Brian Henson Quotes
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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."
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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But if everybody's trying to stay safe, then you never really create something new and different and surprising.
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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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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.
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I was already sort of mixing my science physics enthusiasm with entertainment and directing and puppetry.
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Probably though, by the time I was 17, I already knew that I was probably going to go into film...
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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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.
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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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"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.
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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.
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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.
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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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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.
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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.
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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.