As seemingly joined at the hip as Tim Burton and Johnny Depp, filmmaker Peter Jackson and actor Andly Serkis are again teaming for big-screen mo-cap work. According to Daily Variety, Serkis has boarded DreamWorks’ planned trilogy of performance-capture films based on Georges Remi’s classic Belgian comic strip The Adventures of Tintin. Jackson and DreamWorks principal Steven Spielberg will each direct at least one film in the series.
Created by Remi under the pen name Herg’, Tintin frist appeared in a Belgian newspaper in 1929. The adventures of the young, traveling reporter and his dog, Snowy, have since been published in 50 languages and more than 200 million copies of the books have sold over the past 70 years. Spielberg optioned the rights in the early 1980s, just prior to Remi’s death.
Two live-action Tintin films and three animated features were made in the ’50s and ’60s, and a pair of television series adapted the comic-strip stories with animation. This latest incarnation form Jackson and Spielberg will be completely digital, created with basically the same technology behind the Robert Zemeckis films The Polar Express and Beowulf.
Having donned a mo-cap suit to play wretched imp Gollum in Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings films, and a towering gorilla in the director’s remake of King Kong, Serkis will likely play Tintin’s best pal, Captain Haddock, and may take on a couple other roles as well. Production is slated to begin in September with Jackson’s Weta Digital in New Zealand handling the animation work. Jackson and Spielberg are producing the trilogy with Kathleen Kennedy.
