A Quote by Paul Dini
Jim Henson once allowed me to visit the Muppets on set and spent an entire day showing me how he and the other puppeteers performed Kermit and all the characters! After that, I was lucky enough to work with both George Lucas and Steven Spielberg on many fun animation projects and learned so much from them.
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I don't know how many days I worked there [on Star Wars]. The thing I do remember was I somehow got a parking space next to Kermit the Frog. It was Jim Henson's space, with this Kermit the Frog sign. I took a photo of it and sent it to my mom with a caption that read, "Look, Mom. I made it. I got a parking space next to Kermit the Frog." I was always fascinated by the film-set infrastructures.
It's funny how much one learns from context. Throughout that entire visit to Kenya, with all its meetings, there was an experience of the place that taught me things I couldn't learn by reading global newswires. The fact that I learned so much makes me wish that I could visit more places. So many of the zones, of course, are closed, so one knows about them only in secondhand ways. My research has only scratched the surface. There are thousands of zones around the world. There's just so much work to do.
I was lucky enough to work a little bit with Steven Spielberg.
No one employed [ chaos] better than Jim Henson, by the way, on The Muppets. He had all these chicken Muppets that just brought in the most glorious chaos to whatever scene they were a part of.
I tried [being a mogul]. It bores me. I don't really want to produce other people's movies. Because they're either grown-up filmmakers like Steven Soderbergh or Kathryn Bigelow that didn't really need me - and I've produced both of them. It's fun to sit around with them and be collegial, but they don't need me. They can make the film without me. I make my own stuff. There are tons and tons of other things I'm interested in that have nothing to do with movies or are documentary projects.
I learned many lessons from my first race with my heroes. I learned it was easier to breathe when I cried, so I cried often and without shame. I learned that a teammate's faith in you can propel you up any mountain. I learned that winning requires an entirely different mind-set than not losing. I learned that the best teams in the world share not only their strengths but also their weaknesses. I learned that you don't inspire your teammates by showing them how amazing you are. You inspire them by showing them how amazing they are.
"Stuffed and Unstrung" started as a workshop, actually, classes within our company. We found that our puppeteers were not ad libbing as well as traditionally, Jim Henson Company puppeteers have. We're sort of famous for going off script a little bit and ad libbing.
My strength, if it's anything, is that I can lure some big-name actors in. That's probably the strength of almost any director now. On your own, as a director, you've only got so much weight. James Cameron, George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, Michael Bay... that's about it. Everybody else depends on the star power that they can draw.
The thing that got me closest to doing Kermit was remembering what Jim did when he was doing Kermit. When he would do Kermit, there were certain faces that he made. There was a certain way he stood, a certain kind of body language that he had.
The scene [in The Hangover] where the tiger actually pops up behind us, that's actually a Jim Henson tiger puppet. The Jim Henson Company actually supplied that tiger. And it's really cool. Its entire face moves. It has like all these little motors in its eyebrows and cheeks and mouth. It was amazing.
I don't know when the last time was that Steven Spielberg or George Lucas made a movie with Universal, but I can tell you that Universal is leading the charge. They're looking at film differently. They're planning ahead in a way that I've never seen a studio do before. They're believing in a relationship between fan and film franchise, in a new way. They're more receptive to an audience, in part because of social media, in a way we've never been allowed.
Nooo! Leave that to George Lucas, he' s really mastered the CGI acting. That scares me! I hate it! Everybody is so pleased and excited by it. Animation is animation. Animation is great. But it's when you're now taking what should be films full of people, living thinking, breathing, flawed creatures and you're controlling every moment of that, it's just death to me. It's death to cinema, I can't watch those Star Wars films, they're dead things.
I've been lucky enough to work with the amazing Golden Globe Award winning Chris Colfer and that is fantastic. I get to work with him on a day-to-day basis and he is such a generous talent. Chris and I like to play. He always throws me things and I ping them back to him and it's really fun. We definitely have a very lovely rapport personally - I think on screen too - and I hope you can see that in the characters.
I bought a tape recorder and some stuff and went to Europe for three months when I was 18. The puppeteering was only there as a hobby. I wanted to be a journalist. When I was 19, and after I had spent about a year in college, Jim Henson asked me to come out and try puppeteering for awhile.
I spent time on set in New York and Berlin sitting next to Steven Spielberg while he worked, which was the biggest thrill of my life.
Occasionally I do movies with other directors. I did 'The Diving Bell and the Butterfly' for Julian Schnabel. I did a movie with Jim Brooks ('How Do You Know'). I did a movie with Judd Apatow ('Funny People'). So I do get a chance to work with other people, which is always enjoyable, always pleasant. But still, Steven [Spielberg] makes the types of movies that I'm interested in as well.
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