EXCLUSIVE: Joe Letteri Talks The Evolution of Gollum in The Hobbit: There and Back Again

"Without getting into what he is going to look like on screen, and everything, because we are saving that...Technically, what has been good about this, is that we did Gollum the first time around, and it was the first time that we were doing performance capture in a film. But we couldn't record on the stage. Andy was performing with all of the other actors. But then he would have to come out, and do his performance again on a motion capture stage. We would fit the two together. He would mimic his first performance, and we would put it in with the other actors.

When we did Avatar, we created this whole virtual world. It was completely immersive, and everything was in this virtual world. What we did with Rise of the Planet of the Apes was come full circle with it. We took all of the technology we created for Avatar, and we figured out a way to make that on set. How to make it work within exterior sets. That way, Andy could be in the scene with all of the other actors. So you're not getting a second performance from him, trying to duplicate the first. You are getting the performance that he did with James Franco and Freida Pinto, and everyone else.

It closed the gap for us, to have Andy be right there in the movie, and have that be his performance. That's the thing we finally got to do with Gollum. Just as a way of nicely closing the circle."

"We haven't discussed it yet. The film is obviously set up for a sequel, or two. There is so much story that you can tell now. From what we saw in Rise of the Planet of the Apes, and what we remember from the original films. To me, that is one of the best parts of this. Reading the script, we realized that not only is this a great story...But, boy, you can see where this will go from here.

I actually don't know (how much the Apes will evolve). For a second film, I don't think you want to jump that far ahead of yourself. You still want to bring people along. Again, I don't know yet. They are still working on that script. You could get away with the look of the Apes on the original film. It was so far into the future. They were more humanoid. You could see that they would be walking upright, and doing all of these things that they did. For our first film, they had to look like modern day chimps. That were just starting to become self-aware. We had to start with something on screen that looked as believable as a real chimp could look."