L AAA BBBB Y Y RRRR IIIII NNNN TTTTT H H L A A B B Y Y R R I N N T H H L A A B B Y Y R R I N N T H H L AAAAA BBBB YYYYY RRRR I N N T HHHHH L A A B B Y R R I N N T H H L A A B B Y R R I N N T H H LLLLL A A BBBB Y R R IIIII N N T H H Inside the Labyrinth The Making of Labyrinth (Transcribed by Stephanie Massick) NARRATOR: "David Bowie and friends hard at work at two a.m. at the Atlantic Studios, New York City. They're laying down a new Bowie composition, 'Underground,' the title track for the latest Jim Henson/George Lucas film adventure Labyrinth. But to begin at the beginning, it was here at Elstree Studios, England, that a journey through the Labyrinth had begun some months earlier for director Jim Henson." JIM HENSON (director): "When we first started to write this film, we had this evil Goblin King. And then somewhere quite early on we said, what if he were a rock singer, a contemporary figure? Then we said, who? Michael Jackson, Sting... David Bowie. See, I mean, there's only a few people you would think of, and David was immediately the one we wanted." DAVID BOWIE (actor; "Jareth"): "He [Henson] first brought me the concept on the 1983 tour that I did in America and asked me if I'd consider doing the part. And he showed me Brian Froud's artwork, and he showed me a copy of The Dark Crystal, which I found a fascinating piece of work. And I could see the potentiality of making that kind of movie, with humans, with songs, with a more of a lighter comedy script." JIM HENSON: "I said, if you like the script, would you consider being Jareth and singing and writing the songs for him, and so forth. And David liked the whole thing, from the beginning. Every age group really has a whole thing about David, and he himself is a very normal, well-grounded, straight-forward person that is absolutely professional." BOWIE: "Jareth is the Goblin King. One feels that he's rather reluctantly inherited the position of being Goblin King, as though he would really like to be - I don't know - down in Soho or something. [laughs] But he's not. His thing in life is to be Goblin King, and he runs the whole place as well as he can. And he's kinda spoiled. He gets everything his own way. He's a big kid. What has happened is that the goblins, without his command, have just gone off and taken another baby brother from another girl, and he's got to sort out the whole situation." JIM HENSON: "We brought in Charles Augins to choreograph a couple of the numbers, and he worked with David on 'Dance Magic.' What we wanted was that very vibrant, dynamic, sort of black movement. It's what Charles does all the time." DAVID BOWIE: "Jim gave me a complete free hand. He allowed me to say what I wanted, write the things that I wanted. 'Dance Magic' gave me a bit of a problem. It's a song for the Goblin King and the baby. In the recording studio, the baby I'd picked - one of the backing singers, Diva, had this cute little baby - who couldn't put two gurgles together. And it wouldn't work for me. I kicked it. [smiles] I did everything to make it scream, but it wouldn't. It really buttoned its lips. So I ended up doing the gurgles, so I'm the baby on that track as well. I thought, what the hell, I've done 'Laughing Gnome.' Might as well go all the way. I never thought in twenty years I'd come back to working with gnomes." BRIAN HENSON (puppet coordinator): "Jareth's chambers was a very, very big puppet scene. There were forty-eight puppets on that set and fifty, probably fifty-two, fifty-three puppeteers working at one time. It's one room packed with puppets. It was quite a feat actually, getting that scene done. It was great fun, real crazy. Real crazy. We had so many people. And you get all the puppets out of that setting, it just looks like Swiss cheese. You know, there's no set left. There's holes everywhere. People were walking around saying, any minute this set's gonna fall down. In the planning, there was only supposed to be twenty characters in that scene, twenty puppets. We went on and looked at it, and realized it needs a lot more than that. We had to run auditions the week before, we had to find an additional twenty people, I think, to how many people we already had working. To add to all the mayhem, we had eight to twelve little people in costumes running around, and then at one point in the song, we actually put them all on flying rigs and wire harnesses and had them jumping up eight feet in the air. It was just a crazy scene. Nobody was really told anything in particular to do, especially when the song wasn't going on. They were just told to be goblins." BRIAN FROUD (conceptual designer): "I was in the very early stages. Jim and I discussed what the film might be about and we decided it would be about goblins. From there I started to create pictures and drawings, setting the feel and the mood for the film. And I filled sketchbook upon sketchbook, just doodling in corners and creating these creatures." TERRY JONES (writer): "I sat at my desk with Brian's drawings stacked on one side of the desk and writing away, sort of to see what would happen. And every time I came to a new scene and I needed another something to happen, I looked through Brian's drawings and found a character who was speaking to me already and suddenly, there was the scene. It was wonderful. It was a strange way of collaborating, 'cause although Brian and I never sat down and worked together, it felt that that's what we were doing the whole time." BRIAN FROUD: "I never like to create fully-finished designs, because I feel that pins you down too much. We have a workshop in which we use many different talents to develop these creatures, that involve a lot of technical processes. And I like the characters to emerge slowly. I feel that my role is to nurture that, to bring out the different qualities that are happening, maybe just latch onto the happy accidents and push those a bit further." MIKE McCORMICK (goblin armour designer): "Working with Brian, it becomes more of a creative dialogue than sort of being given a design and say, make this. We have the incredible freedom of range of creative expression to pursue something ourselves and Brian incorporates it with his design and comes back to us, something else is done to it, it goes back to him. It becomes, quite literally, a dialogue of creative intensity. There's no firm directive. The whole thing sort of evolves in a wonderful, provocative, and very satisfying kind of way." HENSON: "When you're casting a part like Sarah, which is the part in the film, you hope someone walks in the door and is the right person. And when Jenny walked in, she was the right person, and it was one of those great little moments. She did a wonderful reading and she's a bright, intelligent actress who takes direction well and everything was just right." JENNIFER CONNELLY (actress; "Sarah"): "It hasn't been one of my aspirations to be an actress. I sort of wanted to be a vet or I wanted to be a carpenter or something, I didn't know what I wanted to be. But I never thought of being in films. So, I just really started with modelling because friends of my parents asked me if I wanted to. Then I started doing commercials, and I went on a film audition, which was for Once Upon a Time in America. I think it was my first one, actually. I don't know, it just sort of happened." JIM HENSON: "I found I could talk very straight to her. We'd talk about her performance. I didn't have to tiptoe around her feelings or anything like that. She could talk, you know, just as an adult." BOWIE: "Apart from being quite beautiful, she's a really good actress. And she's a pleasure to work with. One forgets that she's just fourteen years old. She's really very mature. And it's a big strain, a film like this. And every day, without fail, she was on form. I mean, she's absolutely terrific." JIM HENSON: "Here's a picture that we've been working on, building the characters, for about a year and a half before we begin shooting. But everything all comes together in the last couple weeks. And then, even if you have the characters together, the puppeteers start working with them, they find problems or they try to figure out what they're going to do with these characters. So there's a great deal of sort of last-minute adjusting, figuring out what it's all going to be, before you start to shoot." JIM HENSON: "One bunch of characters that Sarah meets in the Labyrinth is called the Fire Gang. When we first came up with them, we didn't know how they were going to move." TERRY JONES: "They came straight out of a drawing of Brian's. It was these characters going like this, 'hiia!', 'ooowa!', 'hwwah!' They were obviously sort of very wild things, you know. And I kind of just imagined they came in at one point when she was really lost, and they came up with really helpful things. But you're not quite sure how wild they're gonna get! Then they sing a song saying, 'Lift your feet! Lift your head!' And I thought, ooh!, it'd be a good idea if they lifted their heads up off their shoulders as they sang that. So, then they went on singing a bit more and the more they got into their song, they always ended up saying, 'Ain't nobody as wild as me!' so then this one would lift his head up and sort of roll it down his shoulders and start tossing it around and playing it like a basketball and lobbing it around." JIM HENSON: "That was part of the original problem, of how to do that, creating this whole thing that would come apart and be put together in different ways. When we first came up with these characters, we didn't really know how they would move. We had to put a series of puppeteers working with them just to figure out how they would move, what they were capable of. We tried manipulating them in different ways, attaching the feet to the puppeteers' feet, working the feet with rods, and we found each way of operating them would create different kinds of movement. A lot of the decision was, how were they supposed to move? And what we ended up with, of course, was a great combination and so the rehearsals were quite useful because they discovered a lot of different configurations and movements. Obviously, to shoot the Fire Gang, we have to hide the puppeteers, so we had them all wearing black velvet. Now, velvet is probably the blackest fabric that you can use, and so that's what they had to wear. The set itself had to also be covered with black and we had to get rid of anything reflective. Any little white dots or anything like that would show up. We shot the puppets first with a computerized camera and then we removed the black velvet and shot the background using the computer to make the camera move at exactly the same speed and so forth. Then all these elements were put together later in the laboratory." TERRY JONES: "The thing about puppets is they're really sort of liberating things. You can have extraordinary creatures doing anything you like. For example, I remember first when I saw The Empire Strikes Back and I saw the Yoda. I thought, what on earth is that? It must be a little man because he's wiggling his ears and his eyes move and everything. I just came out of the theatre thinking, how on earth did they do that? Couldn't believe it was a puppet." JENNIFER CONNELLY: "I love working with puppets. In the beginning it was hard because, I don't know, it's so strange thinking about the fact that you really are talking to a puppet. But it completely wears away and you just, I mean, completely forget that they are puppets and that they're not some kind of creatures which are real. Because they are so real. The puppeteers make them so lifelike. And you can really learn to relate to each one of them." JIM HENSON: "Ludo is one of the biggest things we've ever made for a single person to operate. It is a very large figure and we had to make it as lightweight as possible and that was one of the big problems. About halfway through the build on that, you know, I was beginning to get worried and I said, how much is this thing going to weigh when it's finished? And they did a lot of calculations and they came back and they said, well, it looks like it'll be a hundred and some pounds. And I said, that's really too much. So they had to just start from the very beginning and just redo everything to cut the weight down. The final weight is still well over seventy-five pounds. Well, I knew it would be too much for one person to operate all the time, so we designed it for two guys to work interchangably. Rob Mills and Ron Mueck are just about the same size and shape physically, so they were able to trade off in the part. As well as all the physical demands this character put on them, they also had to give a performance." JIM HENSON: "Well, Hoggle is certainly the most complicated puppet creature we've ever built. It's the most technically elaborate face because we've put about eighteen motors in there to control all the different portions of the face with these eighteen motors and four people operating that from outside by radio control. Creates enormous problems in just trying to figure out how to make that into one expression." BRIAN HENSON: "The Hoggle crew are five performers. Five performers, one of which is really an actress, Shari. She's inside the costume. She does all the body movement and her head is inside the head. However, the jaw is not connected to her jaw. Nothing that the face is doing has any connection with what she's doing with her face. The other four members of the crew are all radio crew, myself included." SHARI WEISER (actress; "Hoggle"): "A head doesn't just speak, it moves while it speaks. And the body has to have the right attitude, the right breathing, and the right, you know, stance, body position, and stuff like that. So, it was very important to really act Hoggle out and know what transitions were going on. I'm just as much as the people doing the head." BRIAN HENSON: "Five performers trying to get one character out of one puppet was a very tough thing. Basically what it takes is a lot of rehearsing and getting to know each other, getting to know each other's timing, so that when I go 'Fyuh!' [doing Hoggle's voice], you know, something like that, the eyes go 'Fyuh!' [rolling his eyes], you know, and Shari goes 'Fyuh!' [turning his head], and everybody does it at the same time and they all know that it's gonna come. And they know exactly what it's gonna sound like and all that. That took a lot of rehearsal." JIM HENSON: "Because he was the most complicated character, we were trying to do more with him and he had to be virtually the second lead in the film. His hands were always a problem, because Shari has very small hands, and we had to build these sort of large hands over hers." TERRY JONES: "I can't bring myself to call them puppets, because I don't feel what Jim Henson does is puppetry. I mean, I don't know what it is, there's no name for it, it's just sort of some odd kind of magic. But I suppose we're gonna call it puppetry, and puppets, I mean Jim's things, I mean, they're just so... they can do anything." JIM HENSON: "For a graphic artist, creating a two-dimensional optical illusion is difficult enough. But creating an optical illusion in three dimensions was a real challenge for our production designer, Elliot Scott. Scotty designed it so there's nothing that tells you what's up or down, and everything intercuts. In other words, it's all lit so that there's no give away as to what's top and what's bottom, which means you can never orient yourself to what you're looking at. We very carefully storyboarded this whole sequence and followed it closer than we ever did anywhere else in the film because there were sequences in here where we wanted David to do things which you couldn't really do, but by the addition of a mechanical effect we could actually make it look like David was actually doing all of this stuff. And this worked because we were able to turn the camera in different angles because the set would allow us to do that." JIM HENSON: "I've known Michael Moschen's work for several years and he does this incredible act and what he does is as close to real magic as anything that I really know. We had this designed for what Jareth was. We wanted him to have certain kind of magic powers and something to express these magic powers and so then we thought of the idea of using Michael to do that. For the occasions we wanted to use Michael's right arm to be David's arm. We set it up with a stand-in for David so he could rehearse and rehearse and rehearse and try to get this move. We had to have Michael down behind David and he had to be leaning down so that he wouldn't be in the camera shot. He's now working totally blind. When we shot that scene with David, he was incredibly patient. I don't know how many takes we did, but it was lots and lots." DAVID BOWIE: "I had fun. Frankly, it was very amusing. I don't think Michael - Michael Moshen, the juggler - had much fun. It was agonizing for him." JIM HENSON: "The whole trip through the Labyrinth is like a voyage, and so to create the feel of a voyage you have to go through many different places. I think the film does have a lot of different looks and that's due to the combination of Elliot Scott's set design and Alex Thompson's lighting." BRIAN FROUD: "After working on the film Dark Crystal, that was just pure puppets, Jim and I decided that we'd like to introduce a human element. We felt that a baby would be an ideal thing to play off against the creatures. I sat down and started to paint this picture and six months later my son Toby was conceived. The strange thing was that he turned out to look just the baby that I'd drawn. And he was the baby that we used in the film." JIM HENSON: "People say that you shouldn't work with babies, puppets, or animals. And, of course, we work with puppets all of the time, and I have worked with animals a little bit. But this is the very first time I've ever worked with a baby, so now I understand why people say that. It wasn't just a question of getting Toby to look in the right direction. But he also had to have the right expression on his face. And this was not easy." JIM HENSON: "When we were planning the film, and even casting it, it hadn't occured to me that the film had any dangerous situations because everything is fairly normal. And it wasn't until we were actually shooting that I realized that there were scenes that were difficult and uncomfortable and not exactly dangerous, but slightly risky, or they would feel dangerous. It wasn't until Jenny was doing these things that I realized how terrific she was. She's such a good sport about all of this stuff. And she's very brave." JENNIFER CONNELLY: "The shaft of hands... it's this slimy green substance and it has these hands sticking out from all over the place, I mean, tons and tons and tons of them. And it's really high, it's about forty feet or something." TERRY JONES: "I suddenly had this idea, ooh! all these hands just sort of coming out and all grab her. I thought, sounds pretty spooky. And then I thought, well, it'd be very nice if the hands started talking to her. I remembered seeing people doing things where they painted lipstick like that, and two eyes, and I thought, one of the hands gets some lipstick and does that and then starts to her. Then, I think, Jim liked the idea of the shaft of hands and he suggested that the hands actually should just form faces." JIM HENSON: "All the puppeteers had to wear latex gloves designed to look like gnarled, arthritic hands. We ended up making over a hundred pairs and the foam latex people were working day and night to get them all ready on time." TERRY JONES: "When you've had an idea which you thought was a pretty good idea and then you see it done and it's so much better than you ever imagined. It's sort of taken your original idea and sort of leapt a quantum leap. It's one of those magic moments, I think, when I actually saw it." JIM HENSON: "Well, the ballroom scene is Sarah's fantasy, and so I wanted it to have sort of dream, trance-like quality and that's what I asked Cheryl McFadden to convey in the choreography." CHERYL McFADDEN (director of choreography and puppet movement): "It was probably the most free time for me in terms of just exploring my own ideas and working with people and trying to come up with a style for that sequence." JIM HENSON: "This is just about the only crowd scene in the movie where there're only people. There're no puppets there. So it was pretty straight-forward to shoot and we all had a lot of fun doing it." JENNIFER CONNELLY: "I'm awful at ballroom dancing. I've never done it before. I've never been to a ball. So I had to take lessons for that. I felt so strange, because the rest of the people in the ballroom were all sort of professional dancers and everything, and here I was, this kid who's never danced before in her life." ELLIOT SCOTT (production designer): "The ballroom really was meant to be within a bubble. And we felt we really couldn't cope with just inside a bubble, because how do you build the inside of a bubble, as it were, practically? We've got to be practical, after all. So, rather than build a straight-forward ballroom, I tried to put together the essences of a ballroom. That is to say, a ballroom to me means columns; so we didn't have columns, we had huge caps. It means chandeliers, so we devised massive chandeliers. And there were mirrors, so you saw mirrors and reflections of mirrors in mirrors and things like that. And the general costumtry Brian Froud designed were, I would say, vaguely 18th-century Venetian ballroom-like things with distorted masks and things like that. The people in the ballroom were meant to be vaguely depraved, as it were." BRIAN FROUD: "I found designing costumes for a bubble an interesting problem. And I decided that the bubble was actually like a marquis or a tent. That everybody was in fact at some sort of garden party, that they were the gentry, dressing up and playing at being goblins. And I tried to reflect that in the masks I designed. Although they had this Venetian influence, they're actually supposed to be parodies of the goblins themselves. I wanted everything much larger than life as it was a fantasy." JIM HENSON: "We were trying to create a kind of an adult world. You know, the cast is real people here. Sarah is still a child and she's walking into a very adult situation where she knows she's too young to be there. It's something that's attractive to her and it's also repelling. I loved shooting it myself. It was a fun kind of thing to try to weave together." JIM HENSON: "It seemed like right late in the story what we wanted was for our heroes to come up against some huge obstacle, something worse than anything they'd encountered so far. And we came up with the idea of building the largest puppet we'd ever built." GEORGE GIBBS (special effects supervisor): "Jim asked us about last January. He said, 'Boys, I'd like a fifteen-foot high giant.' We said, 'Oh yeah. Very interesting.' Lots of people had tried to make fifteen-foot giants that walk and throw their arms around. They hadn't been very successful. So it was a challenge, really. So, we decided how we were going to make it and we went ahead and made all the mechanics and everything work wonderfully. When the body was produced in fiberglass, it just wouldn't work, because the fiberglass wouldn't flex. Fortunately for us, we had our foam expert. And he developed a foam for us with skin, skin that would flex without looking rubbery. We made the foam look like steel armor." JIM HENSON: "He weighs... I don't know how much. Lots. With all the rig and all the hydrolics, the thing has to be several tons. And so this was the largest, most complicated thing we'd ever built. We didn't have very long to build it, probably two to three months." GEORGE GIBBS: "One man could operate the whole thing. In the old days, we'd have probably had five or six guys all at different levers, working hydrolics. But one man operates the whole of Humongous all by himself, makes him walk forward, makes his body spin 'round, makes him bow down, makes his arms swing the ax. And it's all done with hydrolics. Every move his arm makes, the arms of Humongous make exactly the same move." JIM HENSON: "When George first showed me Humongous in action, it was really an amazing thing, to just stand there and have this large thing walk toward you. It's one of the most awesome sights in the world." JIM HENSON: "A film like this sort of needs a major climax. And one of the best major climaxes is a battle scene. So we wanted to do a great battle scene. But at the same time we didn't want to end up killing a lot of people. We didn't want a big gory battle where people got their heads chopped off and things like that. So we were looking for, how can we have the fun of a battle, and make it fun, without being terribly violent and being the kind of film that we didn't want to make? So, we decided to do a silly battle." JIM HENSON: "When I go see a film, when I leave the theatre, I like a few things. I like to be happier than I was when I went in. I like a film to leave me with an up feeling. And I like a picture to have a sense of substance. I like it to be about life, about things that matter to me. And so I think that's what we were trying to do with this film, is trying to do a film that would make a difference to you if you saw it." ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- CLOSING CREDITS INSIDE THE LABYRINTH based on the Jim Henson film LABYRINTH Executive Producer George Lucas Photography Rafi Rafaeli Barry Ackroyd John Warwick Sound Keith Desmond John Pierson Bob Alcock Alan Dykes Songs composed and performed by David Bowie Score composed by Trevor Jones Production Assistants Sally Dawson Sarah Bowden Beth Solomon Film Editor Arthur Solomon Director Des Saunders Producers Arthur Solomon Anthony Goldsmith Escher print "Relativity" copyright M.C. Escher Heirs c/o Gordon Arts Baarn, Holland Labyrinth copyright 1986 Labyrinth Enterprises ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- And, for what they're worth... my thoughts: Server space and video quality being what they are, I could only include so many useful images from the documentary. And, I only inserted the official interview quotes, rather than the off-hand comments made on raw footage (example: Henson cursing good-naturedly when little Toby Froud messes up yet another shot). I myself liked the documentary, although it didn't have enough clips of Bowie :) to suit my taste. There were bloopers aplenty (including several shots of Bowie and Connelly tripping while trying to waltz gracefully down the ballroom stairs) and many scenes of Connelly in a flying harness (I'll bet she developed a taste for heights). And you almost feel sorry for her as you watch her get drenched by the rain machines... until you remember that she got to star in a film with David Bowie. Who wouldn't withstand an artificial rain shower for that? All in all, the documentary shows that a lot of hard work and creativity went into making of the film. By appearances, it was a long, fun, amusing, complicated process that makes that final product that much more enjoyable and noteworthy.