Weirding Way Media.

Welcome to episode one hundred and thirty two of the Film Inmentaries podcast.

This is Jamie Benning, your host, and this time I'm speaking with puppeteer and animatronic performer Dave Barclay, a man whose career spans Yoda from The Push Strikes Back, jab of the Hut, in Return of the Jedi, as well as on The Dark Crystal, The Little Shop of Horrors, who framed Roger Rabbit, and so much more.

Dave was just nineteen years old when he found himself taking over as puppeteer of Yoda for the Empush Strikes Back, and since then he's been at the heart of some of cinema's most iconic practical creatures.

We talk about his early inspirations, the serendipitous moment that connected him with Mark Hamill, the technical and creative challenges of bringing these characters to life, and his brand new autobiography, My Life with Animatronics, Movies, Puppets and beyond.

So here's my conversation with Dave Barclay, and I'll be back at the end for a bit more jabbering on.

Dave.

Thanks for joining me.

It's always pleasure to talk to you.

You know, we've been friends for a number of years now.

I was trying to work out, actually I watched back the documentary that I made from the interview with you at Madame Tasword's earlier on Today as Research, and that was twenty sixteen sixteen, which kind of boggles the mind.

But obviously there's a lot of things I know about you.

There's also a lot of things I don't know about you, which I'm hopefully going to find out in the book that you've released.

But let's go back to the sort of very beginning.

Where did you grow up, Dave, and where were your first sort of inspirations in terms of a sort of creative life.

Ahead, Right when I grew up in London, England and sort of grew up in North London and had just a relatively regular childhood with my friends, except that my parents were puppeteers, so that my home life wasn't at all regular, I discovered later.

I thought it was quite normal at the time, but yeah, they were making puppets, they were creating their own shows, they were writing the stories, they were rehearsing and ad libbing and working them through, so sort of developing the different stories.

My father would sculpt these beautiful heads.

He was a very good artist and he was a great sculptor, so he would sculpt these beautiful heads and paint them and they created their entire performance world just the two of them.

So they did everything.

So I got used to this whole idea that you can be the boss, you do the bookings, you do the accounts, and you do everything.

So between them they did everything.

So that was my exposure.

And they were originally actors.

They had met at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London RADA and decided that they didn't want to work separately and just they wanted to work together.

And so my grandfather was a song and dance man whose stage name was Alec Layton, and he did a drunk tap dance where he was like it had to be stone cold sober to get it right, so he could never actually do it though he was drunk and he would trip over it and it was just it was brilliant.

His comic timing was amazing.

He was a drama as well, but he had some concert parties left over from the idea of the Second World War when they would go and do these concert parties.

And so my parents created their original puppet show and they called their their company Pex Puppets.

So that's how I grew up with all this creativity around me and my grandfather doing doing performances, and so it seemed completely normal to me that this was this is what everyone did.

I only found out a little bit later that no, I was far from normal.

I mean, it would have been amazing if you've grown up to want to be an accountant or something, wouldn't its surrounded by all of that creativity.

I know, I know.

I mean, so the longest time, I wanted to be a puppeteer like my parents, and that was it.

I became the third puppeteer in the show.

So I took that responsibility very seriously as a child and had a very strong work ethic.

Again, the theater kind of installs that in you, and so that was my childhood.

But then I started discovering science fiction.

I fell in love with the Planet of the Apes movies, the original one when I first saw it, and loved all the makeups and the creativity on that, and I thought, no, I like films.

At that point in my sort of mid teenage.

Oh, I've been doing live puppetry all my life, which clearly was only a few years fifteen years or something, or at the time probably even ten eleven years.

But it seemed like I'd been doing it forever and I wanted to do something different.

So that's why I thought, all right, I want to move into films or television and of the sort of thing that I wanted to do, that job actually didn't exist at that point.

Yeah, were you ever sort of aware of the people behind the Planet of the Ape stuff, like all the sort of Dick Smith character, I mean, were their magazines that you could read at the time in the UK?

Yes, there was, Yeah, there were.

There were things like star Log, star Burst, and I was a big fan of those.

I used to sort of go and collect those as much as I could afford with my pocket money.

No, I definitely knew about John Chambers, who was the makeup term supervisor who created those original plants of the Apes masks and had an amazing team and pushed the envelopes for makeup.

I mean, Stuart Freedman was also doing Apes at the same time for two thousand and one, but they were more realistic, but John Chambers, Well, I think beautiful designs.

I just still love those original planets of the Apes masks.

I think just they just it's the perfect a way of bringing a human being into an Ape character, and so yeah, I love that.

So I made my own I made my own plans for the Apes masks.

And some pictures once.

Yeah, yeah, and did your home movies, which is is another sort of great calling card in a way, because it shows your sort of enthusiasm for and it shows that your ability to sort of see the idea through and also sort of mimicking your heroes is a great way of kind of honing your skills, isn't it.

Yeah.

Well, I made my first Planet of the Eighth mask out of plastic wood because I'd made some puppets out of that, But of course it didn't move very well, and so I thought, now I needed to move to something more flexible, and I discovered it was foam latex, which was completely out of my realm.

I couldn't get anywhere close to that.

But there was some dipping latex for making candle molds in the art shops, so I thought, well, I'll try that, and that was reasonably successful, so I moved to using that so pre vulcanized latex is the technical term, and so I used that for making different masks and makeups and some puppets too.

So yeah, but then I did actually get in the end, I got a chance to meet John Chambers many many years later and thanked him for his inspiration and an amazing work that he did on those films.

Where was that?

Where did you meet John?

At the Hollywood retirement home he had at that time he had suffered a stroke and he was in he was bedridden, but he was in great form.

They just released the clearance that he could talk about his time.

I think that the CIA where he did makeups for people.

I think the film Argo is based on that, and it was a real event.

So he was actually they said, right, we need to get we need to get these people out.

So he put makeups on them so that no one would recognize them and so it was amazing, amazing.

So it was really a joy to meet him, and that felt like a full circle from my original inspiration when I was a teenager to meeting the guy behind all of that.

Yeah, definitely.

Whenever I drive past those retirement homes, I always think are just the stories that must be within those walls.

Just all those people that have, you know, coming towards the end of their lives, and obviously at that stage of life you often have more vivid memories of your earlier years as well.

I just think, you know, tell these stories is so important, isn't it.

And yeah, so many sort of untapped, untapped minds where that's concerned.

This is the sort of stuff that keeps me up at night, Dave.

And again it's the old traditional skills, but also I mean John and his team and massive team to do it, Dan Stripek and all those guys and all the lab guys having developed foam latex, that they could run those amount of appliances and paint them and apply them every day.

Just a phenomenal just like technical challenge.

And that's also something that interest me as well as the artistic side.

Yeah, well that's it.

Your job is a sort of perfect combination really of a sort of artistic and a technical job, because you do have to have that technical understanding of the materials you're working with.

Let's get onto that in a little bit.

But I remember you telling me, like your your origin stories.

It were being commissioned by Mark Hamill to create a puppet.

You were working, am I right?

And remember you working at Hamley's at the time.

Yes, Hamley's toy store.

I had decided I wanted to get into films, but there was not an easy route.

I couldn't see an easy route there was.

There were no university degrees or college degrees for film studies that I knew about anyway.

I don't think they were when that was in the seventies.

So I thought, well, I'll what I'll do is I'll take a gap year and I'll try and get into university to study sculpture, because I thought sculpture would be my best way into the industry.

So I took a gap year and took a job at Hamlet's and that was fine.

It was got to meet some crazy people in London and dark.

They were in Gold and Eye.

The comic book store was around the corner, and just before Forbidden Planet opened a small thing about that that was co founded by one of my teachers from school, Mike Luckman.

Really so yes, he was.

I got to get out of the school education thing, and I think I'm going to open a comic book store and everyone all the kids said, you're mad, sir, but no, he's set up the biggest comic book friends.

So yeah, so I knew Mike, but yes.

So I was in London enjoying all of that, and I was asked to take a very early lunch because of people covering for when I was away.

The person had had a particular window.

So I went out to lunch, came back and was devastated because Mark Hamill, and I was a massive Star Wars fan.

Mark Hamill had walked into the store to my counter to buy a whole bunch of pell and puppets.

These are the puppets that I had as a kid, and these are the puppets that I was selling, and he bought a whole bunch of them, and it was terrible because I didn't meet him at that time.

I didn't get the commission, and I thought, oh no.

But Maxine, who was behind the counter looking after it for me while I was away, said he wanted a Darth Fader string puppet commissioned.

And she had told Mark, oh, the guy who's nearly he's usually here, Dave, Dave could do that for you, and so okay, So I got hold of Mark's address, because obviously all these puppets had to get shipped to the States.

Wrote to him saying I'd love to make a puppet for you, but didn't hear anything.

So then months later i'd left Hamley's, my good friend Gary Cook called up and says, Dave, Dave Mark Hamm has just been back in the store.

He wants you to make that Darth Vader marionette.

So I had completely forgotten about it and just let it go and it came back and so I built it and took it along to Elstree Studios.

He invited me along, presented it to him the day his son was born, the day Nathan was born.

Yeah, strange coincidences.

And so he said, would I like to meet Stuart Freeborn?

And of course I knew who Stuart was.

He was one of my heroes.

I loved all the work he had done, and again I love the fact that he combined all these unusual techniques.

I mean, the apes in two thousand and one were absolutely revolutionary for their technique and all the movements and the mechanisms and the approach.

So that was amazing.

So I got to meet Stuart, which was fantastic.

And had a quit chat.

He was clearly very busy, and he said, oh, well, yes, I might be in touch in a little while.

And I thought it was just a very nice way of getting me out of his office so he could get back to what he was doing.

But a week later I got a call from from Bruce Sharman saying would I like to work as a trainee with Stuart?

And you had to think about it for all of all of two seconds.

From working at Hamley's to selling toy puppets, to accidentally meeting Mark Hamill, to building the puppets, and then it was two weeks later I was I was on the Yoda team and still has given me whole loads of tests to do to see what I see what I was capable of, because he didn't know what I could do.

I did have photographs of my old age makeups and my movies that I'd made, my home movies, and the planets with the apes, and some of my sculptures and puppets were in there too, so there was a there was a range of things that he could clearly see I could mold and sculpture it agree, So yeah, so he took the chance and it was interesting that many many years later speaking to make up artist Nick Mayley, and he was saying that, oh, I've got a picture of somewhere of Stuart, because that's exactly how Stuart got into the industry.

He did makeups of the classic like Universal Monsters on himself to try and get into the industry, and that's exactly what I had done, and I didn't know that while Stuart was alive.

So I guess maybe Stuart saw something in me that he recognized in himself when he was my age, because I think he was nineteen when he went through all of that, and that was the age I was at when I met Stuart.

Yeah, amazing.

Again, it's like one of those sort of full circle moments in a way, isn't it.

Just I think we do do that, don't Maybe we're at a certain point in our careers we start to sort of see the potential in younger people.

We recognize an aspect of them that's also in us, or was in us when we were young, and then we try to bring them long.

I mean, I trained people to do my job, and there are certain people that I train where I can tell most instantly whether they've got the knack for it or not because they have a certain personality, trait or certain attitude towards it.

And I'm sure Stewart would have recognized those things in you because you were young, you were keen.

You were also cheap, Dave, Let's not.

Very cheap.

Yeah, I would have paid them, but yeah, I think I got slightly.

I think I got something like the equivalent of the same salary that when I was working at Sainsbury's, so you're basically got minimum wage, but I was actually getting paid, and because I was doing ninety hours a week, it felt like I was doing okay.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And that first job you were given by Stuart, wasn't it to look after Yoda's top lip because it wasn't closing properly.

Yeah, well that was the first job he properly assigned me.

Again, because you'd seen the different modeling and sculpting that I had done in my portfolio, and I don't think anyone in the makeup lab at that time were particularly inter sculpting, or they had too much to do anyway.

So the Yoda original Yoda that Stuart sculpted had an open mouth, and when it was cast in foam, latex.

The mouth wouldn't close because it was already pre opened in the sculpture, so it's really hard to try and stretch it closed and so it wouldn't.

So rather than resculpt everything, Stuart said, well, we'll just do a small prosthetic top lip that will close the mouth and then you can open it easily from there, so it's all right, okay.

So my job was to sculpt six variations of maybe about half an inch extension on the top lip to make sure that the mouth would close.

But I had six plaster versions of the original sculpture, and I sculptured six different clay versions of an a top lip.

I think one was very obviously, just like a normal mouth, and then the one that I think who finally chose was a bit more random and had little lumps and bumps and stuff in there.

I mean, I just did these six different ones.

Stuart put his He had a particular texture that he put on on Yoda sculpture, so he put that over the lips and then sent it off to be molded.

So then they cast them in foam latext and Stuart tried each one on and oh no, this is the one I like so that became that became Yoda's top lip.

My tiny little bit of sculpting actually made it onto the puppet in Empire and on Jedi, so yeah, on both.

I mean, Stuart did this amazing sculpture and I've got this little tiny bit, but I feel very proud of that little.

Tiny absolutely absolutely.

You know, it's a team effort, isn't it.

You know, sometimes I see sculptures of Yoda, whether it's at like the Lukestall Markives or one you know when it toured around that exhibition, and it isn't your version.

It seems to be pre the top lip, and I'm always I'm My wife already knows I'm a massive nerve.

But whenever I see something like that in a picture, I'm like, oh, that's not Dave's one.

Yeah, well that's how it looked that one, because there is one that there's an early picture with George by By that Yoda and Yoda's mouth is open.

That was So what happened at the end of Jedi is that they wanted some Yodas for exhibition figures.

So Stewart created out of the original mold probably eurorethane foam versions which but he wanted to be able to punch hair into this particular foam, so I think he emerged into some probably dangerous chemical, knowing Stuart, and then that allowed him to punch the hair in and then the chemical would evaporate and then the hair would be in it, so be a rigid cast foam.

And I guess they didn't think of sticking the top lip on.

They just they just cast their head out of the original mold.

So it was that original sculpt But that is the subtle difference between those figures that were created afterwards, even though it's the original mold and Graham Freeborn, who painted Yoda, painted those two, that tiny detail is different.

Yeah, definitely, I always see it.

I always see it.

I mean, Yoda was such a complex character, wasn't it.

I Mean there'd been nothing like it beforehand.

I mean mechanically and in terms of the complexity of the performance.

I mean, I've talked to you a great length about how you would, you know, practice your moves without the puppet, and you would sort of walk around the room and say blink and head turn and all these things.

So Frank had you kind of guys and girls drilled down to a performance where it would become more instinctive when the cameras were rolling.

Yeah, that's right, I mean, because it hadn't been done before.

I mean, Frank obviously had worked with muppets for years and had worked with assistant puppeteers, and typically those would do right hands.

Frank would do the head with his right hand and the left hand with his left hand.

But then if you wanted the puppet's right hand, you'd need another puppeteer, so either it be on a rod or it'd be somebody's hand.

So he was used to working with an additional puppeteer, but not doing all of these expressions.

I don't think anyone had done that before, although they were in the early stages of Dark Crystal, so they were building some animatronic puppets that would need this kind of approach later.

But again, there hadn't been any actual filming yet on Dark Crystal when we worked on Empire Strikes Back.

So yeah, so Frank had to basically come up with a process that we could all go through so we could deliver a performance.

So it just wasn't this random thing with everything going wrong, because that's probably what would have happened.

But no, it was all about character.

For Frank, it always has been.

It's not about puppets or actors or anything.

It's about character.

Like Little Shop of Horror's Audrey, it's about the character of Audrey rather than the way that character is built.

So with Yoda, it's about Yoda's character, so he would act it through himself.

So we knew Yoda's character where we knew his rhythms and supposedly the thought processes behind this character.

So that helped us when we were got to a point where we couldn't rehearse, there wasn't enough time to rehearse anything.

We would just go in and start recording.

Then well, we often do just a single rehearsal to begin with, and that would give us the parameters.

But yeah, it got to a point where we knew the character well enough, we knew the technique and the actual controls well enough, and so we were able to just go along with Frank and follow his performance.

But as I say, yeah, it's the first time I believe anything like that had ever been done.

Yeah, and still so believable today.

I mean, I think you said now in that little film I made about you, that you know the fact that Stewart had made prosthetics to put on people's faces.

It had to look like flesh, and Yoda does look like flesh.

It has that You instantly buy it, don't you.

I think again, I've seen iteration since then that I don't necessarily buy as quickly.

But then, combined with Frank's skill and all the other performers involved, it genuinely feels alive to me.

I actually, when I was a kid, I used to find it really weird to see a clip of Yoda not animal, you know, not moving.

It's just sort of like hanging on Frank's hand because you think, like, where's all the life gone?

Because it really and also seeing those some of those behind the scenes bits where you're preparing things and Frank's talking and delivering the lines of course and doing the voice.

You just see that moment where the puppet kind of rises up, the eyes come alive almost, and there's so much life in that character.

It just still kind of blows me away.

Yeah, I mean, it was so many, so many small little details came together.

And again, I don't think enough has been said about Graham Freeborn's painting of Yoda, which is just phenomenal if you could see it in person, because this is old fashioned film.

This is where Mark's almost looking like he's like it's almost like reddy brown, and you look on film he looks just the normal color he does.

So it's the old fashioned film with the old fashioned painting and coloring and even all the set people having to paint for film because nowadays you put a video camera or even a phone and it kind of captures everything in reasonable range of colors.

But back then no, So this amazing ability and Yoda being green as well, making sure that actually works and doesn't look like, let's sake, come at the frog.

I mean, it could be that extreme in the green that would just look ridiculous.

So that again, the genius of the entire creative department behind Yoda just happened to be the right people at the right time.

What kind of green was it?

Then?

If you had to describe describe Yoda's predominant color, do you think the.

Green version of flesh?

I suppose of human flesh?

You know?

Yeah, how it looked so convincing, Yeah yeah, yeah.

I don't know how Graham did it, and they probably did a couple of film tests.

I don't know, maybe not.

I know Wendy Midner Froud actually snip foamed a Yoda head out of like furniture foam to get a scale and a proportion and for everyone to have an idea of what what you could be and how it could work.

So so there was some there had been some tests, and I know Wendy sculpted a couple of the first versions of Yoda before Stuart did the final version, so there must have been testing that all happened before I joined them.

So yeah, yeah, yeah, Wendy is another another person that's sort of instrumental in your sort of progression in the industry, because it wasn't didn't you have to be didn't you have every reaction to something on the set?

And well, I think so, yeah, I mean I think that's that's what Stuart said, that one of somebody had become allergic to something on set and I had to go down and take over the eye control.

So because they needed a puppeteer, and this is obviously pre pre mobile phones, they didn't have lists of puppeteers, probably any of the Muppet people were actually working on the Muppets at the time.

Yeah, so we need somebody this second to stand in, and Stuart knew that I was second generation puppeteers, so so well, well David can stand in for the afternoon.

So okay, so I just right off you go.

So I was okay.

So I went down to set, grabbed the controls that I'd had had some hand in building, so I knew how it all worked because I've been part of building him and so, and then just tried not to mess up.

So Frank said what he wanted, and I just tried to be as simple and as clean as possible.

And the thing for me is that so much of performances in eyebrows and Yoda's eyebrows really just went up and down a little bit, and although they were good, they didn't really give you this sense of being.

So was I just I don't think Frank told me to, but I think I was just trying to subtly adjust the eyelids so that it seemed that they were alive and they weren't mechanical.

I mean, because I had built mechanical things, and I was used to things just going blink blink and everything.

It's like, no, this was trying to slow everything down and use the lids to express Yoda's emotion.

So that's basically what I tried to do, and I think Frank seemed to like it well enough to ask me to come back and be on the Puppeteer crew from that point onwards.

So yeah, great, and just describe for people, because this is quite a rudimentary animatronic in a way, Yoda.

Because you've got what I think you told me ten cables from you guys into Yoda, so a few for the eyes that you've got some of the ears as well, and they're cable controls, right, these aren't electronic servos now, So what have you got in your hands?

Is it?

Like?

I've seen some of the behind the scenes footage, of course, and it looks like you're sort of holding a box with a couple of levers on it and things.

But can you describe that a bit more?

Well?

There were two versions of Yoda.

There was the one that Stewart originally built, and Bob King built a like a joystick box with a big lever on the top with a blink lever for the eyes.

And I didn't get to work on that particular one.

That one stat Yoda broke down, so they couldn't film on yoda, so Robert Watts asked Bob key, Nick Meylee, and Graham Freeborn to throw a yoda together so we had something that we could film on.

So we worked around the clock to get this yoda together, and Bob Keane built the eyelid mechanisms and controls for that particular oodor And basically it was on like a little wooden plate and the cables were literally went up into the head.

It's like a bicycle brake where you push one end and it moves the other end.

So the eyes were pushed and so through like a bicycle brake.

Cable that went up into the head and was literally connected to the top of the eyelid, so if you pushed it would close the eyelids down.

Those went down, Those two cables, one for each eyelid, went down to a thumb cap, so that if you pushed down on them, the eyelids would close.

But because there were two cables going to this single cap, if you rocked the cap backwards and forwards a little bit, one eyelid would close that slightly more than the other, only slightly.

But I like that because it gave it some asymmetry.

It didn't look like it's a mechanical thing, you know, So so that would be that.

And then you had two sliders, one for left and right, one for up and down on the eyes.

Typically didn't use the up and down because at that point you couldn't control the lids to track with the eyes.

After we got into servos, we could go into the program so that when you move the eyes up, the lids would track with the eyes, because that's the move.

Yeah, yeah, so because the lower lids come up and the upper lids go when when you look, it actually tracks with your eyes.

But it couldn't do that.

It really didn't have the control to do that.

So pretty much Yoda didn't really look up.

We just set the position of his focus and he would look left and right and blink.

So and then there was always sorry to interrupt with were those controls mirrored so as you're looking at Yoda or were you looking at a video monitor, because if you were to hit left, would they go right or would they go left?

Were you, you know, was he facing you and mirrored or was it actually in the direction that would turn?

No, I mean the Frank and all the muppets have always done regular scan monitors, and that means if you've got the character and see if I can get that in.

Yeah, so you would think it would be like a mirror, but it's actually it's the opposite, right, So that's that's because when Jim and Frank started, you couldn't reverse scan the monitors.

It's too difficult to actually go in and do that.

Around in the seventies and eighties it was possible to do what they called a reverse scan monitor, which then it became like a mirror.

But this is the opposite of a mirror.

And this is so you're not really and so much of these animatronic puppets, you're not really thinking about the controls.

It's a bit like playing a musical instrument.

You've got your hands on them, and you're looking at the monitor and the monitor and you move the control a certain way and it goes that way, and then you just remember, well, that's the way you've got to that's what you do for it to look over there, and so yeah, so you try and disassociate yourself with the controls and just concentrate on the movements of the character.

And you kind of do that with puppets as well.

You try not to think about your hands and what your body's doing.

You just think about the performance of the character.

Yeah.

You hear sports people talk about this sort of thing, don't you.

Where they're getting in that zone, in that sweet spot where they're not thinking about the car they're driving or the track they're running.

It's just about making it instinctive and instinctual, and it kind of takes over.

I mean, we've all I've said this before, We've all done that thing, haven't we Where we have driven home and gone.

I don't remember the last half an hour of that journey because you're you're just reacting and using the tools in front of you.

And then you had that other big moment where Frank had to leave for was it for Sesame Street Live?

I think it was Sesame Street.

Yeah, we knew Frank was leaving, he had another job to go to, and it was all scheduled to fit Yoda into his window.

But of course it took much longer.

I mean, Frank did warn them that filming puppets would take longer, and this Yoda took longer than I think anything else up up to that point because it were just so complicated, and also Irvin Kershner wanted it right.

I mean, it would have been silly to agree to take so or say no, that's fine, then we'll get away with that.

No, No, kersh was brilliant.

He was remade sure absolutely that the performances were spot on.

So we took our time and got it right.

But of course that meant we ran over schedule, and so it's like, well, what are we going to do?

And they said, well, okay, let's we'll shoot on a Saturday.

And it's like shock horrors, Like nobody ever shot on a Saturday in the British film industry in the seventies.

The unions were that strong.

Yet somehow they persuaded everybody on the main unit to shoot on a Saturday.

And having said that, there was still two weeks left to do, two weeks of filming for Yoda to do, and so I was sure that we, oh, well, we'll wait till Frank gets back and then that will be fine.

I said, no, no, we've got to got to pull the Dagabar set down in two weeks.

We've got the two week window and that's it.

So you know, Frank's going to have to nominate somebody.

Well, I know he's going to choose, so I thought that maybe Dave Gold, Steve Whitmyer, maybe someone one of his Muppet colleagues.

But now he ended up choosing me to take over at age nineteen.

He said I knew the character and that he was it was sure I'd be fine.

So completely shell shocked.

Suddenly I'm now chief puppeteer for Yoda on my first film, having gone in as a trainee, still on trainee's wages, and now puppeteering Yoda is unbelievable, fantastic.

I mean, it's such a cool story though.

I just I've always loved that because you're such an open person, like you're willing to just kind of go, sure, I'll give it a go.

You get thrust into these situations, but and it isn't necessarily about having the confidence to do it.

It's just having the sort of ability to take that leap sometimes, isn't it, and then find the confidence later.

Yeah, I mean that was the thing.

It's just I mean, I had puppeteered in various forms since I was four, so the idea of puppeteering per se wasn't something I was worried about and I had.

As we were getting through, Frank would often would work out a scene and we'd do blocking, which meant Frank would take the puppet through and you'd walk, we're going to go here, We're going to go here, going to do this gesture, and then the lighting crew would have to make sure he looked good.

So certainly early on Frank would have to go through those procedures again and again and again for the lighting crew.

But as we got further on, I sometimes took over and just did that.

I wasn't performing for camera, but I was actually just performing Yoda for the lighting crew off, just holding up so that they could check him.

I'll look over here, ye, I look over there.

So I got used to actually putting the puppet on my arm and trying to emulate what Frank was doing.

And I guess there was again maybe like Stuart, he saw there was enough there that he thought I'd get away with it.

And for again, a lot of the stuff was I did over lots of all nearly all the over the shoulders onto Mark, and certainly all that fighting sequence.

You see all the big close ups of Frank, and then all the over the shoulders where you see Yoda and you see Mark's face, I'm doing Yoda there, So they were sensible.

They really didn't leave all the important shots for me to do.

Frank had done all of those, so I was I was filling in the shots that they didn't have.

There were a few close ups that I got to do, so which was great fun, a little bit scary, but also I was I was judgmental on the who was doing the eyes.

I wouldn't have done the ice like that, so that was funny.

So yeah, it's because I just I think a prop person was put on the eyes and I was thinking, that doesn't seem right.

But again, I was nineteen.

I couldn't say anything.

I was lucky to be doing what I was doing.

But yeah, it was again I told me once that.

Go on.

No, just just trying to emulate Frank, who's I thought at the time was the world's greatest puppeteer, and so there was there was a lot of responsibility, but it's just like I can only do my best, and so that's what I was trying to do, try to do my best.

So yeah, there was those scenes you did, weren't there with that Eventually got deleted.

I think I ended up finding them as sending them two years ago where you got like silver bar where raised it up in there and Luke Caster chopp it in piece.

It's in the comic book.

I always remember with the weird looking Yoda that was designed before the final Yoda.

Right, yes, but yeah, and then I think you said as well about wasn't there something where you're doing the long shot when the X Wing is being pulled out the swamp or something, they just buried you under some leaves something.

Yeah, that's the thing when with Frank, because all the sets were raised six feet off the ground, mainly so they could get they could do the water for where the X Men was going to be sitting in so there was a small tank in there for all of that.

But then so the actual ground was six feet off the ground.

So for every time Frank was puppeteering Yoda full figure, they'd kind of holding the floor.

He'd reach his hand up through and dropped the puppet on him and so, and they'd make him more comfortable.

Yeah, for me, they should just lie on the floor and they covered me in leaves.

So any idea that I might have been like a star or anything, it's vanished immediately.

So and this was second units as well, it wasn't main unit, so there's a whole different vibe to say unit too.

So but no, I just so delighted to be there.

Yeah, I bet.

And I always think of that set, you know, given that it did run over time and it was a sort of I would imagine there's a certain stench begining to rise from the swamp itself, sort of turning into an actual swamp.

Do you remember the sort of environment of it there?

Was it kind of humid or was it a cold at that time?

Yes, it was.

It was the summer time, but it was cold in that sound stage because it was at that stage the world's biggest film sound stage that was built specifically for Star Wars and for Empire.

And they built the daygo Us set the entire size of it, and then they filled it up with oil smoke, which you're not allowed to do anymore.

So they would just fill the whole place up with oil smoke, and you'd see like three rows of trees could have been built in almost in someone's backyard, the amount of that you could see.

But it actually went on for the entire length of the sound stage, which was huge, and I actually got lost at one point.

I actually got lost in the forest.

I couldn't work my way out and had to get out and then walk all the way back round again.

So it was amazing.

And but yeah, as you say, by the time filming had come to an end, the swamp wasn't very nice at all because it was the water had got very nasty, and they put scaffolding over it for the wrap party and a couple of people fell in and really wish they hadn't.

So well, I have one glass of champagne too many?

Hey, Yeah, And then like you came out the back of Empire, were you straight into the next project or did you have one?

Yeah?

End of Empire.

I actually went off to get married to my wife of now many many years, forty six years now, so yeah, crazy but so and I had a little note to go and see Sherry Amott the Henson Workshop.

So I went along and met with her, and so I think I was the first person she interviewed.

They weren't really ready.

They were they had just acquired the one bee Downshy Hill, which used to be in an old post office that ended up becoming the famous Creature Shop, and so I went along there as they were ripping that all out, had a meeting.

She said, yeah, well we'd probably be starting in about a month.

So I went and visited Stuart Freeborn who was on Superman two.

Nick Dudman was his make up assistant at that point, so I saw on Nick again and we had some time there.

It was great.

And then about a big big about November, I think we because we wrapped I rapped Empire end of August.

November I started on Dark Crystal.

Yeah, another amazing film which sort of took your skills to the next level and took puppetry to the next level.

I mean, it's it's quite remarkable to look back at that film and just think what was achieved physically back then.

Yeah again a bit.

I mean, we've done Yoda.

The Yoda is the only thing that we had a benchmark and a reference point for.

But these are very different, of course, and these were all very and they had been they had spent five years in early development on buildings, early prototypes.

But I think having worked on Yoda, the sculpting, the foam latex, all the procedures that we went through for that seemed to make sense to do that for Dark Crystal, and I got to work with the amazing Lyle Conway, who's a brilliant sculptor and just he's also just a visionary in bringing animatronics to life that can emote.

You know, some people that you can see in some of the eighties animatronics faces are moving.

They're moving, they're sort of kind of worst case they're writhing, but there's no emotion coming from them.

There's movement that there's no emotion.

La had a way of really focusing on the performance and the emotion.

And again, so to be teamed up with Lyle for those years was amazing because again it's the best education I could get in the area of work that I wanted to be in that actually didn't exist until I started doing it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, And it's important to have these mentors, isn't it.

I Mean sometimes it's not until we look back our careers that we realized the people that were key.

And obviously Stuart was a big one and Lyle was a big one.

Did you enjoy working alongside and with Jim Henson himself very much?

So?

Yeah?

I mean he was he was such a gentle and respectful human being.

I think the very first time I met him working for him on Dark Crystal, he said, oh, good morning, sir, just like and I was.

I just turned twenty I think, and he called me sir and I was just like again.

In England, that was quite It was quite the opposite.

Everyone was everyone was swear, there was all these these everyone was larking around there.

There's a big culture of practical jokes all the time.

But Jim was just very, very respectful for everyone, and it was it was an amazing period of time.

I because I was the very first British puppet maker there.

At one point I was the only person amongst the American crew who had arrived that had a car, so I would drive people around in my car and so it was a terrible old Vauxhall Viva, which was at the time, and so yeah, it was great.

But I got invited to my very first ever Thanksgiving in nineteen seventy nine because Jim and Jane Henson were throwing that throwing Thanksgiving for obviously all the American crew that were there, the American puppet designers, and they invited the handful of US Brits there was just three or four of us, I think by that point to join them, and so I got to uh go over to Jim's house and just be part of this extended family.

And again I thought, Wow, I just I'm just so lucky, crazy.

Just crazy.

When you find yourself in these situations, it's kind of odd, is that you kind of have to take a moment to kind of look around and kind of soak it up.

Because they fly by, don't they, But they certainly stay with us.

And then and then you then you were pulled back to Star Wars.

Styles came calling again right in the formula Revenge of the Jedi.

Revenge of the Jedi.

Yeah, well I was at the end of Dark Crystal.

Of course, as all films, the crew are let go there, everyone's fired, and then they go into post production hire a whole new team of people for that.

But Jim wanted to keep myself from Lyle Conway employed at the creature shop, so we were just the only two puppet makers that he kept on.

We built a new rejuvenating Gartham Master because the initial tests didn't look very good or the initial footage, so we built a new head for that and then did all the promotional stuff for Dark Crystal.

We sculpted some Don Post masks that went out through the Don Past franchise, and many many other things.

And it was while I was doing all of this for Jim so just Lyla and I at the Creature Shop got a call from Stuart Freeborn.

Initially, would I like to supervise the build of this new character called Jabba the Hut.

Well, after a lot of deliberation, I said, I'm sorry, Stuart.

I'm employed by Jim Henson.

I've got a contract he once I've got all this work I've promised i'd do, so I'm really sorry.

I would have loved to have done this, but so I had to turn him down.

I was like, understandably really saddened that I'd turned down the next Star Wars film.

About six weeks.

Later, he called me back at the Creature Shop again, saying, okay, would you like to be chief puppeteer for Jabber?

And I thought, well that I really can't turn down.

I was thinking.

I thought, well, well, let me get back to you, Stuart.

So I asked Jim and said that their Star Wars people would like me to do that, and he said was as long as I completed the work for the release of Dark Crystal that was coming up.

If I completed all the work before I went to do Jabba, he would release me for the Jabba days.

And so in the end, I basically got my cake and eat it because I was now being employed by Jim Henson full time, one of two people on the planet in the London workshop, and then I also got to be chief puppeteer for Jabber and he Jim released me to do those days.

So I mean, admittedly I did have to work I think up to about sixteen hours a day, seven days a week to wrap everything up before I went over to do Jabba.

But I mean I've been a workaholic my entire life, so that wasn't the chore.

That was the joy.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, And well, I mean it paid dividends, didn't it.

I mean, just aways think that's amazing about you having to make that choice between Henson and Star Wars and then having both.

It's like, I mean, those things just don't happen.

No, No, they usually don't.

Know I mean, I just again, but again, careful what you wish for.

I mean, that's that's the kind of thing, because I mean, I thought if I hadn't said anything, it wouldn't have happened.

And the same thing happened after we After I finished Jabber and I was back at Henson's just Lyle and Me, producer Duncan Kenworthy showed us the early pilot version of Fraggle Rock and asked for our opinions, and we quite liked that.

We we spotted some errors that they had already spotted and that sort of thing.

But for me, my favorite was spruck At the Dog.

And said, I love spruk At the Dog.

I said, because he is he doesn't actually have words, so this is pure puppetry.

Everything's going to be done with sounds.

But okay, you can bark, but he's you're not just spewing dialogue.

And then the puppet's just randomly moving around.

Now this is this character has got to act physically, And I said, I love that.

I think it's brilliant.

So that's my favorite thing.

I'd love to do something like that.

Well, unbeknownst to me, Jim had planned these international versions of Fraggle Rock where they would reshoot Sprocket the Dog in different countries with different actors.

And so I mentioned this to Duncan Kenworthy.

Duncan mentioned it to Jim, and I think probably about five six months later, I was then officially the Henson puppeteer for doing Sprocket in Europe.

Amazing.

I didn't know that.

I didn't know it was a different acts.

Yeah, but that makes sense, I guess, because yeah, his interactions was always with somebody who spoken, you know, the native language I spose, But yeah, that's such a character for dog.

I mean, can I can conjure the image of Sprockett immediately in my head having watched that as a kid.

But I think that's what always fascinates me about puppetry work, is the amount of character that can be imbued into something that is inanimate ultimately.

I mean, you look at Jabba the Hut.

I still buy it as a living, breathing creature.

I've never really doubted it, and I've spoken to you and Toby and John and many other people that worked on those films over the years, and I still buy it every time I see it.

Do you remember when you were first asked about Jabba getting to work on Return of the Jedi.

Do you remember thinking, well, I've heard that name before because it's mentioned in Star Wars.

I think it's mentioned in Yeah, it's mentioned in the Empire Stracks back.

Did you have any concept of what the character might be?

No, No, I didn't, but I think I might have actually taken a trip out to see Stewart at Elstree when they were doing some early stuff before, when he asked me would I be interested in supervising it, So I think I had an idea of what he might look like before I got to Puppeteerium.

And to be honest, I'm actually really glad that John Coppinger Bob Keene supervised him because they did an amazing job and John's sculpture of Jabba is just phenomenal and he did the paint job too, So those were definitely the right people to write Jabber.

So again, I think everything worked out for the best.

But yeah, so I had an idea that it was going to be this large, two person inside Jabber's chest kind of puppets, so I knew that before I was offered the role of chief Puppeteers.

So yeah, I guess I kind of knew what was going to let myself in for, and we'd just done Dark Crystals.

So I'd been part of the development for a lot of the characters.

I was inside the initial Garthim characters, working how they would work and how the harnesses would work.

I built one of the first British versions of the Mystics.

I built a harness with the arms, and in fact even Jim Henson got into that costume to see what it was like, to understand how uncomfortable and difficult it was to.

Performed the months ahead.

Yeah, so I knew it was going to be potentially uncomfortable and difficult, but actually Bob and John did an amazing job of making sure it was as comfortable as it could possibly be.

And you'd worked with Toby Philpot, hadn't you beforehand on Dark Crystal?

And then he so for people that don't know, you were on the right side, weren't you, Toby was on the left, Yes, And so you were controlling the mouth and the right arm, and Toby was controlling like the head up and down and the left arm, yes, and then the tongue as well at different points.

I mean, did you have much rehearsal time on Jabba before before film rolled?

Well, technically we're supposed to have two weeks, and which was great.

I mean back in the day I think we had they had six months on Dark Crystal and we had close to six months on Little Shop.

So two weeks, yeah, okay, that'll be okay.

But because it was such a complicated build and everyone was pushing the envelope and they were behind schedule the whole time through, we probably ended up with about the equivalent of two full days of rehearsal on Jabba before we actually performed him.

But yeah, I knew Toby.

Actually I knew Toby's father before I knew Toby.

Toby had a very famous puppeteer in the British theater puppet theater world, Panto pu the Puppeteer and the puppet Man.

And Panto was a delightful, delightful human being who originated the Educational Puppetry Association in England in I think the forties fifties, had wrote many books on puppetry and so and was just a font of knowledge and a truly lovely man.

So I knew him before I knew his son, Toby.

So we were both second generation puppeteers.

We both had that common experience.

So so yeah, We got on very well on Dark Crystal, and I thought, obviously, I've got to have somebody inside me who's around about my size, because we were about the same size.

Who who We're not going to drive each other nuts because we can't leave, you know, We've got to be next to each other all day long in very close quarters.

So he was the perfect person, and so we got on great.

And he's just he's still a delightful human being, and it was he delighted to work with him.

So, yeah, he's such a good guy, Toby.

You know, we've had our chats before about Jabber and about Yoda and things with you, but obviously Toby's joined a few times.

And I did that little doco about Toby as well, and I've seen him at conventions and he's just always He actually invited me along to the BFI number of years ago to see the three films in a row and got me into the green room and I met with Garrick Hagen and Paul Blake, And that's sort of the genesis of this podcast in a way, born out Toby's generosity.

Yeah, Yeah, Jabo is just one of those characters that I can look at all day long.

I've still got my original jabber toy from when I was a kid that my mum went to great lengths to buy me that Christmas because it was the toy of I guess nineteen eighty four.

But yeah, there's just something about that design, that asymmetry again, like you were talking about earlier, that gives it all that character, and I don't think it's ever quite been reproduced since then.

I understand the reasons for going down the route of not having a physical model again, but I think we all sort of a lot of us would love to see one built again, you know, just kind of well.

I guess there's the one at madamet To Swords that we visited that day that was a good, good representation of Jamber.

But other than that, I just I still feel like the little seven year old whenever I see him.

You know that I originally was watching it at the Dominion Theater in ninet eighty three.

Right, yeah, yeah, no, he was, he was.

I love the design.

I love the original design that Phil Tippet did, but actually the Stewart and of course John Carpenter had the leeway to adapt it into something would be practical and physical on set, so the initial maquette that filled the tip it because he did fil did loads and loads of various different versions, and George chose the one that he liked the best, and then John adapted that to something that we could actually physically make and control.

And again it's a bit Stewart did the same thing on Yoda.

There was lots of different designs for Yoda, and some of them would have worked better than others, but I think Stuart's approached to taking all the different elements, using a little bit of his own face, and just creating this character was again given the creative freedom to bring it to life with the somehow the limitations that were on hands because these had to be characters that would work in the real world.

With computer animation, you can design anything and make it move, but here actually had to physically work in the real world.

So I think having great artists who know how to do that as part of the reasons why things like Jabra and Yoda was so successful.

Yeah, working within those constraints.

I think of you and Toby and Mike obviously on the tail in Jabba, you know, centimeters away from Carrie Fisher, Mark Hamill, Harrison Ford Peter Mayhew and Chewbacca and Anthony Daniels and Kenny Baker and all those.

I mean, Jabba interacts with just about and Billy d Williams interacts with just about every main character from the saga.

But of course you didn't really get to sort of look at them as such because you had these as small as possible at the time see rt TV or monitors hanging around your necks with a little pinhole camera up in the rafters.

But did you like when you went to lunch, when you broke for lunch, were you just next to Jabber or did you go to the canteen and see the crew and the cast.

Yeah, we would, because the way we got into Jabber every day was we would climb under the set.

There was a whole right directly below Jabber.

Toby would climb up and sit on a little seat in the knock of where Jabber's body swings around to where there's the bowl and the hookah, and then I actually actually slide up a box.

I'd stand on the box which would be where we'd climbed up, and so we would we would climb in at the morning eight thirty and then we'd get out for one o'clock at lunchtime, and typically people didn't know who we were.

We weren't on set.

I remember going to I think it was the third a D third assistant director who would arrange people's calls and whether you were a rat for the day.

And so we went up to him and said, oh, what's happening with Jabba.

Oh, you can tell the Jabba pupperties that they're rapped.

And we said we are the Jabba puppety Oh all right, then, okay, thank you.

So and this is the third assistant director didn't know that we were the actual puppeteers when we asked him, so because he could have perhaps said in the past, oh, yeah, jabb was rapped, and then we would have gone off, but now he actually said, no, you can tell the Jabba puppeties.

So yeah, I mean we didn't.

We weren't on set.

We every once in a while we would go up and talk through We did talk through things with Femmi Taylor and with Carrie in rehearsal, and we rehearsed stuff with with Femi.

That was some of the things that we did.

We were able to do in the days, in the hours of rehearsal before we started filming.

But yeah, most of the time we were just two people stuck in a in a dark little cave.

Well, you missed a trick when you asked that third ad.

You should have done it in your Jabba voice, which they would because of course you did the voice for Jabba on set for everyone to react with and react to.

That's right.

Yeah, yeah, so that was that was That was nice.

I got to, yeah, to be Jabba's voice on set, but yeah, I clearly knew it would be replaced.

Even Frank when we were filmed Yoda on Empire, he was told and we all believed that his voice would be replaced.

It wouldn't be Frank's voice on Yoda.

In fact, a lot of the Dark Crystal voices weren't Jim or Frank when they performed.

So that was kind of like the standard thing is that the puppeteer would do the guide voice and then you get in the celebrity or a voice skilled voice person.

I mean maybe for Dark Crystal it made sense so that you couldn't recognize any of the Muppet kind of characters.

You wanted to have a whole new world, So that kind of made sense.

Yeah, certainly with my my very British and very high Jabba voice wouldn't have been at all appropriate.

So a bit like Dave Prowse's Vader there, that's never gonna I do like it.

It's like a parallel universe Jabba, that's you know, just not as menacing.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I think you did it.

You certainly did a good job to sort of create the atmosphere of the character though.

But then, like I, you know, we've already been talking for an hour day, but like you've got so much more in your career with like Little Shop of Horrors and who framed Roger Rabbit.

Actually I'm writing an article at the moment for ILM about their animal history, and you know, I start off looking at rotoscoping of lightsabers and some of that early Larry Kuber stuff of the sort of wire frame stuff for the death style plans.

But then, of course another milestone in animation was was Roger Rabbit because it was the first time really that we saw live action alongside cartoon established cartoon characters, all right, there were things like that in Mary Poppins and bed knobs and broomsticks and that kind of thing.

But to bring all of those different ips into one film.

I mean that had never been done before, It's never been done since and never will be done again.

But combining you know, your puppetry skills, the traditional animation skills, but then the animators having to take that to the next level with all the sort of shading and the shadows and all of that.

I mean, I look at that piece of footage of you with a gun on a fish wire kind of bobbing it along for the characters.

Is one of the weasels or something is it?

And it just boggles my mind that you're able to sort of visualize that.

But I guess all of that kind of instinct that you have as a puppeteer enables you to sort of imagine the steps ahead while you're on the set with sometimes the rudimentary tools.

Yeah, I mean it was interesting.

I mean, Robert Watts, who was producer on the Star Wars films, gave me a call so there might be a day or two's work on Roger Rabbit go and meet with a special effects supervisor, George Gibbs.

And George had been tasked with Bob's and Mecher's director of the film wanted the best interaction we could get at that time, and they'd done a few tests and they found out that if an object is in the camera, is in front of camera with the actor and they draw the animation around it, it kind of forls you to think that the animation is there because the object's definitely there.

I tried it with green screen.

You know this, somehow you just gut your gut nose, your instinct knows that this has been composited on top it's not actually, and so it doesn't feel like the characters are there so much.

So the idea was to try every possible moment to have some way of grounding the animated characters to the real world.

So my first challenge was the meeting with George Gibbs to talk about the octopus bartender in the Incompaint Club.

Because George was thinking, oh, yeah, we can build this mechanical arm, and he built like a mechanical arm for Baby Herman.

That was one of the approaches that was greenlit and they funded doing that, and so this is a robotic arm that they would then draw over the arm with the animation later to hide that mechanical rig so that was yes, in great idea, but he said that with the octopus Bartender, all the arms are constantly moving, so you can't do a mechanical rig.

There's no way they can build something to that complexity.

So would there be like puppet effects ways of doing it?

And he said to me that I could go home, work it all out and come back and tell him how to do it.

I said, what I can tell you right now if you want.

So I went through told him the eight different ways because I could pre visualize each one of the image rigs and how best to do them, I mean.

And so they all just like, yeah, I do this for that, do that for that, and do this for this, and he goes, okay, here's the script.

Go through the script and tell me in this script what can be puppet effects?

He said, because that sounds great, So I did.

I went back and went through the script, went through the whole thing, and the outcome was we had a team of six puppeteers for the entire movie, for every shot that ramped up to seventeen and we ran two units, sometimes twenty four hours in a run.

So he did twelve hours on main unit, twelve hours on second unit, and every once in a while I had to do MANI second unit, MAINI unit.

So I did thirty six hours in a run, which I'm not sure whether HR would allow that these days.

Yeah that was back in the day.

But yeah, So it was up to me to design in all the rigs and all the approaches for bringing this interaction together.

And so again for me, it was like it was a perfect I love problem solving.

And so this is like the ultimate invisible Man film basically because it had to be invisible because you couldn't paint things out like you can today with computers.

This was all still completely on film.

There was no computer animation in Roger Rabbit whatsoever, and there was no computer touch up.

So for all the strings that were in the shot, brilliant lighting cameraman Dean Kundy would carefully light all the strings out, and then the focus puller would say, oh, yeah, well, we'll put the focus either behind or in front of the strings.

Technically you'd probably want to put the if you've got a floating weasel gun, let's say, you'd want to put the focus on the gun.

They said, no, that will bring the strings into focus.

You weren't noticed that it's slightly out of focus.

We'll put it either behind or in front of it.

Then the strings disappear.

So not only did we have that kind of focus and detail and understanding, just everybody was convicted to convinced to do the absolute best on all the different rinks.

You know.

It's like you were talking about earlier with the you know, with the sort of shooting for film and knowing what the makeup might look like and what Yoda might look like.

Just having that understanding of the limitations of film, but also how they can be used to your advantage.

Yeah, I mean, Kundy's a fantastic cinematographer.

I mean, you know, he sort of shot my childhood pretty much.

I've been wanting to speak to him for a number of years.

And just having all those key people, yourself included.

You know, George was also a very pragmatic man, wasn't he.

You know, having done you know, special effects on so many movies and just spotting that ability and you going right, this is my guy.

Now, Okay, Dave's on board.

But it takes me, it takes those gone.

Yeah.

He did used to introduce me, Oh this is Dave Barclay.

He's getting me my next Oscar.

I've actually held his oscar.

I met him some years ago, he said he passed away did a couple of years back, but a couple of years before that.

He was along at some some talk one night and I got chatting to him in the audience during the break and then yeah, he said, oh, do you want to hold my Oscar?

I said, all right, so yeah he has yeah, yeah.

He's got the under there, which we felt, I mean, the team of puppeteers we felt we did an awful lot of that work that that got the Oscar.

But then there was also all the other departments and Ken Ralston and I l M and everybody, So it was such a huge, huge team effort and to have great animators on set.

And that's the other thing is we were coordinating not only with Bob Samakers, and he would he would sort of want certain things from us, but we would also keep in contact with Ken and Don Harm to make sure that what we were doing was going to be usable for them, because one of the things was that we would typically we obviously we did all our research as best we could, look to all the videos and typical animation you'll do like a nice move and accelerate, decelerate into it and freeze and so no, you can't do the freeze, but that's in all animationally that you do this nice freeze.

No, no, because then what will end up happening If it's a gun, You will see this skating as they're drawing the hand around it.

So and it becomes really obvious that that it's the gun is static, but the hands moving right, so that you always have to keep it just slightly alive, which initially felt very wrong to be doing that, but again it's like and then making it so that you could move it without it looking stupid like it wasn't just randomly moving around.

You had to keep it within character moving and that was that was a challenge that again initially I didn't expect that we'd have to do that, so so but understanding all the processes to know we could, oh, no, that's not right and we're not doing that.

But now we understood that that was part of making this whole thing work properly.

So we had to get that under our belts and make it work.

So yeah, I think you know, we've talked about it before, Dave, like where we've been having brunch in La when I pop over now and again.

But we've talked about like Mark Hamill's kind of ability on set to kind of be engaged with Yoda, and I think in a similar way, Bob Hoskins's performance in that film, his ability to kind of, you know, imagine what was in front of him and see the life in what was in front of him.

I mean, I think he even talked about he started to hallucinate Roger like Roger was because he had to do so many different takes, and there was the stand in of course, which by the way, is still in the Corridors lucasfilm at the Presidio.

I saw that in April.

But yeah, I think both of those actors often don't get enough credit for the work they did in those films, because it really does take a certain mind to be able to take those leaps of imagine to create a convincing performance not only for them, but for the for the puppets and the animation and everything else that's involved.

Oh yeah, Bob was Bob Hoskins.

I mean, Mark Hamill's an amazing human being, wonderful guy, brilliant actor and has had an amazing career and so was Bob.

Bob Hoskins one of the sweetest, nicest human beings you could meet.

He could have made our life hell because we were kind of making his life hell constantly doing all these reasons everything, But now he went out of his way to help us and understand what we were doing.

Again, everybody was looking to make this as good as it could be, and he had so many things to think of, and he was trying to work out where all his eye lines were, and he was just truly amazing with it, and he would and we did our best to engage and give him reference for him to work with.

So but often if we're doing a prop and doing a gun, he's got to be looking at a different place for the weasel's head, He's not looking at the gun.

So again, he was just phenomenal.

Brendan Fraser another person who's amazing and just again doesn't get enough respect for all the incredible work he's done over the years using all those same techniques bringing because if the actor truly believes that that character is there, then so will the audience.

And so that's what Mark, Bob Hoskins and Brendan have done throughout their careers.

To make what we do look even better.

So yeah, well, this is the thing with the work that you do.

I mean, it could easily without the skills and the professionalism and everybody sort of aiming for the point tip of the spear as that we're trying to get the job done, it could descend into fast quite easily.

I can imagine.

Well, I have seen a few animatronic movies in the eighties and some TV shows where it's like, oh glad I didn't work on that.

I won't say any of them.

I'm sure we've always seen them where you go, oh my goodness, come on, it's like people who who really not doing their best and it's not really coming out right, and there's yeah, so so yeah, there, there there are moments where getting to that that as you say that that the pointy part on the on the sphere takes a lot of focus, a lot of dedication, and and a certain amount of luck.

I guess that you've got the right people at the right time playing that a game at that moment.

So but yeah, it was always I always found it.

Every single job was so uniquely different and like Roger Rabbit was, there was nothing really like it before since so and so, you're you're reinventing everything, and you're troubleshooting on the spot, on the fly and NonStop all day long.

And that was just that was exhilarating and wonderful.

I loved every second.

I would have liked it to have lasted forever.

Yeah.

I bet you slept well on those jobs in the limited hours that there was time to sleep.

Yes, yeah, yeah, certainly when I've done main unit, second unit, main unit in a row.

Wow.

Yeah, I mean I've done some long shifts in recently.

I've got some coming up this week.

I did a nineteen hour shift the other the other day, and I couldn't imagine not having had a few hours sleep.

I mean, at least I had that.

But yeah, no, Well, thank you for your work, Dave.

I was going to say, I'm sure over the years people have asked you, like, Dave, you should write a book.

You've got so many stories, You've got so much experience.

So the time has come now and you've and you've now released this book.

What was the kind of the final what pushed you over the edge finally to write the book?

Well, yeah, about twenty years ago, my good friend designer and writer Marty Schofield said, Dave, you've got all these stories and you've got to You've got to tell them and leave them out behind for your family at the very least, you know, And I said, yeah, was like a good idea, and he tried to sort of get me to start writing bullet points, and I thought this is great.

I said, yeah, when I get a moment, I'll do that.

So COVID came along.

I still didn't have the moments even with the COVID.

So and then, to be honest, both my parents passed.

Both my parents died, so and I was thinking, oh, well, I can't check with them about certain things that I wanted to check with Fortunately, my memory was very strong and nothing had gone.

I thought, oh, I better do it now.

I better do it right now.

So yeah, I just decided to start writing.

But I wasn't quite sure.

One of the reasons why.

I was thinking all these stories I could write for like months on end and months and years on end, and it could be thousands of pages, probably most very boring because I'd go into too many details and everything.

I thought, well, how on earth am I going to write this book?

And then suddenly realized I've got all these photos that I could use, So I went through the That's that's my hook.

I'm going to use lots of photographs in this book.

So there's the book, and as you can see, there's just loads and loads and loads as photos everywhere all the way through.

So I'd get a photograph, write a story about that photograph, so that what you're reading there's a visual representation of it.

So that was the that was the idea behind it.

So I'd look at a photograph and i'd write a piece for that, and i'd look another one, choose a photograph, write a piece for that, because yeah, I could.

I could write that whole book just on probably two or three days on Star Wars.

You know, so much to write about.

But I just wanted to try and cover this crazy life that I've led from age four.

Mm.

Yeah, I can't wait to read it.

I haven't got my copy ordered yet, but I thought, given that I'm going to be in LA in July, i should get one there and then and then hopefully.

I can hand you.

I can hand you Pert.

I'll buy one, Dave, I will buy one.

I just want to still personally hand it to you and sign it to you that that would be great.

Yeah, definitely, no, that would be great.

Can you just mention the name of the book and how people can can get it as well?

Yes, yes, it's called My Life with Animatronics, Movies, Puppets and Beyond, autobiography by Dave Barclay.

It's currently available at Colwaters Productions website that's calwatersprods dot com and just go to the store.

It's on the store at the moment.

There's a pre release that has a I think a photograph of signs and Star Wars photograph, a poster from my self made movie and the book as a special deal.

But they will be I think very soon we'll be doing just the book if you just want the book and so.

And also I'm planning to bring a handful of copies with me, well a good handful of copies with me when I'm next in the UK.

So I'll try and put that up on the website in case people want to get it without the ship from the States, because that would be shipped from the States.

So's there's no real publishing because I'm going through Barnes and Noble and there's no real direct version to do that in England at the moment, gotcha.

Yeah, they never sort of made it over here for whatever reason.

But as always, whenever we meet up, Dave, I feel like we could just talk for hours and hours, but I don't want to.

I don't want to use up all your good stories because I want people to buy the book and dive in.

And you know, there's there's so many aspects to your career that I just am fascinating with it, and every time I talk to you, I find out something new, and I'm really really looking forward to diving into the book and finding out more and again really looking the hopefully to catch up with you in July.

But I appreciate your time to Dave Dave as always, and hopefully see you soon.

Excellent.

Yeah, look forward to that, Jamie.

It's always a joy.

I hope you enjoy my conversation with Dave Barclay.

They're always a pleasure to speak with him.

His generosity with stories and insights is endless.

Really, if you want to know more, I recommend you picking up his new book, My Life with Animatronics, Movies, Puppets and Beyond.

You can find it at Cool Waters Productions.

That's Cool Watersprods.

Dot com and look out for signed copies for when he's next in the UK who he does attend conventions in the US where he lives and in the UK as well as you heard the books packed with behind the scenes tales and photographs from across this extraordinary career of his.

Thank you for your time, my friend.

I hope to see you soon.

Unfortunately, that trip that I was talking about in July to LA didn't happen.

That was the job I was canceled off that.

I built a whole trip around going to Martha's Vineyard for the Joe alvesdoc and going to LA to do some podcasting stuff and stay with Joe for the fourth of July.

Unfortunately, I wasn't able to do this second part of the trip.

I was just able to do the Martha's Vineyard bit, which was amazing, but I did miss seeing my friends in LA.

Thanks for joining me for this episode.

If you enjoyed it, please share it.

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I do everything and I need it to make a bit of an income for me as well.

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For the next episode of the Film Youmentaries podcast, we are taking away media m HM.