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.
BRIAN HENSONAnd it should be something that only that group of people could’ve made with everybody invested.
More Brian Henson Quotes
-
-
My dad and mom were, they would take what were popular hits, and lip-sync to them with puppets and do a ridiculous story.
BRIAN HENSON -
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?”
BRIAN HENSON -
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.
BRIAN HENSON -
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.
BRIAN HENSON -
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.
BRIAN HENSON -
And with puppets, especially in our company, we sort of demand a very high standard of puppetry, so it’s a real technical skill.
BRIAN HENSON -
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.
BRIAN HENSON -
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.
BRIAN HENSON -
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.
BRIAN HENSON -
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.
BRIAN HENSON -
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.
BRIAN HENSON -
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.
BRIAN HENSON -
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.
BRIAN HENSON -
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.
BRIAN HENSON -
This is certainly the raunchiest, if you use that word, raunchy. The roots of Jim Henson, though, was adult comedy.
BRIAN HENSON