Andy Serkis has given the clearest account yet of how AI fits into the production of The Lord of the Rings: The Hunt for Gollum. In a new Variety interview, the director confirmed that AI is “partially utilized” on the film and detailed what that covers in practice.
Concretely, AI on this production means de-aging and machine learning in the VFX pipeline. “We’re not creating AI shots in our movie,” Serkis told Variety. Every shot is created in a traditional way.” He has framed his broader goal as reviving the hands-on craft of the Peter Jackson films, combining miniatures, prosthetics, and location work with modern tools where they add genuine value.
On using AI to generate reference imagery, Serkis has no objection. “If you’re looking for reference material, say, in the old days you get reference images for something. Well, now you can prompt something and get a result. And I don’t have any problem with that.” His broader position is conditional approval: “I think AI as a creative tool is, as long as it’s not exploitative and as long as it’s not harming anybody or defaming anybody or telling mistruths, is valuable.”
Where he draws the line is at performance. Serkis argues AI cannot supply what he calls the “authored performance,” the specific imaginative and physical act a human actor commits to a role. His career makes that position concrete. The motion capture work he developed for Gollum across the Peter Jackson trilogy set an industry standard precisely because it preserved the full humanity of a performance in digital form, and that history gives his distinction weight.
Tolkien made a version of this argument in “On Fairy-Stories.” The subcreator’s obligation, as he framed it, is to bring coherent imaginative truth to a created world, and that work can only come from a human mind in genuine creative engagement with its material. Serkis’s separation of AI as a practical tool from AI as a replacement for that engagement maps onto the same concern. Whether those lines hold as production continues is an open question.
The Lord of the Rings: The Hunt for Gollum arrives in theaters December 17, 2027.
For more on Gollum and the new film, check out Exploring Tolkien on YouTube.
