Thanks to incredible puppetry work, movies like The Empire Strikes Back, The Muppet Christmas Carol, The Dark Crystal have gone on to become legendary with their timeless approach. After a lifetime of working behind the scenes in the puppet department on these very films, second-generation puppeteer Dave Barclay has put together an autobiography called My Life With Animatronics. Movies, Puppets and Beyond to capture this incredible creative journey. Giving us an exclusive insight into what happens behind the scenes in the puppetry world. STARBURST catches up with Dave to reflect on just some of his standout projects, his lifelong love for puppetry and what else we can expect from his autobiography…
STARBURST: How did you become a puppeteer?
Dave Barclay: I started as a puppeteer because my parents were both puppeteers. Originally, they were actors; they met at RADA, the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London, and after a few years of acting, they decided they wanted to do something together, rather than always doing different acting jobs. So they formed their own puppet company called Pex Puppets, and it was an amazing success; it took off, and that’s what they did for the rest of their lives. So, from the age of four, I had puppetry all around me. I wanted to be the third puppeteer of their show when I was a kid, which I was for many years. So yes, puppetry, and puppet making, and writing stories, performing, that was all a part of my childhood. So, I guess I have the perfect excuse for being a puppeteer.
Your first major project was The Empire Strikes Back, what do you remember the most from your first day on set?
I started working on The Empire Strikes Back for Stuart Freeborn, in the makeup department in the make-up lab, working on building Yoda. Stuart Freeborn said “Oh! There’s been a problem, someone is allergic to something, we need a puppeteer to stand in immediately for the rest of the afternoon” and so, he knew I was a second-generation puppeteer, so he said “No, David, you should go to set and take over.” This is before mobile phones, so there was no way of getting in touch with anyone immediately. I was sent to the set, and my job was to grab the eye control and perform Yoda’s eyes for Frank Oz. I didn’t have any time to be nervous, because if someone had told me a day before, I would have been terrified. So, for this, I just went straight to set, picked up the eyes, and did the job, and tried to do what Frank asked me to do. That was my first day on set, performing in front of camera, on The Empire Strikes Back. If I had to audition, or anything like that, I would have certainly failed, I’m sure! But no, I just went in the deep end, and just went straight to it, and Frank liked what I did. So, I stayed on as a performer for Frank, for Yoda, for the rest of the shoot.
How did you make the character of Yoda feel so real?
Yoda looking real was all down to Frank Oz. He is a brilliant actor anyway, and a great director. A fantastic person, but also, no one had really done anything like this before. This was the first time that an animatronic character like this had to deliver a full performance like Yoda did, and so, he worked it out, initially as an actor. So, he physically moved it out, as a person, without the puppet, and he had all of us puppeteers, there was myself, Wendy Midener, and Kathy Mullen, so there’s a total of four of us to bring Yoda to life, with Frank being the chief puppeteer. Frank would walk us around, and we would have to exactly copy his rhythms, his movements, and his head movements. He would call out when we were rehearsing, when the eyes would move, when there would be a blink, when he would look down. Those sorts of things, so that we all knew the rhythm and the intent of the character. Because, for Frank, it’s all about character. So, it’s making that character come alive. So we all tried to get on the same wavelength as Yoda’s character. So, for the rest of the shoot, we were able to appreciate where Frank would be going, even if we weren’t sure, because we hadn’t had time to rehearse. It’s all about finding this character, and that’s all down to Frank Oz.
What else did you personally bring to playing Yoda?
One of the things that I contributed to, when doing the eyes, was using the eyes to try to get some emotion. I would try to keep them, not just moving like, you have seen some rather rough animatronics over the years, where you just get these mechanical eyes that go blink, blink, blink, and there’s no emotion to them. With Yoda, we wanted to have emotion, so that he is always fluctuating his eyes. And actually, when it comes to the way those particular mechanisms were built, you could control one eye very slightly differently from the other. So it would be slightly asymmetrical, and that made it look less mechanical. So I think the combination of everything really made Yoda look real.
Jabba the Hutt is obviously completely different to Yoda. However, what were the key differences, and how did working on Jabba within Return of the Jedi, compare to what you’d done with Yoda?
Yes, well Yoda is a typical hand puppet, so you’ve got your hand that goes straight into Yoda’s head. Frank’s thumb would be the jaw, his index and third finger would be the upper lip, and his middle finger was the eyebrow. We did the cable controls of the ears and the eyes, and then Kathy Mullen reached around and did the right hand for Frank, as Frank also did the left hand of Yoda. So, it’s like a typical Muppet style of performance, but obviously it’s a full animatronic. With Jabba, this was a body puppet, Toby Philpott and I were inside his head, and his shoulders, and I was reaching my whole arm out through a hole in, like, the chest area of Jabba, to wear a big rubber arm with mechanical extensions on my finger. Toby did the same with his left hand, and I grabbed Jabba’s jaw with my left, and then did the voice. I provided the voice on set for Jabba, so, in my rather high, British-style voice, obviously he was dubbed, and the voice was replaced for the final film, but while Jabba was on set, and working with the other actors, it was my voice that everyone heard. We were using a lot of our body weight to move his body around, and there were no fingers in the mouth; it was my entire arm and wrist controlling Jabba’s jaw.
For many, The Dark Crystal comes to mind first when they think about puppets in movies. Looking back, why do you think this movie stands out so much, and what was it like to work on sets of that size and detail?
It was amazing, because my first movie was The Empire Strikes Back, working with Frank Oz, Wendy Midener, and Kathy Mullen. Then, they all moved on to The Dark Crystal and invited me along. So, I was the first British puppet maker on The Dark Crystal, and I got to work with the amazing Lyle Conway, working on Skeksis, the earth Skeksis, and Aughra. So, we built 27 puppets in 9 months, and it was an amazing experience, because no one had ever done anything like this before. The closest thing was Yoda, so I was able to bring some of that knowledge through, but also, the puppet makers and designers on The Dark Crystal were developing new techniques that no one had ever tried before. There were no books or YouTube to find out how to do it. We were making it up as we went along, and trying to find the best way, and the lightest way of building all of these characters, because people had to perform these, 8-10 hours a day. So, they couldn’t be heavy things that you couldn’t manage; they had to be light. We wanted them to emote as much as possible, so it was an amazing experience, and the detail of the sets was phenomenal. It was just amazing, walking onto those sound stages, because, again, back in those days, in the original Dark Crystal and the original Star Wars films, everything was real. It was there in front of you. So, in Aughra’s orrery, where it’s all going around, this is this massive mechanical unit, which could literally take your head off if you’re in the wrong place. It was this amazing piece of engineering, and it was real. It was actually there. So, that was the amazing thing about those early films, everything that you saw on the screen, actually was there in real life.
Who Framed Roger Rabbit? is unique due to its crossover with animation and real life. How did that project compare to anything you’d worked on before?
Who Framed Roger Rabbit? was like nothing I had done before, and I don’t think anyone had tried anything like that before either. Like the other films, we were always at the cutting edge, and pushing the envelope as they say, of what was possible. Robert Zemeckis wanted the best interaction with the actors and the Tunes, that he could possibly do for the time. This was still pre-computers, so, everything had to be in front of the camera for real. With the initial tests, they did a test with a green screen and prop, and then they had a prop on wires. They found that with the green screen prop, you somehow instinctively knew it wasn’t in the set at the same time. So when you drew the weasel to hold that prop, for instance, you didn’t feel like the weasel was in there as well. Whereas, when they drew the weasel around the prop that was actually in the set, it gave the sense that the weasel was in the set, because you knew the prop was in the set. Somehow, you knew that. So, the whole idea was to have every single interaction happen on set, for real, at the same time the actors were acting. So this became like a huge invisible man film because the cartoons would be drawn in later, but we had to move the objects on their behalf, for them, before they were drawn. And we had to work with Don Hahn and Ken Ralston to make sure what we were doing would work later. And also work with Robert, and make sure that the acting of the props would link with the characters. It was really applied puppetry. I had to come up with all of these clever rigs, to move props invisibly, and sometimes, at the drop of a hat, they’d say, “Oh yeah, we need something over here, so we have to quickly rig something.” So I tried to do everything as simply as possible, but it could always be performed, and matched the requirements of production. It was an amazing experience.
When it comes to effects, nothing has come close to this movie since…
That’s true, I mean it really is hard to get that integration, where you’ve got a cartoon character, and some great actors. I just worked on a film, which unfortunately it looks like no one is going to see, called Coyote vs. Acme, where we did just that! We had an amazing interaction with Wile E. Coyote, I built a Wile E. Coyote puppet that we filmed. And of course, Wile E. Coyote doesn’t speak. He has no lines in the film, so how do you get this cartoon character to interact with the actors? You can’t just put a ping pong ball or a tennis ball on set, because there’s nothing there for the actors. So, I created a full, expressive Wile E. Coyote. His cheeks would frown or smile. His eyebrows would move. So his face could actually act with the actors. Everyone said that this was the greatest interaction since Roger Rabbit, but unfortunately, no one is going to get to see it, because Warner Bros has shelved the movie, and it is a very good movie. If it wasn’t a very good movie, you could go “Oh, yeah, I understand” but no, it’s a very good movie.
Fingers crossed it gets released at some point…
I sincerely hope so.
The Muppet Christmas Carol is obviously, popular every single year. What memories do you have from bringing that movie to life, and what did Brian Henson want to see from you?
Well, I think this was Brian Henson’s first solo directing, and he did an amazing job. I think it’s my favourite Christmas Carol movie, and it’s one of my favourite Muppet films. It was really lovely to work on. I worked on it pretty much every day, and I wasn’t one of the lead Muppet performers, that was people like Dave Goelz, Steve Whitmire, Bill Barretta. Those guys were doing the main characters, but they always have more than one character. So when two of their characters are on screen, they need a puppeteer to puppeteer the other character in the style of that puppeteer. So that was basically what I was doing. I also did rats and penguins, and all of the fun things that you can do on the film. I got to double for pretty much every muppet, and work with Frank Oz again, which was a delight. It was an amazing experience; it just brings out the love of puppetry that I have. It was the perfect vehicle for that.
Team America: World Police went on to become a cult classic. Its puppet work is legendary. What were Trey Parker and Matt Stone like to work with, and what do you think they really wanted to see from the film?
It’s an interesting one. I wasn’t one of the core puppeteers, as I was actually working on another project, and my good friend Kevin Carlson was puppet captain. So, he brought me in when I had a few days here and there. I started working with my parents, doing string puppets. Doing marionettes, I did that as a child for pretty much my entire childhood. From about four until I started in the movies, and it was some of my marionette work that got me through Roger Rabbit, because we did a lot of things on strings. So I performed puppets and marionettes for many years. So, that’s what I got to do on Team America. Matt & Trey were great, they would just be ad-libbing and changing everything all of the time. They did all of the voices. They had a little button that would open and close the puppets’ mouths. They were very much like the old-style Thunderbirds puppets. Little mouths, with little eye movements. So they had some puppeteers on radio control, doing the eyes, but usually, it was Matt and Trey doing the actual mouth movements, and the guide voices when they were filming. So, they would ad-lib and change stuff around. And it was just very much this fluid and creative process. It was just amazing seeing them work.
It stands up to this day!
It’s a lovely parody of the Thunderbirds, Stingray, the sort of Gerry Anderson shows that I grew up with when I was a kid.
You became an Academy Award Finalist after working on Cats & Dogs, so, what was that whole time like for you, and why do you think your work on that movie in particular stands out so much?
Well, the Cats & Dogs films were lovely. They were produced by Christopher DeFaria at Warner Bros, and we started off with the idea that they were going to shoot mainly animals, with some computer animation, and they wanted some animatronic photo doubles to fill in certain shots. The original plan for Mr Tinkles, was that they were going to do half a dozen grainy video shots of the puppet. Because at that point, really no one had built a realistic animatronic cat before. They always looked a bit rough. So that was our task, to try and build a photo realistic, expressive, life-size cat. It wasn’t like “Oh, you can build it as big as you want, get a person in it” or something. This was a tiny, real-size cat. So, I spent time designing all of the mechanisms, we had a great team of engineers and builders at the Jim Henson Creature Shop, who came up with this beautiful puppet. When Chris & Larry, the directors, saw it, they were very impressed. And from just, six grainy video shots, he was in the entire movie. They actually wrote new scenes for the puppet. They loved the puppet; the executives at Warner loved the puppet. And they wanted the film-makers to really start working out the scenes, because up to that point, it would be a shot of a dog, just looking somewhere. A shot of a cat, looking somewhere. They were going to do the facial replacement later, a bit like Roger Rabbit, where you don’t see it there and then. So it’s really hard to tell if a scene is working, before you get the facial animation. With the puppets, we were able to give them the fundamental storyline and character of the animals on Cats & Dogs, so, it was a real success for all of us. When we got to see the crew screening, I asked the crew members, the people that had worked with us, and the puppeteers, “How many animatronic puppet shots do you think made it into Cats & Dogs” and they said “Quite a bit, maybe 70” and I said “315!” they went “What!” So, there are a few clunkers in there, a couple of shots where I said “Please don’t put this shot in the film, it doesn’t really work, it looks very puppety” they said “Oh no, it’s fine!” But there are so many shots in that film that nobody knows are actual animatronics, because it blends seamlessly. So yeah, I was very proud of the entire team, doing that.
And then you came back for a sequel!
We pushed the envelope even further on Cats & Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore. When I created a Mr. Tinkles with 76 miniature cables, just for his face. I was driven by computers and special data gloves that I made. We were using the height of computer technology and engineering, through miniature and custom-built cables, into this tiny cat’s face. I think a lot of people thought that the expressions on the face were either CGI-enhanced or completely animated by the computer. But no, it was an actual puppet. So, again, we were all very proud of Mr. Tinkles.
So, how did the idea for an autobiography first come about, and what were your initial thoughts on doing it?
Well, about twenty years ago, a good friend of mine, Murti Schofield, who is a brilliant artist and writer said “Dave, you’ve got to put some of these stories down, you’ve been in the industry for years, I’d be interested, and I’m sure your family would be interested to find out some of the details that they don’t know” so I said, “Yeah, that sounds like a great idea.” But, I didn’t do anything. COVID came along, I still didn’t do anything. I was thinking, “I’ve got so many stories for every single film, and I’ve done like 35 movies, this could be telephone directories of stories, how do I approach this?” And then, as I was looking into it, I found a whole series of photographs, and I thought, “Oh, that’s a good photograph, let’s see if I can get permission to use that one, and then another one came up, and that was the hook. My career has all been about the visual world and performance, so rather than just write a lot of text, I decided that I would add a lot of photos. So, basically the book is full of lots of photos that basically describe the journey that I’ve been on with each movie, and each project, and people that I’ve worked with. So I took the idea of taking a photograph, and then writing about that particular moment. So that the reader can actually see what I’m talking about rather than just visualising what it might be. So, that was the idea behind doing that. I was very lucky I got the Lucasfilm guys, and Disney, Frank Oz, Brendan Fraser, Mark Hamill, all to agree for me to put the photos in the book.
Photos can make it easier to jump into the story at any point…
Yeah, there’s so much about different characters, and concepts that people might not know, or projects that people might not know, and “How do you describe that, and make it interesting?” So yeah, that seemed to be the way to do it for me.
You’ve worked on a lot of incredible movies, how did you decide which ones to cover?
Rather than write about every single movie in great detail, I thought I’d tell one or two stories from each movie, and try and get as many projects in that seem suitable. So, not every film is in there, but I think the most important ones, and some of the TV series, are as well. So, I was trying to give an idea of what my life and career has been like, as a puppeteer and a puppet designer. The ebbs and flows, the ups and downs, and the various different challenges from along the way. Most of the major films get some kind of mention, if not, a full description.
Finally, what do you want the reader to take away after reading My Life With Animatronics. Movies, Puppets and Beyond?
I’d like them to kind of understand and appreciate the love of puppetry that I have. That’s what I’m trying to put across, and how I’ve been so lucky, and so privileged to do what I do. Because, what I do, I absolutely love. I’ve loved it since I was a kid, and I’ve had an entire career doing it, so, yeah, if people can get a bit of that coming through, just how much I feel I’ve been really lucky, and how much I appreciate what I’ve been able to do, then that would be great.
Dave Barclay’s website is here.
