The adult comedy The Happytime Murders is set in the underbelly of Los Angeles, where puppets and humans co-exist. From director Brian Henson, the film follows two clashing detectives – a human named Connie Edwards (Melissa McCarthy) and a puppet named Phil Philips (played by puppeteer Bill Barretta) – who are forced to work together to solve the mystery of who is brutally murdering the former cast of The Happytime Gang puppet show.

On October 12, 2017, Collider (along with a handful of other online outlets) was invited to the Santa Clarita, Calif. set, where we got to talk with director Brian Henson, who first read the script for The Happytime Murders about 15 years ago and has been developing it for about the last 10 years. During the interview, he spoke about the genesis of the project, what ultimately made him want to do an R-rated puppet movie, what Melissa McCarthy brought to the role, creating close to 40 new puppets, which scene already didn’t make the cut, how technical the puppetry gets, why the essence of what puppetry is doesn’t change, performing a puppet himself while directing, puppet sex scenes, and how they’ve already come up with ideas of intersecting storylines that could take place in a larger puppet cinematic universe.

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Image via STX Films

Question: Brian, what was the genesis of this project and what got you excited about it?

BRIAN HENSON: Actually, it was Todd Berger, who wrote the very first draft of the script, [about 15] years ago, or something like that, and he had sent it over to us. I had read it back then, but it’s quite different now ‘cause this is a long, long time later. I said, “It’s too R-rated. It’s just not what we do. But, good luck.” And then, I started the show Puppet Up! We started doing improv comedy with puppets, and we do a live show that’s very R-rated and that’s improv comedy. I thought, “This is really good. We found a new voice for puppets. It’s really funny, it’s viciously funny, and it’s a contemporary funny. This is a good next place to take Henson-style hand puppetry.” So, I thought, “We should do something scripted, in long form, that’s in this tone. And then, we remembered this script that we had passed on. It came back around and I met with Todd and said, “Let’s develop it, but it needs a lot of work.” That was really the genesis. From Puppet Up!, I decided that I wanted to do something that’s R-rated and that lets the puppeteers rip. I’ve had the script with Todd for close to 10 years now, and we’ve done many, many drafts. I couldn’t be happier with where it ended up. You think you’re seeing a shock comedy with puppets, where puppets are doing what you never thought you would see, but then it actually is a really compelling story. The characters are really deep and well-developed, so it’s a one-two punch. People will come in thinking, “I wanna see puppets doing what I have not seen Henson-style puppets do,” but then what they get is actually a really good movie with really good characters.

Why did you ultimately want to make a hard R-rated puppet movie?

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Image via STX Films

HENSON: I feel like we’ve always been a little bit naughty. The Henson Company is considered a very family friendly brand. At the same time, people go, “Yeah, but they’re cool and a little bit naughty.” We’re not Disney. We’re not wholesome, in that sense. Hopefully, we are socially responsible. We’re the cool and weird ones, so this is us doing that. I am deliberately rating it R because I actually wanted to make it clear that this is for adults. If you do it PG-13 and just skate the edge, I’d still have an audience full of five year olds, and that would be a problem. So, by making it an R rating, I’m making it clear that it’s for adults. All of our humor comes out of a very blue, very naughty, dirty humor place. Even the well-known Muppets were developed out of that instinct. It wasn’t on camera, but you would know that Kermit has some dirty thoughts, and Piggy certainly does. My favorite part of watching my dad working was that naughtiness that was just so deliciously funny. Everybody on the crew would be laughing so hard. So, I wanted to take that and make it part of the entertainment, The Puppet Up! live theater show that we’ve been doing is that, and it works really well with audiences.

With the R rating and the subject matter, has there been anything that you thought went too far? Was there anything that didn’t make the cut, or did everything manage to make it in there?

HENSON: I may have shot stuff that goes over the line. I’m not sure. We’ve not been censoring ourselves. We did have a bar scene, with a bartender puppet that had a singing penis, which was a very funny joke that we decided not to do. That one won’t make it in the movie. We probably have stepped over, in a couple of places, that I’ll learn as I get it all cut together, and then maybe will pull it back a little bit, but the idea is that it really is uncensored. It really is quite dirty, but it’s mostly language and implied sexuality. It’s not graphically sexual. Puppets come silly string, but you don’t see their penises. There are some pretty graphic, ridiculous ideas that are in there, but there’s also a little bit of an innocence to the characters and the story, in this gritty, tough world.

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Image via STX Films

This movie went through a bunch of different iterations, with different actors attached. What was it about Melissa McCarthy that made you want to work with her on this?

HENSON: Mostly, there were lots of rumors, over the years, which was fun. Everybody loved the script so much that, as soon as a rumor took off, usually there was some truth to it, but nobody was ever attached until Melissa was attached, and Melissa was actually the first attached to it.

What did Melissa change about this? What did she bring to it?

HENSON: Oh where to start? First of all, Edwards was written as a male character. Todd and I were trying so hard to differentiate between Phil and Edwards, in the writing, that one character or the other kept suffering because of it and we thought, “You know what? I think they’re in a testosterone pissing match. They were both trying to out tough each other and break the rules. It was just that one of them got thrown out of the police force and the other one didn’t, but they both probably deserved to be, even though they were also both great at their jobs. They both had moral compasses that ultimately are pointing exactly the right direction, but the characters were, in the end, written quite similar. We thought with one of them being a puppet and one being an actor, it really worked well. But then, when Melissa came in, there was remarkably little that we did to shift the character. Melissa approached it as a tough cop who breaks the rules and is in a testosterone pissing match with Phil. She didn’t feminize the character, which was really wonderful. And then, of course, she brings what Melissa brings, which is this loose, spontaneous style that grows out of a lot of improvising on set. When it comes to comedy, she really can do no wrong. She’s just the best there is.

How did Edwards come to be addicted to maple syrup?

HENSON: We just decided that we couldn’t think of anything sweeter to us than maple syrup because she’s a sugar addict. The idea is that she gets to maple syrup because that’s as far as people will go, but the puppets who are sugar addicts go all the way to a level of sugar that doesn’t exist. We imply that there is sugar that’s so sweet that only puppets could eat it. If a person ate it, they’d immediately go into sugar shock.

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Image via STX Films

There are 125 characters in this, and close to 40 of them are brand new. How did you decide the type of characters that you wanted to create?

HENSON: That’s a good question. Usually, with The Henson Company, we put design continuity into production design and characters, and it’s a very lovely finish. What we discovered with the Puppet Up! improv show, which was a live show, was that we couldn’t afford new puppets, so we pulled out a bunch of old puppets to do that theater show. We started testing it and said, “If it does well, we’ll remake puppets and have them all look like they’re from the same family of puppets.” And then, we realized that having the puppets look like they come from every different type of show you can imagine, but all in the Henson vein, that are deliberately mismatched, where you can have a completely abstract bear puppet talking to quite a realistic humanoid puppet, it lends itself to adult humor. This movie happens to be set in a world that is our world, where puppets are alive and they get different jobs, and stuff like that, but they are all of these different looks, jumbled together. It’s a deliberately, wonderfully weird mixture of puppets.

How technical is the puppetry?

HENSON: As much as possible, we’re performing the puppets. We’re always puppeteering everything. Occasionally, the puppets will be CGI, but I’m hoping that’s invisible to the audience. Even when we do that, we real-time puppeteer CGI characters. We sometimes use the CGI because the puppet needs to do something that we can’t actually do on the set, or we can’t actually do on location, but even then, we want them always puppeteered. It allows us to see a little bit more of the puppets, and let the audience see them doing more stuff that they’re not used to seeing them do. We’ve been puppeteering CGI for like 18 years now. We developed a system, a long time ago, that is a real-time animation engine, so that we could do animated characters that were being puppeteered. As we got further and further into that, and we did some TV series that way, we realized that we could bring it all the way to photo realism with that same technique. So, even if a puppet is CGI, it’s still actually being puppeteered in real-time, as a CGI character. The movement should match, perfectly. It’s just being done, as a technique, to get it on film.

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Image via STX Films

From when your dad, Jim Henson, started to now, have puppets changed, in their essence?

HENSON: I don’t think puppets will ever change, in their essence. People say, “Isn’t CGI gonna take over puppetry? Isn’t computer animation gonna take over?” Maybe, but only in as much as CGI is gonna take over acting and actors. Puppetry is different. It’s the art of infusing a personality and a life and a sense of background. You could probably make a hilariously funny movie about this water bottle, if you thought about it hard enough, or not a movie, but maybe a two-minute piece. It’s when you’re a parent and your kid is throwing a temper tantrum and you go, “Really?! You shouldn’t throw a temper tantrum. That’s not very nice to your family.” We do that for our kids. We do that for everything. It takes you out of your subjective self and puts you in a more objective place, and puppetry has always done that. One of the things that’s great about it is that you’re entertaining the innocent and open child inside of all of us. When a puppet comes on screen, you make no assumptions about them. You don’t assume anything about their personality or their sexuality, or any of that. You wait and learn, like a child does. I think that’s why puppetry has been around for so long, and it will be forever, so I don’t think the essence of puppetry will ever change. The tools of how you can realize puppetry are changing, all the time. When we do CGI puppetry and what we call digital puppetry, we are delivering a computer-animated product that looks like a computer-animated show, but it’s fully puppetry in the approach. In that sense, puppetry evolves, but the essence of what puppetry is, it has always been.

Why did you choose to play the Crab? Of all the characters you could play, why did you choose that one?

HENSON: Truthfully, I didn’t wanna do any. This is a really tough movie to direct. There’s an awful lot of moving parts and it’s a really complicated movie, so I wasn’t gonna do any. In Puppet Up!, I often perform that Crab, and Bill Baretta said to me, “Hey, why don’t you and I do the Boar and the Crab?” And I was like, “Okay.” Even though it was one of my hardest days on location, I was suddenly inside of a garbage can, trying to direct the movie. As I was inside the garbage can, which was a fake garbage can with fake garbage around the top, somebody threw in a half-bottle of beer, when we were looking the other way. So, I climbed in the garbage can and reached my arm up, and old beer was dripping down my arm. I think my instinct for not puppeteering while I was directing was probably bang on, but I did it ‘cause it’s a funny, very simple puppet that I like a lot.

Image via STX Entertainment
Image via STX Entertainment

How much thought was put into the creation of this world, with the puppets existing alongside humans? Did you come up with rules and reasons?

HENSON: A little bit. Not as far as we perhaps could have gone. In the end, it’s largely the logistics of making movies. We went with the idea that puppets are the have nots in this world and the best they can do is try to exist in a world that’s been created for human beings, and then complain about it, all the time. That’s what we’ve run with. There’s prejudice in this world. There’s a lot of prejudice, so don’t ever call a puppet a sock. That’s a really nasty thing. Whenever anybody calls Phil a sock, it gets a really big response. When puppets are mad at people, they call them meat sacks and flesh bags. Not quite as rude, is to call a puppet a feltie. We’ve done more work on the social aspect than the actual physicality of the world.

Do you typically only like to do a couple of takes, and then move on? Is there something more controlled about working with the puppeteers, where you get the nuances quicker and faster?

HENSON: I grew up in the industry, in the ‘80s in London, where you would often shoot six shots, in a day. The industry has generally moved to shooting 20 to 40 shots. I’m sitting somewhere in the middle. I’m going at the speed of very high-level television, or a pretty quick feature. If David Fincher was directing this, we would be shooting for 10 months and the movie would cost a lot of money. I’m letting people bring what they wanna bring and I don’t really try hard to push them. I think the job of the director is to have a vision and a pretty specific plan, but then fully respect the artist who’s coming in, in whatever aspect they’re coming in to the film, and let them present what they think and run with it, unless it upsets the vision completely. I let the puppeteers bring what they wanna bring, and I adjust, rather than telling them what to bring. Directors that tend to have very high take counts feel like they know where you should blink your eyes, what angle your head should be at, and all of that. I don’t work that way. People used to ask my dad, “Did your project come out the way you intended?” And he would say, “Well, certainly not! I had 300 incredible artists who collaborated with me, and it’s the result of only what that group of 300 artists could have produced.” I feel much the same with this. It evolves and adjusts, and my job is to have a vision and hold it all together, but also flex with all of the great, creative people that are involved.

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Image via STX Entertainment

What’s your toughest set piece? What are you asking your puppets to do that’s raising the bar?

HENSON: Oh, everything. The whole thing is tough. With every scene, what the characters are doing is tough. There is a sex scene that is so hilarious, and yet not particularly graphic. There’s a lot of wonderful stuff.

Can you ever do water sequences with a puppet?

HENSON: Yeah, we put a puppet in a Jacuzzi in this. They soak up a lot of water. You have to work through the wall of the Jacuzzi through a giant rubber glove, and you can’t let the rubber glove invert or the entire Jacuzzi will go back into the rubber glove. They just get really, really wet. We have a fight scene in the Jacuzzi, as well.

Have you come up with any other story ideas, while you’ve been working on this? Are you developing a puppet cinematic universe?

HENSON: Not so much while working on it, but before we put this into pre-production, Todd and I had been throwing around ideas of intersecting storylines that could happen, in this universe. That’s something we’ve been thinking about and considering.

The Happytime Murders opens in theaters on August 24th.

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Image via STX Entertainment