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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.