Hi everyone, Keeping in the Michelangelo spirit I'm here with Mak Wilson who brought Mikey's face to life in the classic TMNT movies!
Hi Mak thanks for being here and for talking TMNT and puppetry with me. It’s a great honor!

The honor is mine, Rutger.

I’m always curious, as a kid what did you want to be when you grew up? Were you already inspired by puppet shows or ventriloquism?

Actually, I think I knew what I wanted to be from the age of 6, but it wasn't a puppeteer, it was an actor, which is what I became first. Having said that, I loved puppets and watched every puppet based show on TV, especially all the Gerry Anderson productions, from Thunderbirds to Joe 90. I even made a glove puppet when I was 9. I suppose I thought that puppeteers had to be great puppet makers too, at the time, and thought there was no way I could do that. I did find ventriloquism fascinating too, so I think all the signs were there, I just didn't recognize them!

So you started your career in 1975 as an actor and almost 10 years later you worked on the ‘Spitting Image’ show as the lead puppeteer. How did you get from acting to what you still do up to today, puppeteering?

I actually started my career in 1973 at the tender age of 15 and it was that first stage production that would lead to puppetry. I played the boy player (Player Queen) in Hamlet and it was done in a half mask style. The wonderful Harry Jones, a mime and mask expert later to be a pirate in Muppet’s Treasure Island, taught me and from that moment I was hooked. When I left school at 16 I went to London and performed with the National Youth Theatre then toured in musicals for 5 years, but always loved physical theatre, whether that been mime, mask or dance.

In 1978 I was touring with a production of Paddington Bear, playing the lead, and whilst we were in Cardiff I saw a poster for a company called Caricature Theatre who was based there. They were a large-scale mask and puppet company and this looked like just what I wanted to do. I auditioned for them and got the job. Although my part required half mask and singing, this is when I was introduced to puppets first hand.

From here I went to Cannon Hill Puppet Theatre in Birmingham and spent two and a half fantastic years there before auditioning for The Dark Crystal. To my amazement I got the job, as a Mystic, but didn't do the entire film because of commitments to the theatre company but did do some scenes and many workshops taken by the late and great Jim Henson himself. Then it was Greystoke as the ape Figs (and the voice of the Mother Ape), then came my first film animatronics puppetry work as the chicken Billina in Return To Oz. I loved it! There were quite a few more films and TV shows, with the Jim Henson Company, before Spitting Image came along, including Labyrinth and Little Shop of Horrors.

Did you have any special training or classes for this art?

I've been so lucky to have great mentors and masters to work under. In theatre my puppetry masters were Barry Smith and John Blundell, the best in Britain, and I did many workshops with various mime and mask teachers. As for hand puppetry, as mentioned above, I couldn't have done any better than be taught by Jim Henson and Frank Oz... and Kevin Clash.
Animatronics is a completely different matter. There were no teachers; we were the ones developing it! We learned as we went along. We became the ones who were the teachers.

How did you eventually come to be with the Jim Henson company, did they approach you?

It came about simply because I saw the auditions advertised in the professional journal, The Stage. Since, at the time, I very rarely bought it, it was an amazing piece of luck... or destiny, depending on the way you look at it.

Since I admire you for working with TMNT, let’s go to some half shell related questions. Before you started working on the first movie had you ever heard of the Ninja Turtles besides the popular cartoon? Did you read the comic back in the day?

I had heard of TMNT but hadn't read the comics until Steve Barron sent me them to read. Loved what I read and couldn't wait to do the project... and work with Steve again, having had a great experience with him on The Storyteller and a TV commercial.

Was there any special reason that you came to be Michelangelo’s puppeteer on the first movie?

You know Rutger, I can't remember the reason why I was chosen as Michelangelo’s puppeteer, but it may have been that Brian (Henson) thought Micha and I would work well together. I certainly was glad to be given this fantastic character and couldn't have had a better guy to work with! What a joy Micha was, and how much easier he made my job.
The other reason all those puppeteers who did the animatronics were chosen was that we'd all done suit work. We'd all been inside hellish rubber and knew what these guys were going through, but also knew how to convey what we needed from them at times.

It must be lots of fun working on this kind of big movies, having fun on the set, joking with each other. Do you have any fond memories from the set you’d like to share? Working with Micha I think you have.

I probably shouldn’t say this, but I certainly don't have as many fond memories from the first movie as the second, even though I think it's the better film. You have to remember that this was the first time this scale of animatronics had been done so there were a lot of teething problems. Added to this, we only had one head per character so if the head went down, which they frequently did, there was a lot of down time and tension on set. Still, they were a great bunch to work with, and I had the pleasure of Micha, which made up for it.

As Micha has said, the night shoot sequence was special. There was something magical about those woods of North Carolina. It was also nice to be working in the coolness of the night as we were there in the summer. It did seem to have a calming effect on everyone.
I know Micha has related the story of rigging the head to explode in front of the producers on the dockside set - a joke we never could have done first time around - but the full story goes like this: We rigged one of the backpack units to emit smoke and attached it to a dummy head. The producers were told that there was a problem and they dashed to the set. The camera rolled as they arrived and I began to say to the Creature Shop in raised tones, ‘Try it again!’ Someone pretended to operate the controls. The smoke was supposed to happen now, but it didn’t work, but we carried on. ‘Nothing!’ I said, ‘I am really fed of this! In fact, I’ve had enough!’ and just as the producers arrived beside me I threw the head into the water. There was an eerie silence as they looked down to see the head sink beneath the inky water. They then stared at me and just before they could wrap their hands around my neck, the crew burst into laughter, and they let out a sigh of relief and laughed too.

I always remember all the actors being thrown the first time they worked with the turtles. Not because of having to perform with an animated piece of rubber, but because it was all the puppeteers who were delivering the dialogue off to the side so it wasn’t coming to them from the characters. Added to this, most of us were Brits doing our best with American accents, so they had a lot to contend with, poor things.
Another wonderful moment was when we were interviewed by the great Barbara Walters. What a lovely woman. It was hard too as we had to improvise but making sure our dialogue didn’t go over hers so the voice guys could dub it. However, all didn’t go well as halfway through the interview Mikey’s jaw servo decided to give up! So we had to spend the rest of the interview nodding or saying “Mmm”. Of course, there were plenty of hilarious out-takes, but no one kept them.
My biggest memory of TMNT 2 is the birth of my son Josh, now 18, in North Carolina.

Wow great stuff! Could you tell us something about the techniques behind the facial movements and the complex handlings you had to perform during filming?

The system we used was first used on The Storyteller when Brian utilized it to perform the face of the dog. That was just the joystick though. The mitt, or Waldo, had been used on the Doozers of Fraggle Rock but was developed further for our needs. So, in the left hand you had the joystick to control eyes, eyebrows and facial expressions… although you could program it to do whatever you liked, even the lip-sync. Your right hand was in the Waldo, which is basically like hand puppet. This is programmed to do jaw movements and lip shapes. On the first movie we even tried out infrared sensors on our face to trigger lip shapes, but most puppeteers didn’t like it. I probably tried it more than others. In all you had 14 to 20 controls at your fingertips, and thumb tips, to activate about 14 servos (I forget the exact figure). We had to cheat when it came to the eye movement, as there wasn’t enough room to have servos for eyes up/down.

All this we pre-programmed to our own needs and this took some learning, but the hardest part was trying to remember your lines and act at the same time as doing all this!

In Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze you were no longer just Mikey’s puppeteer but the lead puppeteer. What were your tasks during the second movie?

On TMNT 2 I was Performance Coordinator, something Brian did on the first movie. This involves going through the script with the Creature Shop supervisor and identifying all animatronics related scenes and work out, in advance, how they are going to be done. It means working closely with production and the crew to get shots rigged in advanced. These might be gags, or, in the case of Splinter, simply figuring out how to rig and operate him in full body shots.

You also end up taking rehearsals when the director isn’t there and generally keeping an eye on quality of performance and binging any lack of it to the director’s attention after a shot… if he hasn’t spotted it himself.

In the second movie the electronics were much improved. From big electronics in the shell to refined electronics that could suddenly fit into the characters head. Did the controls change much ‘cause of this technique upgrade?

The controls changed very little between the first and second movies, but the interface took a huge leap. This made programming a lot easier and faster. Of course the biggest improvement was the servos not being driven from cables from the shell and through the neck, which could really cause problems, both for the suite guys and us. If Micha turned his head it not only restricted his neck movement but also it would affect the servo’s movement. No such problems on TMNT 2!

What a relieve. I also loved you in The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy and Greystoke. Series like Dinosaurs and The Storyteller and movies like Who Framed Roger Rabbit and Little Shop of Horrors. What did you most loved doing from your wide range of work?

I like do all the things I do – acting, puppeteering (hand, animatronics, CGI), physical performance, writing, directing, movement choreography, CGI animation directing. I like things with a little more ‘depth’ these days, so a nice rounded character is great, but I also love the challenge and flexibility of CGI.

Nowadays you are still acting, voicing characters, directing and puppeteering. Are there any cool new projects from you coming in the near future?

Well, there’s the possibility of two projects, but one’s not a certainty as yet and one I’m not allowed to talk about I’m afraid. I do want to do more voice over work, so will be pushing that a little and I’m trying to get the three screenplays I’ve either written or co-written seen by producers. There’s some interest there, so fingers crossed.

Well, that was the last question. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk with me. It was a real pleasure!

You’re very welcome Rutger, it’s been great reliving it all, and the pleasure was mine.