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The Dark Crystal: Age Of Resistance020 | WWW.SCIFINOW.CO.UK
huge warehouse complex just outside of London is the last place you’d expect
to fi nd a magical forest dwelling, vast but built for inhabitants just half the
size of the average human. And yet that’s where SciFiNow found itself, hiding
behind a tree, watching as Louis Leterrier gave directions to a cluster of three-
foot-high elf-like creatures, all decked out like a militia clothed in armour made
from the natural world. The creatures turn their faces to Leterrier as he talks to
them, nodding along in understanding, before taking up their start positions
and running the take again. It’s only when you look closely that you spot the
puppeteers crouched in a trench beneath the set, their hands raised above their
heads, operating the puppets while watching screens that show them what’s
happening above them.
If, like many children of the Eighties, your nights were haunted by images of Skeksis and
horrifyingly long-legged creatures running across alien landscapes, then you would recognise this
little elf militia immediately – they are Gelfl ing, the stars of Jim Henson’s The Dark Crystal, and the
returning stars of Netfl ix and The Jim Henson Company’s The Dark Crystal: Age Of Resistance.
The ten-part series is set years before the fi lm, with the monstrous Skeksis acting as the seemingly
benevolent overlords of the Gelfl ing race, bending the magical powers of the Crystal for their own
evil purposes and corrupting the land around them. The series follows three Gelfl ing who stumble
across the Skeksis’ true intentions, and are forced to make a stand against them to protect their
people and their land from annihilation.
Despite the original fi lm being 37 years old, it has never really gone away – both in a literal sense
and a fi gurative one. It has lived on in tie-in novels and comic books, but also in the hearts of those
who were entranced by it in their youth, and those are the very same people who are now bringing
it back. “The Dark Crystal is a movie I saw a little too young, it shocked me a little bit and never left
my mind,” director and producer Louis Leterrier says. He tells us it’s the sort of fi lm he has returned to
time and again throughout his life and his career, fi nding multiple layers in it. He calls it “this weird
UFO of a movie that didn’t belong in the Eighties. It was ahead of its time and a little bit obsolete at
the same time because it was done with puppets,” and says it’s “this ugly-beautiful thing that you can’t
stop watching, it’s mesmerising”.
Leterrier’s involvement in the project dates back to shortly after the release of his fi lm Clash Of The
Titans, when he asked his agent to set up a meeting for him with The Jim Henson Company, simply
because he’d always been such a huge fan of their work. At the time the Henson Company had been
trying to get a Dark Crystal sequel off the ground for a while, and they asked Leterrier to come on
board, but a round of pitching to studios in 2012 came to nothing. “[A]ll the studios were just like
‘nah, we want Transformers’,” Leterrier says of the fi lm climate at the time, adding that many people
just didn’t know what The Dark Crystal was: “They were like ‘oh yeah, the David Bowie movie!’ I’m
like ‘no, the other one...’” he says, referring to The Jim Henson Company’s other nightmare-inducing
Eighties classic Labyrinth.
But those initial rejections ended up being a boon for the project, as Leterrier was fi nding himself
less and less interested in telling the story of a sequel. “[T]here was a whole bunch of elaborated
ideas from Jim Henson and Frank Oz, the story that led to the movie, and that stuff was so interesting
to me that eventually I was like, you know what? I’d love to take a look at what happened before
the movie. It’s such a big canvas that it might not even be a movie, it might be a series.” And so
they worked the project up as a prequel series, bringing on board a pair of writers, Jeff Addiss and
Will Matthews, who were massive fans of the fi lm. Javier Grillo-Marxuach was added to the writing
The fi lm will feature groundbreaking puppets effects work in
much the same way that the original Jim Henson fi lm did. It’s
a mixture of new techniques and classic designs.