“We all worked together for the greater good.The bird-like Skeksis are just as formidable and nightmare-inducing as they were in the original movie, only now we have high-definition close-ups of puss oozing from their beaks or the visceral squish of their rotting flesh. “And then Louis came in and said, ‘O.K., that’s a good starting point, here’s how we can make it bigger and crazier.’ Then Brian came in and said, ‘Here’s how we can add more to that,’ and then Wendy came in and said, ‘Here’s how we fill in the cracks.’” “We tried to write the biggest, craziest, most epic, most sweeping fantasy drama we could, not limited by time, by budget, or by puppets,” said Matthews, one of the head writers. The show’s other masterminds were just as effusive. “Louis has reinvented the genre,” Lisa Henson said. As a result, the series has a whirling dynamism that was lacking in the static and sometimes ponderous film. “They are bent over, they can’t feel their hands, they’re too cold, too hot, too dirty, and no one will see them.”Īs well as being the series’s director, Leterrier was one of its two cinematographers, jogging alongside the puppeteers with a shoulder-mounted camera for hours each day. The puppeteers “are the show’s true unsung heroes,” said the tall and cheerful Leterrier, bubbling with energy on Day 153 of a 174-day shoot. And, of course, there were the puppets - a gaggle of exuberant if battle-weary Gelflings, each one carried and manually operated by its own individual handler. Artificial trees stretched away into the artificial mist, toward distant mountains and valleys painted on backdrops the size of IMAX screens. On the soundstages were caverns, laboratories and villages, all carved out of polystyrene blocks. (Some shots will be enhanced with C.G.I.) Room after room was stocked with swords, canoes, musical instruments, 3D-printed model castles and alien fiends in various states of repair. But the “The Dark Crystal” headquarters was like a vast, immersive theme-park ride. Visiting the sets of fantasy films or series can be disillusioning in the age of computer generated imagery - they consist largely of green screens and tennis balls on sticks. “We thought we were done 30 years ago, or whenever it was,” Brian Froud said, “and now here we are again.” Their son, Toby, played the baby who was abducted by David Bowie’s goblin king in “Labyrinth.”Īll three Frouds worked on “The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance,” with Toby serving as the design supervisor in the production’s “Creature Shop.” As he guided visitors around the menagerie of phenomenally detailed and spookily lifelike latex creations last August, his parents sat on opposite sides of a table, Wendy gluing feathers onto a puppet’s head and Brian drawing runes in a notepad. Froud also met his wife, the American puppet builder Wendy Froud (then Wendy Midener), in Henson’s studios. They went on to collaborate on “The Dark Crystal” and “Labyrinth” (1986). Back in the 1970s, Jim Henson had admired Froud’s richly textured illustrations of woodland trolls and goblins (perhaps the soft, rounded faces struck a chord with the creator of the Muppets). Henson’s next call was to Brian Froud, a British artist who had been the conceptual designer on the original film. In short: Forget animation, bring back the puppets. So the two projects were combined into one live-action prequel TV series, to be made by Leterrier in “the most complicated way possible,” he said. “Everyone was scared of it,” said Leterrier.īut Netflix was interested, Henson said, because it was looking for something children and parents could watch together. Unsurprisingly, Hollywood studios didn’t fall over themselves to bankroll a cartoon about genocide and ecological catastrophe. They ended up with a two-pronged project: Leterrier, desperate to work with puppets, was to direct a live-action sequel for the big screen, while an animated television series was to tell the tale of how Thra’s peaceful, matriarchal civilization had crumbled in the first place, leaving behind the wasteland depicted in the film. “You had the sense that things were happening in other parts of the world which you didn’t see in the movie,” she continued, “and that you could go back in time many years.” Her father, she noted, had worked on developing the film for “an exceptionally long time, so the world had a reality and a mythology to it that were comparable to places like Middle-earth and Westeros.”
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