Andy Serkis on the link between his Animal Farm and Lord of the Rings

The director discusses why his career has focused on re-imagining beloved stories, including rewriting Animal Farm's ending

Animal Farm has been a longtime passion project for Serkis, the pioneering mo-cap superstar of the Lord of the Rings and Planet of the Apes franchises, now a producer and director (Venom: Let There Be Carnage; Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle). He’s been developing this movie since 2011, across several studios, including Netflix. Polygon spoke to Serkis about why he felt such a burning need to make this movie, why its anti-propaganda, anti-authoriarian, anti-consumer messages aren’t aimed at any one current administration, and what happened to the movie at Netflix.

This interview has been edited for concision and clarity.

Polygon: Why was remaking Animal Farm so important to you that you’d stick with it for 15 years?

Andy Serkis: It spoke to me so deeply when I read it as a child. I was 11, and it was one of the first books where it really hit me that there was a story underlying this fairy tale, this allegory. So it stuck with me. I saw a theatrical production when I was about 18, at the National Theatre in the UK. And then when I was working on the Planet of the Apes movies, and I'd been working with performance capture for some time. It just suddenly came across me that there hadn't been an adaptation of the book for a while, and that we had the technology to do it.

So I set about, with my producing partner, Jonathan Cavendish, to make this the first film on our slate of films for me to direct. And it evolved from that into animation, not live action. We felt the innocence of animation would allow us to bring it to a younger audience with its darker themes intact, but presented in a way that was entertaining.

You've been very clear that this movie precedes the Trump administration, and wasn't prompted by it. But at the same time, in both America and the UK, our relationship with the truth and with politics and propaganda, have all shifted strongly toward authoritarian manipulation since the point where you first conceived of this film 15 years ago. Did the movie evolve in any way to reflect real world events?

It concentrates on all world events. I wouldn't say it's specifically regional. It's certainly not aimed at one administration. It is the way the world has gone. As social media has become so central to the way we hear about so-called truth, with surveillance being the way it is, with governments that have stopped listening to the people that have put them in power, and become corrupted by power — absolute power corrupting absolutely — all of those things informed us. It really isn't aimed at one particular administration, because there are leaders like Napoleon worldwide. And this is dedicated to people who are oppressed worldwide.

That’s why we changed the ending of the book — not tying it all up in a nice neat bow and saying it's a happy ending, because it's not. But it's saying, “We have to keep trying, no matter where the wheel ends the next time round.” We all have to do this job, particularly young people, because they will inherit where we're at. They have to have hope that they can change the world.

One of your big innovations here is telling the story from the point of view of one of the pigs, having a character who can see both sides of the story, as an insider and outsider. Why was that an important part of the storytelling for you?

As we were trying to pitch the film to various different studios, I realized we didn't have a protagonist. The book is very objective. It's not really seen through a central character's story. And I really thought it was important that it was a young character. I wanted to be able to have access to the pigs, and actually get inside the bunker with them. It was really, really important that we centralized the journey around Lucky, this character who becomes morally corrupted, but is innocent at heart. That to me felt like it was not straying too far from Orwell.

You mentioned taking this around to a bunch of different studios. This project was at Netflix for a couple of years. How did that relationship end?

It was just a change of thought on their behalf that perhaps this wasn't for them. They were very kind, and they enabled us to write the script and do some animation tests. Then there was a regime change, I believe, in the animation department, and it was just thought of as perhaps not quite right for them at the moment. Then we partnered with Aniventure. But it wouldn't have happened had it not been for the tests we were able to create with Netflix. So it has been a journey, there's no question, but I think it absolutely ended up where it needed to be.

You've been very central to the process of re-imagining Lord of the Rings for a new generation, then doing the same with Planet of the Apes and Jungle Book. Now you’re re-imagining Animal Farm. Is there a particular appeal for you personally in reviving classic stories for new audiences?

It's not something I've set out to do intentionally. The stories have found me, or come back to me. Certainly Animal Farm was one I wanted to make. I naïvely thought we would go out with Animal Farm — we'd got the rights from the Orwell Estate, and I thought, Wow, everyone's going to want to make Animal Farm. Who's not going to want to make it? So it was quite a surprise, actually, that it's taken this long, but that one stuck with me.

And then the others — it is extraordinary, because they were all sort of around at the same time, writing their allegorical stories. Although Tolkien would say he didn't write allegory. Certainly Kipling and Orwell and Tolkien really is a collection, just to take those three, who have played a huge part in my life. But I didn't necessarily choose them — the stories came to me.

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The 2026 Animal Farm is in theaters now.