Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance: Gavin Bocquet talks creating Thra

Hidden Remote had the opportunity to talk to Gavin Bocquet, Production Designer for The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance. Check out what we learned about creating a realistic puppet world filled with detail and wonder!

Gavin Bocquet is no stranger to creating epic and amazing environments. When the original Dark Crystal film was being made, he was across the hall getting to know Yoda on a set for just one of the Star Wars films he’s helped create.

I can well assure you that you’ve seen his work much more than you realize. From the second I saw the trailer for The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance, I was already captured and curious.

There is very little that could be considered spoiler material contained in our conversation, but I still recommend you see this incredible prequel to The Dark Crystal, first.

This interview touches on all the work, creativity, challenges, techniques, and minds behind designing and bringing (back) to life a fantasy world we’ve only partly experienced.

Mr. Bocquet shares how the characters and world of the Dark Crystal were formed, and gives us the knowledge behind the magic of this production. Our talk about how he worked with a brilliant and exceptional team to recreate and expand the world of Thra is telling, humorous, and even brought a tear to my eye in the end.

Hidden Remote: Let’s start with the obvious, how did you get involved with this project?

Gavin Bocquet: I had actually met Louis [Leterrier] — socially a couple of times by some strange synchronicity — so there was some knowledge of each other. When I read scripts and spoke with Louis, it became immediately obvious that it was going to be a pretty interesting project, and the enthusiasm that Louis was going to bring to it. Once that phone call happens, next day it’s a blank piece of paper and you have to start thinking.

HR: I know you only had 180 days on set, so you had a lot to do really quickly, right?

GB: For the original, they almost had two or three years to prep for about 30 sets. We had five or six months for 82. That shows a sign of the times, really. Everything is required yesterday, rather than in a couple of days’ time. We knew we had to work at speed, and Jeffrey Addiss and Will Matthews, the head writers, were always ahead of us and that was really valuable.

HR: Did you have some “extra” time, as it goes in the production industry, because you didn’t have to scout locations and do a lot of that travel that usually comes with productions?

GB: Yes. In theory, we had no location shots apart from one evening in the car park of the studio. It was classified as a location shoot because of the fire we were doing for the funeral pyre. There was a second unit shoot through a woodland area to the west of London for some background plates for the Skeksis carriage chase.

HR: I read that you said it was about 80% new material that you had to come up with. Was that challenging or were you excited with the blank slate?

GB: That was one of our biggest challenges, replicating that original film. We needed to get that right so the audience and fans would initially believe they were in the same world. Then the idea of moving into 5, 6, 7 key other environments, the audience would find easier to connect to once they felt secure in the world of the Skeksis castle.

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Once that was underway with the Art Department, reproducing those sets, the next step, the blank piece of paper of the new set, it’s exciting and challenging, and worrying at the same time.

HR: I knew that you had the challenges with your platform system you made so you would have the different heights of the characters. Was there something else that you were concerned about going into it where you thought, “I don’t know how we’re going to overcome this?”

GB: Just because we were Dark Crystal and building things didn’t mean that we had a wildly bigger budget than other shows that are equivalent. Obviously, there was no location money required so that went toward the Art Department. But I think our biggest challenge was knowing how detailed these sets had to be. You just think, in the time and money you have, is that possible?

No environment on Earth or anywhere is one person’s design, even if you’re looking in your own house, there’s always different people’s design influence in that environment, which gives it character. So I always value the creative input from many areas in the Art Department, whether it’s from the set designers, the concept artists, or the graphic designers. The prop makers themselves are always very involved. We were very lucky and managed to gather a very creative crew together. Which somehow, I managed to steer in the right direction.

HR: Regarding the crew, I wrote in my review that there was sort of a legacy environment going on from Lisa Henson to Toby Froud. I read recently that you said there were also a lot of crew members that had parents on the first set. So was that element going on in everyone’s mind, or is it just kind of a fun fact?

GB: It’s definitely a fun fact, certainly. It did give you a little bit of a personality about the production. And I know Lisa always mentioned, and I think Brian did, too, how the original film had a very friendly, together feel on it. And she wanted to bring that sort of family, together spirit onto this show, which I think we achieved, very much. And on the construction side, having people who were connected to the original film was probably something that helped quantify that feeling.

HR: One of the things that I liked a lot, as a bit of a fangirl, was the library at Ha’rar. I thought that was absolutely immense. How many of those books were really there, and are they books or were they more foam creations like those you did with the Warcraft movie set?

GB: There was a mixture, really. There were, as there often are with things we do, levels of making that art of illusion. Of the thousands that were made, there were some key closeup books, basically the back of the bookbinding rather than the book, itself. And then there was a middle ground and a background, which were molded blocks of maybe 10 books out of polystyrene.

You can never do everything to 100 percent detail. The art of illusion is to make everything work in the foreground and drop back. Obviously, HD in the recent years has made that harder. But I think everything you see in the physical element of the library up to about 16 feet — which in Gelfling size is really about 32 feet — was physically there.

I have to say, the challenge of the whole of Ha’rar and the Vapran clan, the more sophisticated clan of Gelflings, we wanted something rather extraordinary and sculptural, rather elegant in that way. To give you, the audience, the feeling you were in a completely authentic environment in those worlds, even though we did some clever things with how we put things together. If we had designed everything in a completely sculptural way, we probably wouldn’t have had the money to do what we did.

HR: It’s really creative, very impressive. That’s why I was asking how much of it was created, as opposed to just being made from something that already exists.

GB: The technology in the original film was a bit different. More recently with 3D printers, we can make some things in a more technically advanced way, which gave us advantages. For instance, we had four little 3D printers in the Art Department, which would make models from our digital designs. Something like the Skeksis carriage, that started as a series of drawings, very quickly became a 3D sculpt by one of our digital sculptors.

Those ideas were then printed on our puppet 3D printer. Then when that was approved, that same digital file would go to the big 5-Axis, cut them out of poly, and we’d have the full-size Skeksis carriage in six or seven pieces. We had a lot of that going on, although we did also have about 20 physical sculptors.

HR: I felt, as a viewer, maybe I was picking up some influence from Game of Thrones, even James Cameron’s Avatar look to it. I wondered, were these things influences on you? Or did you have other influences, as well?

GB: I think everything you see either in film or in real life, is an influence in your library of thought as a designer. I was traveling, just literally as we were starting, and in the foyer of the arrival hall at Lanzarote Airport, there were four pieces of lava rock on display, like 10 feet high, with brilliant texture. I asked my son, who reluctantly stood in front of these rocks and put his hand out [for a photo]. That became the reference for the type of volcanic rock you see in Grottan.

Those influences can come from basically anywhere in life. And the scale, I think when you look at Game of Thrones, you’re very aware of where you are in the story. It was really important, geographically, to help the storytelling by making Stone in the Woods, Ha’rar, The Crystal Desert, very noticeably different.

When you look at Game of Thrones, I think they achieved the same thing. You automatically knew whose environment you were in. So everything is an influence, from the first time you see something, I think. If things do progress to another series, there’s another four clans to explore, and one’s the sea-faring — which is exciting — with ships.

HR: Well I could keep you here all day because this is so interesting to me, personally. The last thing I’ll ask is, what do you think Jim Henson would think of how this turned out?

GB: I think Lisa must be incredibly pleased and proud of how it seems to be going down. But she must also be tinged with a slight sadness that her dad couldn’t see this. I think the biggest plus for me, funnily enough, was that Brian was there, and Brian was half of Jim, you know?

Brian came up to me about halfway through and thanked me greatly for doing what we were doing. He’s a very, very honest, lovely man — you could tell he was really moved. It must have been quite an extraordinary experience for him, coming back 30 or 40 years later to see this. To know what Jim would’ve thought about it, I think I have to say base it on how Brian seemed to react to it. He seems to feel that we always did good honor to that original film.

I really enjoyed this chat and give my deepest thanks to Gavin for talking with Hidden Remote and sharing all of these magical truths with us! I am hopeful for a second installment of The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance on Netflix. While this interview was edited for time, I’m looking forward to another round if we can get that second season. Maybe we can even get behind those scenes during creation, if we’re lucky! We’ll keep you posted.

The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance is streaming now on Netflix!