Brian Henson Quotes

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.

he puppeteers really responded to it. Patrick Bistrow really responded to it, it's great fun to do improve comedy with puppets.

You get used to it, you look forward to the adrenaline of the stage fright before you go out.

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.

So that's the challenge, you have a big technical aspect of what you're doing whilst you're creatively trying to improvise.

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

I thought, well, if we're inviting an audience, let's do it right. So I put in a proper studio audience at our studios in Los Angeles and it was just a little showcase and it was just for fun.

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.

I think it's a lot richer than what we call fleshy improv, I think it's very funny, puppet improv and fleshy improv.

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

And it should be something that only that group of people could've made with everybody invested.

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 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.

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.

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.

And with puppets, especially in our company, we sort of demand a very high standard of puppetry, so it's a real technical skill.

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.

This is certainly the raunchiest, if you use that word, raunchy. The roots of Jim Henson, though, was adult comedy.

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.

My dad and mom were, they would take what were popular hits, and lip-sync to them with puppets and do a ridiculous story.

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.

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.

But if everybody's trying to stay safe, then you never really create something new and different and surprising.

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.

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.