- Leave?
No, no, no.
Stay right where are.
Hmm.
(light mystical music)
- It's probably the hardest thing that I've ever worked on.
I like to think of Dark Crystal as sort of a work of art.
And of all projects, this is the one that
I'm the most proud of.
- I just fell in love with it
and I've been in love with it ever since.
- I just remember it being quite an overwhelming experience.
Another one of those movies where you
come out of the cinema slightly changed.
- I remember it vividly.
I loved it.
It's such an incredibly all encompassing world,
and the Skeksis are bloody scary.
- 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,
the sort of mythology, that we've got this desire
to explore these different storylines
but we're just being able to do it through Netflix
and through animatronics.
- 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.
- It's 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 round.
You have to match your performance to the puppeteers,
who are all very good at what they do.
They are actors, they characterize.
But you have to match their mouth flaps.
- She told you to let go.
She told you to let go.
- To the crystal chamber!
Ah, scroll keeper!
Scroll keeper!
You take a lot of time to get it right,
because you can be satisfied that you
match the movement in sync,
but you try to give performances that are
as real and as engaging as possible.
- I don't think, puppeteers aren't well known,
by nature of their job that they are hidden,
and I don't think, there's very few famous puppeteers,
it is an art where you choose to hide.
And I very much 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 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.
- Do you have a plan?
- Yes.
But you're not gonna like it.
- It's a team ef, like it's genuinely a team effort.
- It's a huge variety of people in this film
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.
- [Male] All Thra is at risk.
The darkening corrupts everything it touches.
- What is the darkening?
- [Male] Behold.
(dramatic music)
- 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 all-maudra,
and she's of the Vapra clan.
- One of the things that I love about fantasy worlds
is the breakdown of our own world segregations.
- Remember, the bonds of sisterhood can be tested.
But never broken.
- 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,
and I kept thinking about it.
It was like well the mythology is great,
but what makes it really special and transcendent
is the puppets.
- I picked up the phone, I was like, okay,
good news bad news.
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.
Like really?
A series that looks like the film?
And of course we immediately responded that it's yes,
like it's technically possible,
but it would be very expensive.
- 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.
- 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 is got to be
the biggest puppet production ever.
This has no humans, so it is a complete puppet extravaganza.
- The best idea is that you watch the show
and you forget you're watching puppets.
- I think it's wonderful to revisit something
that Jim did 35 years ago.
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.
- There's so few people that know how we did it
the first time, and we're so old
we don't remember how we did it the first time.
- I think it's amazing that the whole Froud family
has kinda 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.
- That's where I think we're sort of thriving
in this fact, is the fact that we're in this world
that's so natural to us as a family,
that we're able to just impart what we know
or what we actually just know to be real.
- I went into the creature workshop
and it's still the Frouds who are creating
these wonderful other worldly creations.
And it's Brian Froud's son who was doing
a lot of the work in there.
And I was like a fan boy meeting him,
'cause he's the baby from Labyrinth.
And 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.
- 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.
- We have a real respect for the younger audience,
which is like 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.
(upbeat music)
- 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 can put them side by side and it is the same world
but there's just so much more of it to explore now.
- Tell no one.
(dramatic music)