First Look: Ron Howard Enters the World of Jim Henson:

Though they had mutual friends like George Lucas, Ron Howard and Jim Henson’s paths only crossed once, backstage at a variety show in the ’70s or ’80s.

“He came through with his group, and I certainly knew who Jim Henson was by that point. But at first I thought it was a band arriving,” Howard remembers. “When I mentioned that to Frank Oz, he said, ‘Yeah, a lot of people thought when we showed up with our gear and our long hair that we were a band they hadn’t heard of yet. But it turned out we were puppeteers.’”

Though Henson died in 1990, Howard got to know him a lot more intimately while making Jim Henson Idea Man—a new documentary that will stream on Disney+ May 31. The film operates as a comprehensive look at the Muppet creator’s life and work, featuring interviews with his family members and collaborators. There are also lots of puppets involved, from the denizens of Sesame Street to the creatures of The Dark Crystal.

“If there was going to be a definitive documentary about Jim Henson, we had hoped it would be in the hands of an accomplished filmmaker. Ron Howard is both a creative and personality match for my father, unlike anyone else we could have contemplated,” Henson’s daughter Lisa, the current CEO of the Jim Henson company, writes in an email.

Howard, for his part, didn’t know much about Henson’s life when he took on the project, which was spearheaded by the documentary arm of Imagine Entertainment, his and Brian Grazer’s production company. But soon, Howard honed in on what he calls Henson’s “restless creativity.”

“It was sort of anarchy on the outside, but underneath it, there was always a smart idea—a witty point to make, an observation about the world,” Howard says. “To see that evolve through the medium of puppetry and television, and then on into movies, was so interesting to me. I felt like you could actually observe a lot about entertainment, what entertains us and why, through his journey.”

As Howard tracks Henson’s evolution from pimply teenager to innovating experimental filmmaker to Muppet impresario, he pays homage to his subject’s oeuvre. The film’s new interviews, for instance, are conducted on a set that recalls a Henson production known as The Cube, which aired as part of a show called NBC Experiment in Television in 1969. “I was constantly looking for ways to honor Jim Henson’s aesthetic and sensibility and playfulness in the original footage, whether they were interviews or some of the animations that we did to help tell the story,” Howard says.

But while Henson’s art—both the already beloved and the more underseen—was obviously a focus of Idea Man, the goal of the film was also to illuminate the man behind Kermit the Frog. Lisa’s interviews with Howard focused deeply on her father’s personality, an experience that was sometimes emotional.

“The whole purpose of the movie is that audiences will get to know Jim Henson as a person,” Lisa says.

Henson’s creative and romantic partnership with his wife, Jane, whose work in developing the Muppets often goes unheralded, also makes up a major thread of the film, which explores the collision between family and business. “My parents’ personal relationship has never before been depicted in such an intimate and honest way,” Lisa says.

That means also diving into the fracturing that resulted in their separation. “I think it was important to understand the price that Jim paid for this gift to us that he built his career and his life around,” Howard says.

For Howard, however, one of the key interviews that unlocked Henson was with Henson’s longtime collaborator Frank Oz—the Bert to Henson’s Ernie. “Frank could help us understand the risks he took, what it felt like to win, and what it felt like to lose,” Howard says. “It just was a great overarching perspective beyond what the family could offer, from a peer, from a contemporary who ultimately was kind of like a brother.”

It was also Oz who put Henson’s early death at the age of 53 into context with that “restless creativity.” Henson’s older brother had died when he was a young man, an event that highlighted the fragility of life for the puppeteer.

“As Frank Oz explains, that probably lent kind of an urgency to the way he wanted to live,” Howard says. “He didn’t take time for granted. I think we are all the beneficiaries of that. Because what a volume of work.”

View this article at Vanity Fair.