Brian Henson Quotes

This is certainly the raunchiest, if you use that word, raunchy. The roots of Jim Henson, though, was adult comedy.

People would say to him, "When you finish a movie, did it come out as good as you thought it was going to?" Or, "Did it come out the way you intended it to come out?"

But initially when I was working with my dad, it was in special effects puppets with radio control and motors and puppet effects.

We wanted to premiere it in New York, because New York is sort of the home of the Jim Henson Company and it's sort of the tone and flavor, always, of the puppet work that we've done traditionally. And that's what brought us here and now we're here.

And one of the funnest things was watching what they did before the director called action and after the director called cut. And they'd keep their hands in the puppets, they'd stay in character, and then they'd start goofing around with each other and be off of script, and it would get quite blue.

So that's the challenge, you have a big technical aspect of what you're doing whilst you're creatively trying to improvise.

And it should be something that only that group of people could've made with everybody invested.

I'd say that that is a challenge, but it also is, again, it's helpful. It's helpful to have the discipline of, okay, I'm doing, I'm doing something that's quite precise over here, working the puppet, and I'm doing something that's very imprecise and creative and unleashed over here, which is the comedy side. And it's kind of nice to allow your brain to be doing those two things at once.

But the fact that most of the show you can't be prepared for, you have no idea really what's coming is initially very nerve wracking, by now, it's kind of fun.

We took a show to the Aspen Comedy Festival, called "Puppet Up" at that point, and in Aspen we just did three shows, and in Aspen, there was a producer from the Edinborough Fringe Festival, who said, "Please come to Edinborough."

I try to emulate his approach of really get the most out of people by allowing them to experiment and certainly allowing people to make mistakes.

So it's Rosemary Clooney - Rosemary? Rosemary Clooney, right? The singer? Yes. Clooney, doing, singing, "I've Grown Accustomed To Your Face," which is, you know, really a love song, but what we see on stage is we see one puppet that's got a ridiculous blonde wig on and she looks ridiculous, and next to her is a head that's just a piece of fabric with a pretty face on it.

In the show, we have recreated two sketches that my dad had, or pieces that my dad had developed. One that he had developed with my mother, one that Frank Oz had developed with my dad. And these are old pieces from the '50's and '60's, and we're going to develop more, too.

There's an awful lot of scenes where we don't know what the scene's going to be about, we ask the audience, pick a place that the scene is happening, pick the relationship, tell us who they are, things like that.

And then after the success at Melbourne Comedy Festival, then we regrouped back in LA and we went back into workshopping and decided to develop a proper show and that's when we started working on "Stuffed and Unstrung," which is a much bigger and sharper version of "Puppet Up."

Where does a character come from? Because a character, at the end of the day, a character will be the combination of the writing of the character, the voicing of the character, the personality of the character, and what the character looks like.

Probably though, by the time I was 17, I already knew that I was probably going to go into film

The first show that my dad and my mom did together was for, was a comedy series, a short form that went in the middle of late-night news, and then through all of their career, it was always the "Ed Sullivan Show," it was a variety act, my dad was on the "Jimmy Dean Show" for a few years.

And with puppets, especially in our company, we sort of demand a very high standard of puppetry, so it's a real technical skill.

And it was a whole lot of fun, and in many ways, what we've done with the show is just taken that part of my early memories of visiting my dad, shooting with the Muppets, and taking that and making a show that's really an expansion of that and presenting a show that's all that.

I think it's a lot richer than what we call fleshy improv, I think it's very funny, puppet improv and fleshy improv.

It's actually good when the performers are nervous, because it kind of sharpens up your brain and a little bit of adrenaline is good. Initially it's really tough.

I always very much enjoyed arts and it was so central in my family, my mother was also an art teacher, as well as founding the Henson Company with my dad, there was a lot of art going on in our household.

At that point, I thought probably special effects, something like that, and indeed, the early days when I was working with my dad, after I left school, I only went to less than one year of college, and then I was transferring, and then I delayed my transfer, and I did a movie, and then another movie, and then I never finished college.

I was already sort of mixing my science physics enthusiasm with entertainment and directing and puppetry.

We are deeply saddened to hear about the passing of Jonathan Hardy. The clever wit and joy he brought to his performance of Rygel was a true gift to the world of Farscape. My sincerest condolences go out to Jonathan's family and to his many fans around the world.

My dad and mom were, they would take what were popular hits, and lip-sync to them with puppets and do a ridiculous story.

So while you're trying to improvise, you're also trying to puppeteer, you're doing everything that you need to do to perform a puppet in our style, for a camera.

We kind of lost a lot of that and puppeteers were sticking to the script and we thought everything needed to get a lot funnier, so we thought we would go to a good improv comedy instructor.

The first big thing that I did with my dad was the bicycle sequence in "The Great Muppet Caper," where Kermit and Piggy are riding bicycles in Battersea Park in London and that was a complex marionetting and cranes driving through the park, it was a complicated scene, and I did that with my dad.

In many ways, I think it's easier in some ways, or it's more entertaining or more guaranteed to be entertaining than traditional improvising. Again, because you're not just you in your body.

he puppeteers really responded to it. Patrick Bistrow really responded to it, it's great fun to do improve comedy with puppets.

The show is probably 60 percent improvising and 40 percent not. So there's quite a bit of it that we do have prepared and that part of it, you have memorized and you've rehearsed and you're prepared, just like any show.

You get used to it, you look forward to the adrenaline of the stage fright before you go out.

Patrick thought we should try to put an audience in front of one of the workshops, basically in front of the class and see how the performers rose to having an audience there, because he said, "You know, it's a really interesting test, because sometimes it gets even funnier."

I thought, well, if we're inviting an audience, let's do it right. So I put in a proper studio audience at our studios in Los Angeles and it was just a little showcase and it was just for fun.

First of all, you're improvising through a puppet, so you're not always yourself: you're a cow or you're a pig or you're an old woman, you know, whatever puppet you pick, or you're a demon, you know, whatever you pick up, that's what you get to be in the scene.

There was a producer from the Aspen Comedy Festival who happened to be there, as a friend of a friend, and she said, "I'd like to book you into the Aspen Comedy Festival," and we said, "Well, there isn't really a show to book in, this is just a little showcase and it's really our workshop." And she said, "No, it's great, I love it, just do exactly what you did."

And then while she's lip-syncing, "I've Grown Accustomed To Your Face," to this little head next to her, the head eats the cloth fabric and swallows it and it's sort of this weird, demonic character there, who then tries to eat the singer. But it's a lot of fun. So there's a couple of pieces like that.

To anyone who's trying to be an artist, in any medium, it's a very odd and lonely and nerve-wracking and scary process when you let anybody see what you're working on. You have to learn to listen to your instincts. Absorb other people's advice, opinions, or whatever it may be from the outside world, but at the end of the day, you have to be true to whatever it is that you're trying to say in that work.

We try to keep it a classy show, but it certainly is blue at times. And it all depends on the audience, sometimes we've have audiences that don't really want us to go too far in that direction.

Really, initially what I very quickly realized that I was loving about the show was, because it reminded me of when I was a kid and I would visit the sets where my dad was shooting with the other puppeteers.

I think in a creative effort, in any creative effort, you need to, people need to be able to be taking risks and if it turns out to be a mistake, if it turns out not to have been the right choice, that should be applauded, you know, by everybody, and it will come up with another plan.

I think initially it's terrifying because going into a show where, you know, "Oh, I'm going to be on stage for two hours, I have no lines to memorize, I have nothing really prepared," and actually I say that, the show is not all improvising.

I was 17, certainly by the time I was 19, I knew that show business was where I was going to end up, and I had my sights on being a director.

But if everybody's trying to stay safe, then you never really create something new and different and surprising.

And again, we're kind of trying to be in that place, that's just so absurd and irreverent and hysterical and it's something that at our company we're kind of, we're so irreverent about everything, we're sort of irreverent about the establishment, we're irreverent about civilization, we're irreverent about philosophy, we're irreverent about religion.

I guess I learned a couple of good lessons from my dad. One was when you're creating something, what you want when you're working with a team of other artists, is everybody to work with some creative freedom, so that you really get the best out of everybody.