Every project is deeply personal to filmmaker Andy Serkis, the actor and director who launched himself, hissing and screaming, upon JRR Tolkien’s Middle-earth when he played the tortured antihero Gollum in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy. But some films are more personal than others, and Serkis’s latest, an animated adaptation of George Orwell’s dystopian parable Animal Farm, cuts especially close to the bone.
After all, while most of us might think we can imagine life under the sort of despotic regime Orwell brings to horrific life in his book, Serkis has first-hand family experience.
His father, Clement Serkis, was an Iraqi-Armenian gynaecologist who opened a hospital in Baghdad in the 70s, when the authoritarian Ba’ath Party was consolidating its grip on power. A few years into that process, Saddam Hussein seized control of both party and country. After Serkis’s father spoke out against the regime, he was imprisoned for several weeks, leaving his wife and children back in suburban Ruislip, west London, in the dark as to his whereabouts.
“He was a doctor,” says Serkis. “He founded a hospital called the Ibn Sina Hospital in Baghdad. During the rise of the Ba’ath Party regime, he used to treat a lot of British Council and Boac [former British Airways] patients,” says Serkis. “A lot of people started to leave. He made a speech which was not pro-Saddam Hussein. He was arrested for that. A lot of people he knew were ‘disappeared’ – in fact, some of the doctors he worked with in the hospital, which still exists, by the way, came to a sticky end. We were aware of that and grew up with that as children.”
