Putting a Human Face on 'It'

After a recent Beverly Hills screening of "The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers," members of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences walked out of the three-hour epic buzzing about "him."

Not actor Viggo Mortensen, who plays the hunky, sword-wielding Aragorn. Not Elijah Wood, cast as the diminutive, ring-bearing hero Frodo. Instead, the chatter focused on Gollum, the wheezing, lisping wretch who plays Frodo's foil.

What a stunning performance. An Oscar contender. He's just great!

Technically, Gollum is not a "he," but an "it" -- an agglomeration of 1s and 0s that required six years of research, scores of computer programmers and countless cycles of processing power to make the animated amphibious creature as believable as human actors.

The key, though, was a human actor -- a classically trained Shakespearean stage player named Andy Serkis whose face never appears on-screen, but nonetheless infuses Gollum with enough sadness and pain to make him perhaps the most believable computer-generated character in a movie.

Animated film characters have mingled on-screen with live actors since Gene Kelly danced with Jerry the Mouse in 1945's "Anchors Aweigh." And animators long have been able to squeeze a response out of audiences -- whether it's the tearful death of Bambi's mother or the fearful rampage of the Tyrannosaurus rex in "Jurassic Park."

Yet despite the advances made by powerful computers in animation, most characters have never felt like anything but special effects novelties to humans adept at distinguishing life from lifelike.

Gollum's debut in "The Two Towers" marks the strongest marriage to date of technology and art in moviemaking. Already, Hollywood is talking about Academy Award nominations both for the team that gave Gollum life and the actor who gave him a soul.

"What's the difference between John Hurt wearing a latex mask in 'The Elephant Man' and Andy Serkis wearing a pixel mask of Gollum now?" asked Russell Schwartz, president of domestic marketing for New Line Cinema, which releases the movie Wednesday. "There's no difference. They're both human."

Making Gollum believable was the biggest technical and artistic challenge for Peter Jackson, who directed "The Lord of the Rings" trilogy. In the J.R.R. Tolkien series on which the movies are based, Gollum is a central figure, a Hobbit disfigured and driven mad by the power of the One Ring.