by David Morgan
They’d saved all the rushes—there was no point doing anything but the first week all at once—and everyone was terrified wondering what we were going to get. Most of the crew thought, “Oh my God, we’re with this tin-pot company [who] know nothing about making movies, it’s all caving in, we’ve got a disaster on our hands, and we’ve all said we’ll take a half-cut in everything!” So the tension was incredible. Graham went straight to the bar because he knew psychologically what to do: he got them all drunk. He opened his own pocket and said to the barman, “Drinks are on me for the evening.” The whole crew were immediately happy! He then went to have a word with Eric Idle; Eric got on his guitar, someone else probably got on the piano, they had a sing-song, and this broke the tension before they went in to see the first rushes.
When they saw the rushes, the crew were so amazed at the standard visually that was coming out that they said there and then, “We don’t care when we get paid, we’re going to work on this.” Well, that’s a real sort of show-biz backstage story, because from then on they really had them eating out of their hand, to slog through that mud, the terrible, wet, hideous conditions in Scotland.
And they were joking, saying already, “Well, of course the next movie’s got to be somewhere hot!”
We Must Examine You
ATHERTON: Coming from a film background, I can remember the rushes have always been a secret. I worked as a loader for a particular cameraman for a couple of years, and he was very protective of his rushes in that he wouldn’t let anyone else see them. And being brought up in that school, I thought the rushes should be a very private thing as well. But the Pythons had it set up in one of the main rooms of this local hotel, and of course all the locals heard about it—it wasn’t a very big town we were shooting in, and half of them were in the film—so they always used to come along and watch the dailies as well. The first couple of days I tried to stop them. I protested to Mark Forstater: “We can’t allow them in, people watching our dailies.”
But as it turned out, it was a blessing in disguise because they used to sit in the back and laugh their heads off! It was good feedback to the Pythons as to whether they got their humor right. And it was a good cover for us if ever we made any mistakes. Because as everyone was laughing, no one was worried about looking for our technical errors. Everyone goes to watch the rushes for their particular angle; wardrobe are in there to see whether they might have got the wrong tunics on that day; the camera boys are in there watching for our side of things. So having the local audience actually lightened the whole thing and made it quite a fun affair, something we all looked forward to.
JONES: I think once we’d started seeing the rushes we felt pretty good; we had good material in there, we liked the look of it because Terry Bedford’s camerawork was just superb, so yeah, I think the rushes were the thing that kept us going, really, because everybody laughed, everybody had a good time. You’d come out of rushes feeling a charge of adrenaline, thinking, “Wow, this is really good, this is really worth doing.” Otherwise you might have given up!
BEDFORD: There was a lot of material not shot during the actual main production. When we wrapped, the “Black Knight” sequence in the forest had not been tackled and that was shot as a pickup in Epping Forest in East London. And a lot of inserts were done by Julian Doyle. Julian is another ex-film school guy who was a little bit of a jack-of-all-trades. I suppose because we’d been through film school we knew everybody else’s job in a way. Julian I think was good for the Pythons because he got a lot done for them, and if anything he was the one who represented the “amateurish” way of approaching it that satisfied that aspect of it. So when the pressure was on about getting a closeup of something or other, he’d say, “Oh, don’t worry, I can pick that up later.” Things like the bodies going over the cliff at the Bridge of Death, which was at Glen Coe, we never shot any of that; it was shot down in London by throwing dummies out of a tall window in someone’s backyard with a bit of fire and a clever camera angle.
Terry Gilliam and John Cleese practicing medieval therapy as the warring Red and Black Knights.
SHERLOCK: I was occasionally working for the costume department on Grail, mainly because Hazel Pethig, who had designed the costumes for all the TV shows, was still contracted from the BBC (as were quite a few—they moonlighted), and so suddenly they went over schedule and had to find people to fill in because she was actually doing a TV show at the time.
I helped the special effects man on the “Black Knight” sequence. Cleese’s stand-in was a man with one leg, that’s how that sequence was done. When the first leg came off he’d already got his arms behind his back, but he could balance because he was used to it, whereas anyone with a leg tied up behind him, it would be much more difficult. Plus you’d have to film him from certain angles to look more real. And of course for the second leg coming off it was in fact [a dummy] suspended totally by wires.
They dug a hole for this guy when he’s just the stump: “You cowards!” The poor guy with one leg was getting pins and needles from being stuck in this hole for about four or five hours while they had every angle.
Were there specific lessons learned from the experience of Holy Grail?
IDLE: Always have sufficient budget. Try and stay out of soggy woolen armor.
DOYLE: You had to be stubborn about what you feel is funny because over a long process, esepcially a difficult film like that, you lose a sense of what’s funny and what isn’t. And especially the artists lose the sense of it. Especially Eric. Eric worries about his stuff; he’s for cutting it out all the time—as soon as it’s shot he’s bored with it, and so somebody [like] Eric will cut his own stuff out almost immediately. He’s seen it once, he’d done it in rehearsal, and then it’s boring by the time he’s shot it. So when I actually cut some of their films, I had be careful and be stubborn about trying to remember what was funny.
The first thing was this rumor that the Black Knight was killing the film: it wasn’t funny, it was too bloody, and they made us take it out. I thought, Christ, I’m sure that’s funny! And then things were in and out, in and out, we had one viewing and I managed to get the Black Knight back in. And John Cleese was always saying, “It should be somebody else’s voice, mine isn’t right.” He didn’t think it was deep enough. I finally got him to voice it, and why shouldn’t it be his voice?
The one thing that didn’t work was Robin with the three-headed knight; I think the dialogue for that was funny, but the actual execution wasn’t thought through, and when we got to shoot it it didn’t work. That was out [for a time], but it seemed to be thin without it there, and when Robin reappeared you hadn’t seen him because he hadn’t done his thing with the three-headed knight—so we felt we had to have it whether you wanted it or not.
Bring Out Your Dead
GOLDSTONE: Holy Grail was very risky. There was no completion guaranty, it was just hoping it could be done, it really was. The budget really was ridiculous and somehow at the end of shooting they were on budget. It wasn’t until the post-production and first cut that anything seemed to be awry, but suddenly the moment of truth came that we didn’t have a film that was particularly saleable and showable; they were worried!
We had this disastrous investors’ screening when the film was supposedly finished. What had happened was, Terry Gilliam and Terry Jones decided to make it as real as possible, to have a soundtrack that was very real, bone-crunching and everything. They were very medieval in terms of the sounds of it, but also the music as well. It was all as authentic as they could possibly get. Neil Innes did the music, it was a sort of semireligious chant that in fact was kind of too real. And so at this screening we had it wasn’t getting the response from the audience that we’d expected.
JONES: Terry G. had done the dub, and you know what it’s like when you’re making a film: you’ve got two or three sound editors working away for months and months building up wonderful, incredibly thick soundtracks. We had a screening for our investors—L
ed Zeppelin and Pink Floyd and anybody who’d put money into the thing—and it started off everybody laughing at the beginning and then after a while just nothing; the whole film went through [with] no laughter at all. And it was awful, I was sitting there saying, “It just can’t be unfunny.”
DOYLE: This viewing with the investors was in a place where the projection box was upstairs and you had to go out of the place, round the back, up some stairs to get to the projectionist. Anyway, we started running it and we hadn’t masked the film, so the guy had the rack wrong—you were seeing the boom in shot; it wasn’t even a small boom, it was a big thing coming in from out of frame. Shit, the investors won’t understand that’s not actually in the film. I rush out of the cinema, go up to the top, “The rack’s wrong!” The third reel he’s got it out of rack again!
The boom in the shot made us look like a bunch of amateurs and the investors were worrying about what they’d financed. They probably didn’t worry that much, but the Pythons probably worried more. It’s all too tense, like you’re all sitting there listening for somebody else to laugh.
FORSTATER: Every screening has a certain mood that you can sense, and the mood at the end of that screening was certainly pretty grim. People weren’t responding, they weren’t laughing the way they should have been. I mean, they were laughing at individual scenes, but there wasn’t a buildup, it didn’t have a rhythm of following through on a film. My memory is that the music was the problem, that the music—how do you describe music? I can’t remember what it was like, but I remember the feeling was that it was too loud, there was too much of it, and that it was the wrong quality. There were too many effects and the effects were too prominent, so that the sound was overwhelming the film. Because the comedy is quite slight, the jokes need to have a context in which they work, and if you overwhelm them with sound, they will just get drowned, which I think is what was happening.
How did the Pythons themselves react?
PALIN: No walk-outs, but some long faces!
FORSTATER: I don’t remember in detail who responded and how, [but] there was a certain feeling of, “Yeah, you fucked it up,” or “This is a mess, what have we let ourselves in for?” I think there were people who probably felt there was disaster looming. And it’s very easy, when you’re in a position like this, to panic.
Being inexperienced filmmakers, they didn’t understand that rough cuts are part of the process and are not necessarily a finished product?
FORSTATER: Yeah. After all, this was the first time that either of the two Terrys had ever done this kind of mixing, so it’s very easy to try something which doesn’t work, and at that point it can all be thrown away, can all be redone. But to someone who doesn’t know the technical side, you might think looking at it, “God, this is it, and we’ve got to live with what we’re currently seeing,” which of course is not the case. So I think probably a certain amount of inexperience may have led people to think it was a disaster which couldn’t be repaired.
JONES: I remembered the lesson of the “Dirty Fork” sketch and I thought maybe the same thing’s happened with the soundtrack, this wonderful sountrack with bird songs at the beginning when they’re shouting up the castle walls and this wind and ravens and all sorts of things going on in the background. So I went and redubbed it and as soon as anybody started talking I just took all the sound effects out, all the atmosphere, everything. I went through the entire film doing that, and that seemed to help, it was something about the soundtrack filling in all the pauses.
DOYLE: Terry Jones swears that it’s all the noise that went on in the film, that they were losing the dialogue, and Terry Gilliam sort of half-believes that. I think the dialogue was perfectly clear; I think what happens is when you do a dub, the first viewing after a dub is always a rotten viewing because you always hear the new things, so you’re listening to the birds and the wind in the background and you think, “Jesus Christ, did I put them on that loud?” Two viewings later, you don’t even hear the birds, you only listen to the new things, the new footsteps. And of course you know the dialogue, so you don’t listen to it, you’re listening to every other bloody noise. It’s a real bugger; I like to get that viewing over with and try to listen to the dialogue again.
GOLDSTONE: We’d already spent all the money by then and couldn’t quite go back to them and say, “Can you put up some more because we’d like to refinish it?” So we had to go to a bank and borrow money against personal guarantees to make up the difference. The decision was clearly [that] the soundtrack was too real and that the music track would work better if it were more mock-heroic, so we went to a music library and bought the music for it, and it worked.
JONES: Neil Innes’ music sounded quaint, it didn’t have an epic feel to it. And we’d run out of money by that time, so I went along to De Wolfe Music Library in London and just took out piles and piles of disks and just sat here at home trying out music to it, trying to get something to work. Some of the “Castle Anthrax” scene, I seem to remember there was about three different records playing at one point, trying to get some sort of atmosphere going.
So it felt like what you needed was really corny, heroic music.
FORSTATER: Once we had remixed it, we knew the film was very good, it was very funny, it was working well. The next screening was very positive. I think everyone was very happy with it. So it was night and day. And I think a lot of credit has to go to Michael White that he didn’t panic. He could see that there was a good film there; he could see that if we went back to the cutting room and remixed it, we’d have a funny film. And that proved to be correct.
IDLE: We had thirteen previews, ranging from bloody awful to finally hilarious. That’s what good comedy editing does, shifts it from a theory to tailored to the audience’s response. It helps when you have four new brains (who are also the writers and the stars) coming in and suggesting what should be cut and what could be moved elsewhere!
Our Quest Is at an End
GOLDSTONE: I found myself a lot more involved in post-production, and then consequently I was totally involved in selling it and going out with them on the road to promote it. I think that was why they came back and asked me to do Life of Brian, because they could see I was very committed to their cause and was able in distribution deals for Holy Grail to keep certain controls and integrity in terms of what happened. That was very important to them—and continues to be.
It was quite nerve-wracking because we didn’t have any distribution for it, and I was in charge of arranging distribution throughout the world; no one else would get into it! And we made the decision to take it to Filmex, which was the Los Angeles Film Festival. This was about February 1975, and so very much in trepidation because we had no idea how an American audience would react to it, I’d invited a number of distributors. It was playing at the ABC Complex at Century City. And the Pythons were at the end of a North American tour doing some live dates and also promoting the PBS broadcasts, and [they] happened to arrive in Los Angeles just about the time of Filmex, so most of them were there for that.
It was extraordinary. We’d gotten to the ABC Complex and there’s this huge queue of people outside and we thought they were queuing for some other film, and it wasn’t [the case]—they were queuing for our movie! That kind of underground thing had happened, it was partly to do with the record albums being available and some kind of recognition of Python as a television series, and they were there, and it worked.
I actually wasn’t able to get anyone to pick it up in Los Angeles. I took a print to New York and had two or three distributors set up to see it there. One in particular, Don Rugoff of Cinema 5, I just called up out of the blue. He took my call and said he’d like to see it. He arranged a screening with all his people. I’d also arranged a screening for a guy at United Artists to see it, and they both started within an hour of each other, and I couldn’t change it. So I had to run from one cinema to another with reels, to get to the Rugoff screening in time for it to start. When I got
there just towards the end of the Rugoff screening, I crept in and all of his people were there and there’s this man sitting in the front row snoring away! And this was Rugoff. Obviously he was not going to buy this!
And the film finished, and then he came to life, stood up, turned to everybody and said, “What do you think? What do you think?” They all loved it. He said, “Okay, I’ll buy it.” So he took me back to the office and we worked out a deal and opened it about eight weeks later, in late April 1975.
It turned out Rugoff suffered from narcolepsy, just fell asleep at very odd moments, so it was nothing to do with the movie at all!
He kind of got it. I think he used “Sets the Cinema Back 900 Years” [for the ads]. I’m sure that was a Python line. “Makes Ben Hut Look Like an Epic” was one we used a lot. He had great style; he gave out coconuts on the first day to everybody who would turn up, the first 1,000 people. It just took a grip, queues around the block for days.
We opened in London subsequent to that, in May. EMI, [who] had turned it down, were happy to distribute it, just on a straight distribution basis; it actually worked out to be a very good deal because it meant that most of the net revenues came back to us.