"Yeah, that was tough. Because of the nature of the way it's been
brought to screen, I've been doing all the post production work, all the
'physicallizing' of him for the motion-capture stuff this year. It's
lovely to be praised as Gollum. I see myself as guardian of the
character since there are so many processes involved in terms of
animating Gollum with 40 animators working on him."
"Throughout principle photography, I was on set every step of the way.
We rehearsed and shot with Sean [Astin] and Elijah [Wood] and we'd work
out the emotional dynamics of the scenes with Peter as any conventional
film scene. And then we'd shoot two versions - one with me interacting
with them and one with me out of frame."
"And that would lead to two avenues for animation where they would paint
over my movements frame by frame. That was especially useful for the
close interactive stuff where we're grabbing hold of each other or me
hauling Frodo out of the water."
"For my motion-capture performance this past year, I had to wear a suit
with dots all over it which are co-ordinates that reflect joints in my
body and that information is picked up by 25 different cameras. They
rebuilt the geography of the sets on the "motion capture" stage. And
then I had to act out exactly what I did a year beforehand all over
again so I had a chance to really hone the performance physically and
psychologically as well because Peter would be directing me in the
motion capture phase as well."
"Eventually, on monitors, I could see a basic rough image of Gollum and
it moved in real time with my movements. At that stage, it was being
like a puppeteer. As the character Gollum, I get dragged by Frodo and
Sam with a rope around my neck. Sean and Elijah loved doing it
(laughter)."
"We went through extreme stuff. We were shooting on volcanoes, and in
freezing cold streams. The scene where Gollum dives in the stream, they
had to defrost that set since it was covered with snow. I had on a
wetsuit and when I hit the water, I practically stopped breathing so
there wasn't a lot of acting going on!"
"Peter [Jackson] spent a lot of time developing Gollum, he's not the
Balrog or the Cave Troll or other types of creatures. We wanted to give
him human qualities which is why he wanted an actor to do it. It's
important to allow the whole process of Gollum to evolve, to give him
more depth.
"I'd played him as an addict, a Ring junkie. He's emaciated; he suffers
withdrawal symptoms from the Ring. He's addicted to it; he suffers all
the pathology associated with it. He's completely screwed up by this
thing which feeds very much into Frodo's story. Frodo needs to
understand Gollum's tortured soul as he realizes what it's doing to him.
And the bond between them becomes very strong."
"The voice and physicality are tied together. He's called Gollum
because he's defined by the way he sounds. He was called Smeagol when he
was a Hobbit until he was outcast from society for stealing the Ring.
He'd killed his cousin Deagol for the Ring. As the Ring began to take
possession of him, he began to speak with this particular tone."
"It's kind of onomatopoeic for the way he sounds. I wanted to find sort
of a link physically and psychologically as to where his voice comes
from and for me it comes from the guilt. It's almost an involuntary
action which is causing the tightening of the throat."
"The pain of the character for me was located there. Gollum was given
lots of animal descriptions by Tolkien, one of which is cats and I
observed how cats got with furballs stuck in their throat, they'd sort
of convulse. And that's where the 'gutteral' Gollum voice evolved from.
But then he's got two different voices, the other being that of
Smeagol."
"Smeagol's the light side of the character's soul that's been squashed
and kept prisoner by Gollum. Over the years, he's been alone in the
misty mountains going mad."
