Original subtitles

THE CRYSTAL CALLS: MAKING THE DARK CRYSTAL: AGE OF RESISTANCE LA LLAMADA DEL CRISTAL: ASÍ SE HIZO CRISTAL OSCURO: LA ERA DE LA RESISTENCIA 2019 DOCUMENTARY BY RANDALL LOBB

[thunder crashes]

[narrator] Another world.

Another time.

In the Age of Wonder.

The opening sequence,

which is just the most atmospheric,

mythic, cool thing, where, you know,

the voice-over comes in all deep and low and talks about another age,

"In the age of wonder."

And then, you cut to these creatures,

these monstrous, bird-like, reptilian figures.

I fell in love with it. I've been in love with it ever since.

The Dark Crystal is Jim's most human creation

of everything that he did,

which is a funny thing to say about a world where there are no humans.

I remember it vividly. I loved it.

It's such an incredibly all-encompassing, vivid world,

and the Skeksis are bloody scary.

It's the only part where I've known

I was gonna accept the part before opening the email.

The original Jim Henson film, like all of Jim Henson's work,

but especially that and Labyrinth, were huge parts of my childhood.

I found them enchanting,

the right side of dark for my sensibilities,

and just completely other-worldly.

There was a book at the library of the making of The Dark Crystal.

You couldn't find the book anywhere, this was pre-internet,

and I would just check that thing out, like continuously.

I just remember it being quite an overwhelming experience, you know,

and, uh, everything about it, the visuals, the score...

I love the score. Another one of those movies

where you come out of the cinema slightly changed.

Early memories I have of watching television with my father

was The Muppet Show.

It was one of the few television shows he would watch.

And then, he took me to see The Dark Crystal movie

when it was in its theatrical run,

and it was just something we'd never seen before.

And it was so magical.

[Dave] I left the movie theater going, "Well, how... how did any of that happen?"

I got Podlings. I thought Podlings were a bit like Muppets. I get that.

And then, everything else, I just wanted to know how.

It's a game-changing film.

So, if we go back and go, "Well, what can we do

to match the level of script quality,

art departments, set design, everything?"

With Dark Crystal, everything is built.

Everything is made specifically just for us.

It's based in reality, something tangible,

something that doesn't trick the eye.

And the craftsmanship, the talent

that has been brought to the table, is just... it's mind-blowing.

Vast on every level. I mean, it was one of the biggest things

I think we've ever attempted

in terms of the amount of characters, the sophistication of the characters,

and also, the challenge of recreating things that already exist.

What fans of The Dark Crystal want is they want an odyssey, they want a saga,

they want something to enrich the universe of the original film,

and that's what this series does.

You could put them side by side,

and it is the same world,

but there's just so much of it to explore now.

[Lisa] Imagine if you are in the puppetry business,

whether as a puppeteer or a puppet builder,

what bigger opportunity is ever gonna come you way

than ten episodes of Dark Crystal?

[narrator] A thousand years ago, this land was green and good,

until the crystal cracked.

[Stephen] There's so much here that you don't know about.

There's an entire world to discover.

[female] It's the first of our trip.

[Brian] I was working in London for five years as a jobbing illustrator,

and I needed to do my own work,

but I didn't know exactly what that was.

But once I got the opportunity to move to the country here,

then, immediately, the first thing I painted

was, indeed, this picture of a troll with trees behind it

and a waterfall coming off its nose.

And that's what Jim saw.

And I was a bit overcome, I think, meeting Jim,

and I didn't know quite what to say or how to express myself,

and it was his leap of faith.

[Cheryl] My father really wanted to do an epic fantasy adventure.

He really enjoyed doing comedy.

He enjoyed doing Muppets. He loved Sesame Street.

He loved the sort of fast, funny, vignette kind of variety show,

but he wanted to do something that really told a complex narrative.

[Brian] But quite quickly, we were hiring people that had other skills,

and Wendy was brought on board

specifically for the Gelflings,

because Jim wanted that strong feminine thing.

It was all about bringing a character to life,

all about creating something you've never seen before

that he was hoping the audience would not only believe in,

but also scratch their heads and go, "How do you do that?"

Hang on!

[Stephen] You have Brian Froud,

who is a guy who, for this world, these things are real.

You have Frank Oz,

who is one of the most brilliant puppeteers who's ever lived,

and you have Jim bringing the world-building, and the humanity,

and the sense of human nature being put into these puppets.

It's a brilliant kind of creative melting pot

that brought the original thing to life.

[Taron] We live in an age of sequels and prequels,

but the great thing about The Dark Crystal is

it's such a microcosmic look at the world that, when you finish watching it,

you're left with these massive questions

about the universe at large which have never been answered.

[Cheryl] There are people who obsess about Dark Crystal,

who really care about Dark Crystal,

and over the years, it's really become a cult film.

[Stephen] Is there going to be a feature film sequel?

Is there gonna be an animated TV show?

I don't think that you could have done

a new version of The Dark Crystal better than on Netflix

with the right budget,

with the creative team that Henson assembled.

It's so exciting to see the world come back to life in that way.

All too often, projects are rebooted or remade based on an IP

where all the DNA of that thing that makes people love it is discarded.

But, for me, if you're going to remake or reboot a franchise,

go back to why people like it in the first place.

[Cindy] Teddy Biaselli had told me that Henson were interested

in doing an animated series of The Dark Crystal,

and I thought about it, and I went home and I watched the movie again.

I kept thinking about it. I was, like, "Well the mythology is great,

but what makes it really special and transcendent is the puppets."

[Ted] I picked up the phone. I was, like, "Okay, good news, bad news.

Uh, bad news is, we're not gonna make The Dark Crystal animated series.

The good news is Cindy wants to know what it would cost to do it live-action."

And you could hear the phone hit the floor.

And we were shocked.

[laughs] Like, "Really? A series that looks like the film?"

And, of course... of course we immediately responded

that it's yes, like, it's technically possible,

but it will be very expensive.

[Cindy] The best version of The Dark Crystal

that could be made today,

would be made by the Henson Company,

by giving them the freedom

to really reach for the best version they can possibly imagine.

[dramatic music plays]

-[gasps] -[laughs] Gelfling!

[screams]

-[laughing] -[grunts]

[panting]

And they picked up a teaser, a test,

to see what it looked like.

[Lisa] Netflix could look at the test and see the same thing that we saw in it.

So what we had tried to do in the test

was we did CG Gelfling with puppet Skeksis.

Trespasser!

-[yelling] -[pants]

[Andy] Does it make sense to do a TV show

in the same way that they did the original film?

You know, how much has technology progressed?

[panting]

[Skeksis] What's that smell?

There's something disparate

between a real tactile object that catches the light,

that is layered and textured,

versus something that is generated in a computer.

And no matter how good it looks, no matter how good it looks,

they looked like two different mediums.

[Lisa] We could make a clean marriage between the two.

And, technically, it could be done,

but the CG Gelfling didn't look like Gelfings.

[Ritamarie] No matter what you did with the eyes of the puppet,

those puppet glass eyes were so hard to replicate

in a CG environment,

that you immediately could see

that it was CG talking to the puppet,

then you really just wanted to see the puppet.

[Erik] Seeing the tests that they did before the shoot

with full CGI character and a puppet,

it was... I mean, it's like night and day.

It's amazing how much more evocative the... the puppet is.

[Alice] As masterful as it is,

you can't talk to a Pixar character in the real world.

I mean, the percentage of the audience that gets to come

and talk to a puppet in the real world is very small,

but I think you know that you could.

[Louise] We're going back to telling the story and what serves that,

not just, "These effects are such fun,

let's-- how much more effects can we do?"

How do the effects serve the story? What can they tell?

[Andy] CG, they can expand your world, they can enhance it and augment it,

and they can totally take it to places that just sets can't

and just puppets can't,

but they can't be the star of the show, and they shouldn't be the star,

because then you do lose that humanity, and it does jar you out of it.

And we all looked around at each other and said,

"We're doing it all with puppets."

And Double Negative, the studio that did the CG,

said, "Well, hold on. We want to show you something."

Take just a shot from the movie, and then just manipulate it,

so you can add a little bit of blink or a little bit of smile,

and just take the performance from the puppet

just that little bit further to add a bit more life to it.

And they augmented Kira's face a little bit.

That gave it a little bit more pop of life.

And we all went... [snaps fingers] "That's it."

[Lisa] We, as a company, have been doing puppets for over 50 years,

and to be here at this point, so many years later,

and be doing what has got to be the biggest puppet production ever.

This has no humans,

so it is a complete puppet extravaganza.

My writing partner and I came up with a pitch for a sequel to Labyrinth,

and we called and we're like, "There's these two guys,

they have an idea for Labyrinth. Do you wanna hear it for a sequel?

Henson Company was like, "No, but we're doing Dark Crystal,

Would you want to come in on that?"

We're sitting there and this French gentleman says,

"Hello, I'm Louis, I'm here to meet with Lisa.

And we realize we're pitching Lisa Henson

and the guy who directed Hulk.

And so, we have to suddenly act like we know what we're doing.

[man] We've seen this moment before.

We turn, look, and we see the archer, except the hunter--

[Blanca] The way they pitched the idea of the show

was just so perfect.

And it was so engaging.

It had high stakes, drama, intimacy,

and, of course, great villains.

So, we were all really in awe,

and our... our hearts were full of joy

to see that we found the right person to bring this back to life again.

And as he falls back,

and that is where Augra manages to emerge...

[Carolina] The level of passion and excitement

when they're telling a story

had us engaged right away.

So when they spoke the story to us, we were like all leaning in.

We're like, "What is this? What is this?" And that transferred onto the page.

If you weren't incredibly familiar with the original film

and didn't have a passion for it,

it might be too hard to decide

how to build up this very elaborate prequel.

We're looking at telling ten hours of modern television,

and it's 30 years after the original Dark Crystal came out.

So, we can't just live with the idea that we're introducing a new world,

the world has existed for 30 years.

So, we had to break a lot of the narrative conceits of the film,

a lot of the visual conceits of the film, and be free to do that.

[Will] And so you can't go into that with like, "And here's how I'd do it."

You gotta go in with like,

"Okay, what do you like about what you're doing,

[stammers] what needs a little more life, what needs a little fleshing out,

what's got too much fleshing out?"

[Ted] Jeff and Will, brilliant writers,

never worked on television before in their life.

We weren't about to literally throw them in the deep end

without any sort of help.

So I go into the meeting, and I'm ushered into Lisa Henson's office.

And there's Lisa, and Halle, and Blanca.

And he came in and he didn't know what he was there for.

He was excited though.

And we said, "We're gonna show you something."

[Javier] And then they show me this five-minute trailer that they shot

as a proof of concept.

And the story's been told enough times that I'm not entirely sure what happened.

[Halle] He was so excited and so happy.

I think he man-cried. I mean, I think he basically man-cried.

I think on the outside I was able to keep a good poker face,

but on the inside, I went into like a full-on, ugly man-cry

for, like, my lost innocence, and my childhood,

and for all the things I'd loved as a kid.

I couldn't say no to the job. It was just one of those things, like,

you could offer me a dollar... [laughs] and I'm gonna do this job, you know?

[Will] The minute he walked in the room, you knew

he was a huge fan of the property.

and he was a huge fan of process.

He immediately set a tone of professionalism and nerd joy.

[dramatic music playing]

Are you nuts? Why would you re-make something so great?

Uh, and then I read the script.

And then I saw they're making it into a TV series and it was a prequel.

I saw the people that were involved and I thought, "Oh, I get it.

You're really digging deep into the world and you can do so many more things now."

[Lisa] Louis came to us a long time ago

because he wanted to know what we were doing with The Dark Crystal

at the time we were developing a feature film.

He jumped on board the feature film and worked with us on that development

on how to do Dark Crystal for today.

And he is the one person on the whole show

who... who has the show in his head.

He's incredibly thoughtful,

and I feel like he's really the right person

to be standing in my father's shoes from the original movie,

where people can, like, ask him,

"All right, what are we doing here?" [laughs] You know?

He... he's that person who knows.

[Javier] The Dark Crystal was heavy with the weight of legacy.

Legacy because all of us grew up with Jim Henson.

Legacy because The Dark Crystal was a huge movie

for a lot of us who love cinema and especially who love genre cinema.

But the trick is to find that sweet spot where you still are able to be honest,

you're still able to be respectful, and you're still able to be creative.

[Lisa] Louis is not a writer,

um, but he was in the writing room the whole time.

So, we did a writing room in Los Angeles with Jeff, and Will, and Javier,

and Jo Lee, and Vivian.

We had a nice team of writers.

And then. Louis worked with them even closer

and you know, rarely left the room.

[Vivian] Will and Jeff had already thought of the ten episodes,

so they did a lot of the heavy lifting for us.

So, we knew where we were going.

There was so much communication,

about where the canon was going,

and sort of what were important aspects to make sure that we didn't change

or things that we did make sure that were the tent poles.

[Lisa] Jo Lee is writing the YA books,

and he's a big world creator.

We've used a lot of what he developed in his YA books

as texture and background for the story that the series tells.

Writing the novels, it was a lot about, like,

making up place names, and character names, and environments,

and now, I'm just one piece in a very big picture.

What was this incredible civilization

that the Skeksis wiped out?

That world building which sort of occurred across the YA novels

and across the graphic novels,

you know, we kind of just created, like, that civilization,

which is a matriarchal society.

Seven clans which are each run by their own Maudra,

who's the matriarch,

and then all the Maudras.

The queen of all of them is the Al Maudra.

And she is of the Vapra clan,

so we actually created seven different clans

which are not based on any human culture,

but what they're a little bit based on

is the way that human cultures are different from each other.

[Simon] Certainly, in science fiction and fantasy,

you have realms whereby you can rehearse ideas

that might not necessarily be possible in the real world.

You can actually present power struggles

or at least environments where things aren't necessarily dictated

by the gender politics of the now, here,

and to show how changes can occur.

[Halle] High fantasy, like all good storytelling,

has a character story, has a plot story that drives the action.

But the thing I think high fantasy can do

probably better than any type of storytelling

is it can send that bigger, overall message,

not only to bringing people into this wondrous new world,

but also speaking to some issues right now

that, uh, we all are feeling very strongly.

And seeing it in myth, and a new myth, it's gonna be very exciting.

[Natalie] It pulls on that idea of unity

against an overriding darkness and evil.

All storytelling is about who we are, and what we do,

and how we behave, and what choices we make.

Uh, and sometimes it's naturalistic, sometimes it's through a fantasy prism.

But with this, when it's through creatures that don't look like us,

from a world that is so far away from us,

it makes us let our guard down.

We don't notice that we're really talking about how human beings behave.

[Javier] What are the tent-pole moments we have to hit?

We know that the pilot is the Gelfling discover

that the Skeksis are draining the Gelfling for their essence.

So we know that's the inciting incident.

You know, we know, we know, we know.

So you start putting those tent poles up on a white board,

and what that gives you is,

it gives you, if not a road map, a set of destinations.

And the creativity comes out of

you sit in a room, and this is how we did Lost also.

You sit in a room day after day, and go, "Okay, how do we get

from point A, to point B, to point C, to point D?"

Next thing you know, you have a season of television.

And from there, that's when you build a world.

If you... you create a character such as...

I'm gonna use an example like Brea.

So, she's a princess, which means there's a mother who's a queen,

which means, oh, there's a hierarchy, this, uh, legacy that she has to live.

What's that landscape like?

It's just a slow unravel,

and it's very beautiful, and it's very delicate.

We wanted to make sure that we also had a love story at its core.

And it's the story of Rian and Deet.

And I think that these two characters need to meet

and go on this journey together.

That's it! Monsters.

-What? -I know exactly what to do now.

You've been so helpful. Thanks so much.

The language of Podling

was created by Jo Lee,

who's one of our writers on the show and who had a background in linguistics.

And he handed me a neat little vocabulary packet

of all the Podling and English words,

and so I learned it by studying Jo Lee's diligent work.

[J.M.] He's done a huge amount to breathe life into it.

He'll write me emails in Podling,

and I'm like,"I don't... I don't know what that says."

Like... [laughs] I made up the language, but I'm not fluent in it.

So, it's very inclusive for everyone.

Every idea on this counts,

like, figuring out how is he gonna shoot that arrow,

because he also had four hands and he can go like this.

What if he also goes behind his head

and shoots up in the air like that with those arms going up?

[Javier] At one point in the writer's room, somebody comes up with,

"We should have a scene where Podlings are being washed,"

and that just goes over there some place.

And then, somebody says,

"We should send Brea to, like, some group of people

who just do crap jobs and they're really unhappy."

And then, you give it to a talented writer like Vivian.

Next thing you know, the daughter is going The Deterge,

and there's a season where you wash Podlings.

And, by the way, that's also a good example

of what I refer to as "wide open spaces."

[yelling]

Having written a Star Trek movie, I know what it's like when you write,

"And such-and-such lands on such-and-such planet."

And you know someone's gonna have to go build that,

or design it or, or all of those things.

But I think, as a writer, you have to trust in the process.

You can't think about the designers and the builders.

They have to take care of themselves.

You write whatever the heck you wanna write.

However vast and expansive it is, you just write it

and let them tell you they can't do it.

It's not your problem.

For Dark Crystal to be able to work,

we had to have that full trust in the creative vision.

I don't know where else you could make an epic,

action, adventure, fantasy, romance, story of love

with puppets, and have it be this epic.

The mantra is freedom and responsibility.

People at all levels within Netflix

do have a lot of freedom to do their jobs how they see fit,

but you're accountable.

So, there's a responsibility for delivering at a really high level.

And we extend that same mantra to our filmmakers.

[dramatic music playing]

[Taron] Before I was an actor,

the thing that really sort of set my soul on fire

was drawing, and sculpting, and making characters.

and that's sort of what I thought my life was going to be about.

And I just remembered the first time that I opened the printout

with the character breakdown and the little image

that I just called, like, anyone who I thought might be interested

to tell them about it, because it was just the coolest thing.

There's something to be said

about the way something is moving in real space,

with the light catching it and that tactile sense,

then bringing it to life.

[Lisa] We were nervous about doing puppet Gelfling,

and it came from my father's concern

that the Gelfling hadn't been entirely successful in the first movie.

The designs were beautiful.

I mean, Wendy did an incredible job,

but, like, the movement was not quite what he wanted.

They were sure that they were gonna be able to do

things that were far easier, far better,

it wouldn't be difficult this time.

And they ran into the same problems,

because, basically, it's a hand in a very small head,

and there isn't a lot you can do with that.

You still need to have a lot of room for mechanisms up above

and enough room for a hand to manipulate the mouth.

I think what's going to step up our new characters

is how we were able to get the character into the eyes

and into the skin texture.

We think the Gelflings are so much improved,

it's almost hard to look back and remember

why I was nervous about doing puppet Gelfling.

But my father was nervous enough about it

that he wanted to cast humans in Labyrinth.

[John] Don't get me wrong, the original stuff is magical in its own right.

You know, back then, they would carve out fingers out of wood.

Now we're-- we have 3D printed fingers,

um, out of plastic.

It's really... the design is fundamentally based on

what we know they built on the original movie,

um, which is basically this skull...

or partial skull...

um, with the teeth mounted kind of below it on a wire.

And you think it's not bad,

but a puppeteer has to have it on their hand for hours.

But the skins, um, are foam-latex,

um, as they were on the original,

um, which is very light, uh, and flexible, uh, material.

This is the core,

and... and this is the actual, uh, detail itself inside.

So, it's got... we've got two molds going on here in...

in theory.

So, this is the core mold,

which we get our fiberglass outside that goes inside it

for the animatronics,

and inside here is the detail.

[Jasper] The inside...

of the skin is actually

exactly the same shape as the outside of the skull.

So, I cut this character in half right there,

and what that does is it allows me to make a tray.

And from that tray, I just start building off.

So, this is the main hero Augra puppet, um,

that Kevin uses most often. Um...

But, um, this is sort of its clone.

Um, she has a foam latex skin,

uh, like the original did.

And then, inside, she ends up with, uh, her ugly Augra teeth

and a foam mouth a lot like that one.

So, he grips it like this.

Um...

And is able to make her talk that way. But then, there is...

additionally, there is a radio control that gives a second puppeteer expression

over her eyebrows and her eye.

Technology is great. There are a lot of things

that you can do now that you couldn't do then,

but, when it comes right down to it,

it's still, basically, a hand in a head.

[Brian] You know, when I do it, it's just a drawing. It's a few scribbles.

They've got to sculpt it, and it's in clay.

And it's a dead thing,

and you've got to make sure that somehow that has life.

Then it's made into a mold, which is a dead... you know, a dead thing,

and then it's cast into this strange thing that is rubber...

that has its own life but has nothing to do with what you're doing.

And then you've got somebody who's gonna make mechanics in it

that are just solid

and only do a few things,

and you've got to try and get those things together.

And it's got to now express some life,

and then you give it to the puppeteer.

[dramatic music playing]

[Peter] It's another challenge for a show like this,

is that we're creating the actors for the show.

They're not gags,

they're not seen only from the left side, or the right side, or...

You know, [stammers] they don't just show up for five minutes.

This is the cast.

-[man] Ready? -Clap test.

[man] All right.

[Neil] I don't think puppeteers are well-known

by nature of their job that they are hidden.

Uh, and I don't think...

there's very few famous puppeteers.

It is an art where you choose to hide.

And I very much I think it's like a musician,

that you have an instrument, but you play a beautiful tune on it.

But we all listen to the... we all listen to tune.

It's the tune we remember.

It's not necessarily the piano it was played on.

It's the character that lives

and has its own life.

[Olly] People were telling stories with puppetry

long before they decided to come up and act,

because they were too frightened to act,

because they were trying to represent all the ancient gods

and all the myths.

We're just bringing back with the current technologies

and sort of mythology

that we've got this desire to explore these different story lines,

but we're just being able to do it through Netflix and through animatronics.

[speaking indistinctly]

As a child, I endlessly drew Jim Henson content and Star Wars content.

Drawings. I used to write stuff and model stuff in plasticine.

I was obsessive about both those things.

And, uh, I've been very blessed, very lucky.

Three, two, one...

[growling]

At the age of two, I saw puppets on television for the first time,

and I was like, "I need to do that."

Straightaway, "That's what I want to do for life."

And I did it from that point on.

My dad gave me a book when I was growing up,

and this book was Fairies,

and it was illustrated by Brian Froud.

[Neil] All the work that I've ever seen Hensons do

is, in form, what I do now,

and, strangely full circle, here I am

doing what inspired me in the beginning.

[Simon] The point is with puppetry is that it's a medium,

it's an art form in itself, and that's what you're watching.

It helps you to stay slightly detached and think about it a bit more.

You don't just get hypnotized by looking through a window, you know?

You're looking at something which is a... a representation.

[dramatic music playing]

This is one of our first rehearsals for the puppet show.

It's the puppet show that the Heretic and the Wanderer,

um, in the Circle of Suns, are going to do for the Gelflings,

to basically show them the way.

Show them what needs to be done, what should happen,

and how the world of Thra should be in this crazy little puppet show.

We have this great young puppeteer called Barnaby Dixon

who's, um...

who does YouTube, um, puppets with his fingers.

[man] It carries the spirit of Thra, and when wielded by Gelfling,

holds the power to unite the seven clans and defeat the Skeksis.

When I teach puppetry,

I always tell people there are three main elements.

Manipulation of the puppet,

voices, and your acting.

And of the three, the acting is by far the most important.

When someone's a strong actor like Becky is,

it comes through.

[Becky] The first few scenes that I did with Deet,

I was still freaking out a lot,

but the first scene that I did with Deet and Hup,

I was way more relaxed,

and it was nice to have somebody else there.

[Olly] Despite being fantasy characters, the majority of them,

particularly the Gelfling, we've got to bring this naturalism to them

to engage with the drama of everything.

And it's got to be believable.

I mean, it's not like you've even got two nice, colorful characters

just against the white backdrop and you're enthralled by them.

This is a whole universe.

You know how hard it is to hold your hand up like this,

even for five minutes?

And they're doing it with, you know, 20, 30 pounds on top of it,

and then acting emotionally and...

you know, you take on the emotions of the character that you're playing.

It's... it's intense.

When I read these scripts, I thought, "My God.

The acting skills required...

this is not just funny muppety.

To come to this, we had to learn another language,

because the Gelflings, particularly, require stillness,

precision,

subtlety.

And it belongs to the...

[Taron] You indulge in an illusion.

Everyone apart from the youngest members of the audience

know that they are looking at an inanimate object.

But through a collection of great performers and great makers,

the audience are able to invest in this thing

and believe it's real life,

and there's something really magic about that.

To bring these characters to life, first you look at them,

'cause they're already created, unlike when acting on screen

and you chose your costume, the way you walk, move.

There's the way that they look,

and then there's a huge part of it that is dictated by the puppeteer.

They decide when the character's suddenly shouting, aggressive,

or whether they look like they're taken aback by something.

And so, the performance really takes place within certain parameters

that are... are shaped a lot by the puppeteer,

which is why Louis has been working with them as actors.

[Alice] I have to eventually come to the point with every character

where I can make faces without thinking,

and I think happy and my hand just does it.

As I'm showing you this, she's...

she's...

you know, she's thinking, she's emoting, she's...

You know, she can be scared, she can be...

thoughtful, she can... she can be sad.

[Victor] When someone else is doing your eyes

and you have a sad moment where you close the eyes,

and then, when you come out of it,

either they have to kind of catch it when you come up,

or maybe they come out early and that forces you to come up,

but because I'm controlling it, it all feels real

and the timing feels real.

With a muppet, you're so used to going like that.

Now, on these things, that doesn't quite look right.

It looks like he's riding a horse to Banbury Cross,

but it is just the movement translating from your own walk

with a bit of something in it to make him work.

And just keeping them ali--

I found when I'm performing Rian,

it's almost like I can't let him keep still.

I have to, while I'm with him,

I just have to sort of just change the weight of where he's standing.

I'm not afraid.

Naturally, when she looks around, the shoulders kind of go with her,

but I don't think that looks very natural.

So, if I have an assist, I'll get them to do both hands

and I'll hold her body still.

Puppets are funny because they can kind of do nothing...

but make you believe they're doing everything.

So, like, just a... just a tilt of the head

and you read an emotion,

like, uh, down is sad, for instance.

So, it's just playing with the camera, and the light, and the positioning,

and you can really sell any emotion.

It's really difficult and exacting, and it's very precise.

And so, when they get a moment where your whole job

is to, like, be a half naked Podling running through the forest

they're, like, "Then I'm gonna go all the way with that."

[laughs]

And, uh, we're probably gonna be in the suits

for a great deal of time today,

because it's a long scene.

So this is challenging.

We clamber in here alongside them, like snuggling.

And I rest my head in Warrick's armpit.

[laughs]

Well, the Skeksis are bodysuits.

It's like a rucksack.

They're sort of harnessing it on you,

then our hands go up through the head

and we're operating like this.

[Victor] I think what I'll do is just, uh...

Hi, I'm in a Skeksis.

-Isn't it fun? -[laughter]

It's very dark and sweaty in here. Yay.

[Warwick] Uh, so this is the Chamberlin's body.

Um it looks quite small,

but actually, it's bigger than they originally were in the movie.

Or so we're told.

Louise Gold knows this because she was there for both the movie and series.

We also have a monitor, small monitor strapped to us,

because, as puppeteers, and in Jim's way of working,

we are seeing exactly what the camera sees.

So we're in some way directing.

We can see exactly what we're doing.

We have these shoulder straps.

And then, in the belly of the beast...

we have our monitor.

We're watching two shots simultaneously,

and pretty much, most of the time, a third camera,

which is like a CCTV.

[Warwick] This is Yergin.

Yergin.

[laughter]

Pretty tight squeeze.

It is. [laughs]

So there are a series of buckles.

There's a waistband.

-All right, you good? -Yeah, I'm good.

-Got the weight? -I'm in.

Gerard will put the head on.

It takes a village to get a Skeksis on.

And, um, I will put my hand up in here.

Thank you very much, Yergin.

-I'm sure that's fine. -No, no, no. One thing.

No? One more thing? What?

Open wide.

Aah.

[spraying]

-There you go. -Ah, tasty.

Working a Skeksis is extremely hard.

It's the hardest puppet I've ever performed in my entire career.

But then, it's really, uh, freeing,

because once you're inside that puppet, you just can't be seen from head-to-toe.

You're invisible and that character lives.

[Simon] Particularly when you have a skilled puppeteer as Warrick

who does all those little head moves and stuff, and...

You can see how he's talking when you're watching the playback.

I've got a lot of help from all over the place, yeah.

Warrick's interpretation, his movements.

The incredible sort of visuals that I'm looking at.

I was certainly trying to follow on from Frank's performance in the movie

and... and get that kind of...

sleazy, snaky, fluid movement.

It's a really distinct performance.

This is good.

Yes, Emperor will be most pleased.

-I go now. Bye, bye. -Wait!

Yes?

[ominous music playing]

[Lisa] Everything is designed to fit in Brian Froud's aesthetic,

and if he didn't design it himself, he's weighed in on everything himself.

And he did design every puppet character and every costume.

[Toby] That's where it all begins. It starts with Brian's line.

The pencil line that he draws on the page,

the curve that he'll use.

[Brian] In the lines I draw,

there's something about them that have to encapsulate life.

You know, there's a line,

and it might have a flow to it

and it feels all right.

But we're going to have to turn this into three dimensions.

We're gonna have to get somebody to sculpt this,

and they're gonna have to put in the wrinkles.

And they can't just put in wrinkles...

[laughs]

...any way they like.

It's trying to get people to understand is,

you are gonna sculpt these wrinkles in this character

because they have to have a meaning.

All the wrinkles...

there are no superfluous wrinkles.

What is the character of this thing?

It tells you something about it,

and so, they have to listen

to, not my drawings anymore,

but, actually, what the character is that you're trying to reach.

[Toby] For him to come and revisit this world and get back into it

might have been a challenge,

but a rewarding one.

[Brian] I don't picture things in my head.

Can't do it. I can't sit and picture it in the head,

and then just draw it.

To get to my subconscious,

to get rid of the chattering mind,

I'll just scribble.

And it's... and it's like looking at nature

and trying to see a face in the...

in the.. in the bark of a tree.

Somewhere in here, I've got to find...

what... what that is.

The challenge is...

[pencil scratching]

it's got to be different, but it's got to be meaningful.

How do you find meaning in a line?

[Toby] To be able to see that stuff come out, and see those things work,

and characters come alive once again...

or to be able to talk to him and find out, you know, about things from the original,

on how he interprets something or sees something.

I mean, that's the magic.

[Jeff] I think it's amazing that the whole Froud family

has kind of come back. Like...

to see the three of them working together is incredible.

And to see him...

watch his son...

follow in sort of the family business.

But it's not even the family business, it's like the family world.

[Toby] That's where I think we're sort of thriving in this fact

is the fact that we're...

you know, we're in this world that's so natural to us as a family

that we're able to... to just impart what we know,

or what we actually just know to be real.

As I grew older, I found that I had the Froudian style, as we call it,

um, where it felt comfortable and it felt like home.

[Taron] I went into the creature workshop, and it's still the Frouds who are creating

these wonderful other-worldly creations,

and here's Brian Frouds' son who is doing a lot of the work in there.

And I was like a fanboy meeting him, because he's the baby from Labyrinth.

So then, the duality of not only seeing someone

from a film that I loved as a child,

but then also seeing his creative prowess and this incredible work he's doing.

It was just fantastic to go and get a glimpse of all that.

[Peter] You have to take something that's spiritual, and creative,

and beautiful to look at, i.e. Brian's designs,

and then somehow translate them and actually create a puppet that works.

A sculpture that is gonna work technically,

mechanically for the puppeteer,

as well as visually look correct,

and-- and capture the spirit that was in Brian's drawings.

Generally, we get one of two versions of designs

when we have designers.

It's either a maquettes, maquettes are the small sculptures,

and Toby Froud was providing those.

And those are very helpful because you get a three dimensional view

of what you're creating.

And Brian Froud was sending sketches,

and he's got a very loose style.

So, luckily for us, Toby Froud is with us,

and he's known his father his whole life.

Imagine! So, he could interpret what the squiggles meant.

[Brian] What they were doing is very, um, kindly

trying to tidy my drawings up.

They were trying to, um, even everything up.

And once they understood it's meant to be asymmetrical,

it's meant to be growing, and organic, and have a flow to it,

it just became simple and it just...

-everything fell into place from then on. -[man] Yeah.

[Brian] Yeah.

Sometimes we weren't understanding exactly the direction design-wise.

We weren't hitting it.

And then, he said, "That's it.

What I want is other."

[Toby] And again, it's that journey.

It's just believing and trusting,

and as soon as it happens, you will get on,

and then it just moves.

[Gavin] The process of designing something like this does start

with looking back at the old film, obviously.

That's what you're trying to reproduce, that spirit,

and push it further.

Obviously, Brian Froud was... was very much with Jim Henson,

the architect of that early product.

And Brian is still around. You know, he's been quite involved.

We were all a bit nervous at the beginning

of obviously, meeting him and talking to him,

knowing that we were sort of holding his baby.

[Brian] Jim really was intrigued by ley lines,

and then there is a sacred geometry.

And what it did was give the original film a depth.

[Blanca] We made sure that both in the script

but also in the art department production

that all those symbols and all that language,

that it had layers,

and that it had, therefore, life.

Brian has done some wonderful, uh, drawings on the Skeksis.

And you'll see little kind of bug-like creatures,

you know, on these circles, and triangles, and everything.

And I took those, and from them I sketched

about... well in the end, we ended up with about 54 symbols.

from which we said, "Okay, this is our Skeksis alphabet."

And so...

we eventually...

made it to here, which is the--

This is the aggression symbol, which is the big Skeksis symbol.

And then it... it opens...

It's a very aggressive...

object.

So, you try and... you try and read...

some of this, and then it...

then it just springs open.

To put together a fantasy universe on paper...

is a lot of work,

but then, to do the details of the fantasy world...

practically...

First of all it's fun, but it's a lot of work.

So, the artistry of it's huge.

[Jason] First, I came in and met Louis,

and I looked at the screen and they ran a bit,

and I was taken aback.

I was just side-swiped by the scale and majesty of it.

How it looked like a gigantic Hollywood special effects movie.

I hadn't expected, I guess, that level of effort and artistry.

I had no idea of the, uh...

the kind of epic nature of the show.

[Louis] More rocks would create a little bit of a...

-you know, a gate for the ramp. -[Gavin] No, that will work well.

[ominous music playing]

[Erik] I just feel like it's such a luxury

to be allowed to shoot in this world

that's not only so rich and full of details,

but that is, of course, just handmade from scratch for this.

[Simon] Often when you watch a film or a special effects movie,

you'd say, "How do they do that?"

With this, you know how they do it, it's just incredible how they do it.

They had about 30 to 35 sets on Dark Crystal,

and they had about three years prep.

We have about 70, 80 sets,

and we had about six months prep.

So, your first, other than creative, thought is about a schedule.

Is about how do we work this?

We were prepping this from when we started pre-production,

making the trees, the plants, the vines that are hanging up

and then, there's all the prop-made plants

that we based most of them from the original movie.

We got all the old photos and reference of all those crazy little plants

that were in Dark Crystal.

[Ty] Every piece that you see in here,

we've actually copied from the original film.

We actually got the original drawings.

The original drawings, yeah, original photographs,

even the original concept models of the original sculpts.

Richard and Ty jumped into the Froud sensibility very...

like, they went in feet first.

I mean, that... there's an original Skeksis sword

when this is actually copied from the original one.

I mean, they're beautiful.

It's obviously Brian Froud who designed those.

[Taron] There's a real joy in knowing that every detail has been...

completely, lovingly crafted,

and there's something akin to a great painting.

There's something wonderful about knowing you can pause any frame

and know that no moment in there is an accident.

Every leaf you see has been placed there.

Every movement of the character has been considered.

To invest in creating an entire other world,

down to the smallest details of what its flowers look like,

and its food stuffs,

to the constellation of the planetary alignments

of the cosmos that it holds,

you are transported to an entirely different landscape

which overwhelms you.

[Will] I turned to Jeff at one point and said,

"Boy, we'd better be careful what we write."

Because, you know, we just put, like, uh, "exterior, balcony,"

and then we get into, "What are they talking about on the balcony?

What's the plot? What's the story? What are the characters on the balcony?"

And then you look, and this balcony wraps around,

and it's 300 feet long,

and you're just, like, "Who thought of that? It's beautiful."

[Gavin] One of the big ones was the citadel, the throne room,

for the Ha'rar Gelfling clan,

and completely new world, very important, it's the head clan.

We went through quite a few different incarnations of what that needs to be,

trying to hold within the budget,

because anything with a compound curve that isn't a straight line

is more expensive than something with a straight line.

[Phil] We had Machu Picchu,

which was our inspiration for this.

This was a town that was up in the heavens.

Well, it was fantastic to see those environments practically,

um, not framed for the camera,

because you could see the mechanics of it.

The fact that they had to be built so high so that the puppets could go inside.

So our standard height here, we have four-foot-high rostrums.

There's the finished set floor and then the set sits on top,

and that's so we can open up the floor to drop the puppeteers in

to have the creatures at the right height.

That doesn't happen on a normal show.

So, you've got the creature's complexity, you've got the complexity of the set,

so you have to map out in great detail which creature's gonna move where

to provide the right type of flooring or open up the flooring.

[Richard] On another film where you're not making everything,

I'll run around and find everything,

book it from the rental companies or buy it, and then...

But with this, on a daily basis, we're constantly making pieces.

[Gavin] And not just at human scale.

There's nothing that could be really hired or purchased.

Sculpting's been our biggest thing on this.

I mean, literally, everything you see has been sculpted.

I mean, we concepted this and from--

And it's very Froudian, as you can see. I mean it's beautiful.

[Richard] With like any piece of art, you can keep going and going.

You have to just say that's your time, this is where we've got to be,

and plan, you know, those five weeks of where each week they want to be at.

From archives, original photographs,

we've been able to scale up, draw off,

and take all the information off the original

and get it as close as we possibly can.

[Ty] And the reason there's this massive hole here

is for the puppeteer, obviously, to...

to work the puppet.

Purely fiberglass piece, polyester resin,

and then we're having to again down to the painters now

to do the finishing, and then onto set.

And that's the continuing train of work.

[Peter] Everybody came together for the common good.

And Gavin, the production designer, was amazing.

And him and his team, they produced the most gorgeous sets

I think I've seen ever.

[dramatic music playing]

[Javier] When you put something on a page,

more than 100 people are gonna come to work on the show and create that thing.

More so in The Dark Crystal,

because it is a completely synthetic universe.

Everything that we write has to be made by somebody, and it's by hand.

It's pushing that back into a handmade quality and feel,

and it's the hardest thing to do.

The film was so rich and vibrant in every single frame,

and to do that across a TV show is a huge problem.

[Javier] When you look at every little detail in The Dark Crystal,

you look at the books in that library,

you look at the vials in the scientist's chamber,

uh, those things are the apex of somebody's art.

[Lisa] You're looking at a set that's all Styrofoam,

but it looks like parquet wood,

it looks like stone, it looks like marble because the painting is so incredible,

and, at the same time, in the creature shop,

we have people who are putting in individual hairs.

The land strider has hair all over its body.

Every one was hand-punched.

[Finola] The main kind of color of hair around here is just one pattern piece.

And then, we've gone through it

and, um, put other types of fur through it to kind of break it up a little bit.

But the pattern had a direction on it

so that we can have it sticking up as much as possible

like the original one.

So you use like a beading needle that's far down,

and then there's one edge to it, so it picks up,

like, a few hairs at a time,

to keep it quite natural, I guess.

Well, this is... this is Brea's journal,

and Brea is one of our main, main characters.

And this is kind of her prized possession.

I think it... it represents her.

The idea that it's a beautifully embroidered item

that maybe... maybe her grandmother embroidered for her.

The paper is handmade.

You know, it's very beautiful,

but I thought it was extremely important that this was a real object.

So, I sat down for quite a few days...

um, and just painted and painted.

So just putting key things in, like, a mother Augra.

And also, um, taking actual flower pressing,

You know, the idea of things getting a little bit purple,

a little bit of the dark things coming in a little bit into her world.

Hup's gonna have a spoon,

or Hup's gonna have a couple of different versions of a spoon,

and those are hand-crafted and made.

And we sit and have meetings about, like, the size of the spoon,

and at one point, he was gonna have a whisk,

and did that sort of drift away from the spirit of Hup?

Like, he's really all about spoons, it shouldn't be a whisk. And...

But people made a whisk, and we looked at the whisk, it was designed,

and you're like, "I don't think this is Hup. I think he's a spoon."

[Will] And you write something like,

"You know... Ah, you know, the Podling, it doesn't want a bath. Bah, bah, bah.

Anyway, moving on."

And they're like, "Okay. We've got a village,

There's 30 Podling. They don't want a bath

but each doesn't want a bath in a different way.

So we made all these Podlings,

and you're just like, "Okay, that's exactly what I meant."

The Deterge is upon us!

Like, we looked at Podling butt sculpts. Does that make sense?

And the first one, we were like, "That's not right." And, and, and, and...

had it redone.

And so, we, like...

There was multiple sculpts of Podling posteriors

before we got to the one that... that I think you'll see in the show.

[Simon] It meant something to everybody, you know. And, uh...

And you could feel that on the set,

everybody was so at pains to make it Dark Crystal.

It was a puppet show and a puppet show is an art.

And that... that art is a big part of the thing itself.

[dramatic music playing]

[Taron] We're still riveted and amazed by CG,

but there is so much of it

that I think there is an element of kind of desensitizing that happens.

The wonderful thing about this world is everything has weight,

it's real, it has texture.

If you were in front of the camera, you could reach out and grab them,

and I think that's really exciting, too.

The reality of it, the weight of it.

[Peter] Jim would have embraced every tool in the box available to him.

And I have no doubt that he would have absolutely loved CG

and what CG would have allowed him to do.

[Cheryl] My father was a real innovator

when it comes to all different kinds of aspects of puppets on television,

puppets on film.

And he had to invent all the time.

He had to come up with new ways of doing things.

Oh, hi family.

[laughter]

-Hello, Nurlocks, feeding time. -[Peter] We didn't want to just rely on

the fact that CG could potentially fix the problem

or could even substitute a digital character

for a... for a practical character.

We wanted to make sure that everything that we did

and all the shots could be covered practically.

We've been talking for a long time about using more puppeteer removal,

so that you can do a large character

by controlling from the outside,

and then removing the puppeteers and the rods.

[Damian] The guys in DNeg are doing some interesting tests

for some of the CG shots that they have to do,

where they've built a human figure behind the CG rig.

And it'll be articulated from the human figure behind it.

So, it kind of mimics all the... the kind of, uh...

kind of the inaccuracies and all that, so it doesn't become too smooth.

You can get motion capture directly onto that.

So, then, you're literally replicating the performance

through the puppeteer.

Anything that gets us as close as possible

to the methods that the puppeteers are using.

Lore is a character that was originally decided to be a full CG character

because of the way he's articulated, what he's made of,

and the things he has to do in the script.

[Ted] We had so many meetings about the look of Lore.

I mean, this thing evolved.

At one point, he had, you know, three legs.

At one point, he looked like a giant turtle.

At one point he-- you know, he was just a big block.

I mean, there were so many looks of Lore,

and now we've come to this thing where it looks like a pile of stone,

and it looked like they were gonna fall.

And he says, "I think there's a Lore in this."

[Andy] The more we started to work on it,

the more people got thinking about him.

We did animation tests, and that got the puppeteers excited,

and then it became this thing where they were like,

"Well, you know, we can build a puppet that can do way more than we thought

and gives Louis even more on set and on camera."

[Jeff] We thought we had set this challenge you couldn't do,

and then they did it.

And so, Lore is on set,

and Lore is there, and Lore is puppeteered,

and it's beautiful to see them interact and come together.

Well, Lore's got this really nice, uh, you know, sort of, like, layers of rock,

and mostly when Damon moves the head,

just trying to keep it sympathetic with what he's doing

and what he's observing,

because it looks like a mouth,

but this is really where he's seeing through, isn't it?

He can be down quite low, and then he can be up quite high.

So, we know that they're kind of key positions

that he will always go to, you know?

[dramatic music playing]

[Ted] Never in my dreams would I think that that thing would be so cool

but, man, I can't wait to own a Lore figure. [laughs]

[Simon] It's nice to see the CG technology used collaboratively with the puppets,

so the whole thing feels very true to The Dark Crystal.

It is, first and foremost, a puppet-led thing,

but there are tiny little things you can do.

Like, in the original film, not that it mattered,

and not that I cared, and not that it was ever a thing,

but, occasionally, you can see a rod now and again, you know?

Not that that means, "Wait, there's a rod, it's not real."

You know it's not real, it's a puppet show.

You should be able to see all the rods really.

But what they can do now is they can remove that stuff,

add blinks, add little bits and bobs,

which give them a little bit more life and presence,

and... and just help with the magic trick that it is.

The way it's developed, even the effects that are CG effects,

we've now complemented most of those by realizing them in a dual capacity

where we have the puppet version of it and the CG version of it.

So there's almost nothing in the whole series

that exists only as a CG effect.

[Andy] It's still photo real. In some ways, the techniques are still the same.

We're still replicating the real world, it's just that the real world is Thra.

It's Jim Henson's, it's Brian Froud's.

And I think there's something about the... the tangible,

hand-crafted quality of it all that immediately makes people think,

"Well actually, this isn't like anything we've done before,

so we do need to think differently about it."

The plan now is for the CG to be more based on the rigging

and have all these little flaws in it

that the...

um, that puppets have.

[Andy] For me, it should always be, you know,

it's not just for the art department to try and work this out,

'cause maybe the VFX guys can do it better.

It's not just for the VFX guys to do it,

'cause, actually, if you built it, it'd be better.

You know, no one should be too precious about what they're doing.

Aah!

[screams]

The great thing about voice work

is that it's inherently a collaborative process,

and you are far from the most important cog in the machine.

They have made choices in movement, in pace, in style.

They've made characterization choices that you inherit.

[Simon] It a very interesting process,

and it's been very, very challenging in a good way,

because usually when you do a voice in something,

if you do animation, you do the voice,

and then the animators take your voice and they animate to the voice.

With this, it's the other way around.

You have to match your performance to the puppeteers,

who are all very good at what they do.

They are actors, you know, they characterize,

but you have to match their mouth flaps.

[Jason] It's an interesting discipline, because the puppeteers,

the world's greatest puppeteers,

have done the work already

and so, you have to act

and convey truth, power, fear, threat, whatever it is,

but you have to match the discipline.

The Crystal calls.

To the crystal chamber!

Ah, scroll keeper.

Scroll keeper!

[Jason] You take a lot of time to get it right,

because you can be satisfied that you matched the movement in sync,

but you're trying to give performances

that are as real and as engaging as possible.

Mmm?

Go?

Leave?

No, no, no.

Chamberlain will decide when Grunac's service is finished.

Until then,

Grunac stay right where are.

Mmm.

So, that's actually quite hard sometimes,

when you might choose a different way of delivering a line,

but you've got to get it into this rhythm of, uh... of speech.

It is amazing to be part of that group of... of Skeksis.

Much to do. Much fun to be had.

From there?

So... she hits him

So, first, like...

[grunts]

She told you to let go!

She told you to let go.

Okay?

And there's something hard about it.

It's really difficult, but the reward is even greater

because it's tangible, it feels tactile.

It's also key that you create a sense of spontaneity in it,

an immediacy, and... and life.

We protect the lords,

the lords protect the crystal of truth.

[Natalie] The ensemble cast of actors that are doing the voice work

speaks for itself.

It's incredible. But behind that is the other layers of the puppeteers,

and the suit artists,

and, um, it's a team eff--

like, it's genuinely a team effort.

It's a huge variety of people, uh, in this,

from different countries, and cultures, and I think you'll get a sense of that.

You'll get a sense of a big, eclectic world.

[ominous music playing]

[dark chord plays]

So, this is when we see the crystal.

So when the crystal comes down, we get this sound

that we've come to associate with the crystal.

[dark chord plays]

And there's an instability to sound.

This is kind of connected to the crystal and the, uh, Skeksis.

In a way, it's a very uncomfortable sound.

[tense sound plays]

So this creates, again...

a sound you wouldn't

associate with an orchestra.

It's just a very unusual sound.

-[metal cranking] -Yes!

[electric whirring]

[Daniel] The Dark Crystal world always felt like, from a different time.

I felt, musically, I wanted to incorporate as many different elements

from all types of musical culture into the score.

I also wanted to give it a simplicity in way,

because a lot of early instruments, they often--

they might not even have a chromatic scale,

they might have quite a simple scale on them.

And by limiting yourself to more of just a smaller range of notes,

it starts to feel, hopefully, more authentic.

I want it to feel like this music could have been made in Thra.

Cast him out.

How can they not?

To believe him is not to believe themselves.

[plays mythical melody]

[Daniel] And so, the idea with that is we can use it in lots of different ways

through the show.

[Skeksis] Thra belongs to us now.

And is nothing...

nothing Gelfling can do!

The first time we were going round set, we would just find all these,

like, mad objects,

and we were like, "Oh, wow!" You could just... It was so tactile.

And I think that's a really important word in this.

If the music can feel as tactile as everything else,

then we've sort of succeeded.

[chanting]

[Daniel] I think everyone involved in this show

has put so much work and effort

into every minute detail.

I think every department,

from, you know, sound, to costume design,

to story, to set building, the puppeteers,

everyone is putting something

that most of us wouldn't even know what is going into it.

And that's what makes the show so special, I think, because...

it's creatively like...

unlike anything else you've seen.

[growling]

[Jason] Nobody's making films with puppets anymore,

the world's greatest puppeteers.

They're working at the very top of their game.

They're working in a context where one of the greatest DPs in the world

is lighting it and shooting it.

And so, uh, it's a look that you've never seen before.

It's a look I've never seen before, that's for sure.

Go where I can see you. I'll be on the other side.

[gasps in fright]

[Taron] Film-making of all types is deceptively simple.

That's the thing about it, you know, it's an illusion

and that's the great joy of it, you know,

that there's a bunch of people who are working painstakingly and lovingly

to create something that other people enjoy

in a fraction of the time it took to create.

[dramatic music playing]

Louis was just fantastic. I mean he... [laughs]

I don't know how he does it.

He almost immediately got how a movie like this is made.

I really love the fact that he embraced our methodology so wholeheartedly.

I felt he was always, you know, behind us. He was championing what we were doing.

Swings in, that makes it ring.

[imitates ringing]

[Olly] Absolutely every day is a voyage of discovery on this job.

We anticipate, analyze, and plan as best we can,

but the sequences are big,

they're ambitious,

you can't cover all your bases.

And then, obviously, you get on set, things change.

Like, the shot changes. Something's not working quite right,

so we're always discovering better ways,

newer ways to achieve what we set out to.

Sometimes we don't.

Sometimes things don't work as we planned,

and then we have to completely change direction.

Ready.

We're constantly altering, and changing,

and addressing everything.

We're replacing skins or we're fixing mouth interiors.

We're working on hand paddles,

we're trying to always make things better,

and also make sure that things

function for whatever they need to do next.

[Ritamarie] The beauty of it is it looks simple.

At the end of the day, nobody's gonna understand

what it took to try to get there.

If you'd have said, "Let's shoot puppets hand-held

and steadicam with two cameras simultaneously,"

I'd have said you're crazy. It's counter-intuitive.

You need to hide the puppeteer's head, and you need to hide the sleeves,

and as soon as you have a wobbly frame, then you're just gonna kill yourself.

But, you know, he does it, and he does it amazingly,

and I think it will change the way people perhaps shoot puppets in the future.

[Jeffrey] Louis is strapped into that rig.

He's moving on the fly, he's constantly adjusting,

"Okay, there's a head coming in here. There's here, there's that..."

And so, it's much more sort of fluid,

and so, the puppeteers have... I don't think any of them

had ever worked with having two cameras running,

which means two monitors, and eye lines can get tricky with puppets.

[Neil] We're used to quite static stuff on us.

And we kind of work within a frame that we're given,

whereas Louis and Erik, they're giving us so much movement.

And we know Louis has got a much bigger picture in his head than we have.

[laughter]

-[Louis] The best, the idea is that... -[man] Um...

[indistinct chatter]

You watch the show and you forget you're watching puppets.

And if we do this, if we achieve that,

we might be onto something.

I don't think we did it, but we try. Every day, we try.

[speaking indistinctly]

[Natalie] It's a marathon task.

It's to have the mental capacity

to play that three dimensional chess

of being thinking about pre-production, shooting, post-production,

all the different elements that something like Age of Resistance requires.

[Taron] And he's also incredibly laid back and mellow,

and I think for most people,

the task of bringing something like this to life,

it's quite hard to comprehend

the amount of work that goes into this that you don't see.

I think what we've never done

is this kind of dance between the camera and the puppets.

So Louis, moving the camera through,

not necessarily always telling people where the camera's gonna be,

and then having the characters be able to interact with a moving camera.

There's so much more dynamism to this shooting,

that I think that is the first.

[Helena] I love it, the energy it gives it.

You can really start to use it when you know he's coming round

and then you can turn into his shot.

[Simon] He's directing through something,

You know, he's directing through the puppet to the puppeteer,

which can't be easy,

giving performance notes to the people underneath

which have to then be telegraphed above.

So, it's like this. Like... [growls]

We're doing everything we can

to make sure that the characters can run, and jump, and fly,

and climb,

and do a lot more action than they could originally.

Climb, Lore!

[screams]

[Natalie] The physical strength

that is required to be there on set holding a camera every day,

as well as the mental.

What Louis has done is super-human,

but to the benefit,

because it means that the audience innately feel his energy,

and there will be a house style,

there will be a house energy.

[Cameron] It makes it a lot easier to have somebody

that has full knowledge of every single episode

and every item that goes in that episode.

And even still, it's just so overwhelming.

There's so much minutia that goes into this.

[man] And three!

[Will] Absolutely, this is Louis' show.

He drives it, and he runs it,

and everyone kind of fills in behind him and helps create his vision.

The performers will come and would raid the village,

you know, so... so, two-by-two coming around.

And then, we have, uh... we have all of them gathering,

so that's 18, 19.

I want to use those big swords in the beginning.

I think you would go for, like... [growls]

one big swoop, you know?

[growling]

And he goes, and he goes... [growls]

And he's going to pow.

[grunts]

[grunting]

General's going to push...

[growls]

And then, Rian goes, "Ah!" like that

and the thing just... [grinds] it goes like this.

Gets stuck.

[Skeksis] You've got him now!

[grunting]

[growling and grunting]

[grunting]

-[grunts] -[screams]

[Ted] It was never in my wildest dreams

that Louis Leterrier was gonna direct all ten episodes.

It's inhuman, by the way.

The biggest question when a director's gonna take that kind of...

amount of work on, you think, "Wow, that's nuts."

But the beauty of it is, it's a single vision.

It's quite tough.

And...

I'm just shooting it.

Louis is directing, and editing,

and helping with the writing and producing--

You know, he's kind of... All of this is kind of...

Yeah, it's a lot.

He's got to take the vision that Jim Henson had,

continue that, and then put his own stamp on it.

He's obviously developed an incredible knowledge

about how the creatures work, the puppets work.

He's often suggesting ways that they can make--

improve the puppets and improve the creatures

that I find quite fascinating,

considering that's not his traditional background.

He's not afraid that they're puppets, which sounds a bizarre thing.

You work on many shows and things where it's,

"Well, it's a puppet,

it's going to do this, and it's gonna be a problem."

But when a character walks into a room,

he and Erik, they shoot it as if it was a human actor.

If he doesn't like something, he'll tell you what he thinks it should be.

He can describe what it should be rather than, "No, show me something else."

It's, like, "No, but how about this?"

And his ideas are brilliant,

and he has given us loads of ideas

of how things could look and how they could be.

[Javier] We're in this hybrid place

where we're neither a feature, nor a television show,

and having somebody like Louis at the top of that,

the way that he works made it really possible

for us to create freely.

We knew what we could write that was gonna get on screen,

because we knew the guy who was gonna be shooting it.

[laughs]

He was there in the room with us, you know.

[Cameron] There's a certain type of director

that is good with these big, big, massive projects,

and he's just one of those. There's like a handful of them.

[Simon] Louis Leterrier has made, essentially, five feature films

and they're all gonna drop at once and form this expansive prequel

to a film that came out 30-odd years ago.

It's brilliant. It's so amazing, and it's gonna blow people away, you know.

Those are the risks that need to be taken.

You can't... If you're safe all the time, everything gets very beige.

[dramatic music playing]

[Peter] The thread that keeps it all going was Louis,

and I also like to think the fact that it is Dark Crystal,

the spiritual thread comes right from Jim all the way through,

and Brian as well.

[dramatic music playing]

I like the darkness that's embraced with The Dark Crystal.

I really do. I think sometimes we can sanitize

and spoon-feed children and young adults a bit too much.

[Taron] Something about that period in the '80s

meant that there was a spate of films that were kind of tinged with darkness.

Not gratuitously so...

-just sort of something... -[growls]

a little dangerous and other-worldly.

I make a point of showing films to my daughter

that I think that she should see,

so I took her through all the Amblin movies

and we watched all the formative movies of my childhood,

one of which was Dark Crystal.

She watched it and really liked it. It frightened the life out of her.

[Javier] The alchemy of working with creatures

in a story that we all knew as kids,

that has this amazing mythical resonance for us...

The puppets can be satirical, the puppets can be emotional,

the puppets can say things we never got to say to our parents,

what we wish we had.

Or that our parents never got to say to us but we wish they had.

[Jason] I've been shocked lots of times, not just once or twice,

that this is going to go out and be watched by families

because it's sometimes very dark, and very disturbing,

and very edgy.

And if it was live human beings, you might shy away from some things they're doing.

But then I remind myself how dark Grimm's Fairy Tales are, and very...

and how... how resilient children are,

and how we over-protect them,

uh, and the power of narrative like this.

But it's... it's certainly not a gentle touch.

[Natalie] It's cathartic as well.

The highs are high, the lows are low.

I like the darkness of the original Dark Crystal,

and the ethos of that has bled into our prequel.

We have a real respect for the younger audience,

which is that you don't have to shield them

from everything uncomfortable.

You actually have to let people experience

some of, like, these grittier aspects of the world that we live in,

and maybe the world becomes a little less scary because of that.

[Ted] One of the things that I love about fantasy worlds

is the breakdown of sort of our own world segregations.

[Halle] So, I love that we have this intellectual, strong female character

that actually comes from a political background,

and yet is able, through her knowledge and her curiosity,

to.. to question it and challenge it,

and is smart and strong.

[Helena] I've never worked on anything

where there's been so many brilliant lead female roles,

and this is packed full.

[Vivian] This is the first studio that I've been in

where we went to the meetings and we were just looking at all women.

[Natalie] It is feminist insofar, and I mean that in a sense of equality.

It's actually scary that message is still necessary and relevant now

actually, 30 years on.

You'd like to think that that would be historical

but it's not, it's still contemporary.

[Javier] Each clan has its own Maudra,

and then there was an Al Maudra over all of them.

It is a maternally-driven society.

The sprite and bless the Al Maudra.

[Javier] And ultimately, that's the magic of The Dark Crystal

is a group of people,

all of them brought their A-creative-game to this thing

at every level, from design, production, writing, direction,

and every time you see one unit of what they created,

everything implies the existence of a great universe behind it,

and you get to, in your own mind, go and live in that universe

for as long as you want.

[Toby] We brought everything we could,

the skills, the imagination, the technique

um, from truly, you know, astounding artists.

[Taron] 95 % of this production

has been created in exactly the same way that Jim Henson's original film was,

and that was very important to me as a fan of the original,

and I think the fact that Netflix, Louis, the Hensons,

everyone's been very committed to that authentic way of making the series.

I think it's wonderful to re-visit something that Jim did 35 years ago,

which was, you know, one of the most remarkable things that he ever achieved.

[Lisa] I'm so proud because I really believe it does look like the feature.

It looks, in some cases, like more than the feature,

because we're doing so many more locations,

and more... more clans, more different types of Gelflings.

We have dozens and dozens of puppets this time around,

so, it's really big.

And I'm happy that not only we could make it like the feature,

but we could make it even... even bigger.

And I think it's just great that my sister Lisa,

you know, picked up the torch

and has carried it through

to the most extraordinary end point.

Its exciting to have brought puppetry to this point.

[instrumental music plays]

♪ Hush now, don't you cry ♪

♪ Even wings forget to fly ♪

♪ Darkness creeps close to the light ♪

♪ Did you know you used to soar? ♪

♪ We can ignite the fires ♪

♪ Take back all the hours ♪

♪ Just when you think You lost your essence ♪

♪ You come back with resistance ♪

♪ When you're on the out ♪

♪ I'll pull you right back in ♪

♪ I'll stop the fall you're in ♪

♪And the storms you weather ♪

♪ This could be the end ♪

♪ Or start of something new ♪

♪ It depends on who ♪

♪ Comes together ♪

♪ And the calm winds call ♪

♪ Bring back the age of old ♪

♪ We call, go whispering home ♪

♪ Told us to take back what we sowed ♪

♪ We can ignite the fires ♪

♪ Sing out with the choir ♪

♪ Just when you think You lost your essence ♪

♪ You come back with resistance ♪

♪ When you're on the out ♪

♪ I'll pull you right back in ♪

♪ Stop the fall you're in ♪

♪ And the storms you weather ♪

♪ This could be the end ♪

♪ Or start of something new ♪

♪ It depends on who ♪

♪ Comes together ♪

♪ When you're on on the out ♪

♪ I'll pull you right back in ♪

♪ I'll stop the fall you're in ♪

♪ And the storms you weather ♪

♪ This could be the end ♪

♪ Or start of something new ♪

♪ It depends on who ♪

♪ Comes together ♪

♪ So when you think You've lost your essence ♪

♪ You come back with resistance ♪

My own kids have always been a part of, uh, the creative process, I suppose.

Uh, my oldest two daughters have always been people

that I can bounce a lot of things off of.

It's kind of the most exciting challenge that we've tackled so far.

[Toby] And I think Jim Henson would have just been delighted

by... by the iconography of this

and how strange it is. [laughs]

This is such a wonderful moment,

as a legacy for Jim Henson's vision.