Theatre: Aping isn’t monkey business
 | | Call of the wild: Baloo and Mowgli in The Jungle Book |
Bridget Galton
PETER Elliott was mauled three times by chimps at the Oklahoma Primate Centre while studying for his debut movie role.
The 49-year-old now accepts that trying to integrate into a group of animals with "10 times the upper body strength of a man and the emotional stability of a one-year-old child" was more dangerous than he had foreseen.
But his two-year chimp research led to ground-breaking work playing Tarzan's ape father Silverbeard and choreographing the actors in monkey suits in the 1984 movie Greystoke.
Since then, the Primrose Hill father-of-three has worked on around 45 movies as a movement director, creating realistic gaits for creatures as diverse as early man, guinea pigs and aliens.
Elliott, who lives on Gloucester Avenue, trained in the method school of acting and employs the same approach for his movement work.
"Before, people never did any studies of the animals, they just put a stuntman into a costume, said 'action', and wondered why it looked rubbish," says Elliott.
"But with my method, rather than choreographing every move, you get the actors to create a real animal then hand it over to them."
On Greystoke, the actors would improvise for hours in "character" interacting as a group of chimps.
"The hardest job was getting them to be humans afterwards," jokes Elliott.
On Gorillas in the Mist, the 1988 film about primate expert Dian Fossey starring Sigourney Weaver, he encouraged the performers to treat the apes as an acting role.
"I like to work from the inside out so they were method apes. I teach the actors how the animals think, move, breathe, behave and interact. It is much more realistic and believable because the people in there are playing real gorillas with characters rather than a mime act of an animal moving."
Elliott says actors are often called on to don animal suits because it is difficult to get the real thing to perform for the cameras.
"The real animals obviously don't read the script and are not interested when you say 'take two'.
"With Gorillas in the Mist, you can't make a film about an endangered species and kill a couple of them, so we used a mixture of real animals and people in costumes. Although the costumes were very expensive and use animatronics - they cost millions of dollars - they are inanimate until a performer brings them to life."
The same method worked for Vogons in the recent film of the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. "They looked like 8ft giant baked potatoes and moved with the weight of an elephant so we used some animal inspiration and worked with the actors to invent the rest."
Elliott's latest job was not for a film but for the Birmingham Stage Company's acclaimed production of Kipling's classic tale The Jungle Book, which is running at the Bloomsbury Theatre this Christmas.
"I hadn't done stage work for a while and thought it would be a fun new challenge," he says. "These animal characters have to tell a story and sing and dance, so it wasn't possible to use realistic studies because you can't have the tiger walking on all fours, and real animals don't do song and dance routines.
"We worked out a way to keep the essence of the animals but still allow the actors to tell the story."
Elliott says for Bagheera the panther the actor uses a predatory stare and slinking cat-like movement, while with Baloo the bear they used a snuffling speech and based his walk on a "clockwork toy where the bottom half moves differently to the top half".
"It was fun because I could do more cartoony characters and there was less responsibility of making them 100 per cent real."
o The Jungle Book runs at Bloomsbury Theatre until January 28.
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