My agent told me they were casting for the voice of Gollum. I hadn`t read The Lord of the Rings, but I read the script and realized what an amazing role it was. I developed a voice for the audition tape, then met Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh at the auditions and fell in love with them both.

Of course the computer animators take a lot of the credit for what`s going on, but with Peter`s help I really fleshed out the character,

When I first came out to New Zealand for principal photography, the focus was on voicing Gollum. But Peter wanted Gollum to be the most interactive digital character ever made for a movie, with a combination of live action and digital animation.

I think he (director, Peter Jackson) was originally going to have Kong kill Lumpy. Instead he gave me a role who finally gets devoured by computer graphics ? I don`t know whether that is a comment or not.

[on playing Gollum in Lord of the Rings:] "Everyone has their own interpretation of what he is, what he looks like and how he sounds. So it was up to me to just trust my own instincts."

Of course the computer animators take a lot of the credit for what`s going on, but with Peter`s help I really fleshed out the character.

We didn`t want to anthropomorphize him to the point where we were explaining every single little gesture. Gorillas both in captivity and the wild have an enigmatic quality - a sense of disconnect, of otherness. - on his title character in `King Kong` (2005)

The voice he created for character was so perfect. The character was quite scary and the voice was quite scary at times.

This was absolutely, really needed because we were doing really badly this year.

This is no mere monster movie,

It is very much a character piece and very much about relationships. A lot of the themes in the film are about isolation and love, with all the characters isolated in some way.

Every single frame has got something going on in the background; in many ways, it`s an embarrassment of riches. I guess some of the New York scenes, especially in the third act when Kong is back. Some of that rampage stuff, with the people running down the street and all the shop signs and all the neon that just goes on for miles. Those big aerial shots in New York that completely faithfully re-create New York at the time. That`s pretty special stuff.

I`ve always been really in touch with my primal instincts. In my profession you have to be. You have to be open to going where your emotions take you. Acting is a sort of pressure cooker that allows the fizz to come out the top. God knows what I`d be like if I didn`t have that. Even more animal, perhaps.

I do feel incredibly liberated when I`m inside another`s skin, basically, and so method does afford you that, hugely.