Gollum star sets up acting school for the 3D era

Fans of the actor Andy Serkis come in two kinds. There are those who recognise him from orthodox if challenging roles, such as Ian Dury in Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll or Einstein in Einstein and Eddington ; then there are those who revere him as Gollum, the creature from Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy. While his acting roles in human guise have earned him critical plaudits, it is the experience of acting inside a hi-tech special effects suit that has changed Serkis's life and given him a new mission. At the opening of the Cannes film festival next month, he will announce the details of a new studio he is setting up in London to teach and develop the "performance capture" skills he has perfected. With his partners in the film production company Caveman , he will be setting up The Imaginarium as a British base for the kind of technology he believes will become central to film-making in the next decade. Actors, he passionately argues, have no reason to be afraid but should embrace the future and learn to love the technology that is broadening the possibilities of entertainment at a rattling pace. "Actors, on the whole, are just really poorly educated about the whole process," he said, acknowledging the unfounded fear that he encounters in the profession. "There is still an idea that CGI [computer-generated imagery] characters are going to take over the world. For me it is really a question of allaying the fears that all film-makers have, but particularly with actors." He recalled the Bafta ceremony this year and the celebrations that met each prize that went to the Kathryn Bigelow film The Hurt Locker rather than to James Cameron's state-of-the-art fantasy Avatar . " The Hurt Locker is a great film, but it was very conventional in many ways and no director here could have got anywhere near to what Cameron has done with Avatar ," he said. "It is not a question of an actor being smothered by visual effects... in fact the exciting thing about it is that it means you can play anything." Serkis is about to complete work on a cameo role in a remake of Brighton Rock , but he plans to put digital technology first for a while. He is about to appear in Jackson's Tintin and has signed up to reprise his role of Gollum in the director's planned treatment of Tolkien's first Middle Earth adventure, The Hobbit . He also plans to direct and is to start a new project with musician Nitin Sawhney for the Sadler's Wells Theatre. "With The Imaginarium we want to create a creative hub for visual artists," said Serkis. "We are basing it on the notion of a theatre and we want people coming in and out." The project will be commercial as well as educational, he added, because he will be producing pieces for advertisers, for the interactive game market and for live events. "What it actually means is fidelity to the actor's performance, to the character. That is what Peter Jackson understood and that is what makes special effects interesting to watch," he explained. "There are certain technical things you have to learn. For instance, when I played King Kong for Peter I had to get the proportions of the movements right. It is like looking in a magic mirror or rather like working a marionette. But the psychology, the acting, is no different."