Interview: Bret McKenzie from The Muppets and Middle Earth
Tuesday, January 10, 2012 at 7:11PM 
Bret McKenzie at the Muppets premiere in 2011Oscar's music branch has been known to throw an unpleasant curveball over the years in the Original Song category (no Cher performance last year? Ouch! No Springsteen in 2008?! It still stings.) but if they don't deliver us a performance by the resurgent Muppets on the February broadcast, felt fur will surely fly. We get so few original musicals these days so The Muppets was the go to musical comedy last year.
Bret McKenzie has given Oscar ample reason to include the beloved characers on the big night. The actor/musician, most famous as one half of the Flight of the Conchords duo and soon to be seen as an Elf in Middle Earth (however briefly) in The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey wrote two songs that have landed on Oscar's Best Original Song eligibility list: "Life's a Happy Song" and "Man or Muppet". (The third eligible song from the movie "Pictures in My Head" has different composers).
I spoke to him recently on his awards buzz, his cult hit show and (very briefly) Middle Earth. He calls the response to his Muppets songs "Pretty incredible. I did not expect to get awards for this movie."
Nevertheless, the honors have been coming. Both of his Oscar eligible songs are up for the Critics Choice Award this Thursday (imagine competing with Elton John!) and who knows? An Oscar nomination (or even two!) could follow.
Nathaniel R: Did you feel crazy pressure about taking on this job. The Muppets have "The Rainbow Connection" which is an all time classic. The music is very connected to their whole mythology.
BRET MCKENZIE: It was a very intimidating job, taking on Paul williams shoes. Luckily I wrote one song at a time for it. Initially I wasn't writing three or four so I didn't feel so much pressure. But one of my friends was like 'Oh man, you're never going to write another 'Rainbow Connection' [Laughs] I was like 'Yeah, you're right!'
But, you know, we just did our thing really. Luckily James [James Bobin director of The Muppets who also had a hand in Flight of the Conchords] and I had just spent the last five years doing Conchords. We had done a lot of comedy musical numbers so we were pretty comfortable with the genre. The challenge was just to make sure that the songs felt like Muppet songs.
Nathaniel: Was this a situation where they knew exactly where they wanted a song. "It goes here and it's about this!"?
Bret: That's exactly it. When I came on they'd already done the script. I went in to James' office and he had the film mapped out on script cards on the wall, white cards. A blue card was a song. There were songs scattered throughout the movie. That's how we did Conchords as well, so you didn't have songs back to back. They had these sort of loose ideas for what the songs should be. They'd actually -- by the time I came on -- already had dozens of demos submitted. They got lots of people to write songs and they went through and chose their favorites. It was surprising how difficult it was for people to write songs that fit into the musical format.
So you knew which characters your songs would be for ahead of time.
Yes. I was writing for Gary and Walter who didn't exist. I knew who Jason Segel was. I had seen Forgetting Sarah Marshall so I knew him. I knew he could sing a bit which is always good. Then I got the job of writing the rap for Chris Cooper which was one of the highlights of the film, teaching him how to rap. He's a very serious actor, an Academy Award wining actor. He was quite method! [Laughs] We're quite different people. I'm quite bubbly and he's very serious.
Even about rapping?
He took it very seriously. He wanted to make sure it was a solid rap performance. I taught him over Skype how to rap!
Did you test the Muppet music on your kids to see how they responded?
Musical Comedy Divas & Muppet-like Middle Earth Directors ...after the jump!
