Phillip Huber has been a puppeteer/actor/performer for over thirty years. Recently his work as an artist was featured in last year’s surprise comedy hit Being John Malkovich, directed by music video director Spike Jonze. The “Dance of Despair” sequence during the opening of the film and the “Heloise and Abelard” street performance, in which he manipulated bizarre marionette reactions of John Cusack and Katherine Keener, were some of the highlights of this beautiful surreal film. Huber also operates the Huber Marionettes (with director /choreographer David Alexander); a traveling showcase of his work where he displays original performances with his own custom designed marionettes.

 

The Huber Marionettes have been seen on the Tonight Show, CNN Showbiz today, in a pre-broadway tour of Busker alley and in their own touring show , Suspended Animation. In this age of computer generated effects created by legions of artists, Huber’s singular talents stand out as an example of an unfiltered visual form, created solely by the human hand.

 

How long have you been working as a puppeteer?

I’ve been a professional for 32 years.

 

What inspired you to enter this art form?

I was motivated by the television shows of the period. Kukla, Fran, and Ollie and Howdy Doody were two shows that I was very enamored with and they were very influential on me. I was extremely shy as a child and my mother gave me a hand puppet when I was three years old. That gave me an outlet for my expression. I could hide behind the sofa and do shows with this hand puppet. Later, I was given other hand puppets as gifts. That was the start of it for me. I enjoyed being in the background and projecting a personality through the puppets.

 

Do you recall the first time you performed in front of an audience?

I was seven years old and the show was for the neighborhood children and family groups.

 

Did you construct your own puppets at first?

No. I was modifying commercial puppets. I was adding bits and pieces to the costumes. But they were hand puppets so they were very simple. When I was eleven or twelve I started experimenting wit marionettes. My very first attempts were re-building stuffed toys. I would build a wooden skeleton (armature) and stick it inside a stuffed toy and create a marionette. It wasn’t until I was fifteen years old that I started to truly build marionettes from scratch. I learned from Library books only. There were no professional puppeteers where I lived, A small town in Illinois. So I got all the books I could and started by “trial and error” techniques of construction. I continued on from there and started touring professionally. I created a variety show and performed it while attending High school and college.

 

Did you attend an arts college?

It was a small liberal arts college- Principia, in southern Illinois. The great thing about it was they allowed me a great deal of course flexibility. I was able to create my own curriculum. They allowed me to teach a course on puppetry and to create (for my senior drama project) a huge production of Mozart’s the Magic Flute. For that project I built over twenty-five marionettes and trained six novice puppeteers and designed and supervised the building of a double bridge marionette stage. It was a huge project for me. I think I learned what not to do as much as what to do correctly.

            When I was fifteen I discovered a national organization called the Puppeteers of American, and I joined. They published a periodical called The Puppetry Journal and for the first time I was able to read about professional puppeteers. Once a year they would hold a festival. I attended my very first festival in St Louis. There, I met professional puppeteers for the first time and was able to talk with them. They offered helpful encouragement and guidance. They saw my first puppets and gave me advice. That was a major turning point for me. I was really inspired by some of those puppeteers, many of which were at the end of their careers at that point. One of them was Frank Paris, a puppeteer who worked all over the world. He was famous for working at Radio City Music Hall and had rather large marionettes. He always worked solo in what is called 'cabaret style'. He was right out in front with the puppets. The spotlight was on the puppet and he was dressed in black. He was a great inspiration to me.

 

Were you ever involved with any other media other than stage performances?

Three days after graduation from college I was offered a job with a professional puppeteer in California, Tony Urbano. At the time he was doing the puppetry for a TV show called Dusty's Treehouse. It was syndicated and appeared all over the U.S. I performed several times on that show. [Tony] was also involved with a lot of television commercials and I worked on a great many of them using all kinds of puppetry. There were even a couple of times where he was doing special effects for low budget horror films-mostly involving bats. It was just on the fringe of what you would call special effects.

 

How was the experience of working on films and commercials different from the stage performances?

Well, I enjoyed every experience I was involved with. I am extremely patient. In film, patience is the number one thing you need. I realized very early on that film and commercials involve a great amount of sitting around and waiting for the next shot to be set up.

 

Around that time what other areas or mediums did you work, in?

I appeared as a variety performer on a number of TV shows. I appeared on the Tonight how. I worked on The Muppets & John Denver Christmas Special that they did in 1979. So I continued to have a lot of experiences in other areas of puppetry. My focus after leaving Urbano was primarily on marionettes. Marionettes are much more difficult to use in the medium of film and television. They don't seem to be in demand very much now. Especially, because the Muppets have become such a great success. Unfortunately producers lose any sense of imagination regarding other kinds of puppetry that may work for them. I quickly found that whenever I went into a meeting [with a producer] to discuss the usage of puppets in a commercial or television show, the first thing out of the producer's mouth was, "We want a Muppet-like character." Even though Henson has been such a wonderful influence on puppetry, there is also that phenomenon when something becomes so successful that it completely takes over the art form. Suddenly everything became hand and rod puppets.

 

How were you approached to work on BJM?

About a year before filming began, my office manager was requested to send videotape [of my work] to the Production Company. We didn't hear anything from them for several months. Then, three months before they were going to start to shoot the film, [the producers] called around to various puppeteers in LA. At some point they called my office and they asked if they could come in and see my workshop and talk with me. They were so impressed with what they saw they basically offered me the job on the spot. The problem was the puppets needed to be completed and in the hands of the actors within only three weeks. Not only because the actors needed to get comfortable with the puppets but so the producers could decide how the puppet scenes would work within the film. It was just not enough time. It takes me about 200-400 hours to complete just one marionette. Also, I had other commitments. I had just completed [a tour] in Paris right before this interview. It turned out [the producers] didn't feel they could work around my schedule. So they went out and searched for other people to build the puppets. They found another company [Images in Motion]. This company had only built stop-motion puppets. They had no experience with marionettes. They did have experience with all the latest building materials and they made the marionettes in casting resin. They were able to complete the puppets on time and within the film's budget. I didn't hear anything more [from the Production Company] for about six months and then they called me and said they needed me to work the puppets for some scenes. I told them I had to examine the puppets first because marionettes are built to do specific movements. The producers sent me a video of John Malkovich doing the Dance of Despair, which they wanted duplicated with the marionette. I saw that they had chosen movements which were virtually impossible to duplicate with a marionette-forward summersaults, back handsprings, wall-walks, very rapid movements and sudden stops. All of these are the worst possible things to attempt with a marionette. But I looked at the puppets and decided I could modify them and attempt the movements. I was really unsure about the summersault. I felt they would have to cut away halfway through the move so I could untangle the puppet and bring it up to a standing position. Later the director [Jonze] said he did not want to do that. He wanted the summersault and the back handspring to be all in one movement. That was the biggest challenge for me technically. I literally had to modify every joint in the puppet. I had about six and a half weeks to do all the modifications and work out the movements. They put up the entire set in my garage so I could rehearse easily.

That was the only way I agreed to take on the project, if they allowed me plenty of time to do this. All principal photography was finished, so they gave me total freedom to complete this. They scheduled the puppet shoot when I was ready.

 

What did you think of the work that was done on the Marionettes by Images in Motion?

I thought they did a beautiful job! Absolutely incredible considering they had never worked with marionettes before. Unfortunately, they were not aware of what the choreography would be like. That is a crucial factor. It's something that producers or directors don't really understand when they decide to use puppetry. You really must know what the final concept will be when you start the building process.

 

How were the marionettes articulated?

 

The only special joints were articulated toes on the feet, which was my recommendation to the director, early on. (Jonze) had picked my brain at the beginning and asked me what should be put into the puppets. I had -a marionette with articulated toes that enabled it to go into a kneeling position very comfortably. The other thing they wanted was face animation. I have marionettes with what's called 'double eye animation'. That means the eyeballs are capable of moving side to side and with separate eyelids that will slide over them to close. The producers wanted this in these tiny marionettes. The marionettes are only twenty four inches tall. It must have been a great challenge for Images in Motion to build that animation into the heads. And it was extremely fragile. I was repairing it constantly. When you make something that tiny, it is so delicate that any shock will mess it up.

We were working on the Heloise and Abelard scene (which was written for me to perform, after they saw what I did with the Dance of Despair). We were filming the long shot exterior scenes first with John Cusack holding the puppets. When he got punched, there were a couple of takes where he actually threw the puppets in the air. They slammed against the building behind him and then slammed onto the concrete. I had to pick up these puppets after each take, untangle and reset them and put them back into the stage to shoot another take. The trouble was, the next week we would be shooting all the close-ups and I was going to be doing all this delicate manipulation with the same marionettes. Needless to say, I had to spend several days repairing the puppets. On that take when [Cusack] smashed the puppet against the building, the puppet's eye mechanism fell into the back of its head. It was a good thing they were long shots so you couldn't see that Heloise looked like a zombie! (Laughs.)

 

How many marionettes were made for the film?

I modified four of them. There were seven puppets total.

 

The opening of the film features the Dance of Despair-an incredibly lifelike interpretive dance with marionettes. How long did it take to film?

That sequence by itself took six days to shoot.

 

 How did the director set it up? Did you perform it straight through with multiple cameras?

[Jonze] had only one camera. He wanted to shoot in sequence. I told him that would be very difficult because at certain points I would have to stop and re-string the marionettes. So, it meant that sequence would be impossible to shoot in real time. It was shot in segments and not in order. The first part of Dance that was shot was the marionette hitting a drinking glass off a table to smash a mirror. That was real! It took three operators to perform that. One operator had to pull the string that guides the drinking glass into the mirror. One person had to assist me by pulling a string that swung the puppet's arm horizontally. I manipulated the rest of the puppet's movements leading up to the grab of the glass. We all had to work in perfect unison. We had to shoot twenty eight takes or so before we got it.

Have people approached you and asked if there were any post effects/digital work done with the puppets? If none, are people surprised by that?

They have. The majority of people think there was some digital enhancement. They are surprised to discover there was none. The only camera trick used was in a shot, which required a puppet to freeze in a pose. That was difficult because the puppet was moving too quickly to stop completely on cue. Marionettes don't stop dead in their tracks if they have been moving quickly because they are basically a pendulum. We solved the problem by starting in the final pose. I analyzed all the movements leading up to the pose and performed it in reverse and they shot it in reverse. This was only about three seconds in length but it was pure puppeteering anyway.

 

There is a (fake) documentary in the film where Malkovich (Controlled by Cusack's character) is teaching a class of students how to perform as puppeteers. He instructs one student to 'act' with the puppet. Do you agree with that philosophy?

It's like method acting taken to the extreme. I do think the puppeteer needs to be an actor and I do think you (as a performer) need to think about your performance in order to make it work. You have to be involved with the character and become absorbed into it. I don't think you physically have to weep in order to make the puppet weep. That is a step that I wouldn't take. Quite often, when I am operating a marionette, I am feeling the emotions the marionette is feeling. What I am trying NOT to do is express it on my face. I try to keep it internal. Yes, a puppeteer has to be a good actor. Is a good actor necessarily a good puppeteer? The reverse is not always true. A good puppeteer has a personality that doesn't mind stepping into the background. Most actors like to be in the foreground and take center stage and that's where the puppet is supposed to be.

 

Based on the success on this film, would you continue to work on other films given the

right opportunity?

Yes, if I had the right opportunity and the right circumstances I would be happy to. I enjoyed every minute of making (the film). It was extremely challenging. There were times when it was extremely frustrating, but ultimately it was an incredible learning experience.

 

 

Special Thanks to David Alexander and Phillip Huber. Photos courtesy of Suspended Animation and from the collection of the author

 

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