You’ve just completed commentaries for the new versions of Dark Crystal and Labyrinth, how did it feel to go back and look at the films again?
Well, I was a bit concerned that it was going to be a bit emotional. I did the commentaries at Peter Gabriel’s studio and they were expecting to spread it over a couple of days but I actually did it in a few hours. So they just set up a screen for me and I just sat there and I worried the sound man a bit because I said ‘well I don’t know what I’m gonna say because I was never there!’ And he looked a bit worried and thought ‘well what am I doing?’. And so I said ‘what I mean by that is I really wasn’t on the set because I was on the next set you know getting it ready, or I was in the workshop getting the puppets ready. I wasn’t actually there when they were filming it because I was always ahead, you know, I was always getting things ready. So I said, ‘I’m not sure what I’m going to be able to say because I’m not the director, I cant give little stories about what happened, you know, the problems here and so on. And I thought ‘well I don’t know if I’m going to have anything to say’ but apparently I did. And it’s a challenge because you are looking at the film and you are trying to remember some of the emotions that were going on while you were making it but also some of the technical aspects. And so certain images as they come up on the screen start suggesting things for you and you start to tell that story but you cant dwell on it because meanwhile the images on the screen are moving on. So you have to keep apace with that and so it is sort of a strange technical challenge …
Would you say you enjoyed it, then?
Yes I did. I have just got back from America where they have re-released Labyrinth on the big screen. It is fascinating to see things on the big screen again because you are so used to seeing things now on small screens. And I know that when I saw Dark Crystal a few years ago - they re-released it in Paris on the big screen and we went to see it then - that it is quite astonishing on the big screen. You know, especially with Dark Crystal, we created a whole world there. We spent five years doing that, luxuriating in it, but it means that every single thing you see on the screen has a meaning. In every little detail in the costuming and the shape of the rocks to the shapes of the animals are all part of this specific world, you know, the world of the Dark Crystal. And so on a big screen you get to see a bit more of that. And it is more immersive. However, I think that’s why, you know the interesting thing is, when the film the Dark Crystal was released they pulled it after a week because they sort of panicked I think. But it did phenomenally well on video and DVD ever since because you get so much more out of it each time you look at it.
Do you view the film differently now?
Well, we made the film for ourselves. Nobody will ever do this again because all films now are driven by accountants and they want to know who it is for, and how it’ll be marketed. But Jim wanted to make the film that he wanted to make. We all did and so that is what we did. So he sort of financied it for years himself and it was only near the end that he got the final money to pay for it. So it meant that we had freedom to do whatever we liked and that sort of shows, I mean, you can luxuriate into it. And that’ll never happen again. So I’m very proud of the fact that Jim allowed me to be a part of that and he trusted me enough to allow my type of images to get up on the screen. Because it didn’t happen by accident you know (laughs). That’s why it took five years, because it isn’t just me doing a drawing and hoping for the best, its me doing a little rough thing and then working with the technicians and working every day at getting what it feels like on the inside out onto the outside. If that makes any sense.
How did you find working in a three-dimensional, live setting?
Well I had made … I had done some sculpture. When I left college I was doing major collage stuff but when I … I did do some caricature heads for books and for TV times, I did a cover of TV times that was of David Frost, a caricature head. And so I had done some sculpting. Jim didn’t know this, he had seen one of my paintings on the cover of an illustration book and thought I’d be the right person to design it and so he was presently surprised to find that I could also work in 3 dimensions, or understood that at least. I did a lot of maquette things in the early days too to show people what the skekces looked like and what the mystics looked like.
Where did the inspiration for the skekces and mystics come from then..?
Well Jim wanted reptiles. He wanted something reptilian and I started drawing. And my little drawings at first were more like deep-sea fishes and gradually they came more like dinosaur birds. At least that’s what they felt like to me. But of course our secret always was that they had to be, the mystics and the skekces were really the same creature. And Jim liked my trolls, he always liked my trolls which are like dogs or animals, but part human, part something or other, so I had to always find the mirror image of them with the skekces. So I was designing them in tandem. The really ugly one … Jim and frank loved monsters. They kept wanting to make them more horrible and lots of people have said how it scared them when they were kids and we didn’t really mean to do that but we couldn’t help it. Jim loved the monster and so … The thing about my work and about many of the creatures is that when you look at them, you’re not quite sure what you’re looking at because they are amalgams of various creatures, you know part creature, part everything, and yet they should have a quality to them that is recognizable that you seem to know it, know them before. And when they are working at their best that’s what they are.
What were your abiding memories of the production from your side of things?
As an artist, my relationship is with the idea and with a drawing board. And it’s just me and the idea and I have to articulate that in some way, and the inner voice tells me if its right or, you know, and it communicates to people via a book or whatever. But when you’re doing a film it is a collaboration and so we started with 9 people on Dark Crystal and ended up with 360. Ad so what I have to do is find a way of using everybody’s unique talents. And I really liked their creativity, and that’s the way Jim works as well, so I valued everybody’s input and also their ideas. I know enough and have wandered around other studios in Hollywood to know it doesn’t work that way. You know? It’s a horrible situation but our workshop was different. And what I have to do then is with light touch is shape it and mould it. It’s no good it going off in tangents, its got to feel like it is part of the same world and its got to look like it is part of the same world. And so that is why I design from the inside. Because puppets in particular do nothing, but if they can do one thing well it implies they can do everything well. So I would often design creatures around a movement or a bit of technology that would do something and I would just design around it. So although the outside surfaces are incredibly important and we spent a lot of time and effort on it the real creativity happened on the inside. All be it with, in those days, a bit of string or a bit of tape and a performer, because we were pioneering everything by the time we finished Labyrinth we had highly sophisticated radio-controlled animatronics.
It must have been quite a change working from one to the other…?
Yeah, last year the Aacademy of Arts and Sciences, the Oscar people had an exhibition of animatronics in Hollywood, including lots of puppets from Dark Crystal and Labyrinth and they finished the whole event with a showing of Labyrinth. Because they still value it highly as an animatronic film. When you look at it, it is amazing how well it stands up after all this time, and this technology. But I think it is because it was still fairly simple and you still allowed a performance to happen, and that has always been my philosophy you know, if we can do it with a bit of string it will be much better, and cheaper (laughs). And I think that everything got, actually I was talking, just now in America, to Stan Winston, and he said after seeing Dark Crystal and then the Making Of, that he based the terminator on what we did. You know it was a puppet. It inspired him to do it that way. Of course now it is all CGI and everything but then … I had a really nice chat with him and when I walked around his studio I saw lots of little bits and pieces that I recognized. I was like ‘oooh, that looks a bit like my work!’ But he was quite honest about how much he ripped me off! (laughs)
How big a part do mythology and mythologies play in the films? Do you start with them and shape the story around them or vice versa?
It was Jim’s idea to kind of split off evil and how in the end that didn’t really work and you have to integrate it. The interesting thing is I know that seminaries have used the film when teaching about the nature of good and evil and that’s why… I have had people come up to me and say their father wouldn’t let them see the film because it was the devil’s film and things like that. And it is weird how people can misinterpret it. Because it is a moral film, it takes another approach to good and evil. Jim liked putting that in, there was a softness and an openness to the main characters I think that is enchanting but it was my job I felt, if I’m creating a whole world I have to make you believe it. And although this world is not of the earth and its somewhere else, is that I have to create a world that feels ancient and so I spent a lot of time on developing just symbols and symbology and geometry and all that is literally an underpinning of everything you look at.
How do you approach that then, do you look at existing symbols and work from there?
Yes, I did, I shamelessly stole from every and any sort of image, and occult images and alchemy, which is till do. A lot of that goes into my paintings, and the geometry goes into my paintings as well. So once I got the geometry then I kept designing symbols on top of that, I designed animals on top of it … … And so subliminally when you look at the images you don’t know why but it literally everything is connected. It is suppose to be connected emotionally in the film but it is connected in the way it has been designed in its underpinning of shapes and symbols. And once we got the fact that things were once whole and now have been split and then coming together, and I based things on threes, and triangles, and then we got the suns coming together, and there were symbols of eyes, and then there was ogra, and then everything starts to come together and be interconnected. And so there are a lot of symbols that are broken, and so what used to be a circle is no longer a circle. And the thing which disappointed me, and I said it on the commentary, was the end, with the figures that turn up at the end. Because of you look in the book at my design of it, they are creatures of light, they are transcendant beings and so we didn’t really make them as puppets, we made them as figures but the special effects guys were supposed to do a lot of work on them, and I kept saying to Jim ‘how’s that going?’ ‘oh that’s fine’ and of course it never happened. To me, they were supposed to have another layer, on top of spinning lights and glows and everything that you don’t get. So I was a bit disappointed in the end. But it is interesting because it is a puppet film using lots of different techniques and nothing had been made like it before. A Bafta nomination for Special Effects was a way of trying to get me an award and my name was the special effects guy but in truth there is hardly any special effects in it at all. It is all puppets, we all did it ourselves if you see what I mean?
So how did you move from five years of Dark Crystal right into Labyrinth? Did you know you were going to go straight into it?
Well, we were all exhausted. Wendy and I and Jim were at a special showing of Dark Crystal in San Francisco and when the film was over the screen went up and there was a big banquet with fantastic food and people were dressed as skekces. And we might have had a couple of glasses of wine and so we were in the limousine driving away from there and Jim says ‘shall we do another one?’ and I said ‘why not?’ And so he said ‘what shall we do this time?’ and I said “ I dunno” and so he said “ well let’s do something mythological’ And his daughter Lisa was studying mythology at college and she was really interested in Indian mythology and he said ‘do you know anything about that’ and I said ‘no!’ and he said” no neither do I’ And so we paused for a while and then I suddenly said ‘well what about goblins’ I don’t know where it came from but I could see Jim’s eyes light up and he said ‘yeah that’s great but this time I want to put some human beings in it.’ And immediately I saw a baby. I just saw the juxtaposition of ugly goblins with a little, sweet baby. And I thought that’ll work, and I said ‘goblins steal babies traditionally’ and he said ‘great, that’s it.’ And then the idea of Labyrinth came up and it is a great symbol and it can mean many things. And that was where we left it. I came back to England and painted a picture of the baby surrounded by goblins and that was the beginning of Labyrinth. That was how it started. And for years, Jim had that up in his house in Hampstead and then I painted immediately. Whereas before on Dark Crystal I had started with little sketches, this time I painted pictures. Some major pictures of just some ideas for characters. And so some of them got into the film and others didn’t and Jim looked at those and said ‘oh that’s great’ and then he started to develop the story from that. And then we started the same process of developing the same prototypes and building them.
So there really wasn’t much of a break between the two then..
Well no, luckily it only took three years.
Would you like to go back to films?
I don’t know. It was such a joy to work with Jim and his openness to creativity. He inspired people and he encouraged creativity. And I don’t feel a lot of that goes on anymore in the workshops. A few years ago I was talking to Richard Taylor who runs the Weta workshop and in the way he was talking about it really sounded familiar because it sounded like he ran his workshop the way we did ours. Much more open and more like a family. So I’m not sure about doing any other films. I mean, they are talking about doing ‘The return to the Dark Crystal’. I spoke to Lisa Henson when I was in America and they are confident they are talking about a 2009 release date so it sounds as if they are still going to go ahead. So I have had some input into the script and I have designed creatures for it so far just some early stuff and that is as far as it has got.
So it wont be another five year job then…?
No, not this time around. And it will be a mixture of puppetry and CGI.
How will that work?
Well they have a director and I’m not sure how much they are going to…Jim always valued my visual input. And so whether this will happen again it is very difficult to say. So quite visually how it will look I don’t know. I mean, I am all for it being one or the other … … As an artistic statement it could be very interesting if all your background is CGI and the puppets are in the foreground artistically but I think they are talking about mixing it all up. So potentially it could be wonderful. Hope for the best…
What informs the contradictions in your work? In regard to the colour and shapes and the differences often between the image and the text.
Well there is an abstraction that goes on. People tend to think that it is all on the surface and what they don’t quite understand is that the reason why a lot of my design did work with puppets is that there are a lot of swirls and textures and dangly bits but underneath it is a really strong underpinning of structure. And that is what makes it work. And so the same things happen in my art in the paintings. There is geometry that goes on underneath or there is some big basic strong shape and there is always the tension between things that are small and things that are big and sp there are contrast and yet the idea is that they are all connected some how, they are in part of the same world.
How do you approach your work?
I really can’t stand painting it drives me mad. Because in a sense it is like you are in chaos. You start of with a white board and that is like perfect and as soon as you make the fist mark everything’s gone, it’s off balance. So really, painting is a nightmare and chaotic things. It’s only when it is finished and knowing when something is finished is the most important thing. And it’s about balance, when everything balances, it may not be perfect and it may not be right, but it’s just in balance. You’ll know its in balance because if you put another mark on it it’ll go off balance, and then I’ll have to spend another 2 weeks bringing it back. And the painting will look different because you have had to redo it all but it’ll feel the same. Or its just knowing when to step away from it is the most important thing. A large painting involves a lot of complication, there is a lot of cosmic geometry goes on underneath and then ill place some major figures on top of that relating to the geometry and then the rest is about flow and design and composition and when other figures go in that now have to relate to the other figures. The paintings themselves are relatively flat cos they are not meant to have depth, you are meant to travel across them like maps. They are like maps into faeryand, they are telling you how to go on a journey.
How much of yourself is in your work and how has your work changed over your 30 year career?
I don’t know how much myself is in it, I trained in graphic design and so I am trained in a sense visually and so any painting and anything you do is a series of tricks, lots of tricks put together but what you try to do is in the trickery is try and express something truthful. And that is where the voice inside your head tells you about whether this line is right, where to make a wiggle is it the wrong wiggle keep doing it, and then suddenly it feels right. And so when shapes and forms start expressing something truthful then I know I am the right track. And what that truth is I am not always the person to know, it’s not my job to do that. I mean, when I am working at my best I have somehow got to step aside and allow whatever it is that needs to be expressed be expressed because of I get in the way, its no good, it if am to much me, if there is too much of me in the picture then it may mean that that is a failure where there is less of me and I have just facilitated it then I think that is a better thing. When I started, when you are young, you are born with a lot of arrogance, and you think you can just do stuff. And you can, it is odd, and sometimes you just do it because you now no better and you have no fear but as I get older I become more fearful because I know that it is not that easy to do this stuff. And then the other thing is, time runs away from you, there is so much to do and so little time, life is finite, and so it is knowing what to do, I find I don’t have so much patience anymore, about spending a long time on a painting. I am more interested now in how to do something more directly, how to express something directly without going round the edges of it somehow. As an artist, because I have a book coming out in America in September called Brian Froud’s World of Faery and so that is 30 years of work so that is interesting to see it all together, and there is definitely a progression and differences in styles and I could never go back to some of those early styles. The pressure is the world always wants you to do the same thing but as an artist you grow and change and so you find other levels to express and so there are subtle changes in the style but it’s intent is more the same. To me it has just deepened, I have just got deeper into the things which are almost inexpressible and you sometimes wonder why you bother expressing it and you wonder if it is possible. I mean I don’t know but I do try. An obviously I do try doing it in different ways. It has been interesting to experience my work on the screen in three dimensions and it always seems to want to do that. It doesn’t seem to want to stay still on the board because what I try to do with the art is not to be static, I don’t want to kill the idea by defining it so much. Often there is a slight aloofness to what I do and I want the spirit of it to move on and move out into the world and then when the viewer sees it they experience it. But they do seem to want to keep moving into other things, into 3D or into video, they keep wanting to do that. We have been trying for years to do a major movie. But when you mention faeries people get a bit frightened. We haven’t been terribly successful but we are trying.
How did the collaboration with Neil Gaiman come about?
Well, we haven’t really done it as such, Neil and I were guests of honour at a convention a few years ago, he was the writer and I was the artist and on the panel, someone said ‘have you ever thought about working together?’ and we just looked at each other and said ‘no, but we will’ and we made a promise. We were trying to develop a faery film, he was going to write it for us and it was progressing quite well and then we had a falling out with the studio because they were being stupid about things, and so we have still been trying to work together. What we have just done in the book is one of his poems and one of my images together, I just saw him in America, we were signing, and we are still trying to do something major together of we can.
And what does the future hold?
One thing I can’t tell you about, apart form that, it is difficult to know, we are involved in a thing called Faeryworld Festival which has been going for a few years now and we have just had one of our most successful, it is a weekend of music and that was held in Eugene, Oregon, and we are about to do FaeryCon which is a conference about faeries, again with music – there is going to be a good faeries ball and a bad faeries ball and that is going to be in Philadelphia. So there is that, we have been trying to do things like a Las Vegas show but it is hard to get things to go but we are trying to bring faeries to the world in lots of different ways. One of the major problems is people think they know what faeries are so there is resistance but when they actually see them and see what I do they get it. They understand that is had a different dimension to it.
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