by David Morgan
A lot of that was equally to do with the sorry state of the British film industry. There were very few sources of finance, and the kinds of films that were being made were not really very good. It was interesting; at the time foreign sales were not really an important part of anybody’s business here. They would make a film based on what it could recoup in England alone. There was a whole slew of films from TV: On the Buses, Rising Damp. That was felt to be the safe way to capitalize. And a lot of them did very well—I mean, very modest budgets, it was possible to do that. But it made for very dreary films.
Was the BBC involved in investing in theatrical versions of television series?
GOLDSTONE: They tended to be ITV series, which had very big audiences. They were showing to eighteen, nineteen, twenty million people, and so the theory was if you only got ten percent of that into the cinemas, you could make money. In some cases it’s very true, but it’s not very inspiring! It was that sort of mentality that didn’t want to reckon that Python could be the one that would make the leap across. They saw it as [playing to] a late-night, very alternative audience.
It’s only a model. Shh!!
The terrible thing was the original budget was £150,000, and even that could not be raised by conventional means. So we capitalized on the fact that there was a lot of support from the music business in Python. Python was much more attuned to rock and roll than it was to British movies, so that’s really where the money came from.
FORSTATER: Tony Stratton-Smith, who was head of Charisma (which was the Pythons’ record group), was very interested in the film business, and he had given me a number of people to approach who he thought could be interested, like Pink Floyd’s management, Led Zeppelin’s management, Island Records, independent younger music labels and groups. I think they were all willing to have a go; they all liked the Pythons, they could see that it would be fun to do it, and if it didn’t make any money, well, at least they were backing something they enjoyed.
GOLDSTONE: Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Jethro Tull, Island Records, Chrysalis Records, and Charisma Records each had £20,000 or £30,000 invested. And then a friend of mine, Michael White (who is a theater impresario), put up the rest, so that covered it.
But the overall thing was the Pythons’ need to maintain absolute control over what they were doing. I was able to get that.
IDLE: John Goldstone is a sweet man, but his great virtue was saying nothing. He actually tried to get us to share bedrooms on the movie to save money! Cheeky bastard…
“Well, What Do I Think?”—“I Say Let’s Be Nice to Him!”
GILLIAM: Ian had directed And Now for Something Completely Different, and that was the one where I think we started [wanting] even more to be directors. Terry and I really had him surrounded on that one. So when it came, a chance—“Here’s the money to make a Python film”—we just decided we wanted to do it. We were the ambitious directors, and others went along with it.
JONES: No one really pretended to be a director; there was just concern to get the stuff on. We knew we had this material that had made us laugh at those meetings, that was the key thing, and it was just making sure that what was read there got out.
The “Witch” scene (weather permitting).
I’m not sure why it was I wanted to direct; it’s just I didn’t want not to, if you see what I mean. It just seemed natural, really, because I had always been so involved in the direction of the TV shows, taking a group responsibility for checking off on the editing and everything.
It was purely because I was the only one that was interested; the others weren’t as interested in that side of it, and I think perhaps didn’t feel that it was that crucial. Whereas I had this total tight feeling in my stomach, that it was so crucial. Everyone was saying, “Well, you do it, Terry,” but I was feeling a bit nervous about the idea. It was I who suggested that Terry G. should codirect; I thought since Terry’s got such a good eye that it would be very good to work together. So that’s how it came about.
They were all great performers, and because we cast ourselves—we all take parts that we liked—generally there wasn’t much to say about performance. That was the least part of directing. Directing was really much more doing the creative humdrum jobs, just making sure the film gets on the screen, and to make sure we’ve covered ourselves and we’re getting the shots right and can tell the story.
Did you start out with a specific division of labor between you and Terry Gilliam?
JONES: It’s very odd, I think we sort of did it on alternate days, is what I remember, but Terry and I very much agree that we knew what we wanted, and I couldn’t tell you who was responsible for what in terms of the look of the thing. I know I was very keen on making it funky and making sure everybody had dirty teeth; it was a different kind of Middle Ages, but Terry was equally keen on it.
GOLDSTONE: I think they trusted Terry in terms of how it would be shot because Terry Jones’ attitude (as opposed to Terry Gilliam’s) has been always much more about performance than visuals. He cares much more about the way a scene plays, whereas Terry Gilliam cares more about how it looks and to dazzle people with the visual of it. I remember with Life of Brian there was a time when having spent a lot of time and effort designing sets for it, Terry Gilliam got very upset that we weren’t seeing it all on the screen; there were moments when the tension was there. But ultimately the nature of Python is more verbal than visual, and it seemed very important to make it work on a performance level and that the words were there. But it’s just the way that Terry shoots things—same with Wind in the Willows and all the others—he’d prefer to make sure a scene was properly covered to give him the ability in the cutting room to get the performance to work than necessarily show all the visuals that your crew provides you. And again Jim [Acheson, designer of Wind in the Willows] was very upset from time to time, that not every inch of his set and costumes were being seen, but you have to make a decision as to what the thing is about, and that’s Terry’s strategy. That’s why his films are different from Terry Gilliam’s.
I Seek the Bravest and the Finest
JONES: There was quite a lot of debate about [who should play Arthur]. I think in the end nobody wanted to do it.
PALIN: No one wanted to sacrifice the chance of playing lots of silly smaller roles in order to play one big one.
SHERLOCK: Nobody wanted to play the lead because they thought it was hammy, it was too dry. All they wanted to do was play all the cameos, where you could then have a nice long break before doing the next cameo! But Graham realized not that his part was a star part but that it was essential to hold the rest of the film together, and I think he had a better overview. That may be simplistic, I’m sure they all had the overview, but they didn’t want to do it, and he said, “Okay, I’ll do it.” And inadvertently stole the show.
JONES: Seems obvious now, doesn’t it? I think I was quite keen for Graham to do it. I’m not sure, I can’t even remember whether I thought Gray would be a great idea, or whether I was in favor of Eric doing it.
Follow Only if Ye Be Men of Valor
JONES: Setting up Holy Grail was just so problematic. We had five weeks to shoot it in. Terry and I had been all over Scotland and then all over Wales looking for locations, and we decided on Scotland. We’d picked all these wonderful castles, and then two weeks before we were due to start filming we suddenly got this letter from the Department of the Environment of Scotland saying we couldn’t use any of their castles. I was in a panic. Terry and I’d been planning to go up and go through everything and make sure we knew exactly where our cameras were going to be, and instead of doing that, we found ourselves rushing around trying to find new locations for the whole film. It was a nightmare. We ended up with Doune Castle—that had to be three castles—and then we came up with Castle Stalker for the ending.
TERRY BEDFORD, DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY: It was a very outside-the-industry project. We obviously all worked for very little money. And I guess because it was like th
at, Mark Forstater naturally came to some of the people that he’d been at film school with. By then I had made my name as a director of photography on TV commercials, working with Adrian Lyne, so I was a good contender, and Mark gave me the opportunity to be the D.P. The most fascinating thing is that the clapper/loader (who’s the junior in the camera department) was Roger Pratt; he was my focus puller on Jabberwocky, and then helped Gilliam out on the model sequence in Life of Brian. He’s gone on to photograph Brazil and Batman, so he came right up through the ranks.
Interior shooting at one of the “approved” castles.
Anyway, we all went up to Scotland to shoot this film. It was very hippie, in my recollection of it all. It was a family affair; everybody seemed to have their children with them, if they had children. It was all very entertaining. I didn’t see a great deal of the friction between them other than it was a bunch of egos trying to make one project.
It was very much a student atmosphere to me, and I wasn’t long out of college, either, so as I said we were trying to do things differently from everybody else. [And] the Pythons were fairly anti-Establishment. If you were to say to Gilliam, “This is a professional way of doing something,” it would really put his back up.
It was all very much done in a hippie fashion. Things weren’t organized as well as they could have been, so it was a little ragged around the edges, a little bit amateurish to me. It was more like a circus than a film! But it all [came together] at the end of the day.
It just seemed like fun, really. Even some of those arguments to me felt like fun, because the sixties were a time about arguing and putting your point of view and getting cross and then forgetting about it the following day. That kind of creative energy is what was expected of one—to have a strong opinion, something that’s sort of frowned upon these days! If you have a strong opinion these days, you’ve either got to be pretty powerful, or you’ve got to put it in a very palatable way. You can’t be confrontational in the 1990s, I find; you’ve got to be political about it.
DOYLE: They had a plan that we would shoot in Glen Coe, shoot in Killin, shoot in Doune, shoot in Stirling, shoot in this, shoot in that, it was like every four days we were going to change. Terry Jones was getting really upset with me because of what appeared to be a negative attitude if I kept saying, “I think this is impossible.”
BEDFORD: On the location scout, we walked into that great hall at Doune Castle, and I distinctly remember Terry Gilliam looking up at the roof saying he liked [how] the moisture had got in on the brickwork. I was just thinking to myself, the chances are that you’ll never ever see that, and the light would never be up there anyway. It occurred to me that, being an animator, Terry Gilliam has control over those elements [unlike] when you’re making a film, especially on the budget we were talking about and the amount of light. I mean, I had no lights; there were one or two days when lamps were actually brought in. We had a couple of what we call red-heads and a small generator that you could stick 300 yards away and cover with blankets to cut the noise. In fact, in the cave when they are looking at the carving, that’s lit with the actual burning torches.
It’s pretty threadbare stuff, you know! We just had to make do and get on with it. So in a couple of cases the exposure was quite thin, including when we photographed the sequence in the great banquet hall, there was barely enough light to get the wide shots.
JONES: When we actually started the first shot of Holy Grail, I was going to shoot this bit on the edge of this gorge, and Graham was trembling and shaking, wouldn’t go anywhere near the edge. I think he said it was fear of heights, which we thought was really odd because he’d been our mountaineering expert. I certainly didn’t realize this was because he was doing cold turkey at the time, he was trying not to drink. So we couldn’t do some of the shots that we wanted close to the edge. But that was all sort of slightly swallowed up by disasters such as the camera shearing its gears on the first take!
BEDFORD: The first day was a disaster. Again, it goes back to this sort of amateurish approach. They wanted to go to the top of Glen Coe, which is a mountaineering trip. It was a dialogue sequence, and on the budget that we were shooting we had a very old Arriflex camera, it was in like a cast-iron coffin to make it soundproof, and it was dragged up the hill along with other pieces of heavy equipment. I think it took half a day to get all the equipment up there. And I suppose in their mind they thought they’d be up there in half an hour and within a half an hour of that they would be filming. But by lunchtime the camera is only just up there, half a day’s gone. That didn’t help at all to get things off the ground. And then the devil got in the works because on slate one take one, the camera broke down, quite seriously; it’d stripped its gears. It wasn’t something that could be fixed out on location. We had to shoot everything on the second camera, which was not a sync-dialogue camera, it was to be used for picking up inserts. So the whole opening part of the film had to be post-sunc. The “professional” way of doing it [would have been], you’d have gone up to the top of the hill to shoot the wide shot with the wild camera—you would have been up there in half an hour—and shot the dialogue at some more accessible position lower down.
JONES: I remember a mistake we made, in the “Knights Who Say ‘Ni!’” We were shooting this terribly quickly, we actually shot ten minutes of cut film in one day. It goes right from the Old Man, Arthur, and Bedevere in front of the campfire to the spooky point-of-view shots going through the forest, knights appearing and disappearing, to the whole scene (which is actually in two parts), and to Robin’s minstrels arriving. In one day. Mike was doing The Knight Who Say, ‘Ni!’ When Mike read it out it was just one of the funniest moments for me, his characterization. And I remember seeing him having this beard, this mustache and everything being put on, and he had high eyebrows that were covering a whole lot of his face. And then our costume lady put this helmet over him, so you couldn’t see his face at all! I thought, “Bugger me!” But they were saying, “Oh, but it’s funny because we’ve got these big antlers on his helmet.” And then we stuck him up a ladder so he couldn’t move. Poor old Mike, he’s acting his socks off there and you really can’t see him. It was never as funny as when you could see his face. But we were going so fast it was one of those decisions; once you’d started filming him with this helmet, you had to keep it on.
The Knights Who Say “Ni!”
I don’t know whether it was because of that, but John always after that would never wear mustaches, and quite rightly, too!
’Course It’s a Good Idea
BEDFORD: I don’t think there was actually a kind of decision on the [film’s] style; they didn’t come to me and say, “We want this film to look medieval,” or anything like that. I think we just fell in because I wanted to make it look moody and to conjure up the atmosphere as much as possible, which is very different from anything they’d ever done before, [which was] all very much TV and in-your-face. What we were really talking about here was bringing a cinematic mood to it, but they were all very, very gung-ho for that; they loved it all, especially Terry Gilliam. I suppose one would have to say that the dark side of Gilliam was the one that was chaperoning that along. And of course Terry Jones is interested in medieval history and stuff, so it all does fit really that they would want to create this sort of atmosphere.
HOWARD ATHERTON, CAMERA OPERATOR: There was a great atmosphere on the film—a lot of humor obviously on-camera as well as off. I can remember at times it being very, very difficult to keep the camera steady because everyone behind the camera was laughing their heads off during these antics. They were quite serious when they’re doing comedy, they’re very intellectual about the whole process, but for us they were just the Pythons. Particularly the rabbit sequence: one of the things about it was the special effects were so crude, so makeshift that they were part of the comedy. I think on any other film they would have been laughed off the screen, but because it was Python they’re accepted as part of the humor; in fact you can see th
e cables this rabbit was sliding along, bouncing up and down, [and] it was even more humorous.
Terry Gilliam and Terry Jones, both lovely guys, Terry Gilliam sometimes would tell me the setup he wanted, and I would set it up and get things organized, and then Terry Jones would come across and look through it and say, “No, this is not what I want,” and I’d have to move it. And Terry Gilliam might come back and have it moved back again! There was never any animosity between them, but they would go off and have a little, you know, “I wanted it this way” sort of thing, very gentlemanly. And they’d sort it out and they might do it one person’s way one time and the other way another time. Even though Terry Gilliam is more famous for his visuals, I don’t think in particular he was more demanding on the visual side of the setup because Terry Jones also had his ideas about what he wanted.
Terry Bedford would be struggling to get the light right, and I would be struggling to get the camera move right or a composition right. John Cleese was very impatient quite often. He would say, “How many laughs in that?” In other words, you’re wasting time on the wrong thing. He thought the only thing you should spend time on was getting the humor right, whereas Terry Jones and Terry Gilliam especially wanted it to look like a film and not like television. So there was always that battle going on between the Pythons and between us as well, because we were always trying to make it look as good as we could as a film. I think even John Cleese wanted it to look good, but he just didn’t want to waste the time (if there was going to be any time wasted) spending that extra couple of minutes getting an extra lamp in or a reflector or adjusting the camera. I can see it from his [side], he’s very, very serious when he’s going about his thing, and he more than any of the others dominated his sketches. When he had written a sketch he was very much, “No, no, this is the wav I want it.”