{"id":593565,"date":"2026-08-23T14:28:11","date_gmt":"2026-08-23T14:28:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/593565\/"},"modified":"2026-08-23T14:28:11","modified_gmt":"2026-08-23T14:28:11","slug":"aardmans-peter-lord-and-david-sproxton-at-the-oscars-i-went-to-the-gents-and-had-a-pee-with-jack-nicholson-family","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/593565\/","title":{"rendered":"Aardman\u2019\u200bs Peter Lord and David Sproxton: \u2018At the Oscars, I went to the gents and had a pee with Jack Nicholson!\u2019 | Family"},"content":{"rendered":"

Aardman\u2019s Peter Lord and David Sproxton in 2006 and 2026, with their puppets of Fowler and Babs from Chicken Run, and Morph<\/a>Aardman\u2019s Peter Lord and David Sproxton in 2006 and 2026. Later photograph: P\u00e5l Hansen\/The Guardian. Styling: Andie Redman. Archive photograph: Aardman Animations<\/p>\n

Peter Lord and David Sproxton are the founders of Aardman<\/a> Animations. The pair began animating as teenagers, selling their first short \u2013 starring a superhero called Aardman \u2013 to the BBC\u2019s Vision On in 1972. In 1977, they created Morph for the children\u2019s programme Take Hart. The studio\u2019s breakthrough into adult audiences came via Channel 4\u2019s Conversation Pieces series, and its animators, including a young Nick Park, went on to make Wallace & Gromit, whose films have won multiple Academy Awards. Aardman became employee-owned in 2018, with Lord and Sproxton transferring majority ownership to staff to safeguard the company\u2019s independence. They were knighted earlier this year.<\/p>\n

Peter (on left)<\/p>\n

We\u2019re sitting there smiling happily and\u00a0in front of us are some puppets, because that\u2019s what we\u2019re famous for. In this case, Fowler and Babs from Chicken Run, and Morph.<\/p>\n

In 2006, we were in between productions \u2013 we had finished Chicken Run and the next was Flushed Away and Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit. I was going to California quite a lot to jolly the production along. While it was exciting to be in Hollywood, we never aspired to be part of it when we started Aardman.<\/p>\n

I was born in Bristol, but when I was nine my parents moved to Sydney, Australia. As a small, not very sporty boy, I found the school system there fairly terrifying. Then, when I was 12, we ended up in suburban Surrey. My new school was a very old-fashioned place where teachers wore gowns. On my first day, there was only one spare seat in the class. It was next to Sproxton, brackets, DA. By chance, we also got off at the same train stop, which was Walton-on-Thames.<\/p>\n

double quotation markMy car is 20 years old. Dave\u2019s was even older when it finally packed up. Money has never been the motive. It\u2019s always been to make a community<\/p>\n

Over the years, we got closer. I liked that he was very different from me. I\u00a0was very arty, and David extremely practical \u2013 good with his hands and able to understand how to build things. The turning point was when David\u2019s father got a camera. We would sit around David\u2019s kitchen table and work away on ideas.<\/p>\n

During our university holidays we would meet up and think of ideas for animations. Dave would create sets and props, and I\u2019d make a puppet. It was a partnership of mutual\u00a0interdependence.<\/p>\n

We created Morph accidentally. It was just a lump of Plasticine that turned into a little person and then developed over time as a character, which is where the fun lies. After a few years, we got the gig to do The\u00a0Amazing Adventures of Morph \u2013 26 five-minute episodes. When we found out, it was one of those fabulous high-five moments \u2013 not that we would ever have high-fived. But making children\u2019s TV was the sum of our ambition and we were thrilled.<\/p>\n

Over the years, disagreements would flare up, inevitably because it\u2019s quite stressful. But mostly it has gone smoothly, partly because we both feel the same about the really important things: how you treat your people. It sounds cheesy, but we\u2019re not in it for the money, and never have been. I\u2019m not saying we haven\u2019t made money. We have. I\u2019m very happy. But we didn\u2019t want a yacht in the Maldives. My car is 20 years old. Dave\u2019s was even older when it finally packed up. Money has never been the motive. It\u2019s always been to make a community.<\/p>\n

Dave was the best man at my wedding, his brother was the photographer and his father was the vicar. Perhaps because of his father\u2019s background, Dave is a fantastically ethical person. He has a very strong sense of what is right and is extremely unselfish. In comparison, I seem possibly venal. If a project comes up that we could take on, he\u2019s always looking to share it with somebody else.<\/p>\n

Faced with all the questions, the challenges of life and of running a\u00a0company and of creative decisions, we\u2019ve become each other\u2019s best ally against the world.<\/p>\n

David (right)<\/p>\n

We took this photo when our CBEs were announced in 2006. I\u00a0had bought the shirt in the late 90s from\u00a0somewhere like Benetton and thought it was jolly, so it became my\u00a0uniform.<\/p>\n

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That year was a busy period for us, with significant business changes, lots of ideas and films we wanted to make. Animation was in the ascendancy.<\/p>\n

Peter and I went to a state-run grammar school in Woking. He was left-handed, I was right-handed, so we didn\u2019t have much space between us. I\u00a0noticed he was always doing figurative drawings in his notebook. He also had a very strong Australian accent. It was quite hard for me to actually work out what his surname was.<\/p>\n

As we got to know each other, we discovered that both our fathers worked for the BBC: his dad was in the sales side, and my dad was a religious programmes producer. Both our mums taught art, so there was a curious commonality there.<\/p>\n

I was better on the organisational side, and Pete had the more imaginative stuff covered. We also had shared beliefs and motives. My father was an ordained Congregational minister, so there was a strong value system in place. That we were both being brought up in the 60s and early 70s was important, too. There was an optimistic creative dynamic to the Beatles period, the youth revolution, the happy hippy\u00a0stuff. The world was our oyster.<\/p>\n

double quotation markI am always asking myself: how do we make this stuff from his imagination actually happen?<\/p>\n

For the first six years, I was running around like a wotsit. Eventually, we built up a team of skilled people. When Creature Comforts won an Oscar [in 1991, for best animated short], it was a\u00a0huge moment, because the Brits didn\u2019t get many Oscars in those days. The ceremony in LA went on for five hours back then, so there were lots of ad breaks. I remember going to the gents during one break and turning around, thinking, \u201cMy God, I\u2019m having a pee with Jack Nicholson.\u201d<\/p>\n

When we did the deal with DreamWorks for Chicken Run, the question was: how do we divide our forces? I had broadly said to Pete and Nick [Park], \u201cYou go and direct Chicken Run and I\u2019ll sort out everything else.\u201d In retrospect, that might have been a dumb thing to say, because it took me out of the day-to-day film production side. I stepped back from doing the camera work \u2013 the shooting and the directing \u2013 and ended up doing more management and overseeing. I missed being on the studio floor. Did I tell Pete? Probably not at the time. It was the right thing to do, and I was doing it for all the right reasons. Even if I would visit the studio and gnash my teeth, thinking, \u201cGod, I wish I was doing that, rather than sitting in finance meetings.\u201d<\/p>\n

Outside work we have supported one another, too. We were both deeply affected as our parents got older and eventually popped their clogs. Pete ended up with three kids, and I\u00a0suppose that\u2019s where our social time began to divide up a bit. I guess if I\u2019d had kids, too, we would have done a lot more together. But that wasn\u2019t to be.<\/p>\n

Pete is a natural storyteller and is an inspiration to others, often just by his presence. He\u2019s not the best of timekeepers, but that\u2019s always been part of his makeup and is not unusual for someone so creative. He has got an incredible mind, and I am always asking myself: how do we make this stuff from his imagination actually happen? Really, that question is at the core of everything that I do.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Aardman\u2019s Peter Lord and David Sproxton in 2006 and 2026, with their puppets of Fowler and Babs from…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":593566,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[146,85,46],"class_list":["post-593565","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-entertainment","tag-il","tag-israel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/593565","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=593565"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/593565\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/593566"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=593565"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=593565"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=593565"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}