Punk rock icon Iggy Pop gets a creepy puppet makeover in the video for The BPA’s “He’s Frank”, Norman Cook, aka Fatboy Slim’s latest musical adventure. In director Nick Ball’s nifty Bunraku-inspired (traditional Japanese puppet theatre) video, a whip lean, shirtless puppet Pop rebels against his black-clothed manipulators, fighting and flinging them round stage before bottling a hapless Cook. Dazed spoke to Draw Pictures’ Ball about the making of a punk rock puppet video…
 
Dazed Digital: What did Norman and Iggy want from this video?
Nick Ball: Something dark and menacing with a comic edge.

DD: Where did the inspiration for the video come from?
NB: Norm loved the “Seattle” video (featuring Emmy the Great) I did for The BPA and asked if I'd do this one too. I really wanted to do a puppet video and this seemed like perfect opportunity. Originally I suggested a dance off between the Iggy puppet and a puppeteer but that soon developed from dancing into fighting.

DD: What did Iggy think of his puppet self?
NB: He absolutely loved it.

DD: How did you get all his movements?
NB: We watched as much footage of Iggy performing as possible and then tried to replicate it as best we could. Iggy loves a mic stand when he's performing so we incorporated one and used it as the base for the performance. The rest of the moves were created by simply assessing what it was possible for our puppeteers to do and what wasn't. We had a stunt coordinator choreograph the fight sequence.
 
DD: Who made the puppet and what is he made of?
NB: He was made by Jonny Sabbagh and Will Harper at Dark Vast. He's mostly made of foam rubber with a wire armature.

DD: The technique of the guys manipulating puppets – where did that come from? Who are the guys controlling puppet Iggy?
NB: It's a Japanese puppetry technique called Bunraku. The puppet masters are Jonny Sabbagh, Will Harper, Joel Cadbury and also Rod Woodruff who was our fight and stunt coordinator - he's the one taking all the punches!

DD: Any fun anecdotes or stories from shooting?
NB: We nearly ran out of bottles to smash over Norm's head for the final shot, he was really cool about the stupidly high number of takes we did even though we'd cut his head.  It's not as easy as you might think to be bottled by a puppet Iggy Pop.