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Friday, Jul 10, 2009
Andy Serkis' computer-aided performance was one of the best things about "The Two Towers." But the Academy isn't ready for digital actors.
Feb 18, 2003 | With the release of last August's ill-received "Simone," moviegoers were teased with the promise of a look at Hollywood's future. The film's promotional materials suggested that the film would focus on the long-controversial topic of "synthespians," computer-generated actors who would be capable of replacing their human counterparts.
To the disappointment of critics and audiences alike, this turned out to be little more than a gimmick: The film focused not on the world's reaction to the first virtual cinema star, but on the attempts of a second-rate director (Al Pacino) to conceal her "true nature," lest his work be written off as a fraud. In one of the film's accidentally philosophical moments, the director attempts to convince himself that "if a performance is genuine, it doesn't matter if the actor is real or not." And, though "Simone" never gave audiences cause to consider this claim further, recent developments have made the proposal one that can no longer be ignored. The real worth of "Simone" is found in the unanswered question that it poses: Even if a celebrity were "virtual," would there be any reason to hide it?
Well, here's one reason: We don't know how audiences will react to a performance that owes more to computer code than to human talent. Perhaps, as "Simone" suggests, it shouldn't matter whether an actor is real or not, but with the announcement of the nominees for the 75th Academy Awards last Tuesday, it has become clear that -- at least for now -- it still does. The most interesting question of this year's Oscar race was not who would be named, but whether Hollywood was prepared to adjust traditional definitions of talent and achievement to honor the first wave of computer-generated performers.
The question arose in response to public statements made in December that New Line Cinema would seek a best supporting actor nomination for Andy Serkis, the human actor whose talents were tapped to guide the computer-generated performance of the pitiful wretch, Gollum, in "The Two Towers," the second installment of the epic "Lord of the Rings" trilogy. And while Gollum's performance is nothing short of breathtaking, earning praise from critics as the most impressive aspect of the altogether overwhelming "Towers," it was not clear whether audiences or Academy members were prepared to see Oscar honors go to an actor whose face they have never seen. Is Hollywood ready to acknowledge and honor digital performances, or even human-digital hybrids? This year, the answer seems to be a resounding no. When the nominees for best supporting actor were named on Tuesday, Serkis was not among them.
Even to those who believe that Serkis gave an Oscar-worthy performance, the decision doesn't come as much of a surprise. New Line, and the "Rings" production team, recognized the difficulty they faced in gaining a nomination for Serkis' Gollum, whom audiences might be tempted to mistake for an improved descendant of "Star Wars'" much-reviled Jar-Jar Binks. "Rings" executive producer Mark Ordesky has explained in interviews that, unlike the other synthespians audiences have encountered, "Gollum is groundbreaking, because he's not only CGI, but is actually a performance-based character. He's not comic relief, he's not an antic. He really is a major dramatic character."
According to "Rings" director Peter Jackson, the most significant difference between Serkis' Gollum and the computer-generated actors that precede him is Serkis himself. Prior to "The Two Towers," all digital characters were developed mainly in postproduction: designed, refined and then inserted into completed sequences alongside actors who had delivered their lines to on-set substitutes constructed from broomsticks, tennis balls and the like.
For Gollum's performance, which offers much of the emotional and dramatic resonance in "The Two Towers," Jackson found such techniques insufficient. Instead, he brought in Serkis to perform Gollum's part on the set in real time alongside the other members of the "Rings" ensemble, in an attempt to capture the flow and pace of genuine interaction. Serkis then spent months in postproduction with the visual effects team re-creating his performance, one scene at a time, in an elaborate motion-capture animation studio that recorded his most minute movements, gestures and expressions. The final animation of Gollum was generated from this recorded model, and painted into the film in place of Serkis.
"What was important," Jackson explains, "is that there was one person, an experienced, skilled actor, making all of the decisions on behalf of Gollum. [Andy] would decide how Gollum would move, how he would act, what emotion he would have, what pauses he would put where, what weight he'd put into a particular scene -- just as any actor, like Elijah and Sean, would be doing for their characters."
