Black Friday Blues? Observing Buy Nothing Day? How about a family excursion back to the future of simpler times with the new movie “The Muppets”?
Terry Gross of Fresh Air has the definitive interview.
November 23, 2011Nicholas Stoller made his directorial debut with the raunchy 2008 comedy Forgetting Sarah Marshall, which starred Jason Segel as a guy who had to reassess his life after his girlfriend of five years dumped him.
Segel famously dropped his towel in the opening scenes of the film, which led The New York Times to call him “a young actor with nothing to hide.”
The two filmmakers have teamed up once again — this time with Miss Piggy, Gonzo and Fozzie Bear in tow — for the family film The Muppets. Segel tells Terry Gross that the only frontal nudity in this film comes from another star of the movie: Kermit the Frog, who never wears pants.
“In terms of our R-rated past, there’s an essential sweetness to what we try to do. And that’s not that dissimilar to The Muppets even if in Sarah Marshall there’s cursing and nudity,” adds Stoller. “We’re still trying to get at something that’s not cynical.”
The premise of The Muppets follows three Muppet fans — Segel, Amy Adams and a Muppet named Walter who’s voiced by Peter Linz — who want to reunite the Muppet cast and make them as famous as they were back in the day, when movies like The Muppets Take Manhattan and The Great Muppet Caper regularly appeared in theaters.
“We set out to make a Muppet movie that harkened back to the late-’70s, early-’80s Muppets that we grew up with,” Segel says. “I had the opportunity to work with my childhood idols, and I wasn’t going to take ‘no’ for an answer. So I set out to make that happen.”
Having written a script, Segel and Stoller asked Bret McKenzie, from Flight of the Conchords, to write the lyrics for several original songs featured in the new film.
“We didn’t have to tell Bret much in terms of tone, because he’s by nature very Muppety,” says Segel. “Flight of the Concords is a very Muppety vibe — it’s two wide-eyed innocents making their way through a tough New York. So he knew what to do … right from the start. [And] all the great Muppet movies were musicals.”
The film opens with a grand production number featuring hundreds of cast members singing and dancing down Main Street in a place called Small Town USA. It’s campy — but intentionally so, says Stoller.
“The Muppets are always winking, there’s a kind of self-referential thing going on, so with a little wink, you can get away with a lot of campiness,” he says.
The two filmmakers also turned to another Flight of the Conchord salum — James Bobin — to direct The Muppets.
“As soon as he expressed interest, it was a no-brainer,” says Stoller. He explains that Bobin often helped them realize if the scenes they had written were realistic.
“It was easy for us to imagine scenes,” he says. “We imagined one scene with 10 full-body Muppets running away from an explosion — and James said that it was impossible. He had to do the heavy lifting.”
Once Disney gave Stoller and Segel the green light to make The Muppets, the Muppet puppeteers helped fill them in on the cardinal rules of the Muppet world. For instance, Muppets think of themselves as humans in their world. And they are never, ever mean.
“The Muppets don’t get laughs at other people’s expense,” says Segel. “It’s part of what I really loved about the Muppets. They don’t even want to destroy their villains. They want to reform their villains.”
He points to the first Muppet movie, when the villain Doc Hopper wants to cut off Kermit’s legs to make frog legs.
“As opposed to destroying him, Kermit is like, ‘Maybe you should think about why you don’t have friends. Maybe you’re just lonely and you need to be a happier person,’ ” he says. “The Muppets are pure.”
The Muppets are also really honest.
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