A collection of Andy Serkis’ favourite movies: “It’s always been my touchstone”
His rise to stardom may have been predicated entirely on becoming the industry’s go-to guy for performance capture, but Andy Serkis was hardly plucked from obscurity and stuffed into a leotard to begin his rise up the Hollywood ranks.
The actor and filmmaker made his screen debut in 1989, but a breakthrough role failed to materialise, with his highest-profile part in a feature before Middle-earth coming when he went to extraordinary lengths to embody John D’Auban in Mike Leigh’s Topsy-Turvy, only for the majority of the scenes to end up on the cutting room floor.
Acting is a funny old business, though, with big breaks often coming through the unlikeliest of circumstances. For Serkis, it was the role of Gollum in Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy, a gift that kept on giving after he mo-capped the title character in the director’s King Kong, led the Planet of the Apes reboot trilogy as Caesar, shot second unit on The Hobbit, and will take the reins on the unnecessary spinoff The Hunt for Gollum.
It’s been an unusual rise to the top, but Serkis has been an ardent cinephile since his teenage years when he experienced a classic movie that changed him forever. “I saw it in 1979 when it came out, on 70mm in Paris, I was taken to see it and I didn’t know what the hell it was I was going to see, and it was just massive,” he said to Hot Corn of Apocalypse Now. “The choppers, everything about it, it stayed with me, that film really stayed with me and informed me hugely as a filmmaker, it’s always been my touchstone. That was the one.”
In terms of being able to rewatch it whenever and wherever the opportunity presents itself, though, Serkis prefers to have his heartstrings gently tugged after naming Jane Campion’s The Piano as the film he’ll never get tired of watching, with the star stating in no uncertain terms that “I absolutely adore that film.”
Jazz legend Duke Ellington’s score for Otto Perminger’s courtroom drama Anatomy of a Murder serves as Serkis’ favourite-ever soundtrack to a feature, while classic musical The Sound of Music endures as his ultimate guilty pleasure. “Every single time I listen to the songs they just always want to make me cry,” he admitted. “It is very much linked to childhood, and that’s another movie that really blew my mind when I was a kid.”
For a scene that causes him to be reduced to a blubbering emotional wreck each time he sees it, Serkis opted for Niki Caro’s coming-of-age drama Whale Rider, pointing to the school hall-set moment when Keisha Castle-Hughes’ Paikea Apirana is “expecting her grandfather to turn up and he doesn’t show any emotion towards her or accept her because she’s not a boy basically” as a bulletproof tearjerking trigger.
Andy Serkis’ favourite movies:
- Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979)
- The Piano (Jane Campion, 1993)
- Anatomy of a Murder (Otto Preminger, 1959)
- The Sound of Music (Robert Wise, 1965)
- Whale Rider (Niki Caro, 2002)
