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 HENSONThe 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.
More Brian Henson Quotes
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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 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.
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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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You get used to it, you look forward to the adrenaline of the stage fright before you go out.
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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 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.
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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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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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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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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.”
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he puppeteers really responded to it. Patrick Bistrow really responded to it, it’s great fun to do improve comedy with puppets.
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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.”
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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.
BRIAN HENSON