“This film will be different,” promised Andy Serkis, at the Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle at the See What’s Next Asia event by Netflix in Singapore. “I called it ‘Mowgli’ because this shows the young boy’s journey, brought up believing [that he is] a part of a family and then realising at a certain age that he is not. Kipling was a child when he wrote the book. Hindi was his first language and then he was sent to England against his will. So he understood [it] from a personal space.”
Rohan Chand, who plays Mowgli, has acted in films like Lone Survivor and Bad Words earlier, was the third to audition for the role. “I just thought there was something remarkable about him when I met him on Skype. I told him, ‘You are going to be acting with the finest talent and actors’.”
Andy Serkis
The 54-year-old actor-director is a pioneer in performance capture technology and is known for films like Rise of the Planet of the Apes , The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings . “In the last 18 years, performance capture has been adopted into mainstream filmmaking. When we started working with it on The Lord of the Rings , the perception was unclear. As years have passed, it has become one of the greatest 21st century tools in cinema.” Serkis has set up Imaginarium Studios in London, where he uses the technology across different platforms like video games and theatrical productions.
Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle features Christian Bale as Bagheera, Cate Blanchett as Kaa, Andy Serkis as Baloo, Naomie Harris as Nisha, Peter Mullan as Akela, Louis Ashbourne Serkis as Bhoot and Benedict Cumberbatch as Shere Khan. Matthew Rhys and Freida Pinto also play characters from the nearby village. According to Andy, it was the script and its possibilities that attracted the cast. “They responded to the underlying themes of the script. I think they were interested in challenging themselves and loved the idea of becoming something else. Performance capture isn’t about overreacting. It’s really about understanding the internal psychology and emotion of the character.”
For the Indian audience, the Hindi version has Bollywood actors like Kareena Kapoor Khan (Kaa), Anil Kapoor (Baloo), Madhuri Dixit Nene (Nisha), Jackie Shroff (Shere Khan) and Abhishek Bachchan (Bagheera) who have lent their voices. The film will première in Netflix on December 7.
(The writer was in Singapore at the invitation of Netflix)
