Andy Serkis (The Cottage) Interview
Tell us about your character...
I play a character called ‘David’ who with his brother Peter tries to take this character Tracey hostage to get some cash. It’s ‘David’s plan and he has got his younger brother Peter (who Reece Shearsmith is playing) involved, and it all goes horribly wrong.
How did you come to work with Paul Andrew Williams?
I’d had a meeting with him and just really loved the script, I thought it was beautifully written and the characters were really well defined. It was close to being comedic but was very strongly character driven. With the events coming thick and fast and the escalation of events it was very readable. Paul is fantastically adept at creating the atmosphere and the pace and the world of this story on the page. It’s very rare that you see such an articulate script. I had also seen Paul’s film London To Brighton and it was just an amazing film. It was a fantastic debut feature.
Is working with a writer/director a bonus?
Absolutely, certainly an actor/writer/director as well. I find working with actor/directors exciting because they know when something will work from a performance point of view and they are most interested in performance. A lot of directors you work with have an interest in performance, obviously, but are bound up in the visual side of it to the point where they think the acting will just take care of itself. But with Paul, he’s quite specific and admits he can be quite pedantic about beats in the scenes and the way that lines are written and so on, which you take, because he has lived through all of the characters that he has put up there.
How does he get a performance from his cast?
By absolute fluke! (laughs). He just really ultimately relies on the fact that he’s cast really well. He’s fantastic. He really knows how to tweak and adjust the scene or adjust the beats of a scene very subtly. One of the greatest things about Paul as a director is that he never for a minute assumes a superior position and beats you with a rod of iron. He’s terrific at just being one of the gang and we’re all telling the story together and he happens to have written it, and he’s directing it and he finds a very personal and easy approach to dealing with his actors. It’s really refreshing.
What do you think of working with in-camera effects?
With this scale of filmmaking, everything has to happen in camera because there just isn’t the backing budget to do a lot of CGI work. But more importantly it’s very physical and it has to have areality and tangibility about everything that happens. The gore and the horror works in tandem with the comedy and the reality of the performances. It’s all got to be totally believable. It’s great to achieve and find these non-digital methods as often they can work out the best.
Does it help your performance?
It really does help. There’s a scene where Steven O’Donnell’s character gets into a bit of a sticky situation with a trap. It wasn’t working. But we got our hands covered in blood and were dealing with a great big gash in his leg and it started to play. When you’ve got real tangible stuff to play with, the scene kind of lights up.
What do you think of horror films?
I think everybody wants to be scared. People love being scared. It’s part of human nature. It goes back through history, archetypal storytelling is all about scaring, from children upwards. There’s nothing better because it reminds you that you’re alive and things are ok on a day to day level. In this film, it’s a peculiar mix. Because it’s so character driven there is a believability to it so it’s not ‘out-there’ horror. You can easily imagine yourself in the situation, which makes it slightly more worrying. I wouldn’t necessarily say that I was a horror fan particularly but this kind of film really appealed to me because of the balance of the elements, the truthfulness of the characterisation and the way it’s all being acted by everybody across the board. It’s absolutely brilliant. You’ve got some great, and big, comic performances as well. It’s really rooted in a kind of reality. I suppose that balanced with the horror aspect of it makes it just a great film.
Tell us a bit more about David and the family?
We sort of built this back story up of David being his father’s son really and Peter being the mummy’s boy, the younger one who’s been totally controlled and protected. They are innately dysfunctional, and then at some point David has watched his father walk out on the family and he consequently is terrible at keeping his own relationships. He’s all over the place and he’s leading a pretty unfulfilled desperate life. He’s got involved with underground elements through a club that he’s working at so he’s making this last-ditch attempt to get out of that world. He thinks up a crazy scheme to take the daughter of the club owner as a hostage, never thinking that anything’s really seriously going to happen to her but thinking that it’s going to be a way of ensuring his escape from the world. Obviously it goes horribly wrong. The first half of the film is about his relationship with Peter and their past and their dysfunctional relationship with their parents. Then it changes gear and goes into a more extreme horror mode in the second half where, just when you think things couldn’t get any worse from the bungled heist point of view, it just falls apart at the seams because there’s another danger lurking in the dark outside.
What can audiences expect?
I think the beauty of the script and the beauty of the way that Paul’s directed this is that it isn’t something that you can immediately put your finger on as a typical genre piece. It does straddle a lot of different areas and hopefully feels more like a great film as opposed to a horror film or a comedy film.
The Cottage is released in UIK cinemas on 14th March 2008.
