Monty Python Speaks

by David Morgan

  Cleese flexes his muscles.

  ATHERTON: I remember feeling very sorry for the wardrobe department because every single night they would work very late trying to clean off the wardrobe. The actors were always in mud; if there wasn’t mud on the set they used to import it! That was the whole theme of the period: mud, dirt, excreta.

  I remember them having to eat excreta at one time, and they’d made up various concoctions of chocolate and all sorts of other things, and they were testing which was the most edible of the concoctions. Which looked the worst and tasted all right?

  JONES: I remember Mike getting really ratty when we were doing the “Plague Village.” His job was being a peasant who had to crawl through the mud and go to one spot where there was some chocolate in the mud and he had to start eating this chocolate. He’d spent the whole morning doing this, then he realized that he wasn’t on camera all the time. He did get a bit ratty about it, quite rightly!

  CAROL CLEVELAND: Graham’s drinking problem was pretty severe on Holy Grail; it sort of reached its peak there, really. At that stage the fellas were getting quite concerned about it. The day I arrived I remember him sitting there in a terrible state, he had the shakes something awful. And though this occurred on the television series, because we didn’t have very long in the studio we always managed to get over it there. There had been retakes because of Graham, but I don’t think the television audience was ever aware of that because it was all done in little bits. But when it came to the film, it obviously was a great worry, and I think John (being Graham’s best mate) was particularly concerned.

  There was still a lot of lunacy certainly with the two Terrys, who have always been the two loonies of the group—their directing it together caused a lot of problems! I wasn’t around it that much but even the scene that I was involved in, “Castle Anthrax,” what would happen is they would sort of designate different scenes to each other and that particular one was quite a long sequence. I can’t remember which came first but I think Terry G. was going to do the first part of it anyway, he was there in the morning setting it all up, the lights, camera, da da da, and got everything going, and then later on Terry Jones came along to take over and didn’t like at all what Terry G. had set up and so changed it all: the whole setup, the lighting, everything was changed. Now this apparently was happening all the time, because they just couldn’t agree on what they were doing. And so the crew were tearing their hair out, literally; they were apparently often near rebellion by the time I arrived to do that scene because to them it all seemed so unprofessional, so disorganized.

  Every time one or the other Terry came on and said, “Well, no, we won’t have that,” you can see them all throw their eyes up to the heavens going, “Oh, God!”

  I Didn’t Expect a Kind of Spanish Inquisition

  JONES: The directing wasn’t really regarded like someone taking control, it was the director basically having to do a lot of leg work and a lot of graft that nobody else wanted to do, really. [The anger] was mainly focused on Terry G., because he was so focused on the look of the thing and on what he was shooting that he could sometimes forget that people were being [made] uncomfortable.

  There was a little bit of bad feeling that went on between Terry and John and Graham. I think John didn’t feel Terry was paying him enough [attention]. There had always been a little friction between them in a way, because John is always making fun of Terry being American, and I think Terry wasn’t tactful enough with John in asking him to do things, and John would find himself in very uncomfortable situations where Terry is getting the thing to look right. Whereas I had always been a bit more careful with the artistes, I suppose.

  GILLIAM: When we actually got around to making Holy Grail, it was like, “Oh, now we’ve got to do all the things we claimed we could do that Ian couldn’t do,” and I think we did. But I think it was the end of the first week of shooting, where everyone got pissed one night, Terry and I were just shattered because everybody was going, “Wrong!” A lot of shit had been dumped on us and a lot of things had happened and we were actually managing to survive and keep things going. And Graham got really pissed one night and said what a complete disaster we were making—this was a time we were feeling very, very vulnerable!—and how Ian should be in there, and what egomaniacs, megalomaniacs, useless pieces of shit we are. Oh, that’s great.“Fuck you, Graham! Get your lines right!”

  I just thought, “This is horrible,” but the one sad thing is, deep down I think we both felt they may be right—we might not be able to do this.

  Did you actually think you could function as codirectors?

  GILLIAM: Yeah, we did. Terry and I tended to agree on most things, until we actually started working together and then we discovered we didn’t agree quite as totally! The real difference came in that I’ve got a better eye than Terry, is what it’s about. I’m better at those things, and he’s better at other things. Ultimately that’s how we ended up working it; I ended up being at the camera, and he worked with the guys, because having been in my little garret all those years, my social skills were not as highly developed as they are now! The idea of going out there, slogging your guts out and trying to get them to do what was needed for the sake of [the shot]? Again, John and Graham didn’t particularly like all this cumbersome stuff. Eric was all right. I mean, they just want to go out and do the funny lines; that’s a bit extreme, but it was kind of like that.

  CLEESE: Filming is an appallingly technical process, doing the same business over and over and over again from different angles, and on the whole directors forget—I’m not talking about our directors, because they’re good on it—but most directors simply do not understand the process that actors need. And when I’m working, I will sometimes say, “All right, we’ve got the technical stuff settled, now it’s the actors’ turn. Let’s do four or five takes back-to-back.” Because what happens is you get warmed up. What normally happens is you do the first take and then it all stops while somebody adjusts this bulb, this light, somebody adjusts the position of a lamp, somebody else comes and takes some fluff off your jacket, somebody else is worried about the fact that there’s a bit of glow on your nose. By the time you’re ready to shoot again, you’re cold again.

  In movies everybody concentrates on the fucking technical aspects! And they don’t matter when you’re making comedy; what matters is whether it’s funny! A take can vary tremendously from being dreadfully, embarrassingly unfunny to being hilarious. And it all depends on whether you go into that particular take with the right energy and the right degree of focus. It’s great if you work with directors from television; you don’t get this problem because they understand what the actor needs. But in filmmaking you can find yourself being made completely subsidiary to all the technical requirements; and then when they’ve got a take that everyone else is happy with because it’s in focus and the sound was all right, they want to move on. It’s absolutely putting the cart before the horse.

  It is something as you can tell that I feel strongly about. And that’s why I think actors become difficult and self-protective, because if they don’t get difficult, their performances are going to suffer because they’re not going to be given the circumstances they need to produce their best stuff.

  I thought Jonesy had a great, nice atmosphere on the set; I remember very few disagreements with Jonesy, partly because by the time we’d got on the floor the disagreements had already been heard at the writing stage, so we all walked on the floor knowing exactly what the material was about. I thought he was very good, and I always felt it was right within the Python group that he would direct because that was more in tune with his talents than with Terry G.’s talents, which are to produce the most extraordinary visuals but not so much to make a funny two- or three-man sketch.

  I know that there was one occasion when I exploded at Terry G. when we were doing a shot where the composition was very crucial, and we were kneeling while wearing full armor and it was very, very uncomfortable. And
I remember that Terry G. was lighting a shot with infinite care, which meant that we were kneeling there for ages, and he was moving the camera a couple of inches this way, then he’d move it back again. I remember complaining after a time, saying, “Do you realize this is really uncomfortable?” And I certainly realized that he’d been doing all this kind of thing for years in the animation, without the bits of paper complaining to him, and I think it was hard for him at that stage to think of the actors as people. At some point I just got up and said, “Well, fuck this”—or whatever rude remark I used at the time—” I’m not kneeling there any more because I am now in pain.”

  But what happens is that people are always interested in negative emotions, and so for all the twenty sessions you have when things go down quite well, people are really interested in the twenty-first session, when there was a big argument. And there are famous moments when people got angry, and so those are the things that everybody remembers. What they don’t actually remember is the context of it, which was that most of the time we got on pretty well.

  GILLIAM: The one scene where it blew up was the scene where all the animals were being thrown over the battlements, and to do the shot I had to get their heads below the parapets so I could do a matte to put the animals in the [shot]. That meant digging a hole in the ground and sticking the camera in the hole and they had to be on their knees, so everybody was the right height. John just was like screaming and shouting.

  I finally said, “I don’t want to sit here and have to beg you guys to do this so that your sketch that you’ve written works! I don’t want to have to sit there and have to tell you how all this stuff and why, I’m doing it because I need your heads below the battlements.”

  “This is really uncomfortable, Terry—”

  “I know it’s comfortable, but if your head goes above that line I can’t do the matte, blah blah blah.”

  “We can’t act like this—”

  “Well, I need another five minutes, we’re not quite set up.”

  “These things are killing me—”

  “Shut up! This is your fucking sketch; you wrote this fucking thing, I don’t need this!” And I walked off; the dam finally cracked and I went off in a huff and lay there in the grass: “I’m not going to do this shit.” It was appalling behavior! I left Terry to take them on.

  It was really difficult for me, having only had to deal with pieces of paper, things like that. To actually be able to convince people to do things (which you have to do as a director)—my skills were not at all there. I was pathetic!

  Codirector Gilliam making sure there is enough light.

  Terry and I disagreeing—it wasn’t big things, but purely practical things: “The camera should go here because that’s that.”

  Terry goes, “Why don’t I go over here?”

  “Well, I think it should be there.”

  “Well, I want it there!”

  “Terry, the shot’s better here!”

  “Eeeauuuewwwl…”(!)

  But what was happening on Grail, these enthusiasms [of Terry’s] I knew weren’t right. Now this may sound wrong, but I just know when it came to where the camera should go and certain technical things—that’s what I’m good at. And I find trying this other way—“Eeeauuuewwwl, it might work!”—is wasting time we don’t have; the light’s going down, we’re going to lose that and the shot will fall apart. And so that’s really where we divided in a sense, and because I couldn’t stand talking to the fucking group to try to convince them to do anything my way, Terry and I split—and it worked out very well. We plowed on.

  I think they always deeply suspected me of being more interested in the image than the comedy, that was the basic thing. John in particular just thought everything I was doing was getting in the way, because for him it had to be comfortable and easy and then the comedy would flow, and I was always trying to stick a helmet on him and then stand him in a ditch and that was getting in the way. I mean, they’re pretending that you don’t have to do all these things, and I think you do.

  I want it to be both great looking and funny. I think most of the stuff we pulled off in Grail worked really well. I was just looking at a little clip this morning, “Bring out your dead.” It’s gorgeous. Shit has never looked so beautiful! And because of that, it’s funnier because it feels so much of a serious movie, a real movie, with real people groveling in the mud, and then: “I’m not quite dead, I’m feeling much better!” It’s funnier that way.

  JONES: Terry hated working with me, I don’t know quite why. He didn’t really like the experience. Because Terry’s a real perfectionist, you see, and I’m not. I want to make sure the thing gets on the screen as well as possible, but I’m not really a perfectionist to the extent Terry is. There was one day, when we were doing “Constitutional Peasants,” I think it was. The location wasn’t very good, actually, I’d been rushing around trying to find this location, we finally got this field and it wasn’t great, and Terry was trying to make it look better than it was really. He had started off, and I was late being made up or something, and I kind of took over because nothing had actually been shot because of some problem. Maybe I was a bit untactful in that situation, and I think Terry felt a bit ruffled about that.

  IDLE: You don’t “direct” comedy; you just avoid trying to get in the way of people being funny!

  You must understand that the rest of us have a healthy contempt for directors. This was the least-wanted job; obviously the two who wanted it got it. Since they are both control freaks (as are all directors), it drove them both mad. But Terry G. won; he drove Terry J. more mad! Terry J. would be cutting by day and Terry G. would undo it and be recutting by night. In the end, the balance works great. Terry J. is good with the acting, Terry G. is good with the location feel, the sinister boat, the visual elements.

  PALIN: Gilliam’s early experience with Python was to come from the ranks of being an animator who worked in his own little loft producing inspired stuff but on his own, and doing occasional performances, which he did and they are much treasured! He appeared in a suit of armor hitting someone with a chicken; that was the great Terry Gilliam in there! But it was quite something for him to then mix with the group in the same way as all the rest of us had been mixing. Because during the television series certainly Terry worked very much on his own; he didn’t come to group meetings, not nearly as often as the rest of us. So when it came to the first bit of directing, which was Holy Grail, Terry had to interrelate with the rest of them.

  We were making our first movie for a small amount of money. There were tensions; for instance, we were doing a scene where we all have to kneel down, rather uncomfortably, while a rabbit is dropped on us or something like that. And then it works, and then Terry Gilliam says he would like another shot because the sun is now at a lovely angle, just glinting off the top of John’s helmet. And I remember John saying, “Fuck the helmet, you know, fuck the sun! It’s late, it’s quarter to seven, it’s time to go, I’m extremely uncomfortable, that’s it!” So, that’s what Terry had to put up with there. I think he had to learn ways of dealing with that. The Pythons were not an easy group to work with!

  I think Terry was almost too deferential to actors, too respectful, and didn’t really know quite how you got the best performances out of actors. You get the light streaming in the right place, you get the look of the scene fresh and different and unusual and not like anything you’ve seen before, and then he would expect the actors to come in, do their lines and go. Which is, you know, quite permissible; that’s the way a lot of directors direct, and they do it very well. But I think probably as Terry moved on to dealing with the bigger stars—I’m thinking really post-Brazil, when he was doing The Fisher King and 12 Monkeys—he had to find a way of working with people who needed him a lot, needed a director to spend a lot of time with them. When he was working in England, the English actors just got on with it, really; on Jabberwocky, I can’t remember anybody going up to Terry, saying, “Terry, how should
I do this, am I right, do I look good, is this the way my public should see me?” There was none of that—you just got on with it, and I think Terry was happier with that. But I think that he has certainly learned how to deal with actors more now; he’s got a great deal more confidence, and rather deftly handles a lot of good actors and thus produces some great performances.

  Did the fact that two of their own were now in charge change the dynamics of Python?

  PALIN: Yes, it did change things—quite considerably, really. [It may be] all very democratic where we all discuss how things are going to be done, nevertheless you know it’s power which the others don’t necessarily have. Terry Jones became not just a writer and actor but also the director, Gilliam as well. It gave the directors more to do and more of a stake in the way the film was going to look like. As long as that was effective it was fine, but if it was cause for doubt—people thought this is not how something should be done, or a feeling that Terry Jones is taking this over, or Terry Gilliam’s taking this over—then there were tensions which had not really been there before on the television series when we had an outside director.

  What was most difficult was the combination of the two directors. And there was a sort of merciless divided room attitude of John’s—if he didn’t like something that Terry Jones was doing, he’d praise Gilliam extravagantly and say, “I wish he were here”; if he didn’t like something Terry Gilliam would make him do, he’d say, “Well, Jones is the only one who really understands how to do comedy!” So I think that was pretty intolerable, and never repeated. It was very hard for the two of them to codirect like that. You had to have one person who was responsible.

  SHERLOCK: They were all so new to it, the only people who knew about how a film should really go were some of the producers. Graham’s version as I remember it is [that] Terry Jones was so keen to get as much in the can as possible that they were working overtime something like four hours a day, they’d been working for over a week, they were exhausted, the crew hadn’t been paid, and were doing all this overtime because Terry was so keen. And the two Terrys were alternating, so there was all of that going on; they were actually getting behind the camera in costume and then walking back around to do [the part], so it took so much longer, so they needed to do overtime in a way. I mean, it’s this real power struggle to “Oh no, I don’t like that shot.” “Well, in that case we’ll have to do it two ways!” And all shacked up in this terrible hotel in Stirling. Nobody was enjoying it.