Louis Leter­ri­er on real­is­ing a life­long dream with The Dark Crys­tal: Age of Resistance

He may be best known for helm­ing high-con­cept genre fare like The Trans­porter and Clash of the Titans, but Louis Leter­ri­er owes his love of sto­ry­telling to the vivid felt fan­tasies of Jim Hen­son. So when the oppor­tu­ni­ty to direct a pre­quel to the cher­ished 1982 fam­i­ly adven­ture The Dark Crys­tal for Net­flix pre­sent­ed itself, the French film­mak­er didn’t hesitate.

At an exhi­bi­tion at London’s BFI South­bank, com­pris­ing icon­ic sets and char­ac­ters from both the film and forth­com­ing series, Leter­ri­er revealed how The Dark Crys­tal: Age of Resis­tance allowed him to realise a life­long dream, work­ing close­ly with Henson’s daugh­ter, Lisa and even attend­ing ​‘pup­pet school’ to bring the colour­ful world of Thra to a whole new audience.

“There was a book about the mak­ing of The Dark Crys­tal, by Bri­an Froud, that came out after the film was released, and that book, along with the film, are what first gave me the crazy dream of want­i­ng to become a sto­ry­teller and a film­mak­er. All these old pic­tures from the set where it’s 15 pup­peteers hid­ing under the stage, oper­at­ing the char­ac­ters, that just fas­ci­nat­ed me as a kid.

“Like so many peo­ple around the world, I was raised on Jim Hen­son. Whether it was Sesame Street or The Mup­pet Show, his cre­ations were the first exam­ples of visu­al sto­ry­telling that real­ly cap­tured my imag­i­na­tion. There’s a pow­er and a tac­tile beau­ty to Jim’s art that is still so mov­ing. There’s a rea­son his name is still on the title: he’s the rea­son we want­ed to return to The Dark Crys­tal and the rea­son peo­ple are inter­est­ed in this new series. I’m just the guy car­ry­ing the flame.

“I fell into mak­ing action movies. I was always more inter­est­ed in stuff like The Dark Crys­tal, but when I was 26 a movie fell into my lap – it was The Trans­porter, and it did well enough that I was allowed then to make a more films. It’s easy to become pigeon­holed when you have a suc­cess­ful movie, but I’m grate­ful for that expe­ri­ence. The main thing I brought to The Dark Crys­tal from my action movie days was this sense of world-build­ing. Whether it’s a fist fight between Jason Statham and who­ev­er, or a war between the Gelfling and the Skek­sis, you’re tak­ing the audi­ence on a jour­ney and in many ways it’s the same sensibility.

“I love cre­at­ing big worlds – whether it’s action or fan­ta­sy of what­ev­er – and I want­ed to know how Jim did it. So I met with Lisa Hen­son, who had the rights to the Dark Crys­tal sto­ry, not as a direc­tor but as a fan who had a thou­sand ques­tions about her father’s work. She told me that they were think­ing about doing a Dark Crys­tal pre­quel, and asked if I want­ed to be involved, so of course I had to say yes.

“I approached it from a fan point of view. I want­ed to answer ques­tions about the sto­ry and the world, like what hap­pened to this civil­i­sa­tion, what made them go extinct? How did they become gaslit by this rul­ing class? What was the tip­ping point? I was very inter­est­ed in explor­ing that, and the inten­tion was always to make it so that peo­ple can watch this series and go straight into the film. It’s been a long jour­ney – eight years – and I was real­ly helped by the fact that Net­flix gave us their full sup­port from the begin­ning and financed a short film that allowed us to real­ly fig­ure out what we were doing.

“They even paid for me to go to pup­pet school. Pup­pets have been shot in a cer­tain way for many many years, and I need­ed to under­stand how that worked, because the sto­ry demands real pup­pets. Of course we added some CG, but we didn’t want to change how things had been done before. So I first went to Atlanta and to New York and a few dif­fer­ent places to see the orig­i­nal pup­pets and lit­er­al­ly open them, look under the hood and see what was inside them. I put my hand in them, move them around, and got to learn the machin­ery of pup­peteer­ing. With­out that, I wouldn’t have known how to shoot the series.

“I must say the pup­peteers are the real unsung heroes, because no one will see them ever – their role is to be com­plete­ly hid­den – and yet they bring these pup­pets to life with their move­ments and their voic­es. Their voic­es are even­tu­al­ly replaced by voice actors, but the pup­peteers deter­mine so much about each char­ac­ter. They’re the real mag­ic of The Dark Crystal.”

The Dark Crys­tal: Age of Resis­tance launch­es on Net­flix on 30 August. Into Thra, The Dark Crys­tal: Age of Resis­tance Exhi­bi­tion runs from 23 August to 6 Sep­tem­ber at the BFI Southbank.