With a name like Meat Puppet, Eros V’s WTF short was always going to turn heads. The story of a man-child, obsessed with toys, who finds himself possessed by a puppet, the film continues the director’s streak of creating some of the most exciting genre shorts on the circuit. A blend of comedy and horror, Meat Puppet has already scooped awards at SXSW and Neuchâtel and is now one of just five films shortlisted for this year’s Best British Short BIFA award. Riding the wave of this acclaim, we caught up with Eros to discuss how a conversation with The Jim Henson Company inspired the short, the unusual challenges actors David Jonsson and Máiréad Tyers had to master for their roles and the lo-fi techniques behind the magic trick of bringing a puppet to life on a shoestring budget.
[The following interview is also available to watch at the end of this article.]
What I love about your short film work is that they’re this mix of genre filmmaking and comedy, but it seems to me that the most important element is your films’ entertainment value. How would you introduce your filmmaking to someone who hasn’t seen your work before and what inspired you to take this route in filmmaking?
That is a fantastic question. To the extent that there can be a philosophy when you’re making short films and learning what your style is going to be and the sort of stories you want to tell, I tend to go for balls to the wall, all killer no filler thrill ride entertainment with a very bizarre twist. I grew up watching crazy genre movies, very much just watching whatever I could get my hands on. So it meant a lot of these big high concept Hollywood blockbusters. My family aren’t in film, there wasn’t much understanding of how film really worked so for me in a weird way it was always like a beginner’s mind.
I didn’t go to film school, I used to act so that was my way into the industry. I had a sense of how sets work but in terms of the ideas I came to, I always came back to something bombastic and way too big for the budgets that I actually get in reality. When I sit down to think of an idea it’s always something big and crazy, then usually the challenge is to try and distil it in a way. Effectively I love films that are fun. For me, every film should have some kind of narrative, some kind of purpose and ideally be as crazy and out there as possible. It’s those kind of confluence things that I’m trying to work on through these shorts. With Meat Puppet feels like it’s getting there I like to think.
What every idea starts with is some kind of funny image and the funny image was this tiny puppet that’s become possessed and sentient that’s still attached to this dying body.
Crazy and unpredictable is definitely how I’d describe your work. Where did the inspiration for the wild idea of Meat Puppet come from?
It’s an equally bizarre story. A couple of shorts previous to this I made a film called Double Tap which is a horror movie about Instagram. For reasons that I’ll never understand someone at the Jim Henson Company who make The Muppets watched it, reached out and said would you make something weird but involving puppets? I thought about it and came up with the idea, went back to them and said how about this, and they were like, “No. Not interested. Too weird!” so I was left with this script/concept.
Basically what every idea starts with is some kind of funny image and the funny image was this tiny puppet that’s become possessed and sentient that’s still attached to this dying body. It could have just been a very funny short and it is, but then it became a question of what’s the story? Why would this happen to a person? Then pretty quickly it became that it’s probably going to happen to an immature person who is adamantly refusing to be a grown-up and needs to be effectively trapped into a tiny childlike toy so that he can learn the value of of being a grown-up and everything he had that he threw away. That became the narrative once that crystallized. It let me effectively get away with/persuade people to do all of the crazy shit that happens on top of it in the film. That was the genesis, it sort of started as a kind of what if and spiralled into what it’s become.
I’m a 46 year old man but I read the title “Meat Puppet” and I start to giggle. What made you go for that name?
Again, because of the stuff that I grew up watching I always try and think of this one-two punch of the title of the film and the premise of the film and that they should work in harmony. I think about titles like Bruce Almighty, the idea of a random guy being given the power of god and how that title perfectly captures the idea of the script. With this one it was obviously quite hard. How do you figure out a title for a film that’s about a guy who’s trapped in a puppet and has to move around this nearly dead body? Weirdly back when I was acting I did this TV show with a director called David S. Goyer, who did a lot of the Blade movies and Man of Steel, and he used to affectionately call all of the actors his “meat puppets” so I always had that phrase in my head. When I was thinking of what to call it, it just kind of popped out and I was like, “Well that’s perfect” because it’s basically this puppet that has to move around this dying body in this flip of what you’d expect, so that was where it came from. At one point we talked about changing it because I was thinking, it’s kind of funny but we could experiment with it and everybody was like “No, it’s perfect, you shouldn’t touch it!” so it stuck.
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It’s just got loads of meanings and I think once you’ve got a title that does that, that’s usually a winning formula. What’s great about it is it lets you know what your film is, as when you’re when you’re making a film the biggest challenge is actually knowing what the hell you’re making. It’s easy to look at the end result and think these guys knew what they were doing all along but that’s never a given. Having a title that tells me what it is means that whenever you have ideas about how you’re going to shoot it and how you’re going to write it, you can almost check back in and ask, “Does that actually work? Does that meet the premise itself?”
When you think about it, underneath the crazy concept of this possessed puppet there’s actually quite a grounded story of this young man who needs to grow up. What made you want to tackle that particular theme in this film?
I’m a pretty nerdy person and I will unashamedly spend my Saturday morning watching Tokyo Ghoul or some random anime thing, which as someone who’s about to turn 30 is not necessarily what one’s expected to be doing, not that there’s anything wrong with it. There is this thing that I’ve felt in my life where you do get to a point where you’ve got to balance these things and you can’t necessarily be sat on your sofa playing Playstation and watching anime all day. It’s not to say you have to throw it out the window but you have to find a balance. It was that as a general idea about what it means to grow up. As I said, the way it works for me is often it starts with the image, with the idea itself and then you kind of work backwards and sometimes I find out what I was thinking after the fact.
When I was a kid I had what felt like four DVDs – Liar Liar, Bruce Almighty, Big and basically anything Jim Carrey related – and all of those films they’re absolutely batshit bizarre high concept ideas but, they always hang on something very fundamental and relatable to anyone and everyone. That’s something that I’ve always wanted to try to do. In some ways, the easiest bit is having the crazy idea the hard bit is making the crazy idea resonate or feel relatable so that when people watch it they’re like, “I see, I understand now why this idea has purpose”. In this case it was just a personal observation about what it means to grow up and I hope that other people see it and vibe with it a little bit.
The way it works for me is often it starts with the image, with the idea itself and then you kind of work backwards and sometimes I find out what I was thinking after the fact.
Let’s talk puppets. You mentioned the Henson Company earlier and that’s the style of puppet we see here, but when you think of genre filmmaking you expect something much more sinister or creepy like Puppet Master or Child’s Play. What made you go for this design/look for the puppet?
A confluence of things. The general thing is that form fits function, this is ultimately a story about a person that needs to grow up. Early on Hugh Purves our amazing puppet designer, who also was the lead puppeteer said, “Do we want to give it human eyes?” and had so many amazing ideas because he’s such a talented guy. What it came down to in the end for us both was that this puppet needed to feel childlike. It needed to feel like the physical embodiment of his inner child so distinctly kiddy and sweet and cute and sort of dumb because what it’s trying to do is so life or death and serious. The entire film is this guy trying to sort the situation out and what makes that funnier and thematically relevant is that the puppet itself is kiddy and childish.
What’s interesting with puppets is that the expression you get out of them and the versatility of that is related to what little features you give them.
Part of that is also preference. I really like things that are cute/scary and the style of it feeling almost muppet-esque was very important. We had so many discussions about how humanoid adjacent to make it because what’s interesting with puppets is that the expression you get out of them and the versatility of that is related to what little features you give them. The biggest reference that we used was the modern The Muppets movie with Jason Seagull and Amy Adams where they’ve got the main puppet Walter who’s orange and feels very humanoid, like he’s supposed to feel like a human in contrast to say Kermit who is much more puppet-esque. That was why we ended up going with decisions like giving the puppet ears and various things like that. Hugh brought in the eyes that are joined together with this eyebrow which is one of his trademark things that he likes to do and is so effective on screen because it’s so vivid. No matter where you put the puppet, even in a very wide shot, you can really tell where it’s looking and it feels very alive. And then the other thing was I wanted it to have a mullet because I thought it’d be funny. So yeah, it’s a mixture of very deep thinking and just dumb shit of me being, “Let’s give it a mullet” and he was like, “Fine”.
I’m also interested in how you brought the puppet to life. There are some scenes you watch and you think okay that’s puppetry but there are other scenes where I wondered how you did it – for example when the puppet is dragging Oz across the floor. How much of it is practical effects and how much VFX is in there?
This is the sort of thing where if this were a Hollywood movie everybody would be trying to say that it’s all practical effects, all in camera and there’s no VFX, in the sense that everything is in camera and everything is done for real. But obviously, there are visual effects because we’ve got puppeteers and rods and various things we need to make those things happen. I like to be open about the fact that we do use visual effects because I love them and if you use them in the right way they’re an amazing tool to augment what you can do on set. Bringing the puppet to life and achieving the film was probably the biggest technical challenge. There are something like 100 visual effects shots in there. Most of them are painting out rods or puppeteers but it’s an enormous amount. There are feature films that have much fewer visual effects in them than this 12 minute short.
Usually how I like to think about it is you’re kind of performing a magic trick. There are certain shots where as you say people kind of know how it’s happening but they go along with it. Like the puppet is talking and they know that there’s a guy out shot. But then you have these moments where suddenly people are watching it and they’re like, “Well hang on a second how the hell did that happen?” Those are the moments that embed you in the narrative. Once the illusion is great enough, you forget all about how it’s being done and you just focus on the story. The whole goal of the production was to get to that point. We had to do so much stuff behind the scenes, a lot of prep, a lot of visual effects and it was all for this moment that you pull the curtain away and the puppet would be alive. At that moment you’re just left with the story and that’s why the story is so important.
We had to do so much stuff behind the scenes, a lot of prep, a lot of visual effects and it was all for this moment that you pull the curtain away and the puppet would be alive.
How we did it was we had two puppeteers for the most part in morphsuits and they’re in a lot of shots doing the puppet. We shot loads of plates and painted them out. It was all done in a way that was incredibly lo-fi because we had basically no money so it all had to be incredibly simple. We thought about it a lot and about how we wanted it to feel. There’s the moment for example when they’re having the argument and I wanted that to feel almost like sloppy handheld coverage but what’s interesting with that is you can’t shoot handheld coverage when you need to paint out two puppeteers. You could if you have millions of dollars but if you don’t you can’t really do that. In order to match it we shot her stuff handheld, then we shot the puppet locked off with multiple plates and then we shot a plate of handheld motion which we then applied to the shot. It feels like you’re watching this sloppy scene but in reality, to achieve that you need to shoot it five different ways and comp those things together. It’s all incredibly practical because the actors are there, they’re talking to the puppet, they can touch the puppet, they can do whatever they want but we used a lot of visual effects to facilitate that. It was a bit of a challenge but it’s worth it I think.
And your cast are great in the film especially when they’re either possessing the puppet or talking to it. How did you get your actors involved and what do you think they bring to the film?
The film would not work without Máiréad Tyers and David Jonsson they completely bring it to life! They both had incredibly hard jobs to do in very different ways. Máiréad had such a tough job on set because David was playing a dead body at that stage. We rehearsed everything with the two of them so that we knew what it felt like and then when we got on set Máiréad’s holding the memory of those scenes and applying that to what Hugh the puppeteer is actually doing instead of David. And vice versa for David as he rehearsed the scene, then he’s playing a dead body and then a few months later he’s in a recording studio re-dubbing the lines. It was a big challenge and I’m insanely lucky that they both said yes.
It was a complete shot in the dark with them both. I didn’t expect us to get such an exceptionally world-class cast and that’s probably the thing I’m most grateful for. We reached out to them and sent them it and I guess were very lucky that they both were game and presumably didn’t have anything going on that week, and we’re super up for it. They do a fantastic job because as I said the whole thing is about this illusion. When you strip away all the technical stuff, you’re left with two characters and they managed to keep that despite one of them being in a puppet or the other one talking to a puppet and that is seriously hard even if it doesn’t necessarily look it!
One of the other things I love about Meat Puppet and all of your films actually, is that they never outstay their welcome. Maintaining that throughout a film like this isn’t an easy thing. Can you talk about how you kept that sense of urgency throughout the short?
Thank you for saying that. I have a big thing (I think we all do right?) with modern day films where everything is just too long. It’s two and a half hour long films and everyone is going out of their minds because they don’t need to be that long. Ultimately people’s time is very precious. We have this thing now where we can shoot on digital, we can shoot as long as we want, we can edit much easier than when it was physical film so we’ve gotten used to being able to do what we want, but people’s time and the medium of film for me is precious. If you can tell a story in a way that’s more condensed you should use what you need and very little on top of that. That’s my taste, those are the movies that I love to watch, ones that have narrative urgency. That was the thing particularly with Meat Puppet but also with all of them, is you usually get to a point where if you’re watching something you get the idea. Say with Right Place, Wrong Tim, I get it there are some clones you know and it’s very funny but at a certain point you’re like, “Okay I understand it now, now what?”. As a writer and filmmaker you’re always trying to put yourself in the audience’s position and pre-empt what they’re going to be thinking.
If you can tell a story in a way that’s more condensed you should use what you need and very little on top of that.
In Meat Puppet you see him dragging around it’s very fun, he’s trapped in a puppet and the answer to the question of what next is his soon-to-be ex-girlfriend arriving. And so as you’re watching you’re like, okay here’s the next thickener with the plot. In terms of maintaining it, I work very closely with my editor Flaura Atkinson, we’ve worked together now for about five years and have edited everything together. We work very tirelessly to get to a point where we feel like we have a formidably tight edit that keeps things moving. On a fundamental level that’s what I like to watch, I like films that know their purpose, they know what they’re doing and they also understand that as a viewer you’re also intelligent, you liked that bit but you’re ready for the change and for the plot to advance. That’s what we try to do and are hopefully getting better at it with time.
Meat Puppet played in SXSW’s Midnight Short Program earlier this year where it won the Special Jury Prize and an Audience Award and is now a nominee for Best British Short at the upcoming BIFA awards. What do these kinds of accolades mean to you as a filmmaker?
When I sat down and wrote the script for Meat Puppet – which at one point features a puppet going into a grown man’s ass – I didn’t necessarily picture it as an awards piece in any meaningful way. I just went out there to have fun and make something that I’d watch and that I thought people would like. I’m very grateful and I think it’s also really important, particularly with the BIFAs, because there isn’t that much stuff that comes out of the UK that gets to be weird and that’s partly because there’s no money for it. There’s very little funding and this film was rejected by basically everybody before we scraped together the money by hook or by crook.
When I sat down and wrote the script for Meat Puppet – which at one point features a puppet going into a grown man’s ass – I didn’t necessarily picture it as an awards piece in any meaningful way.
It’s really important that films like this and a lot of the other ones that are on that BIFA longlist and are now nominated are these cutting edge out there movies because they can come from Britain. They can not only come from Britain but they can go to the US and internationally and win awards at major festivals. We should be very proud that we do that! When I look around and see a lot of the shorts that come out of Britain, I think yeah these are really good and so in that sense it’s really meaningful to look at these nominees and see that reflected in these genres that we often overlook in Britain. That’s the thing that matters most to me. Obviously, it’s nice for us personally but that’s what’s really cool.
