Part Two

Into the Labyrinth with Jim Henson

The master Muppeteer leads a young girl and a rock & roll goblin
through a movie maze of monsters, mayhem & magic.

by Adam Pirani
Labyrinth Welcome to the Labyrinth, where one
wrong turn deserves another and another.
� � � With Labyrinth, Jim Henson ushers in a new phase in his career. The era of Henson as feature film director is here. The days of Henson as TV Muppeteer are over.
� � � "We're talking about another Muppet film, which would be fun to do," Henson says regarding the characters which he created 30 years ago. "And we'll probably do occasional specials - but I doubt if we'll ever go back into full-time production with those characters.
� � � "Mostly, Frank [Oz, who puppets Miss Piggy, Fozzie Bear, Animal and others] is such a mainstay of that group of characters, and I certainly don't see him wanting to return to weekly television. He really enjoys working in films, and from all reports, he's doing a wonderful job on Little Shop Of Horrors.
The Muppet master, Jim Henson, and
friends Hoggle, Ludo and Sir Didymus. 		JH&all
� � � "At the same time, Frank says he always wants to continue doing the Muppets, too, and so we'll do that as it fits - but I just doubt very much that it will ever be weekly again.
� � � Relaxing in his comfortable London home during the final weeks of post-production on Labyrinth, the 49-year-old director is calm and confident. Henson (previously profiled in STARLOG #85 and #107) has achieved success by almost any standards: married for 26 years with a large, creative family; owner of profitable companies in the media and merchandising fields; and a creative artist in his own right - puppeteer, educationalist, and yes, movie director.
� � � Labyrinth evolved in the wake of The Dark Crystal (STARLOG #66), Henson's previous excursion into a world of creatures not quite human, yet not just puppets - animatronic characters, elaborate mechanical puppets operated by radio or cable control.
Hoggle Hoggle leads the way out from the "oubliette" -
a place where you put those you want to forget about.
� � � "Brian Froud [conceptual designer on both movies] and I started considering Labyrinth as The Dark Crystal opened," Henson explains, "because we decided not to think about another film until Crystal did open. We wanted to do a lighter weight picture, with more of a sense of comedy since Dark Crystal got kind of heavy - heavier than we had intended. Now I wanted to do a film with the characters having more personality, and interacting more - more inter-relationship scenes because those are the kinds of scenes that our creatures and puppets do best.
� � � "Then, Brian came up with the idea of a labyrinth, which he thought might be a nice handle for the film, and we liked that very much. The story went through a number of configurations. It was all going to take place in a fantasy world, and we started with a king and queen, and the king was going to rescue his baby from an enchantment.
� � � "We were pretty far down the road with this story conceptually, and then Brian brought up our concept to Alan Lee, an illustrator who worked with Brian on a book called Faeries, who was working on Legend. And Alan said, 'Gee, that sounds an awful lot like Legend.'
� � � "So then he told us parts of Legend, and we said, 'Oh! Gee, we better make major changes.' So, we pulled back, regrouped and started a different story because we didn't want to do anything similar to Legend. We decided to go with a young girl as our lead, instead of a man, because that hadn't been done very much.
Henson tried to avoid the similarities
between his fantasy and Legend. 		Goblins
� � � "It was really interesting, because we then put this whole concept together, and it wasn't until we were well down the road that we realized that Return to Oz was coming out with a young girl going through a fantasy world. It was a very strange realization but when we did it, we hadn't even made that connection.
� � � "We worked on the story first with Dennis Lee, a Canadian poet, who had done much of the final dialogue and narration polishing for Dark Crystal. Dennis, Brian and I worked on this story for nearly a year, and then Dennis finished a major novella version of the story. I then wanted a screenwriter to take over and turn it into a screenplay, and brought in Terry Jones [STARLOG #106]."

Seeking Sarah

� � � Throughout the writing of the movie, Henson was working with a specific theme in mind. "We began with the idea of a young girl going through the labyrinth to rescue her baby brother," he recalls. "At first, she was going to be a fairy tale princess in a fantasy world, and then a Victorian girl. We finally decided to bring her up to date and to set the film in contemporary America, mostly for just commercial reasons - you appeal to a larger percentage of the audience just by setting a film in the present-day U.S.
� � � "We basically wanted to make Labyrinth about the growing-up process of maturity, working with the idea of a young girl right at that point between girl and woman, shedding her childhood thoughts for adult thoughts. Specifically, I wanted to make the idea of taking responsibility for one's life - which is one of the neat realizations a teenager experiences - a central thought of the film."
Sarah's room There's no place like home for Sarah (Jennifer Connelly)
and her newfound friends after their return from Labyrinth.
� � � Finding an actress to portray the central role of Sarah, one of only two human characters in the movie, was difficult. To avoid child labor restrictions on the filming, 18-year-old actresses were originally considered, but after extensive auditions and screen tests, Henson and executive producer George Lucas were not satisfied.
� � � "So, we decided to look at younger actresses," Henson notes. "And roughly at that point, Jennifer Connelly [STARLOG #108] came in, and she was great. It was one of those moments you hope happen when you're casting - she just came in and seemed exactly right. Jennifer performed a lovely reading of the scene, and did an improvisation that was brilliant - she's very bright.
� � � "She was right at that moment between child and woman. During filming, she was 14-and-a-half, and some of the time when you talked to her, she was like a child, and at other times, she was very much like a young woman.
� � � The labyrinth's other human occupant is rock star David Bowie as the evil Jareth. "The Goblin King was originally planned to be another creature," Henson says, "until it occurred to us to make it an actor. While we were considering various and sundry actors, we thought to make Jareth a music person, someone who could change the film's whole musical style.
Bowie's part was originally intended to be played by
another creature, but now the human actor is a shape-shifter. 		Jareth
� � � "We thought of several people, but by far the one that was most exciting to us was David Bowie. But I had no idea whether he would consider singing in a film, since at that point he never had. [The recent rock musical Absolute Beginners, which featured Bowie in one production number, was shot after Labyrinth even though it was released first.] I thought David very possibly wanted to keep his acting separate from his musical career.
� � � "When we met in New York, we chatted and I showed him some of Brian's sketches. 'This is what we have in mind,' l said. 'Would you consider doing this part, would you consider singing in it, and would you consider writing songs for it?' And he said yes to all of it. He liked the idea and said, 'If you come up with a script I like, I'll do it. I'm not going to sign unless I really like the script.'
� � � Each new draft of the script was then forwarded to Bowie for his comments, though he was not officially contracted until a few weeks before the Labyrinth cameras were scheduled to begin rolling.
� � � "David Bowie's very professional," Henson comments. "He's just terrific. He comes into the scene very prepared - he knows his lines and he certainly knows how he sees it being played; I barely directed, outside of staging and things like that. He had the character of Jareth well in hand, and I agreed with what he was doing - he was very, very solid, terribly easy to work with."
Sir Didymus Sir Didymus rides Ambrosious while
both contemplate their resulting social
life if they fall into the "Bog of Stench."

Helping Hands

� � � Bowie and Connelly may have gotten along well with their director, but working with the movie's animatronic characters, operated by teams of puppeteers working outside camera range, was another matter. "It took patience from the actors, and both Jenny and David are very patient," Henson says. "I really appreciated it because some people don't have the patience to work with the characters. I had warned Jenny, I said, 'Look, we're going to hit scenes maybe 15 times because the puppet's mechanics are liable to be falling apart on you, and you're just going to have to be patient.' And it's true - it can be very frustrating for performers when they're doing a wonderful job and they get a perfect take, but the thing falls apart over there. But both Jenny and David played it very well."
Special FX supervisor George Gibbs gave
Henson a hand with this rigorus sequence. 		Shaft of Hands
� � � Regarding specific scenes, Henson notes "the four musical numbers are some of my favorites." One of Labyrinth's most challenging sets - and the movie was shot entirely in the studio - was the shaft of hands. "That was quite a rig we built, up on the enormous Star Wars Stage at Elstree Studios," Henson explains. "We didn't want just literal hands, so we made a foam latex glove, which still looks like a hand, but it was kind of greygreen, and went into sort of oozy things where it came out of the wall.
� � � "We had our own group of about 24 core performers, and then we brought in another 75 people to go up this huge rig, with stabilized levels, a good 40 feet tall. All these people were squashed.
� � � "And Jenny, because she had to fall down through the middle of the shaft, was sitting in a harness on a pole-arm, floating her, out in the middle of space, which is not a comfortable place to be. When you're on top of that stage, you look like you're way up in the air, with nothing underneath you. And she was such a good sport - and if anything, she enjoyed heights.
Goblin battle The goblins mean to keep Sarah from entering the castle.
� � � "When we got everybody in there, I looked at it and said to [special FX supervisor] George Gibbs, who had been preparing these hands, 'There aren't enough hands - can you give me another 150 hands, without people in them?' And all of this was done very quickly, and it played very well."

Cutting Compromises

� � � Henson's close collaborator on Labyrinth was George Lucas. "George came in when we were still struggling with the script - Terry Jones did two drafts, then Laura Phillips, a Canadian writer did a couple of drafts, and about that time George came in, and worked a good deal on the script. Once we went into shooting, I didn't hear much from George.
� � � "When we hit the editing, I did the first cut, and then George was heavily involved on bringing it to the final cut. After that, I took it over again and did the next few months of post-production and audio.
� � � "When you edit a film with somebody else you have to compromise. I always want to go one way, and George goes another way, but we each took turns trading off, giving and taking. George tends to be very action-oriented and he cuts dialogue quite tight; I tend to cut looser, and go for more lyrical pauses, which can slow the story. So, I loosen up his tightness, and he tightens my looseness."
Beyond the Goblin City lies Jareth's castle. Castle
� � � Like Lucas, Henson is an innovator and experimenter with film - Labyrinth's creatures are unique. What does the future hold? "The technology's capabilities increase every year, and with all the different techniques that are open to filmmakers these days, you can do almost everything - anything your imagination can create," Henson declares. "It's hard to say where it's going. There's some stuff being done by computer that will improve FX technology. Labyrinth's credit sequence was done by Digital Productions in California [who created computerized graphic effects for The Last Starfighter]. They also did the white owl that is vaguely like the symbol of the Goblin King.
� � � "The kinds of things which they can do are going to be changing the state of the art of special effects because this stuff is capable of doing many wonderful, wonderful things. Computer generated stuff will be the biggest single change in film in the next 10 years."
� � � Though his own movies take several years in development, Henson intends to wait until Labyrinth is out of the way before embarking on a new project. "I tend not to overlap them," he notes. "I have a couple of films vaguely in mind - two wildly different ideas. I don't know which one I'm going to do." [Skip to end]
� � � Meanwhile, although the Muppets are not scheduled for an imminent return, Henson continues to develop and oversee various video enterprises. "I have several TV projects in the works, but it's really too early to talk about them," he says. "Muppet Babies is working very nicely. Marvel Productions in California is really producing the animated program, and all we do is offer script suggestions and that sort of thing. We're also developing a second animated show with Marvel - if it works out, it'll be on this fall."
� � � Also currently working on a TV concept is Henson's own Creature Shop, the character-makers-for-hire established in 1984. "The idea occurred after Dark Crystal - we had brought many wonderful people together - including some very unique talent who had never worked in films before - and worked with them for four years, and then they kind of trickled off.
� � � "Lyle Conway regrouped several of those people for Return to Oz [STARLOG #95], and then we decided to try such a thing, and we did Dreamchild [STARLOG #101] mostly because I loved Dennis Potter's script, and under Lyle, Dreamchild was a very nice little experience for us. We thought, 'Well, what we would really like is to hold this core of really talented people here.' "
� � � The presence of the Creature Shop - located right across the street from his London home - is inspiring to Henson. "Creatures are great fun, and we have such a talented group of performers right now, between our puppeteers, the talents of our Creature Shop, the builders and so on. It's fun to develop projects that stretch all those people. It's a good family of performers and workers, and we have somewhat of a family feeling, which makes all this work quite enjoyable."
� � � Whatever his past successes - be they Muppets or movies - Jim Henson has no intention of looking back. "I love to work, I love doing what I do," he says. "It's always exciting to me to try and do things that we've never done before - that is always more interesting than just repeating what has been done in the past.
� � � "There are many ideas that we haven't done, that we still want to attempt. One project that we're considering for next year is a Broadway show - with puppets and creatures and masks. I hope to begin that soon."

ADAM PIRANI, STARLOG's British Correspondent, profiled Kenny Baker in issue #108. Part one of this interview, conducted by Dennis Freeland, appeared in STARLOG #107.

STARLOG / August 1986 � 1986 by O'QUINN STUDIOS, INC.

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