Cat Vomit as Artistic Practice!
Jan. 31st, 2004 04:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
malsperanzaAndy Serkis interviewed on NPR, Jan 18, 2004:
Interviewer Liane Hansen: He sounds like a cat, and that was deliberate, wasn't it?
Serkis: The cat thing is absolutely true. When I was coming up with the voice, [...] I was thinking about the pain of the character [... his pain is] carried in his throat. He's called Gollum because of the way he sounds. Well, why does he sound like that? I linked it to the murder of his cousin and that moment in time that gets trapped in his throat. So it's like a muscle spasm, it's like Tourette's Syndrome, it's like something that's trapped in his craw that will never go away, and its involuntary.
I was thinking about all this stuff whilst I was preparing for the audition, and one of my cats, Diz, who doesn't exist any longer, literally strode into the kitchen and started coughing up furballs, which is what cats do. You know: they lick their fur and it gets stuck in the back of their throats. And he started doing this kind of convulsion, which rippled through his entire spine, as they do, and they kind of go [makes horrible gagging sounds] and then they go [puaahhh], and then they spit out these furballs. And I thought, Thanks for doing that while I'm trying to create Gollum, but it was actually kind of useful because it became Gollum.
Interviewer Liane Hansen: He sounds like a cat, and that was deliberate, wasn't it?
Serkis: The cat thing is absolutely true. When I was coming up with the voice, [...] I was thinking about the pain of the character [... his pain is] carried in his throat. He's called Gollum because of the way he sounds. Well, why does he sound like that? I linked it to the murder of his cousin and that moment in time that gets trapped in his throat. So it's like a muscle spasm, it's like Tourette's Syndrome, it's like something that's trapped in his craw that will never go away, and its involuntary.
I was thinking about all this stuff whilst I was preparing for the audition, and one of my cats, Diz, who doesn't exist any longer, literally strode into the kitchen and started coughing up furballs, which is what cats do. You know: they lick their fur and it gets stuck in the back of their throats. And he started doing this kind of convulsion, which rippled through his entire spine, as they do, and they kind of go [makes horrible gagging sounds] and then they go [puaahhh], and then they spit out these furballs. And I thought, Thanks for doing that while I'm trying to create Gollum, but it was actually kind of useful because it became Gollum.
