Terry Jones, who wrote the Labyrinth script, has a few bones to pick with Jim Henson and David Bowie about their treatment of his story. Read on... Click any thumbnail to see the full-sized pic.
Thanks to Solea for providing the original for me to transcribe and scan. A Jareth's Realm exclusive!
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With Labyrinth now out on video, Terry Jones talks about writing its screenplay and reveals his plans for a fantasy film of his own.
Terry Jones gazes into a crystal ball. He explains it is a prop from the film Labyrinth. It also happens to be a marvelous photo opportunity. But it is no use to me for my camera bag only contains the remains of the spam sandwiches I had for lunch.
It has been that kind of day. I have already mistaken Jones’ au pair for his daughter and been discovered sitting on his front doorstep eating lunch. Now his son Bill, a boy of obvious intelligence, is interrogating me about Starburst’s editorial policy.
As Bill wanders off engrossed in the magazine Jones shows me a bound copy of the storyboard for his proposed film Erik the Viking. The spine comes loose and Brian Froud’s concept art spills onto the coffee table. As Jones talks he fastidiously collects together the pages and begins clicking the spine back into place.
When complete, he explains that Erik the Viking will be loosely based on characters to be found in Jones’ book of almost the same name. Jones notes that it was whilst trying to interest production companies in the film that he was approached to write Labyrinth. “It was an odd coincidence really. I’d just seen Dark Crystal and was terribly impressed with Jim Henson’s creatures. So I rang up his office to see whether he would be interested in Erik the Viking. The secretary said, ‘Oh, that’s funny, he was trying to get hold of you yesterday.’ Later I found out Jim’s daughter – who’s an executive at Warner Brothers – had read Erik the Viking and had suggested that I might be a good person to script Labyrinth.”
Jones says that the idea of putting a totally imaginary world on the screen is “really exciting” and explains that is why he was attracted to Henson’s work. However, his interest in fantasy dates back to his childhood when he preferred reading about animals to books about the Famous Five. “I found it difficult to relate to these children who were always going on holiday. I never really had holidays. I also had difficulty getting a bead on the world. The great thing about fantasy or fairy tales is that they take ideas and put them into an abstract concept that makes it easier to see the idea as a whole. A fairy tale like The Emperor’s New Clothes is actually a brilliant exposition of a profound political truth. To do that in modern, realistic terms you’d have to produce a quite tedious political drama.”
Labyrinth might seem to be precisely the kind of story Jones would have enjoyed when he was a child. The film follows a young girl called Sarah on a fantastical quest to rescue her brother from the clutches of Jareth, the Goblin King. Along the way Sarah braves the Labyrinth, encounters a variety of friendly, unfriendly and frankly odd creatures and learns a little about growing up and life in the “real” world. In fact Jones found himself at odds with Henson’s world view.
“Jim and I had a basic disagreement,” he explains. “It was a very friendly disagreement but we had very different ideas about what we wanted the story to be about. Jim wanted it to be about a young girl coming to adolescence and putting her childhood behind her and growing to face the world. That wasn’t a story that meant a lot to me. In the story I wrote the Labyrinth got wilder and wilder. It never obeyed any rules. It kept on cheating. Eventually the girl learnt there was no answer, no solution. The only thing you could do was to go with it and enjoy it. When she did that she got to the centre of the Labyrinth.”
Jones envisaged Jareth as a “hollow man.” “He was using the Labyrinth to protect himself to keep people away. He was trying to control the world but he was really empty in himself. The one thing he couldn’t stand was somebody coming close to him so when the girl got to the centre he kind of evaporated.” Jones laughs. “And that story didn’t mean anything to Jim you see.”
Labyrinth had already been in pre-production for six months when Jones joined the project. "One of the worst things is to have unlimited reign to do whatever you want so Labyrinth was very enjoyable to write. I was given the basic outline of the story and Brian Froud had this great pile of drawings. Every time I came to a new situation I just looked up the drawings that I liked most and put those creatures in.
“I felt it was very much Jim’s film. I said to Jim when we first met, ‘Well look, I’ll just write something fairly fast and see if anything I come up with is of any use to you.’ So I was expecting them to do what they wanted with my material.”
But Jones feels that some of the changes in his script proved detrimental to the story’s dramatic structure. “It seemed to me you should never go to the centre of the Labyrinth before the girl gets there because the whole point of going through the Labyrinth is wondering what’s in the middle. If you give away what’s in the middle to the audience, you blow the narrative tension that’s built into the story. Another thing I felt strongly about was that the Goblin King should not appear right at the beginning and right at the end. If he can appear anywhere he likes there’s no contest. Why doesn’t he just zap the girl straight away? Why does he let her go through the Labyrinth?”
Many of the script changes were a result of casting David Bowie in the role of Jareth. “After the first draft everybody said they loved the story and they thought it was great. Then, about a month later, Jim came up and met with Brian and myself and said that he wanted David Bowie to play the Goblin King. Of course as soon as he said that it blew the whole story because it meant he [David Bowie] would have to appear all the way through the film and he would have to sing.”
Jones tried his hand at song writing for the maniacal creature called Fireys. “I called them the Wild Things. I wrote them in because I’d written a song which they sang and as they sang it they performed the actions in the lyrics. It just built up as they got out of hand. They lifted off their heads and one’s tail got up and danced. Then David wrote a song instead. I was a bit intimidated. His song was much better musically than mine and much more interesting but the fact that their heads came off was irrelevant. It wasn’t about the same thing.” Jones sighs and laments, “It was a shame because it would have been a really good number.”
Despite his disappointment with Labyrinth Jones’ admiration for Henson’s work remains undiminished and he was impressed by the visual realization of many of his ideas. “The goblin city was wonderful and he did terrific things like the shaft of hands which was better than I imagined.”
Although Labyrinth met with lukewarm reception at the box office it has been acclaimed by fantasy fans. It was certainly one more step in the search for a film that will do for fantasy what Star Wars did for science fiction. Whether it was a step in the right direction you can decide for yourselves. Meanwhile Jones and fellow Monty Python member Terry Gilliam are entering the fantasy stakes with films of their own. Gilliam is already lensing The Adventures of Baron Munchausen for Columbia. The film’s release date is Christmas ’88. Jones’ film of Erik the Viking is still in its early days. “At the moment we’re negotiating finances. I’m just doing the storyboard so we know how much it is going to cost. We’re looking for twelve million dollars.”
The script has already undergone a number of revisions after Jones became dissatisfied with merely adapting the original story. The new adventure will see Erik and the Vikings journey to Aesgaard to wake the gods because the time of Ragnarok has arrived. So has Jones – who scripted the Njorl’s Saga Python sketch – developed an interest in Norse mythology?
Jones considers the question. He frowns. “I’m not sure really…”