of the “Lord of the Rings” movies, “was one of the last filmmakers to use scale models. Now it’s all digital.”
When Serkis entered the scanning room, John Segalla, an energetic “navigator” in a navy lab coat, escorted him into the pod-shaped apparatus. “Keep your camera on—that’ll be like your accessory,” Segalla said. “Now place your feet in the center circle.”
“I’ve actually been scanned before,” Serkis said. He struck a heroic pose, peering down through his Leica, as if to document the Lilliputians below.
Segalla said, “I’m worried the camera strap will break when we make the figure,” which would be made from gypsum polymer and be one-eighty-seventh the actor’s size. “Let’s shoot one more.”
When they were both satisfied, Segalla asked, “Where would you like him to go?” The mini Serkis would be a kind of hidden Easter egg, a companion to the Yoda secreted near the airport.
“Can you put me on the Eiffel Tower?” Serkis said. “I actually climbed it to the second level, twenty-five years ago.”
“We can put you underneath it,” Segalla replied. He noticed Serkis’s lack of expression. “All right, as high as we can!” ♦
