Ah… Gollum…

Can Gollum win an Oscar?

January 9 2003

As Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers breaks box office records in the US and Australia, it has generated the first big question of 2003: should Gollum get an Oscar?

There is no doubt he is the most intriguing little freak since ET, and a nearly perfect representation of the character described by J. R. R. Tolkien in the book of The Two Towers. But is he a human performance or just a pattern of pixels?

The Two Towers director Peter Jackson says it was a job of acting by Andy Serkis, who did Gollum’s hissing voice and spidery movements, over which Jackson laid a computer image.

“I think what Andy has ultimately achieved with Gollum is as relevant an acting performance as The Elephant Man with John Hurt (who was nominated for an Oscar in 1981),” Jackson told Entertainment Weekly. “Hurt’s buried beneath inches of rubber, but he has to use his acting skills to push this prosthetic around and fuel the character. Andy is really doing the same thing. He’s the driver manipulating this pixellated skin that we see in the film.”

In the two-disc DVD of Fellowship of the Ring (as opposed to the four-disc DVD, which is more expensive), there’s a documentary on the way Serkis did his “performance”. We see him wearing a white suit outdoors and interacting with Elijah Wood as Frodo and wearing a black suit in a studio and banging a fish on a rock.

Jackson’s commentary says: “The character of Gollum is a completely digital creature, but I was determined that I wanted an actor to actually create the character . . . We were doing a lot of Gollum as motion-capture, which is when Andy wears a suit covered in these little dots.

“Often we use Andy’s original performance that was photographed on the set and we do the animation over the top of Andy’s performance. Gollum is probably the most actor-driven digital creature that has ever been used in a film before.”
There is no doubt Serkis is in there. But what the Oscar nomination panel will have to determine is how much of Gollum’s impact comes from the big, sad eyes and the changes of expression from childlike and sentimental to paranoid and malicious.

Serkis (who looks a bit like Rowan Atkinson and previously had bit parts in movies called The Escapist, Shiner and Pandaemonium) explains why he is more than a voice: “The stuff I’m doing on set is demonstrating to the animators. Obviously the animators will be able to create a lot of subtext by a look or a blink that the character does, that I won’t be so much a part of because that’s their domain. But I would try to indicate to them how I see the character being played.” The question of what constitutes an acting performance was raised again this week with the release of a list of The Biggest Box-Office Stars of All Time. An American popular culture website called The Numbers cross-indexed performers’ names with ticket sales, and came up with a top 100 that begins, not surprisingly, with Harrison Ford.

Through three original episodes of Star Wars, three Indiana Jones, and such hits as Air Force One, Patriot Games and The Fugitive, Ford pulled more than $US3 billion ($A5.23 billion) across cinema counters. (If such a list were compiled from Australian box office takings, Ford would top that too.)

More unusual is Samuel L. Jackson at No. 2. He reached that spot not because of his powerful performance in Pulp Fiction (which did not do particularly well at the box office) but for smaller roles in Die Hard With a Vengeance, Jurassic Park and the two most recent Star Wars episodes.
A little further down the list, after the likes of Tom Hanks, Tom Cruise and Mel Gibson, we come to some unfamiliar names: Jim Cummings at 10, Frank Oz at 12, Clint Howard at 13 and Kenny Baker at 14. They are apparently so hot that they have sold more tickets than Julia Roberts, the first woman on the list. But who are they?

Jim Cummings is the Disney organisation’s favourite voiceover man for cartoons, specialising in Winnie the Pooh and Lion King characters. You heard him most recently as Captain of Guards in Shrek. He has never been in a live action movie.
Frank Oz is a puppeteer and director who did the voice of Yoda in the Star Wars series and the voice of Miss Piggy in the Muppets series.

Clint Howard happens to be the brother of director Ron Howard, and was lucky enough to get bit parts in Splash, Cocoon, Parenthood, Backdraft, Apollo 13, The Grinch and all three Austin Powers flicks.
Kenny Baker has been in all five Star Wars movies – he is the dwarf inside the whistling robot R2D2 (and his colleague Anthony Daniels, who was the man inside C3PO, appears at No. 19).

It must have been hot work trundling that tin can through the desert, and Baker certainly deserves recognition. Baker will power R2D2 for the last time in Star Wars Episode Three, due to be filmed this year.

By then, Serkis will have won his Oscar – and the floodgates will have opened for hundreds of behind-the-scenes manipulators who until now have been denied their place in the sun.

Updated: January 22, 2003 — 4:58 pm