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Peter in Gorillas in the Mist |
Peter Elliott - People say he’s monkeying around
Peter Elliott has made his career panting, hooting and grunting around the world’s movie sets. He is considered, in the monkey business, to be the primary primate, writes Simon Wroe
IN his 30-year career, Peter Elliott has been attacked by most of the animal kingdom: chased by black mane lions; clawed by a panther; mauled by chimps more than once; almost flattened by stampedes of zebra, wildebeest; and – most terrifying of all – elephants in fancy dress.
Elliott, a short, limber man of 5’5” and 52 years, wears his wounds with pride. For the actor and animal movement expert, each injury is a badge of experience.
“For the amount of time I’ve been doing this, I’ve been quite lucky. I’ve still got all my fingers,” he says.
Were any creature to relieve Elliott of his digits, the chances are it would be a member of the ape family.
He has devoted much of his professional life to simian study, even infiltrating a group of chimps to earn a place in their hierarchy.
As the “film industry’s primary primate”, he has starred in Gorillas in the Mist, Congo, and surreal comedy series The Mighty Boosh, in which he plays the DJ gorilla Bollo. He’s such a lifelike ape, in fact, the LAPD nearly shot him for being an escaped wild animal.
Most of the world’s hi-tech gorilla suits are built on his frame, and he can speak “chimp” – a nuanced collection of pants, hoots, grunts, whimpers, barks and screams. Until recently, he could converse with the primates of London Zoo from the garden of his flat in Gloucester Avenue, Primrose Hill, opposite the suitably named Darwin Court.
“Most people think they’re little cuddly things but chimps are probably the most dangerous animals to work with,” he tells me. “A fully grown chimp is about eight times stronger than a man in the upper body, as emotionally stable as a one-year-old child, with an IQ of about 85.
“Submissiveness is a good idea.”
The son of a woodwork teacher, Elliott was “always one of those kids that would come home with pockets full of animals” during his Hertfordshire childhood.
His monkey mania began in 1978 when, aged 21, he auditioned for a part in Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan. Warner Bros had done a test film with a mime artist in an ape suit and panicked: it was terrible.
Elliot, 18 months out of drama school, was flown out to LA and appointed head of research and development, with a stratospheric budget and an army of underlings. He went from happy-go lucky acrobat to Hollywood silverback in one agile leap.
The film’s producers wanted to mix real apes with human actors in costumes. Elliott spent two years trying to find out if this was possible, concluding it was “completely mad. Everyone was going to get their arms and legs torn off.”
At the time, the height of gorilla impersonation was hairy stuntmen running around on two legs. Elliott, who trained as a method actor, decided method chimps were needed. He spent months at the Oklahoma Primate Centre observing behavioural patterns, sounds, and mannerisms, and talking in sign language to a chimp called Washoe. “The doctor had to tell her to sign slowly because I wasn’t very good,” he recalls.
Improvising for up to eight hours a day, Elliott sometimes fails to leave his work at the studio, pant-hooting in restaurants and barking on public transport.
“You get into a strange stream of consciousness [which] can be difficult to switch out of,” he says. “Working with animals makes you realise how out of touch we are with reality. You learn great respect for them, probably more than you respect people. They still live in the real world; we live in a large, architecturally designed zoo we call a city.”
Elliott is an unpredictable interviewee: switching from howling primate to middle-class father-of-three to wave to an anxious-looking neighbour. He is prone to starting sentences with “When I was living with the Masai” or “If there is such a thing as a controlled stampede, you don’t start it with a shotgun”, and the pleasant flat he shares with his children and wife (a teacher at the Central School of Speech and Drama’s movement department) is crammed with animal models, artefacts, and hundreds of porcelain penguins from his many trips to Africa and beyond.
He’s just finished advising on a (non-Disney) stage production of The Jungle Book at the Bloomsbury Theatre, working on “pared down yet fairly realistic” studies of wolves, bears, and tigers with the actors. Reality is of less concern in the world of musicals. Or in Bollywood, where Elliott is off to next for an undisclosed project featuring an orang-utan.
Summer 2009 will also see the long-awaited release of Spike Jonze’s feature length version of Maurice Sendak’s Where The Wild Things Are. Elliott choreographed the movements of all the fictional beasts, as he did for The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
The film – which has been two years in post-production, CGI mastery and studio wranglings – is a far cry from Elliott’s first choreography credit, Quest for Fire, which makes the dubious claim of having “over a million years of evolution in one movie”.
It was while filming Quest he got caught in the mammoth stampede.
“Well, it was 14 elephants dressed as mammoths,” he corrects. “So they were already quite annoyed. Nobody had told me elephants can run about 30 miles an hour when they get going. I had to roll out from under them. Then they went through the wardrobe tent, through the make-up tent and off into the wilds of Scotland. It took us about eight hours to find them all.”
For Elliott, that’s just another day at the office.
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