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 HENSONI’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.
More Brian Henson Quotes
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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.
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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.
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And it should be something that only that group of people could’ve made with everybody invested.
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And with puppets, especially in our company, we sort of demand a very high standard of puppetry, so it’s a real technical skill.
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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.
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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?”
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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.
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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.
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My dad and mom were, they would take what were popular hits, and lip-sync to them with puppets and do a ridiculous story.
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So it’s Rosemary Clooney – Rosemary? Rosemary Clooney, right? The singer? Yes. Clooney, doing, singing. “
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
BRIAN HENSON