Brian Henson Quotations

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

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

Oh, well, I can't tell you; it would be telling you the end. It's a one-character lip-syncing because in the early days, that's what my dad was doing.

It's really great to do one piece, "I've Grown Accustomed To Your Face," my dad developed in 1956, when he was 20 years old, and it's great to do that piece again now and see that it still really works as well as it ever did.

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.

We're also irreverent, we have an irreverent attitude towards puppets, as well. So a lot of what we do is we're kind of making fun of the puppets for being puppets, even while we're doing it. And again, that all feeds into the absurdity of this show.

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.

And that was always my father's favorite part about shooting as well. Often my dad would shoot very, very late, he was quite a workaholic, they would do 20, 20-hour shoots and stuff like that.

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.

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.

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.

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.

And if the audience is in a kind of naughty, raunchy mood, then they're going to make naughty, raunchy suggestions and then we take them and we do the scene anyway, and that's part of the fun.

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.

"Sesame Street" was really the first kid's show that my dad did. He did a couple of TV specials that were targeted for kids before "Sesame Street," but really, it was, it's kind of going back to our roots, when we start to get adult. This show gets very adult sometimes, and that's because of the audience.

It was actually what my dad did and with the Muppets, the years with the Muppets, it was really all targeted to adults. It was in a time when everything had to be safe for the whole family. But he was targeting adults.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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 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.

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

And so as a director, as a leader, and myself as a director and a leader, I kind of try to make sure that we hold onto the vision and kind of corral it, but by the time you finish whatever the project is, a TV show, a series, a movie, a stage show, it should be a product of what all those people can do, and therefore, it can never be what you imagined it would be in the beginning.

And my dad's answer would be usually something to the affect of, A, it came out better than he imagined, but also, he said, "No, it would be impossible for me to imagine the way it will come out." He said, "Yes, I story-boarded it, I had a plan, but then I work with an army of great artists and I want all of them to create inside that creation."

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?"

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.

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.

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.

But curriculum-wise, I was drawn to the sciences and specifically to physics, and I really enjoyed it and I think for a little while there, I was really thinking my schooling would be in physics, that that was something I loved.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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 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."

we sent a troupe to Edinborough, and then in Edinborough, there was a producer from the Melbourne Comedy Festival, so we went to Melbourne. So it's one of these shows that kind of organically developed and it started developing momentum way before I even thought there was a show here.

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."

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."

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.

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."

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

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.

"Stuffed and Unstrung" started as a workshop, actually, classes within our company. We found that our puppeteers were not ad libbing as well as traditionally, Jim Henson Company puppeteers have. We're sort of famous for going off script a little bit and ad libbing.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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'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.

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

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.

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

The challenge is, well, there's a huge challenge, which is when you're improvising, you're meant to sort of clear your mind completely, just be open and funny, and paying, you know, paying attention.

A puppet that starts to improvise badly is almost funnier than the puppet that's improvising well. So the show gets better when the improvising is really good, but also the show can also sometimes get better when the improvising sort of goes a little wrong and that's sort of a blessing to improvising with puppets.

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

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 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.

Lew Grade told my dad, I'll make your TV show. I know it's going to be a big hit,' ... The show had definitely not run its course when my dad decided to end the show. My dad just liked doing a lot of stuff. He was so full of stuff he wanted to do.

I think it's crucial that there be a family advisor who was close to running the company; who the family can trust, and who can guide discussions. That was probably why it happened so smoothly.

I was very advanced in physics, so I thought that something in astrophysics was where I would go ? I was thinking about NASA and stuff like that.

Where we used to just look at the visitor as a whole, now we are breaking it down to families, youth groups, school groups, tourists, tour groups, ... A family is going to be reached differently from a school group.

We're used to releasing Muppet movies in the off-season, not on the on-season. We've always done well that way.

What we saw in EM.TV ... was exactly the international strategic, financial, marketing and distribution partner we have been looking for.

What we're trying to do is entertain ourselves, and we are mostly a bunch of adults, but at a basic level that works for everybody.

When people say about the Muppets, 'It's a gentle soul with a naughty sense of humor,' Jerry was just as responsible for that as my dad,'

The reason he did 'Saturday Night Live' was because he was pissed off. He wanted everyone to know that Muppets aren't just for kids.

With puppets, you follow the head and the arms will follow, but Frank didn't really do that with the Swedish Chef. He and my dad were best friends, but they were very competitive. They were always doing things to see who could be funnier and how could they upstage each other, ... Frank was often leading. He'd be picking stuff up and choking things. My dad would be talking mock-Swedish and he'd have to try to keep up. After a while, Frank would say, Maybe someone else should do the hands,' but my dad would never let him. He said, No, you're doing the hands.'

What happened was that because my dad had made 'Sesame Street' and it was a huge hit, everyone said, 'Oh, ('The Muppet Show') is for kids. We don't want something that's feeling extra silly.' It was never intended to be for kids. My dad was a very determined salesman. He always had faith that his work would be successful. He never stopped trying to sell The Muppets.

It wasn't harder for me to direct than it was for me to run the company, which wasn't necessarily what came naturally to me.

It is with great respect that we recognize these honorees for their commitment to excellence and their unique creative expression, By encouraging audiences of all ages to rediscover the magic of books and reading, Ms. Rowling has truly made this world a better place.

In going forward, I really am doing much the same as my father did. He sort of had a grand scheme that wasn't too specific. Out projects were always innovative.