Are you happy or sad that it’s coming to an end?
“Both. Obviously, it’s been such an incredible five years, or four years or whatever it is. It’s a little strange feeling really because I know we’re all planning to go on seeing each other, so although the film journey is coming to an end, it just doesn’t feel like it. Actually, there’ll be the DVD releases and all of the promotions of that, and I think that we’re all looking forward to these next couple of months and celebrating the final one going out. So, at this point in time, it never feels like the end. I’ve hardly finished yet.
I still have more stuff to do on it anyway. I actually had actually shoot a scene last week, and the film has already been delivered, which was then cut into the movie immediately, even before the animators worked on it and I laid down some tracks. I’m going back to London on Saturday and I’ve got to do more on a vocal track. So, I don’t actually feel like I’m finished yet.
A lot of people were astonished that you didn’t win an Oscar for The Two Towers, and reckon that if you’d been giving a voice and body language performance from behind a mask, like John Hurt in The Elephant Man, you would have done.
I think people have a strange ‘unknowing’ about the word pixels, because it’s new and we’ve just developed it. The technology has changed dramatically between when I started on the films to just now. The technology that we were using in June, for instance, it’s moved on such a lot. We were shooting motion capture, which is wearing a suit with dots all over it to move a computer-generated image, but we were shooting it at the same time as shooting on set, and that’s never ever been done before. Four years ago, it’d never been thought about being done. So it continues to evolve.
Also, the definition of it has changed. It’s moving away from being called motion capture to performance capture, because motion sounds like it’s just collecting movements, but actually, you’re capturing a performance, an actor’s performance. That came from the Screen Actors’ Guild, who think that that’s probably a better way of terming it. As an actor, I’m very interested in developing it further because it has fantastic potential. It’s a new genre of acting that opens up the possibility of playing, really, any character that you like as an actor. You’re bound by your own physicality, your own body shape up to a certain point, but with this you can play someone like Gollum. Anyone’s body could be scanned into a computer and they could assign dots to your body shape and then they could assign those dots to mine and I could walk around with your body on the screen, providing that I could find the psychology to go with it and a voice. That’s what acting is about.
by Ian Spelling |
