The great and powerful Oz

You know how it is. One minute you’re feeling all fuzzy and warm inside because you’re off to meet Frank Oz, the puppeteer behind Yoda, Miss Piggy, Bert, Grover and Cookie Monster, the next you’re feeling terrified because you’ve just read some of his previous interviews. “Miss Piggy tore me a new one,” writes a traumatised young buck from The Onion.

Whoa. The Onion? But those guys make a living out of making orifices where there were none before.
I need not have worried. Within minutes Frank Oz emerges as a contrarian of sorts, but it’s all in good fun.
“What do you mean Death Proof is better than Planet Terror?” he rants. “You’re a crazy woman.” And so on.
A few battles later and my nerves have sufficiently settled to ask him about his fearsome reputation as an interviewee.
“Oh that,” he grins mischievously. “That only happens when I’ve got the people who come in and ask me to do voices. I was on a radio station in the States the other day and the first thing the guy says is, ‘So dude, do Yoda, do Yoda.’ No. I’m not actually a muppet. I’m not doing that because you keep shouting at me. I mean, do these people shout at Paul Simon to start singing ‘Kodachrome’?”
Richard Frank Oznowicz – for ‘twas his name – was born in England in 1944 to Isadore ‘Mike’ Oznowicz and his wife Frances, part-time marionette artists who were taking refuge from the Holocaust.
“We travelled around a bit,” says Frank. “Obviously they needed to get the heck out of Antwerp and soon they wanted to get away from the Blitz, so we lived in Morocco and eventually moved to the US.”
Though he performed as part of the family troupe from his teenage years, the “whole puppet thing was accidental. I was a young kid trying to please my parents and make some pocket money. I hated puppets really. I wanted to be a journalist.”
He did, however, possess a canny aptitude for the family trade, a fact not lost on Jim Henson, whom Frank first met aged 17 at the Puppeteers Of America festival.
“It was an odd progression,” recalls Frank. “When I started out it wasn’t a partnership. I was a performer and I worked for Jim as an employee. That was it. But as the characters grew so did my role.
He was, he admits, very much the Bert to the famously sunny Jim Henson’s Ernie, both behind the puppets and in real life.
“He was just a great guy,” says Frank of the late Mr. Henson. “There wasn’t a trace of mean spirit in him. But at the same time he was a strong, singular man. He’d go on working for hours to get something right.”
Since emerging from beneath Henson’s shadow, Mr. Oz has proved a significant directorial talent with a string of comedy hits including Little Shop Of Horrors, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, In And Out and Bowfinger. His foray into heavyweight material with The Score, a crime thriller uniting the not insignificant talents of Edward Norton, Robert De Niro and Marlon Brando, was somewhat tarnished by stories of bust-ups between Oz and Brando on set.
“Looking back I could have handled it better,” admits Frank. “He had just come off The Island Of Dr. Moreau which he had taken over and destroyed. So I went in on the offensive. I just didn’t want that to happen. There were creative differences too. He wanted to play a flamboyant gay character but I felt that this guy is part of an underworld. He couldn’t survive if he were that conspicuous”.
Frank had worse luck with the 2004 remake of The Stepford Wives, a half-baked vehicle for Nicole Kidman.
“It was a mess and it felt messy to make,” he says. “It was this big $100 million movie and it kept ballooning and I kept panicking until finally I no longer had control. I was old enough to know better. I was old enough to say ‘no’. I liked parts of it but I really should have trusted my instincts more.”
His experiences on that film have partly inspired his latest work, the British-based dark comedy Death At A Funeral.
“I wanted to make something that was all about the script,” he says. “I see movies like Charlie And The Chocolate Factory all the time and they’re all about production design not character. I liked the idea of making something with no CGI with a budget of $10 million so I could stay in charge of the material. It’s not that I’m into self-aggrandisement. It’s just that you want to do the job that you’ve signed up for.”
It seems to have worked out for the best. Death At A Funeral, a frantic comedy that makes room for mishaps with hallucinogenic drugs, streaking, blackmail and a gay midget, is pitched somewhere between Fawlty Towers and classic continental farce.
“That’s definitely it,” nods Frank. “My parents were European so I grew up on that kind of European cinema in small arthouse theatres. I loved the simplicity of that comedy style. Not knowing the language was never a barrier.”
So can he do Miss Piggy for me now?
“What do you think?” comes the response, replete with mock growl.
Harsh. He really is Bert.

Death At A Funeral opens November 2