by David Morgan
GILLIAM: Terry’s passion, his enthusiasm, his crusading zeal, that’s so beside his writing skills. It’s just his passion for things. When somebody is so enthusiastic and so convinced of something, I tend to think that’s probably a good way to go.
Terry did it to me on Jabberwocky. In the beginning he’s the poacher. I’ve set this crane up, it’s a cherry picker [that’s picking him] up off the ground. It takes a while to set up, and the sun is going down, and we’ve got to get it before the sun’s gone—I wanted long shadows. And Terry goes, “Eeeauuuewwwl, there’s a little place over there that I think might be better.” “No, it’s better here.” Terry’s very persuasive, and the producer John Goldstone said, “Well, why don’t you just move the crane?” I said, “If I move the fucking crane we’re going to lose the light.” Terry says, “Eeeauuuewwwl…”
Fuck! “Move the fucking crane” (just to show them)! So we move the crane, we get in there, and it doesn’t work. Now I’ve got to move crane back. So I proved my point, lost the light, all this because I know I’m right (because that’s what I’m good at), and I don’t have the time or patience to explain exactly why the shot is better here.
It sounds like Terry is manipulating things, like John.
GILLIAM: But Terry isn’t manipulating. With John, it’s him trying to pull strings like a puppet. Terry does it just [because] his gut is telling him, his passion, his enthusiasm. And I’m always a complete sucker for enthusiasm.
Gilliam as the jailer’s assistant in Life of Brian.
THE MONOSYLLABIC
MINNESOTA FARM BOY
Beanssssssssss!!!
PALIN: Terry Gilliam certainly in visual terms comes across as the most stylish of the group; he really gave the show its major style, which I don’t think they really had otherwise. They were put together pretty roughly, but Gilliam always gave the show a bit of polish. I think Terry provided the element which made Python different than anything else.
The animation [gave it] a tight edge—it was well done, it was sharp. Like John, he was very economical with what he did with the images he used; his timing was brilliant, the images he used were pretty strong, his sound effects were brilliant, his choice of music was very good—just the images he had, like a cat stomping through London or a bus just being flipped over by a woman’s leg. We’d all heave a sigh of relief when Terry’s animations came to the show on the Sunday morning, and that was great—another three or four minutes in the can, good stuff.
None of us told Terry how to do his animations, which was interesting, whereas the rest of the scripts of Python would be all up for discussion. You could say, “Well John, I don’t like this thing you’ve done here,” or Eric would say, “Mike and Terry, I don’t like what you’ve written there.” Terry did go his own way with his animations. And having worked with him on Jabberwocky, he had a very special vision as to how Jabberwocky was going to work. And he was always sort of, “All right, I will show you something wonderful and then you can tell me whether you like it or not,” rather than, “What do you want me to make? How should I do this? Please give me your advice. Tell me.” Terry said, “No, I think I know what I want to do, and this is it.”
It was very good for us to have an American in the group. First off, he wasn’t from our school background, so straight away he had a slightly fresh look at the way we would look at things. He’d say, “God, you anally retentive English, you’re writing this because of so-and-so…” He was an audience. Gilliam was a great laugher, too. At a writing session, once Gilliam started going it was just wonderful, and very infectious, too. And I think everyone respected Terry; I mean, anyone who seemed to have all the benefits of an American education and been successful both in California and New York and wants to come over and work for the BBC for a pittance, you know, deserves some respect! Why should he want to do that?! And John used to be very rude [to him], but John is only rude to people he actually quite likes!
But he would also muck in. Terry was intrigued by us English boys. I think he saw us as a strong group; I think university was the main thing which typified the way we worked. During the sixties, Oxford/Cambridge was a very, very strong source of comedic talents. It wasn’t just us; there was the “Beyond the Fringe” group. I think Terry respected us in some way, so to act with these guys, just to do anything, he felt quite flattered to have a go at [it]. And we always put him in suits of armor to start with, really uncomfortable roles!
But then I think he realized later on, Terry’s much better and much funnier than he’d given himself credit for, so in some of the films he had larger roles and he’s just superb, like the jailer’s assistant in Life of Brian.
That’s Gilliam’s contribution: the freshness and consistency of very good work.
JONES: I think Terry G. was a great fighter. He really loved the challenge and he always does; he survives on a fight, really. Doing his own animations really in the teeth of the BBC—the BBC was insisting that he had to employ one of their animators and they didn’t really want him to touch material, and Terry was insisting that he had to do it himself. It was a really big fight!
CLEESE: Well, obviously on the occasions when he sat in the group his evaluation of the material read out could be taken very seriously. But for me it was always as though he was fundamentally operating slightly outside, and he would be given a job to do and take it away and do it almost always very, very well. So for example on Life of Brian, he was taking care of the look of it, he seemed to me to do a marvelous job, but I wasn’t terribly aware of him being part of the group. He’s much more like an artist in a painterly sense. He works in a studio, he doesn’t work in a team, or didn’t on Python; we worked very much in a team. He would often work very, very late whereas we were working office hours. And that was how he did his contribution. I vaguely remember him bringing in drawings and showing them to us, but he was always really a sort of semidetached member of the group, but I didn’t mind that.
Did the others ever ask him to contribute to writing sketches?
CLEESE: I don’t think we expected him to write words. And although I’m quite sure he would have suggested a line here or there at script meetings, I can’t remember his ever putting them down on paper, though he obviously did later on.
IDLE: Gilliam is one of the most manipulative bastards in that group of utterly manipulative bastards. Michael is a selfish bastard, Cleese a control freak, Jonesy is shagged out and now forgets everything, and Graham as you know is still dead. I am the only real nice one!
THE GROUP DYNAMIC
Yes! We Are All Individuals!
CLEESE: One or two people in the BBC definitely saw me as the mover of the group. The reality was that Terry Jones and I were probably the strongest personalities. The negative side of that is we were probably the two who argued the most, because we cared terribly about the material. You could say we were young and naive; writers are like this when they start. The funny thing was, we never argued about the acting. No one ever got into a snit because they hadn’t got some role; all the arguments were about the material, and they would sometimes get quite intense and absurdly silly. I remember one sketch, we had a kind of taxidermized animal hanging from the ceiling with four light bulbs in its feet; we got into quite an acrimonious debate about whether it should be a sheep or a goat. And in retrospect it’s hilarious that we could get cross with each other about whether it should be a sheep or a goat! But we cared so much about the material that we fought quite a lot.
Jones and I would often lock horns and that would create a certain balance, and then the others could jump onto the scale on one side or the other. I didn’t find Terry in those days at all easy, although I always liked him fundamentlaly as a person, because I always felt that he felt strongly about everything. And on the whole it’s easier to negotiate stuff if people don’t feel tremendously strongly about it; you might just say, “Well, what do you think? What do you think?” Whereas Terry would forever say, “Oh, I really feel, I really f
eel…” as though the intensity of his feeling was the strongest part of his argument. And I used to find that difficult.
GILLIAM: John and Graham wrote contained pieces; they tended to be very confrontational pieces—bam bam bam! Eric wrote again his tight things; wordplay was his speciality, I suppose. Mike and Terry tended to be more conceptual in the way they were approaching things, and I fit more in that group with what I was doing.
You’ve got John and Graham as the center of one half of the brain, and you’ve got Mike and Terry as the center of the other half, and Eric’s the individual on that side, and I’m the individual on this side. It’s like us on one side who thought in a freer way and those on the other who thought in this more aggressive, defensive way of writing sketches; they’re much more the control freaks. I couldn’t invent a better balance between us, this Cambridge/Oxford thing—or the tall guys versus the normal-sized guys. Whatever it was, the division was so clear. And Occidental [Gilliam’s Los Angeles alma mater] starts with an Occ sound—even the first syllable is close enough to Oxford!
Graham in a sense was like a fifth columnist in that group, because Graham was sort of floating out there, but he and John worked well. John always complained but they did work well as a team, because Graham balanced John’s anal-ness.
Terry Jones would get incredibly angry about things because John was always trying to control. At the reading out of material, John was like the guy working in the Senate or the House of Commons where you get bills through. John was always very good at that! So there’s John kind of manipulating people, and then Terry would get very frustrated because he could see we were being manipulated, and he’d be up in arms, and then the fights would start, and the rest of us could sit back and watch!
And then there’s a weird dynamic between Eric and me because we were the two singles in the thing, and there was a sense that we shared something in common because we were both outside the two groups. And yet we don’t really, we’re very opposite, except I think Eric’s love of music works well with animation—there’s a musical quality in all his stuff and that kind of links [with me] in a strange way: we’re the pop video section in the middle!
[You have] John’s desperate need for control and Graham’s kind of strange inertia floating around, or combination of inertia and chaos and anarchy all in one thing; Graham’s Splunge! just gets in the way of John’s need to control and manipulate. And then Mike balances Terry’s passion and his belief [that] he’s right; Terry’s rightness is like a God-given right, a righteousness is what it is. And so Mike being the nicer, gentler guy balances Terry.
A typical Python story meeting at Terry Jones’ home, at which John Cleese displays his affection for his host.
You’ve got the Zealous Fanatic and the Nice Guy, you’ve got the Control Freak and the Splunge!, and then Eric dances around them [as this] verbal chameleon, and then I’m doing this visual dance around it that connects the bits and pieces. I don’t think you could invent a group that would work better than we did when we were working well. It’s this amazing chemical balance, it’s like a proper molecular compound—and Eric and I are the free radicals!
Those are the things that always intrigue me, how it came together—it’s not like anybody planned it. The thing with Saturday Night Live was Lorne Michaels planned it, it’s not a patch on Python, I don’t think. I mean, wonderful, wonderful stuff, but it’s much more of a packaged program. And ours was this organic growth.
What was interesting about that chemistry was, after a while, you couldn’t tell who wrote a sketch at a certain point. After a while Mike and Terry started writing things like John, and my cartoons were much influenced by what they were writing. Then suddenly the live action stuff started looking like the cartoons! It was all blending in different ways, and that was really intriguing.
IDLE: I suspect these glib subdivisions of Python. I like words, but John and Graham liked words, too—look at the “Dead Parrot” sketch, which is pure Roget!
JONES: As we wrote on, we started parodying each other. Mike and I wrote a parody of one of John and Graham’s sketches. Because of things like the “Dead Parrot” sketch, which is basically straight out of the thesaurus, we wrote a parody of it, an “Astrology Sketch” (“…the zodiacal signs, the horoscopic fates, the astrological portents, the omens, the genethliac prognostications…”). Mike read this out and everybody laughed and it went in, and we were just amazed because we’d written it as a joke, really. We thought they’d go, “Oh come on! Get away! Making fun of our writing?” But we were quite surprised that it actually got into the show! They all thought it was funny, so we didn’t say, “Actually it was just a parody of one of yours.” I kept a bit quiet, and it got into the Yes Pile.
And then John and Graham began writing slightly more visual things, so there was a bit of a crossover there. It became more difficult to recognize each other’s material.
IDLE: People would begin to notice certain traits about each other’s work, like Mike and Terry always starting off with long pans across the countryside, or a typical John and Graham confrontational opening. They would then parody [the others’] work in their own. This, too, was a useful form of criticism.
You must remember we were like a family. Sure, there were arguments and disagreements, of course we could say nasty things about our work, but this was the liberty: to be ruthlessly honest—we were not carrying any passengers. No allowance had to be made, or adjustments for people’s feelings. By and large this worked; where there was a blockage or impasse, usually a third way would miraculously emerge. At these moments no one could ever remember who made the suggestion.
Jonesy is stubborn, John controlling, Mike affable, Eric suspicious of authority and Gilliam incomprehensible, with the doctor as an emollient. It was a fine mix of good British chaps (and a Yank) who just got on with it. When we got to the States, we were amazed to find they assumed we wrote it out of our minds on drugs—as if anyone could successfully write stoned. (See Saturday Night Live and Hunter S. Thompson.) When you’re stoned it’s hard to find the keys to the typewriter. Actually we always worked office hours: Nine to five with a break for lunch. Even in the West Indies!!
The criticism and encouragement was the best. I have never experienced anything like it before or since. It is still the standard by which I judge collaboration. You could say the honest truth about what other people had written; there were no polite solecisms. As Lenny Bruce said, “You cannot fake a laugh.”
It was like a senior common room in this respect. The métier was taken seriously. We were very serious about our work, but we laughed like fuck.
How did the group dynamic on Python differ from what you’d experienced working on other series?
JONES: I suppose the great thing was that we all liked each other’s work, so we all had a respect for what the others did. So therefore you really wanted to make the others laugh, and yet at the same time we respected each other’s criticisms. So if they thought it wasn’t funny, you’d think, “Phew, that was a bit of luck, we might have tried to do that!” I mean, occasionally there was something you really thought was funny and you thought, “They haven’t got it.” I suppose the best example of that was a late one from The Meaning of Life, the “Mr. Creosote” sketch, the fat man in the restaurant, which was something I’d written. Mike and I both thought it was our funniest piece. And we saved it up for after lunch! Mike hit them with it first thing after lunch, and nobody thought it was funny; it got thrown out. And then about a month later, John rang up and said, “Hello, this is something that will bring a little smile to your face: I’ve just been looking at that ‘Mr. Creosote’ sketch, I think it could be quite funny.” What John had realized I think was that the funniest part there was the waiter. And he and Graham came up with the idea of the “wafer-thin mint.” So that got rescued. In a way it’s the only real collaboration between me and John, in writing terms.
Generally when the group didn’t like the thing, you felt, “That
won’t be right then.”
CLEESE: You see, you become very pragmatic in comedy. I really mean this: Comedy is what people laugh at. And if you come in with a piece of material you think is very funny and you read it out to the Python group and they didn’t laugh much, you didn’t think there was anything wrong with the group; you thought there was something wrong with the material.
I think we were much more tightly bound than The Frost Report group. When you read material out to The Frost Report there were so many more people sitting around the table, there wasn’t the sense that we were a group, or a “band of brothers,” whereas there was in Python.
Do you recall a particular criticism of the group’s that you didn’t agree with?
JONES: The “Spam” sketch, the one in the restaurant with “Spam Spam Spam Spam Spam…” and the Vikings. We read it out and everybody laughed, and then John and Graham said they’d like to work on it, they thought they could improve it a bit. And so they took it away and rewrote it, and they kind of rationalized it somehow—they made it more logical. And it lost the rhythm, it was a rhythm piece, really. Mike and I thought, “This isn’t as funny.” Actually there was no discussion about it—Michael and I just substituted our original sketch.
How was responsibility within the group taken or shared?
PALIN: Terry J. was always incredibly keen to involve everybody in everything. He is the most open of people, and yet has this very strong feeling that he knows how to do it. So that makes it slightly complicated; he’d love people to come in and have a look, but basically, Terry had a very, very strong idea about how a thing should be, so he wasn’t always as sort of altruistic as he was before. Yes, he was anxious that everybody should be happy with what was being done, but once you have that responsibility of directing, you end up doing much more of the work while the others go off and do their other things.