It’s crazy how isolated the Western world has become from reality. Apart from anything else, nothing sets your imagination free like a direct connection to the planet you actually live on. When I think back to the landscape I grew up in, I know that across the dirt road passing in front of our house was a big swamp, and further down the road was a terribly frightening wood with a house in it that was sort of ruined and no one was exactly sure who lived there. Straight away, the mind goes flying. The swamp was magical too, because one year they cut down a load of trees and piled them up along the edge of the road, and if you crept down among the trunks you’d find all these wonderful mossy spaces to hide out in.
In 1966, my mum began to assemble a retrospective diary of family illnesses (in later years I have sometimes wondered if my relative freedom from health-related anxiety can be attributed to the fact that Beatrice Gilliam did all my worrying for me). In the entry for 1948, when I was seven years old, she wrote as follows: ‘Terry had a number of terrible sieges with the croup. His temperature would be very high and he would see horrible creatures on the ceilings and walls and think they were after him. I was so frightened that his mind wouldn’t come out of these hallucinations . . . ’
At one with nature in a summertime Minnesotan variant of the Garden of Eden.
And then again, sixty years later, by a Spanish waterfall with Johnny Depp, trying - and ultimately failing - to film DONQVIXOTE. (This was just before the moment in the documentary Lost in La Mancha where Johnny’s got the fish in his trousers and he ad libs the line ‘You’re a fish – I’m a man.’) How did I get from one place to the other? If you look closely at the first photo, you can see I’m actually standing by a tombstone, so maybe it wasn’t so very far after all.
Some might argue that these fears were not without foundation in the long term, but I have no memory of those particular hallucinations. I think she may have conflated my troublesome outbreaks of coughing with a recurring nightmare I started to have after seeing Alexander Korda and Michael Powell’s The Thief of Bagdad at around this time. Cineastes will tell you what proportion of my films contain images inspired by that landmark of Arabian adventure, and I suspect more do than don’t. The spider in it loomed so large in my dreams that I’d wake up in the night with my bedclothes strangling me like a suffocating web.
Luckily, not all my formative cinematic experiences were so traumatic. I’d go to the cinema and see Snow White or the bad boys’ world in Pinocchio and think, ‘This is a world I want to be a part of.’ As a kid, once you’ve had your first taste of Robin Hood or ‘cowboys and Indians’ on celluloid, that’s it, it’s done – you just want to be on your horse, outspeeding the Sheriff of Nottingham or hunting down that Redskin (or Native American as you will later more respectfully come to know him).
I also read an enormous amount. My favourite books tended to be by a Scottish author called Albert Payson Terhune, who seems to be more or less unknown in Britain these days, perhaps because while he wrote a lot of excellent stories about loyal dogs, someone else wrote the most famous one – Greyfriars Bobby.
An early reading list . . . no Dostoevsky as yet, but plenty of horse and dog books. I can’t date this exactly, but fellow Pythons would probably say. ‘Maybe in your early twenties?’
We always had dogs in the house – usually setters, along with the odd spaniel – so these books did not require great intellectual leaps of understanding on my part. But the great thing about reading as a spur to the imagination (as opposed to say Grand Theft Auto – not that I don’t enjoy that too) is that you’re doing all the visualisation yourself. However good the author might be at painting a picture with words, the final stage of translating that mental picture from two dimensions into three is up to you.
It’s the same with the radio, which was all-powerful in America at that time. There was a children’s radio show called Let’s Pretend, which was one of my very first gateways to the fantastical. It might seem a strange thing for a cartoonist to say – that radio was the medium that first taught him how to conjure up visuals – but it’s certainly true in my case. Even later on, when I started to get actively interested in animation, the name of a voiceover artist like Mel Blanc still probably meant more to me than Chuck Jones’ did. And once I started making films of my own, I loved doing the voices and sound effects every bit as much as the images.
We didn’t have a TV during the time we lived at Medicine Lake, but I do remember going round to a neighbour’s house to watch Sid Caesar’s Your Show of Shows. Caesar was the one commanding your attention, but I realised when I went back to that show years afterwards that it was the less prominent Carl Reiner who was truly breathtaking.
Another comedian I discovered on that same neighbour’s TV, who made a huge impression on me right from the off, was Ernie Kovacs. Even though I saw him ridiculously early in life – I was just ten or eleven years old and pondering the economic benefits of my first paper round – I think Kovacs was the one who did more than anyone else to bring alive my interest in what I would later learn to think of as surreal comedy. No one else was doing that kind of thing on TV at the time, and he died far too young in a car crash, but not before he had introduced my receptive mind to the entrancing notion of a thing not having to be what it was.
Ernie Kovacs and Sid Caesar (handsomely pictured here) were so anar chic that it was hard to imagine how they got on the telly. But TV was a fairly new medium then and clearly couldn’t support the legions of executives that are now available to get in the way of talent. In a way these shows were my first connection with what became Python.
In terms of constructing a home for my youthful imagination, the two sure foundations which Ernie Kovacs and Walt Disney had to build upon were Grimms’ fairy tales and stories from the Bible. Decades later, when I eventually came to try to film Grimms (an experience that was a mittel-European horror story all of its own, but we’ll come to that later), I’d find out that they had been every bit as bowdlerised as the Old and New Testaments have been. But just because a sacred text has been tampered with by a few old men with beards over the years, that doesn’t make it any less powerful.
The version of the Bible I read at least twice all the way through was the King James, which is a pretty good run at the material, all things considered. Once you’ve got a book like that in your hands, you want to get to the end just to find out what happens – was it the butler who did it, or the Messiah?
As well as a tree-house, my father also made me a special table for backyard performances of the secret knowledge imported by this magic set. It wasn’t so much about becoming a master of illusion, as learning how to keep the audience on your side when things almost invariably went wrong . . . useful preparation for my later career as a film-maker.
Either way, I was raised to know the whole thing – Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, Joshua, the lot – and I do think the generations who’ve grown up without learning the Bible (and to my own secular regret I include my own children in that) have really missed out. Stories like David and Bathsheba are the building blocks of our culture, but who knows Bathsheba now? Who even knows David?
It’s not necessarily a question of having a reverential attitude. What’s interesting is sharing a culture that has grown out of those tales, because it’s easier to have fun with things when everyone understands what the references are.
Ours was a relaxed religious household. Christianity was a normal part of life, like fresh water and mosquitoes; everyone we knew went to church on Sunday, listened to the sermon and sang vigorous non-conformist hymns like ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’ (which are much better than the standard Anglican hymn book – that is fucking horrible).
Lawnmowing for candy is one of the essential human transactions. Contrary to the propaganda of certain studio executives, tight budgeting has always been really important to me . . . whether I was saving $1.30 out of every $2.10 earned as a kid, or trying to get by on $50 a week and still save up fo
r a film camera in New York in the mid-sixties. Obviously the numbers are bigger now, but it’s still the same fucking thing. To me it’s always been about buying the freedom to do what I want and nothing else . . . I don’t have to clean those cars or make that advert, because I’ve got a dollar thirty for a sketch book and some pencils. I owe my forensic record-keeping to my mother, who even kept the hospital bill (totalling $76.60) for the week of my birth – room, drugs, laboratory anaesthetic, Thanksgiving dinner for Gill, circumcision for Terry ($2). That first brutal edit was standard practice in America – every kid (well, all the boys at least) got circumcised, and I suppose $2 wasn’t a bad deal, given the excessive amount they took off. I’ve suffered with that all my life, but that’s another story – let’s call it the director’s cut.
Going to church was the big social event of the week, and any other large-scale gathering which took place at the weekend – a square dance or a barbecue – was likely to be organised around that same social hub. It gave you a real sense of community. The same way that knowing that if you wanted to buy something, you’d have to save hard to get the money, prepared you for the realities of your working life as an adult.
When I was eleven years old, our family underwent what should in theory have been a great upheaval. Like so many of our fellow Americans before – and after – us, we sold our house and drove out West to try our luck in California. A two-wheeled trailer was hired, all our moveable possessions packed into it – including my grandmother on my mother’s side (although eventually we heeded her protests and let her come in the car with the rest of the family) – and we set off into the future.
The whole thing felt like a big adventure to us kids, but must have been pretty stressful for the adult members of the party, given my dad’s uncertain employment prospects. He knew there were possibilities with a company called 3M, which had been based in Minneapolis, but it was nothing definite. And by the time we’d moved into a little pink house in one of aluminium giant Henry J. Kaiser’s tract developments – serried ranks of more-or-less identical brand-new houses, with much less space around them than we’d been used to back at Medicine Lake – the Gilliams’ California dream was losing a little bit of its lustre.
My mum’s diary recounts my reactions in the same melodramatic terms she so often (and so mystifyingly) tended to ascribe to me: ‘Terry was very disappointed. He said, “I thought we were coming to Paradise.”’
It was true that at first everything did seem kind of contained and not natural, but LA hadn’t been completely valley-ised by then. From where we lived in Panorama City, you had only to go fifteen minutes down the road to reach open fields. If you were willing to drive a little further, you could get to the mountains or the beach in under an hour. And by the time we’d gone into the mountains a few times at the weekend, and my dad had built fences in the back yard and clad the kitchen units in walnut, the San Fernando Valley soon started to feel like home.
Panorama City was not far from Stoney Point, which was one of the places where stock footage was filmed for Westerns and cowboy-themed TV shows. When you saw the standard shot of the posse running or the cavalry or someone shooting and someone else fall, that would often be where it was.
The phantasmogoric WILDWEST wallpaper of my LA bedroom is a definite step on from Minnesota’s more austere domestic environment. Life there wasn’t about decoration, it was just about what you needed, whereas one we were in CALIFORNIA, cowboys became an option. This is GILLIAM in this Larval stage – a young boy newly arrived in LA in search of the Western experience . . . I was ready to RIDE.
When you go somewhere for the first time thinking it’s going to be something it turns out not to be, that’s always disappointing, but the funny thing about Stoney Point was, we kept going there. It still had an allure. You’re at this place, and it’s not quite what you hoped for because it looked much more dramatic on film, but then you start looking at what is really there and your imagination starts making it interesting again. I suppose that junction – the place where reality and myth or fantasy meet – is where a lot of my films ended up being located.
It wasn’t like I particularly needed an escape route. I didn’t have any problems adjusting socially to life in California. No one laughed at how we talked – we all spoke American. When you moved into a new community in the 1950s, the neighbours were there to welcome you, and going to the church a few blocks away was how you got to know everyone. We’d been Episcopalians or Lutherans in Minnesota – I can’t actually remember which – but the church we joined in LA was Presbyterian. It didn’t seem to matter too much.
We were Protestants, that was the main thing. People weren’t zealots. They believed in the basic stuff, but nobody spent too much time thinking about how the Trinity actually functions. We didn’t buy transubstantiation – we had to draw the line somewhere. I mean, come on. The Catholic Church was the competition – they took their orders straight from Rome.
The one thing that was truly different about arriving in California was that this was the first time I knew there were Jews in the world – not just in the Bible. Most of the people who lived near us in Minnesota had been of Scandinavian origin. But our new next-door neighbours were Jewish, and Jews were like magnets to me.
They just seemed smarter and funnier than everybody else I knew. I don’t think I necessarily thought of them as more glamorous than my existing family and friends, just a bit more exotic and better read. I always used to complain about our own relatives when my parents suggested we go and see them: ‘Why? They’re not interesting.’ But I’d find any excuse to spend more time at my new Jewish friends’ houses. I’d got a whiff of something heady there that I definitely wanted more of. Looking back now, I suspect that ‘something’ might’ve been showbiz, as a lot of them seemed to have some connection – and even the vaguest pointer in that direction was a giant green ‘walk this way’ sign to me – to Hollywood.
Here I am at the piano with siblings Scott and sherry. I had to go without Christmas presents for a year or two to help pay for this, but it was worth the wait. I loved (and still do love) the way that to play Scott Joplin you have to get the rhythm going with your left hand while your right hand does something completely different. I now have a Steinway Grand, which I bought from Rocky Horror Picture Show star Tim Curry (and he’d bought before that from Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters). You wouldn’t guess its illustrious pedigree if you heard me play it, though.
Aside from putting on my magic shows and hammering away at my little blonde wood piano like an Aryan wannabe Fats Waller, I’d found one other reliable outlet for that instinct for showing off, which seemed to be so much stronger in me than my parents’ genes might have suggested. And that outlet was drawing.
It started back in Minnesota after a school trip to the zoo. We’d been driven into Minneapolis by special bus, and when we got back to class the teacher told us to draw one of the animals from memory. I cheated and copied a bear from a book sneakily tucked on my lap beneath my desk and got a lot of praise for it. The pattern of my creative life was set.
In the days before video games, comic books were the main corrupting influence on American youth. But they were also more part of the cultural furniture there than they ever were in Britain. You grew up with Superman and Batman, and a whole section of the newspaper was given over to strips like Terry and the Pirates, Mutt and Jeff, Dick Tracy, Dagwood and Blondie (an earlier generation thrived on The Katzenjammer Kids, Gertie the Dinosaur, Little Nemo and Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend). Trying to emulate the cartoonists was a large part of the pleasure of reading them from a very early age for me.
I learned everything I know about drawing from this book. Talent borrows, cartoonists copy.
You draw something and straight away it either works, or it doesn’t. That was (and indeed still is, on the ever rarer occasions when I get around to it) the delight of cartooning for me – the instant feedback. It’s not like making a film or writing a book, where you’
ve got to work on it for years and then somebody’s still got to go to the cinema or buy a copy to see what you’ve done – it’s more like a kind of performance. Quick – do it – then, Boom! You get the hit of an audience, even if it’s only an audience of one, liking (or hating) it.
I guess there’s always been a kind of smart-arse quality about me, where when someone says something I’ve got to come back with a quip that says, ‘I’m here, and I’m pretty clever.’ Maggie, my wife, still finds that pretty irritating, and I guess by doing it in the form of a drawing, I shift the whole transaction onto ground that I feel confident on.
These are some of the earliest original cartoons I can’t remember doing, and I actually think they’re better than some of my much later stuff i did at college. They just seem more confident. I really like the two pupils in one eyeball, and those suction cup things are incredible.
PICASSO had is blue period, bud my formative works were predominantly concerned with Hoover attachments. I guess that was tech paranoia of the fifties doing its deadly work. Once when I had scarlet fever as a kid I hallucinated that my parents went into the other room and the refrigerator blew up and killed them.
The film THE WAR OF THE WORLDS might have been another key influence That came out in 1953, making me twelve or thirteen at the time I did this.
never met my grandfather on my mother’s side. His and my grandma’s marriage had broken up after he got ripped off in a business deal and turned to drink, but I wasn’t encouraged to ask about that as a child, because it was perceived as such a disgrace to the family. Years later, when my mum gave me her journal to read, I found out that one of my grandpa’s other shameful accomplishments was running a cinema in Bismarck, North Dakota – which she initially tried to pass off as ‘a theatre’ (as if that made it more respectable!). So the cinematic gene was definitely in there somewhere.
Gilliamesque Page 2