Lisa Henson Quotes

What’s gonna happen to us, you know centuries from now? We don’t know. We just kind of have to live our daily lives and win the daily battle. We think this is a really hopeful and inspiring story about heroes who, when faced with a really scary and mysterious threat—which is what the Skeksis are doing to them and threatening their very life essence—you know, they manage to pull together and fight as a team. You kind of don’t expect gelfling—if you know the original film—you don’t expect gelfling to have that kind of gumption. You don’t even know that they have a fight in them, but they do. And we learn that they do in the series.

For me, watching his performances of Aughra and the Chamberlain is incredible and I'm so moved by how he infused life into those characters. That's pure talent to really take an inanimate object and give it life so believably. It's still the core asset of this film.

I think people, whether they are studied in puppetry or not, are going to love the artistic tapestry that’s up there. Some of the tiniest details in The Dark Crystal like when the Chamberlain’s eyelid starts to twitch, just make it feel so much more real, so much more alive.

We took that as our jumping off point for the whole series. What was that culture? What was lost? What was that beautiful Gelfling civilization?

We kind of look at it as the Henson Company's little Star Wars or Lord Of The Rings franchise. It truly has the ability to be explored in different geographical parts of that world, or different time periods of that world, and it's been so fun to expand the canon of The Dark Crystal. Now that we've got the ball rolling on that, it feels like that could continue indefinitely.

They just couldn't get their head around the idea that the person who was doing The Muppet Show and The Muppet Movie, things that were so light and joyful, that he himself would want to deviate from what he had been doing. It was really surprising to people and they expressed a lot of doubt about it. Then, the film did pretty well commercially and it also did very well internationally. This story has so many universal qualities such as good and evil, the characters are not American and they're not from any place in particular and so it worked around the world.

People talk about how look and feel of The Dark Crystal is so much more real than CGI but they also had no choice because there was no computer animation when The Dark Crystal was made. There were some optical effects, there were some composites that were hand done in the lab but there were no computer effects.

The prep period for The Dark Crystal was really long, it was literally years because they had the world and the creatures developed before they ever had a firm storyline. The script for The Dark Crystal actually fell in place later than anything else and some of it was only during post-production.

We're so pleased that that is pure puppetry. If you take the puppeteers out, they're still being moved by the puppeteers. We'll have a very simple scene of a character that's doing a normal gesture, and that's many puppeteers to accomplish that.

[I]t's basically the screenplay adaptation so that is the sequel to The Dark Crystal. We thought, 'Why should we let this story that we thought up not get seen by the public?' We just went a different way with it.