Andy Serkis Shows How He Captured Christian Bale's Animal Instincts in Mowgli

Hi there, I'm Andy Serkis,

the director of Mowgli: Legend Of The Jungle,

and this is notes On A Scene.

Let him go, Bagheera.

Bagheera.

[Bagheera roars]

We're gonna look at a scene

which is the culmination of an event

in Mowgli's life called the running,

which is a rite of passage trial

that he has to go through to prove himself,

and to enable him to be considered part of the pack.

He's never gonna be able to run

as fast as a wolf on all fours,

so Baloo, his teacher, has been teaching him

to slide down trees, to jump from branch to branch,

to enable him to get a bit of a head start.

At this moment in time, it just about looks

like Mowgli is in the lead,

and gonna cross the finishing line

before all the other wolves

when, suddenly, something happens.

[Bagheera roars]

When we headed into this movie,

I really didn't want to use

documentary-style photoreal animals

that you would never believe a voice would come out of.

Part of the design of the animals

was to license them so that you could actually see

facial expressions that made human vowel sounds,

'cause these are animals that represent humans.

If you look at Baloo's face here,

the jaw line, the muzzle, the eyebrows,

animals don't really have eyebrows like that,

but these are all designed

to make them look more human.

Although it feels like a bear,

it's actually not the shape of a bear's face.

I purposefully wanted all of the eyes

of the animals to look as human as possible.

In fact, this is the character that I play.

Baloo, as a character, he's very grizzled.

He's got furrowed brows.

He's covered in scars.

There's a scar on his nose there.

I have quite a furrowed brow,

and I also made Baloo have a slightly slack jaw,

so when I was acting him,

I sort of let my jaw drop on this side a little bit

so you got, you know, and he's talking like that.

He's like that, yeah.

It sort of drops out of the corner of his mouth.

He's got a bitten ear, so you can see

that's sort of chewed up.

We wanted our animals to feel real,

and to feel not that they were fluffy CG inventions,

but that they were textured, real beasts

that go through survival on a day-to-day level.

We shot the whole film in two different passes,

one, the first section of the movie

was with all our A-list cast,

so Cate Blanchett, Benedict Cumberbatch,

and Christian Bale, and Rohan Chand, who plays Mowgli.

It was all about their performances, really.

It was about their facial capture performances,

and moving around physically as their creatures.

Once we'd done that, we would then move on

to our jungle sets, which we built at Leavesden Studio,

so all of these trees, all of the vines,

all of the stuff in the foreground here,

this is all real foliage, all the stuff down here.

Then you find a point where you're looking

into the background, and all the stuff

from there, all this,

this is all CG set extension.

This actual shot is what we would call a pickup,

or a facial ADR, which means that, in fact,

I actually shot this piece,

it must've been two years after principal photography

to get this look.

In the ADR stage, I'd just have my head-mounted camera

with dots all over my face, and then I would be able

to watch on screen what's going on,

and then I'd be able to trace Mowgli's eyeline

as he's running towards me, and that look

that I give in this very, very shot

was actually something that was captured

two years after the event.

That's the great thing about performance capture.

You can keep adding little modules

of performance, pickup beats,

bits of storytelling as it carries on.

[Bagheera roars]

[Mowgli screams]

Let him go, Bagheera.

Bagheera.

[Bagheera roars]

Here, on screen, we've got Rohan Chand,

who is Mowgli in our picture.

Extraordinary young actor.

The makeup department went to town.

Again, we wanted him to not look too clean.

In other versions of Mowgli's story,

the boy always seems to look

like he's sort of just strolling down through Central Park.

He never seems to get dirty.

We really wanted him to feel grungy,

and dirty, and filthy.

[Bagheera roars]

[Mowgli screams]

Here, we have Christian, who is,

at this moment, at this extraordinary moment

of losing himself, and he really goes

into full panther mode.

Christian actually did this, lept on top of him,

and we captured all of Christian's performance.

You can actually see Christian's face in this,

and all of this skin texturing, and fur,

all of this, the detail

that the visual effects team work on,

getting the jaw to read Christian's jaw,

the yellowing of the teeth, again,

to make the character seem more believable.

These whiskers, we spent a long time getting these right.

In every single shot, they're lit slightly differently

so they don't become too distracting

because of the jaw opening and closing so much.

Yeah, this wonderful sort of tension

in his brow that the animators would bring to it

whilst not losing Christian, but yet,

really seeing the full panther in him.

[Bagheera roars]

[Mowgli screams]

Let him go, Bagheera.

In a shot like this, Rohan really,

he has to go from naught to 60,

and just to get into this shot,

to literally roll, be flicked over,

land, have Bagheera land on him,

he's got to emotionally be totally in the scene,

and prepped, so part of what I used to do with him was,

I used to say to him before every single shot,

Rohan, right, we're gonna get into the zone now.

I'd make him do press-ups,

get him in focus, we're gonna get ramped up,

and then it would be a real fast count.

Three, two, one, action.

I'd throw him into the scene.

He would roll in, and he would be really pumped.

Bagheera.

[Bagheera roars]

Get up.

You let your guard down.

I told you, never let your guard down.

When I think about the other roles

that I've played using performance capture,

it's difficult enough to take a humanoid face,

and to transfer it, and transpose the performance

onto, say, Gollum or Caeser in Planet Of The Apes,

but those are much, much more humanoid faces,

facial structures, they're not too different

from a human's face, but when you're looking

at transposing a performance with a muzzle like this,

that takes a lot of work, a lot of understanding

about how to make the emotion read in the performance,

and actually quintessentially get

what I was doing in this moment.

What they're looking at when they get the material is data,

which is the 3D-captured dots in 360 degrees,

but they're also looking at what we call witness cameras,

which are lots of cameras placed around the actor's face

so that you can really read the performance.

It was their job, then, to absolutely get

this greater fidelity to what I was doing

in the moment there.

For instance, a shot like this,

with this physicality, a change of physicality

and a blocking move with the camera,

again, it was inspired

by the first performance capture phase

when Christian turned away, and moved away,

and tries to gather himself.

They would look at the reference shot

of the witness camera footage,

seeing what Christian was doing,

and then we would either have, as a rehearsal,

we would have a motion capture actor,

or in fact, sometimes, we use two actors

with a spine, so it'd be two actors,

one playing the front legs,

and one literally playing the back legs.

On the end of sort of a flexible pole,

they would have Bagheera's head

that they could move around and steer.

That would enable us to get our framing absolutely right.

Get up.

You let your guard down.

I told you, never let your guard down.

He's only chasing me.

He targeted me.

He knows I'm the weakest.

Rohan was 10 years old

when he started making this movie,

and 14 when he finished, so he, obviously,

started off with a slightly younger facial features,

and we were very worried, over the course

of the four years, with all of the pickups that we did.

This actual shot, which we had to match in

with the previous shots in the sequence

was actually about a year and a half

after those previous shots.

Rohan had changed by now.

He had actually grown.

This is now shot against a blue screen,

so this was all a CG environment.

We didn't build that again.

This is, we had to replicate

what would've been created a year and a half before.

You'll notice that there is a slight difference.

He had grown his hair very long,

but he had to come back

and have false hair extensions put in.

The makeup, you'll notice, is slightly different.

We tried to match it as much as possible,

but when he stands up, he's just that little bit taller.

That was because there's a different reaction

that we wanted to get rather than,

what used to happen, actually,

in the first time we shot it,

was that he really started shouting at Baloo

in terms of how he was betrayed and so on.

Then Baloo has a real go at him,

but we thought Baloo was being a bit too heavy,

so we pulled that back, so we needed to reshoot this.

You can tell this is a boy

who's going from the age of 10 to 14,

and then going back to the younger version of Rohan,

which was back to when he's 10 going on 11.

He targeted me.

He knows I'm the weakest.

[Bagheera growls]

All of your lessons, they mean nothing.

We see Mowgli take off, and really,

it's a pivotal point at the end of this scene,

because he then begins his journey

towards stepping over the line,

becoming assimilated into the world of mankind,

and then having to retract and find his place,

so this is a huge turning point.

Our journey is really about a boy who feels other.

There are laws and rules that are within the jungle

that hold the structure of the jungle together,

and some of them, he can abide by,

some of them, he can live with, but some of them,

he just can't because he's not an animal of the jungle.

When he finally gets to the village,

he realizes neither can he fully live

in the world of man because their rules,

and customs, and laws don't apply to him either.

The whole film is really about a search

for his identity, and how he can be himself.