If you're anything like me, Brian Henson played a huge role in your childhood — which makes his new show all the more shocking.
'Puppet Up! Uncensored', a live show produced by The Jim Henson Company, is a very modern — and very adult — take on puppetry. Created by Brian Henson and Groundlings performer Patrick Bristow, the rude, racy and R-rated show features a troupe of puppeteers who have been trained in the art of improvisational comedy.
A sell-out hit at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival in 2007, the wild and spontaneous show — in which the puppeteers can actually be seen by the audience, as well as the puppets — is about to come back to Australia with dates in Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane.
Ahead of the show's return, I caught up with Brian Henson — son of the legendary Jim Henson, and longtime chairman of The Jim Henson Company — to talk all things Henson, including the art of puppetry, the rise of CGI, the sale of The Muppets, the legacy of 'Labyrinth', and the chances of 'The Dark Crystal', 'Fraggle Rock' and 'Dinosaurs' gracing our screens once more.
{youtube}Z5GcbRNSYjA{/youtube}
What was the impetus for 'Puppet Up!'? Did you feel limited by the work you were doing elsewhere?
No, not so much, actually. The way that it first started was… ‘The Muppet Show’ came out of that time of vaudeville and variety shows of the late ‘60s, early ‘70s, and it was a very funny version of those shows. I felt like it was time to come up with a new, funny voice for puppets, and that started us developing improv comedy with puppets. We were so happy with the tone of comedy that was coming out of it that we then created the show, ‘Puppet Up!’
It happened very organically. We were trying to create a new tone of comedy that we could take to more adult venues. But the result was, we had something that was so funny in the workshops, just training with the puppeteers, that we built a show right off the bat. Since then, it’s been probably seven years since we put the first performance up of ‘Puppet Up!’ It’s developed and evolved and become something quite extraordinary; a very highly produced show. But the roots of it was really an improv workshop with very talented puppeteers just grabbing puppets.
How did you hook up with Patrick Bristow? What does he bring to the show?
Honestly, my wife [actress Mia Sara] introduced me to Patrick. I was wondering, ‘What can I do to make the puppeteers even funnier? How can I get a stronger edge into what we’re doing?’ And she suggested, ‘Why don’t you find a great improv teacher to work with the puppeteers?’ She found Patrick and called him, and then he came in to meet with me, and we just got talking. He’s a great director and a great improv comedian himself, but he’s a teacher as well.
So it started with me just talking to him and saying, ‘Do you think we could do improv comedy with hand puppets?’ He said, ‘Well, it’s pretty complicated, and the performers can’t look at each other, so that’s going to be weird… but let’s try!’ So that’s basically what we did; we brought a bunch of puppeteers together and we just tried.
It was so successful, so quickly. We started doing workshops every week with puppeteers, and then after a couple of months, we tried putting a show up, just for fun, just as a demonstration. We just invited friends and family, but it was so funny, and there was actually a producer from the Aspen Comedy Festival there, and she came up to me and said, ‘That was fantastic, can you bring it to the Aspen Comedy Festival?’ I said, ‘Well, it isn’t even really a show, that was just a demonstration…’ And she said, ‘Bring what you just did to the Aspen Comedy Festival’.
So we went to Aspen. And in Aspen, we were booked for Edinburgh, and in Edinburgh, we were booked for Melbourne! And that’s the way the show started. So the last time we were in Melbourne, the show was brand new. Now… the production values are much higher now, and the performers have a lot of experience under their belts. Their skill level as comedians and as puppeteers is much more developed now than when we were last there.
{youtube}QG7IWSIEjvs{/youtube}
Do you find that, to be a successful puppeteer, you also have to be funny? Because it seems like two fairly different skill sets, but there seems to be so much of an overlap in your company.
Well, you know what? There isn’t normally. These are a very, very rare breed, and they’re really important to our company. My dad and Frank Oz and Richard Hunt and Dave Goelz, all those original guys who were doing ‘The Muppet Show’, they were very unique. And we’re always striving to find more performers like that. Because you’re right!
To be a puppeteer, you have to be a little bit introverted, you have to be very technical in your thinking, you have to take it very seriously, you have to rehearse and practice your technique. And to be a good comedian? You have to go, ‘To hell with everything! I don’t care if my clothes come off while I’m onstage; if it’s funny, it’s funny!’ So you’re absolutely right that to be a really good comedian… it’s actually the opposite side of your brain to the side that is operating the puppet.
Puppeteers are often very much not funny people. So to find the ones that can be really funny and be great puppeteers is actually really hard, and we are actually auditioning and looking for people all the time, year round, for decades, to find those. They are a rare breed.
As part of this show, you’ll be reprising a few classic routines by Jim Henson, Jane Henson and Frank Oz. You must feel very protective of that material?
Protective? Well... I’m super fond of it. I’m very nostalgic for it. But my dad never had a precious attitude towards the work. We always do it as carefully and as well as we can, but at the same time, we’re not terribly protective. It gets loose and it gets fun.
The recreations that you’re talking about in the show, yeah, we perform them accurately to what Frank and my dad and my mom did back then, but with that same looseness of tone that they had. Again, that comes back to… how can you be a precise puppeteer but also a very funny person? You have to embrace a looseness and a technical accuracy simultaneously. That’s the way we present it.
The truth is, even when we do those old pieces... depending on which two puppeteers are underneath, those pieces will be subtly different. Even my dad and my mom would be kind of horrified if they saw that puppeteers were trying to get their hands to do exactly what theirs had done 50 years ago. So everything is delivered in a fresh, spontaneous way.
Frank Oz is still very much alive. Is there ever any talk, or any thought given, to him working with The Jim Henson Company again in some capacity?
Well, we certainly don’t rule it out, but Frank has very much his own track as a director. These days, he’s mostly attracted to 'real' comedy, and has been for quite a while now. He loves puppetry and everything he did back then, but once he started his career in directing… he really likes doing live action comedy, for the most part.
Would we work together? Absolutely! Will we? I’m not sure. It’s hard to find a project that would intrigue him and intrigue us at the same time right now. But we’re all really good friends.
Did you always know that you wanted to go into the family business? When did you know that you wanted it to be your career, as opposed to something you just did when you were young?
As a kid, I was building puppets from the age of five or six, probably, and doing puppeteering here and there. As a teenager? I don’t know what I thought I was going to be. I was particularly interested in physics. I have a more technical mind. I always liked the puppetry and working with my dad, but what really pulled me in was the ‘special effects’ side of the business.
Particularly when my dad created The Creature Shop in London, coming off of ‘The Dark Crystal’… I was 18 then, and I was most enjoying working with that group, doing very technical puppets that blurred the lines. Was it puppetry or was it special effects? Well, it was both. It was special effects at its highest standard and puppetry at its highest standard.
The first time I directed was probably when I was 21 or so, and that’s really when I decided that I wanted to make it my career. Basically the film business in general, because it was mostly films, back then, that we were doing. I was enjoying directing, I enjoyed supervising animatronics and performing animatronics and coming up with new techniques.
Then when my dad died, I had to take over The Muppets as well, and started directing Muppets movies. It’s quite interesting, because then I grew an enormous respect and fondness for the most basic form, for hand puppetry. So it’s interesting. What I’ve ended up is with an all-round enthusiasm, but as a young man, I came in through the special effects side of it.
Was there any concern about standing in your father’s shadow?
Well, sure, I guess. I was 26 when I had to take over the company. I was 26 when my dad died. So I was very aware of the expectations from people. It was a lot of pressure. What always made me feel good, though, and made me feel like I could continue on and on, was that my dad always believed in reinventing. Don’t copy something you’ve done! Try to do something new. Always try to do something new.
He stopped making ‘The Muppet Show’ when it was either the number one show in the world or the number two show — some people say it was number two to ‘Dallas’ at the time. But, you know, he stopped making it. He said, ‘I’ve made this for five years! I’m done. I need to do something new and I’m going to do something new.’
So standing in my father’s shoes means embracing that excitement for innovating and doing things in a new way, questioning the status quo, being a little bit anti-establishment. Don’t do it the way other people are doing it. Do it the way that you and the group of people you’re working with are most excited about. So it was more about carrying forward my father’s philosophy. That was easier for me to do, than to think I was trying to stand in my father’s shoes.
My father is my father, and nobody will ever… you know, there won’t be another Jim Henson. Ever. He was so extraordinary, and so extraordinarily unique. I certainly am not going to be another Jim Henson. I am me. I’m Brian Henson, and I’m whatever I am.
{youtube}2DPU2w_XCAk{/youtube}
One of your first major roles as a puppeteer was as Hoggle in ‘Labyrinth’. Are you surprised that movie is still so fondly remembered now?
Yeah… I mean, I’m actually not ‘surprised’ that it’s so fondly remembered. It’s a very unique film. Well, it has a close cousin in ‘The Dark Crystal’ — that was a fabulous movie to work on, with hundreds of people all investing one hundred percent of their efforts and their imagination into creating something that had never before been tried on film. So that was ‘The Dark Crystal’. Then, when we set out to make ‘Labyrinth’, we said, ‘Okay, let’s take what we learned on ‘The Dark Crystal’ and make it funny as well’.
I’m thrilled that it’s still hugely popular. I mean, we distribute the movie ourselves, so part of it is that we’re very good at presenting it to new audiences all the time, so that the movie’s not forgotten. It’s not sitting in a Warner Brothers library of thousands of movies, because we distribute it ourselves. So I’m thrilled that it’s still real popular.
{youtube}n6LNBm8v4wY{/youtube}
You were the chief puppeteer and the second unit director on the ‘Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles’ movie. If you look back at the effects in that movie, a lot of it still holds up. Are you surprised they’re going with motion capture for the reboot this year?
I guess I’m not surprised, because there are a lot more people who do that. There aren’t many people who can do what we can do. It’s interesting, because when you use animatronics, when you use our techniques, it’s very entertaining, but it tends to require the audience to suspend their disbelief just a little bit.
With Muppets, you have a big, big step of suspending your disbelief. You’re going to believe that felt and fur fabric and ping pong balls are living, breathing, thinking things with a soul. With animatronics, it’s a much smaller step, because they’re much closer to living and breathing, but there still is a certain wonderfulness about the fact that you kind of know they’re not ‘real’ real. That’s part of what’s entertaining and lovely about them.
With CGI, there’s a lot of, ‘Let’s just make it believably real, so people really believe it’s a living thing’, but quite often it loses some of its soul and some of its charm and some of its personality when you do that.
But am I surprised that ‘Ninja Turtles’ is going CG? No, I’m not, because really, literally, for every one of us that does animatronics, there’s a hundred people out there doing CGI now.
You mentioned that soul and that charm that you can get with animatronics and puppets that you don’t necessarily get with CGI. Do you think CGI has caught up to some degree, or do you think there’ll always be that gulf?
No, it depends on who’s doing it and what they value. We actually have what we call the Henson Digital Puppetry Studio. We’re now doing CGI animation as well, but the way we do it is we put one puppeteer in the motion capture arena, to perform the body, and then we put another puppeteer on mechanical puppetry interfaces that we’ve built and created ourselves, and they perform the face and they voice it.
We can do seven of those characters, all performing together at the same time, and then we shoot it with virtual cameras, and when we do that, we get an extremely organic and entertaining effect. It is its own style. We love it, but often a key frame animator — somebody who’s a very careful animator — will look at our technique and say, ‘But it’s very sloppy. I don’t really like it.’
But we love it, because it’s very soulful, like puppetry, and it’s really entertaining. So now, computer animation has really become a tool, and it depends on which artist is using that tool and what that artist wants to get out of the character that they’re creating. So I do think you can achieve that soulful creature through CGI. But if you want them interacting with human beings, for instance, you’ll get something else that happens if you can really put a human being in a space with your creature. You’ll get a certain benefit from that.
Or you can spend $250 million a movie and do what Pixar does. They’ll spend thousands of hours on a 20 second sequence trying desperately to make it look like it was spontaneous. And they can! By doing all that work, they create the illusion of spontaneity, and it’s really quite extraordinary and beautiful. But it’s not spontaneous.
{youtube}kuzF22sR-lo{/youtube}
When your father passed, it was the early ‘90s and CGI was creeping in. Was there ever any consideration given to closing up the Jim Henson Company? Or did you know you could adapt?
Yeah, right away, we just sort of embraced everything. We did ‘Dinosaurs’, the TV series, right after my dad died, and that was animatronics on television, which had never been done. It was a film technique brought to television. Right after ‘Dinosaurs’, we started developing our digital puppetry studio, and then we had to kind of wait about five years for the computer to go down in price.
We had a great technique, but it required a million dollar computer just to run one character, so we had to wait five years, or six or seven, actually, for the computer to become more reasonably priced so we could use that technique.
But, you know, there is an approach to bringing characters to life that we have that is… we create characters that are outrageous in concept, but in personality — in their souls and in their personality — there’s something very, very universal about our characters. People of every generation, from anywhere in the world, can relate to them.
So we can take that approach and apply it to cel animation, to stop-motion animation, to CGI, to puppetry, to animatronics. All the techniques are exciting for us, and we try them all in different ways. Hand puppetry — the basic, original Jim Henson technique for hand puppetry — is timeless, because it is not technologically driven. It’s not really, in any way, datable.
It is what it is, much in the same way that ventriloquists were very successful in the 1950s in America, and there are ventriloquists that are very successful now. The art form isn’t timely. So for us, with the hand puppets, we know they will always work, because it’s a time honoured tradition that you can apply in a very modern context.
With ‘Puppet Up! Uncensored’, we’re taking a time honoured Henson tradition with hand puppetry, but we’re bringing it to a very cool, funny piece that is very modern in its tone and energy. But we didn’t have to adjust the technique, you know what I mean?
{youtube}HNR4hKbSH7I{/youtube}
You mentioned ‘Dinosaurs’ earlier. That’s a show that has that universality, those characters that feel very human. It’s very fondly remembered by ‘90s kids like myself. Is there any talk or any chance of a ‘Dinosaurs’ revival?
Wouldn’t that be nice? I don’t know… it was such an ambitious show. It was a half-hour comedy starring 18 fully animatronic dinosaurs that would produce one episode a week. It was so ambitious. We were kind of insane to try it. We were all really proud of the result, but I don’t know that we’d go back to it. You know, every now and then we sort of talk about it, but we think, you know, maybe not right now.
It was so ambitious, and it came at a time when production budgets were higher for television than they are now. It would be much harder now to realise a TV show that ambitious. So I don’t know if we would return to it, but thank you for asking. I’m glad you loved the show.
Around that same time, you directed ‘The Muppet Christmas Carol’. How much pressure did you feel stepping directly into Jim Henson’s shoes as the director of a Muppet movie?
Well, it’s interesting you should ask, because that was the hardest thing for me to do, doing ‘Christmas Carol’. Running the company wasn’t as hard. ‘Christmas Carol’, we were developing the script with Jerry Juhl writing, and we were very confident. It was a good script.
I BEGGED Frank Oz to direct that movie. I approached other directors, too. And they all said, ‘No, Brian, you should do it’. That initially made me very uncomfortable. I mean, I was pretty confident in myself as a director, but I didn’t think I should be directing a feature film, and certainly not one that was that important, the first Muppet movie after my father’s death. All of that was… that was a lot of pressure.
Luckily, those same directors I approached to direct it who said I should do it all helped me tremendously. Frank Oz was an executive producer and he was there every day that we were filming. He was giving me advice all the time. I’m very, very proud of that piece. I was not confident that I would do a good job, but in hindsight, I’m really, really proud of what I did. But that was tough, yeah.
How did you go directing someone like Michael Caine, who’s done so many films… was there any hesitation on his part about working with someone who didn’t have that much experience?
Oh, I don’t know. Michael’s a funny one. I’ve heard him say in interviews, and it’s probably true, ‘Oh my god, I didn’t realise that Brian Henson hadn’t directed a movie until after we were done!’ But he was a dream to work with!
You know, if you work with character… if you work with puppets and animatronics, trying to give a realistic and soulful and convincing performance, it means that you’re watching the details of the performance very closely. And actors actually rise to me as a director because they love that I’m so observant. And the only reason I’m so observant is because I’m used to working with actors who aren’t actually alive!
I have to keep a close eye on every aspect of the actor’s performance, to make sure the illusion of life is there! So I actually really enjoy working with actors, and they enjoy working with me, because we get very deep. I get intensely involved in the details. I love all of that. And Michael was a dream to work with. He’s very professional.
You know, what actors are most concerned about is ending up on a set where, basically, people are wanking. Where the director is saying, ‘Let’s try it this way now! Okay, let’s try it that way!’ Where people are being a little frivolous with their judgement calls. That can offend actors. They can feel like, ‘Hey, now wait a second, I’m not just your plaything to throw around the place’.
With puppets and with animatronics, it’s so tough to pull it off that everybody has to kind of be there in the moment and get it right so you can feel good about it and move on to the next thing. That’s a satisfying form of production, and all of the good actors that I’ve worked with have really risen to that. Michael had a great, great time.
Since Disney acquired The Muppets, you’re obviously no longer involved with those films. Knowing how much they meant to your parents and to you, does it feel strange to see a trailer for a Muppet movie or whatever and know you didn’t make it?
Well, it doesn’t feel strange because it was something we wanted very much to do. My dad, when he died, was trying to sell The Muppets to Disney. He’d already made three movies and a TV series and he felt like The Muppets needed to live on, and where he was hoping they would live on was in the Disney theme parks. That was his dream, and it was something we were eventually able to accomplish.
But, you know, I’ve certainly seen the next Muppets movie that’s coming out, ‘Muppets Most Wanted’. It’s a really good movie. And we see all the trailers before they come out. So we’re involved, but we’re not making the Muppets anymore. And I think that’s great! It was what my father was running for so many years, and then for 10 years it was what I was running on a day-to-day basis, and now Disney are running it.
I get to be the wise old guy they can call for a little bit of advice here and there, but for the most part, I get to sit back and watch. And Disney don’t make mistakes, which is good. They’re very careful, creatively. Their last Muppets film was good, it was solid, but this one’s much better.
Fantastic. What’s the status of the much discussed ‘Power Of The Dark Crystal’ movie and ‘Fraggle Rock’ movie?
Well, both are active. Both are big, and movies take a lot of time, often, to end up eventually on the screen… there’s still a lot of work going on on both projects. I’m confident that both will eventually be made. But these things take time. They shouldn’t, really, but you end up partnered with a studio and then somebody gets fired from the studio and then you take the project and move to another place. It’s that sort of thing.
Eventually you get all the pieces lined up and you make the project. So both are still in active development, but neither of them have production schedules yet.
Cool. I’ll let you go there, but thanks for taking the time to talk.
Thank you! Make sure you come to 'Puppet Up!' It's a lot of fun.
{youtube}2x8olo26DsU{/youtube}
'Puppet Up! Uncensored' will travel to the following venues:
Princess Theatre (Melbourne) — March 27-30, April 8-20
Playhouse (Sydney Opera House) — April 1-6
Brisbane Powerhouse — April 24-26
For more info about the show, head to puppetup.com.
