Thanks to reader Micah for pointing me to this NPR interview with Andy Serkis, which offers a nice nugget to dovetail with this morning’s post about Oscar-worthiness and the potential for a Special Achievement Award for the actor’s work in “Rise of the Planet of the Apes.” Here is his take on awards hub-bub around performance-capture (which starts at the 18:40 mark):

My take on it is — and having worked on it for some years now — is that acting is acting. A performance is a performance. When we shoot these things, after they’ve been shot, the director, Rupert Wyatt, cuts the film, he edits the film. And the actor’s performance — my performance as Caesar, for instance, in this film — he can see my face on film going through all the emotions. He then cuts the entire story using my performance. And then eight or nine months down the line the visual effects shots, the overlaying of the performance with the skin and the texturing and coloring and painting over my eye movements and so on, that’s done later on. But the director’s already edited the movie and told the story and wants to uphold the performance of that actor.

[Photo: NPR]

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