You always want to aim high.
I think we live in an entertainment world where performers like to flaunt how great they are. The Conchords don't do that. Even when they stumble onstage, people like it.
'Muppets' is incredibly analog, 'Alice' is very digital.
It's a beacon of hope in a dark world. You watch 'The Muppets' and you're smiling for an hour and a half, and then you go outside, and the economy is in crisis.
Personally, I've always liked movies about big diamonds, like 'Pink Panther' and 'The Thomas Crown Affair.' I've always found those films really interesting, and they have a good energy about them, which I like.
I've always liked the Muppets. I watched 'The Muppet Show' in England every week as a child. The show was originally broadcast in England.
Muppet films are never easy to film 'cause Muppets have no legs.
I remember watching 'The Muppet Show' in the '70s. I was six or seven, and my dad watched it with me, and my grandparents watched it with me, and we're all laughing throughout, but I think we were probably laughing at different things.
The Muppets are always really positive when they come across adversity, and they always have the ability to see the good in people.
'The Muppet Show' spoke to me at 5, and it speaks to me in my late 30s in the same way.
If you know people, it's so much more fun working with them because it's like your family is back together again.
'The Muppets' is really about innocence and charm and sweetness and light and having hope - and stupid gags.
'Muppets' was very much an exercise in anti-CG and the anti-effects world. It was very much in camera. We wanted to create a world where tangible puppets walked around and talked to each other. You could touch them. You could meet them.
In England, 'The Muppet Show' is very much seen as an English thing. So for us in the U.K., it is one of the treasures of the history of children's TV and of comedy, basically.
'Alice' is effectively a story about a game of cards. 'Through the Looking Glass' is a story of chess.
When you try to teach children things, you're trying not necessarily to do it directly.
I love the idea of exploring the Victorian imagination and what Victorians thought the world of fantasy would look like.
Lewis Carroll, you see, wasn't really interested in telling an exciting story. Well, he wasn't interested in things like cause and effect or a linear narrative. It's surreal, it's absurd, it's wordplay, it's satirical, it's analyzing itself, it's funny, it's an enormous challenge.
Cable news is 24 hours long, so you have to fill it up with something.
No, the Muppets are not communist. And the character of Tex Richman is not an allegory for capitalism in any way. The character is called Tex Richman.
