Either way, the next scene we shot he asked me if he could ‘try something’. Of course I said yes, and then he just batted his eyelids like a love-sick cow as Uma Thurman’s Venus spoke, which was both hilarious and sublime – sometimes you almost feel like those things are happening as an act of atonement. I never really know what to say in situations where an actor has got upset on a personal level, so I just try to get in there and look understanding – as if I’m doing something to make it better when really I don’t have a clue. I think how a lot of the best actors tend to work is almost by a series of controlled explosions, and in those situations it is sadly inevitable – as any one-armed mining engineer will tell you – that the odd unscheduled blast will occasionally sneak in.
Much as Columbia wanted to cut costs, making BARON MUNCHAVSEN in black and white just wasn’t an option.
often say, ‘If you haven’t read the story, you don’t know you’re in it’, but the sad truth is that knowing you’re in a story doesn’t necessarily change the ending. In fact, that kind of self-awareness can become a problem in itself – you start to realise the pre-set patterns are waiting for you like dog shit on the pavement, and it’s just a question of which one you’re going to tread in.
Because the producer Thomas Schühly’s heroes were Dino De Laurentüs, Alexander the Great and Napoleon, he was very excited about working on such a grand project and insisted on calling BARON MUNCHAVSEN ‘the new CLEOPATRA…’ But I kept telling him to shut up because the Italian crew all got new cars and houses from the last one, and if we kept telling them that we had all this money, it was inevitable that they would take everything we had and more.
My most ornate story boards for my most ornate film… Who could possibly have guessed that this was going to be expensive?
If I can immodestly presume to construct an analogy on the capacious foundation of the oeuvre of Orson Welles, let’s say Brazil was my Citizen Kane – the time we took on the studios and won – then Munchausen was my Magnificent Ambersons: payback time from the men in suits. Brazil had come out and done OK. It made decent money – not loads, but enough – and was widely recognised as an achievement of some kind. But this guy who’d made it was clearly trouble and his come-uppance was long overdue, so once things started to go wrong on Munchausen, I knew I’d clicked out of Kane and into Ambersons mode. That sense of falling into another story is like a flying dream without the actual flight.
On Munchausen, where the original budget was roughly £23 million, we were probably pushing £30 million by the time things had really gone tits up. The insurers Lloyds of London had come in to produce the film for a while (from which point things actually progressed quite smoothly, because they brought in a sensible woman, Joyce Herlihy, who’d been the production supervisor on Jabberwocky, and she made intelligent decisions without just blaming me for everything) until they reached the limit of their liability, and then it reverted back to the bond company, Film Finances.
The role of the bond company is one of the most significant – and least discussed – aspects of movie-making. For a suitably handsome percentage, the bond company guarantees that if you go over budget, the film will still get finished, and (at least in theory) it’ll be them that coughs up the money. They operate along basically similar business principles to the bail bondsman in a Western, except there are no actual bullets in the shoot-outs. There is an element of waiting for people to go for their guns though, because a bond company will often sign off on a blatantly fictitious budget, confident that the producers will chip in the extra cash to avoid the stigma of calling them in.
What did they mean the director was ‘out of control’? Everyone of these elephants was integral to the storyline…
By the time Munchausen got to the post-production stage, the studio had been subject to regime change and were happy to see the projects of David Puttnam’s old guard doing badly so the new boys would shine by comparison. At this point the bond company will generally start dumping all their other bad debts on you, under the old Hollywood adage of ‘If it’s down already, you might as well bury it.’ The way the accounting of major financial institutions is set up often tends to militate against fiscal common sense and in favour of profligacy. I remember talking to one of the people from Lloyds about the racehorse Shergar, who had been stolen a couple of years before, but they were ‘convinced’ was still alive. They’d paid out millions on the basis that he wasn’t, so we asked, ‘Why don’t you just get a private detective and stump up a few thousand to track him down?’ And the guy said, ‘It’s not worth it, the money’s already been written off.’ If you blow the whistle that a mistake has been made, you’ll probably end up in even bigger trouble, so it’s probably best to just sit back and let the millions keep on flowing (which in this case, was probably good news for us . . . up to a point).
Even Baron Munchausen’s four Academy Award nominations could not dispel the bad financial ju-ju, which had been intensified first by a web of intrigue between the bond company and the studio, and then by the studio’s decision to limit the film’s American release to a fraction (and a small one at that) of the usual number of prints. My new-found pariah status in Hollywood was not entirely without an upside, though. As a consequence of the difficulties I subsequently had getting projects off the ground, I’ve definitely made fewer films than I would’ve liked. However, given an easy ride, I probably would have knocked out some real stinkers, but I was saved from myself by my own notoriety, so maybe there is some kind of guardian angel at work in my career after all – it’s just that he or she is a pretty fucked-up, ironic character.
The cast has a group premonition about the pathetic release the studio would give the film.
A man at war with the fates – pondering the potential benefits of a spell in the cinematic wilderness.
Bitter resignation to the malevolence of destiny aside, there was at least one sense in which the toxic aftermath of Munchausen really did prove to be a blessing in disguise. There’s nothing quite like an enforced renunciation of the ego for paving a new avenue of creative fulfilment. Such was my determination to control as many aspects of the film-making process as possible that I’d always sworn I was only ever going to make films from my own scripts – it all had to be me, I was going to do everything. But of course then reality kicks in and decrees otherwise, and you realise that there’s actually nothing better than coming across something someone else has done which you just think is wonderful.
There I was, flicking distractedly through the latest version of The Addams Family script and thinking, ‘This isn’t really doing it for me,’ when in the same package from my agent, Jack Rapke, along came The Fisher King. It was already past midnight when I started reading it. I was just about to go to bed, but I thought, ‘I’ll take a peek anyway,’ and right from the first page I was thinking, ‘Fuck, this is good.’ I just understood it – the dialogue was great, I could identify with the characters and even the fact that it wasn’t full of special effects was working for me – ‘OK, you’ve done the big one, now let’s come down to something more practical . . . ’
The painful truth was that the main reason Richard LaGravenese’s script had been sent to me in the first place was because they wanted Robin Williams to be in the film. Robin had been in Munchausen and was my buddy, and therefore I was the bait – that’s all, just a little worm stuck on the end of a hook.
This is the kind of moment when it becomes very clear what your power is – if you have any left – but I think one useful attribute I can legitimately claim is the ability to recognise reality. Of course, that’s the secret weapon no one in Hollywood expects me to have. They all think I’m a dreamer and a fantasist, and OK, in a way I am, but I can also recognise reality – there it is, sitting over there. That doesn’t mean I want to join it for lunch, but if I have to, then I will . . .
The director seduces a doubtful Robin with an ancient ritual dance.
Being a honey trap for Robin Williams might
not be much, but it’s better than nothing. So long as I can snag the big names, then I can still do my job – I think that was what I learned there, and it was a lesson I was happy to take on board. Do I want to be Steven Spielberg – to have all that money and be able to do exactly what I want? In one way I do, but the problem is I want to be able to tell the stories I think need telling. To be fair, Spielberg’s Amistad did change the black man’s future enough for them to have walk-on parts in Lincoln and be grateful. I accept that. But it does not fall to all of us to make that kind of grand contribution to humanity.
The rest of us less saintly and philanthropic directors must gather our crumbs of validation wherever we can find them. And The Fisher King – perhaps as the universe’s reward for my willingness to set aside my customary monomania in taking it on in the first place – would offer my bruised ego as much balm as any other film in my brickbat-bestrewn cinematic pantheon.
Because it was Richard’s first script and he’d written it on spec, I asked if I could see the earlier versions. Just as I’d expected, they were even better than the one the studio wanted me to make . . . i.e. the pressure to compromise had already been brought to bear. But that wasn’t going to happen now I was in charge. Not only did I go back to the previous drafts of various key scenes, I also worked as hard as I could to stop myself putting my fingerprints all over the film. So often in that situation the director will come in and piss all over the script just to claim it as his own, but I was determined not to do that out of respect for Richard’s writing, and the most satisfying aspect of this rare act of self-abnegation was that the one time I gave in to pressure to incorporate one of my ideas, it actually worked out really well.
(Very) rough sketch for Grand Central Station waltz sequence.
The original scene was just a homeless woman singing in Grand Central Station and Jeff Bridges’ character stopped whatever he was doing and was captivated. I looked out over the Grand Central Station concourse and thought, ‘All these people in the rush hour are moving faster and faster, trapped in their own worlds – wouldn’t it be wonderful if they looked at the person they were passing and fell in love and started dancing?’ When I shared this silly romantic notion with everyone, they were very receptive, but I didn’t want to do it because I was determined this should be Richard’s film and not mine. But he liked the idea too, so in the end we did do it, and it was great, and now every New Year’s Eve people come to Grand Central Station to waltz with an orchestra playing.
One of the things that isn’t my job as a director is to teach acting. Actors have all these phrases they’ve learned to use to describe what they do – let’s call it the thespian lexicon – which I have never got round to learning and don’t feel I should. So when I’m directing I don’t ever try to do their lines, but rather just communicate a certain energy – which sometimes communicates itself a little too effectively, to the extent that the actors can end up just doing a version of me, which sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t (perhaps this is what happens to my old Help! fumetti veteran Woody Allen as well).
Gilliam and Bridges co-star in Battle of the Mullets.
No doubt the strength of my identification with the central characters is a factor in this too. Jeff Bridges in The Fisher King was probably the best example. It was only when the film was finished and people started asking me, ‘Don’t you see what he’s doing?’ that I realised. He’d picked up all sorts of my movements and mannerisms – I don’t know whether just naturally, by osmosis, or as a form of deliberate defence mechanism. (I was so in his face and he couldn’t escape me, so he thought he might as well reflect me back.) Either way, Jeff caught me out a couple of times on set by saying, ‘Sorry, I’m not quite sure what you mean,’ and asking me to do the line, which of course I couldn’t, because the kind of energy I bring to the set is like Harvey Kurtzman’s autistic son. I’ve got so many thoughts in my head that it’s like the river of my language has run dry, and the fact that I can’t quite get the words out makes me crazy.
The Red Knight brings us a long overdue splash of colour…
It always intrigues me to find out what people’s reactions to my films are once they’re finished, but I’m wary of setting too much store by them – first, because my ego is probably well enough developed already without feeding it extra protein shakes; second, because if you take the praise seriously, you’re going to have to give the criticism the same weight. But some of the responses to The Fisher King did give me great satisfaction. I remember David Crosby telling me that he had been in a car crash that resulted in the death of his wife, a tragedy for which he felt very responsible, and that he’d lived with the guilt of it for many years. But he found watching The Fisher King a very cathartic experience, to the extent that he actually felt the burden lifting from his shoulders.
One woman told me she’d come out of a screening at a New York cinema and walked twenty-five blocks in the wrong direction before she realised what she was doing. And there was a Universal PR girl who said she’d gone home after seeing Brazil, got in the shower and wept uncontrollably (of course, it is possible that those tears stemmed from the realisation that she was going to have to help me with the publicity). I love it when the films really get to people – for some reason I find a lot of Christians coming forward to tell me how much they’ve been affected by them – because then you know you’ve managed to take someone to the point where they are lost in your world.
When I did this illustration for a piece on Paul Newman in The Sunday Times in 1968, I didn’t imagine that we would become friends, but after THE FISHER KING there was a project he wanted to talk to me about, and we got on really well. Paul had this dirty grey Volvo estate that he used to drive around Vermont in, but he’d put this massive engine in it, and he loved pulling up next to some guy in a fancy car who’d be thinking, ‘Look at that old fart,’ then Paul would rev up like he was on the grid at the grand prix and go roaring off round these blind corners. He took me out in his boat once, and that got the blood flowing in just the same way. He seemed to have some arrangement with the coastguard which meant he didn’t have to abide by the speed limit in the bay, so you’d be flying over the waves – Boom! Boom! – hanging on for dear life.
One of the things I most enjoyed about the sequence of three American films which The Fisher King initiated was that I’d been living in England for so long by that point that I felt like I was coming back to the land of my birth almost as a foreigner, which always tends to be the widest-eyed and most observant perspective to have. The same process of uncontrolled de-industrialisation that had been so helpful in supplying locations for Brazil had been in operation in the US too. So by the time I got to Philadelphia to make 12 Monkeys, there were these three beautiful decommissioned power stations waiting for us.
I love it when you can just sneak in and use a building that is already there instead of designing the space yourself, which would cost money and probably produce something much less interesting. I suppose in a way this approach is the live-action location equivalent of cut-out animation, but I also prefer the idea of adapting real places rather than starting from scratch, because when I watch a film that has effectively been designed by a single mind, I never get the same kind of scruffy, human thrill out of it.
One of the main misunderstandings of my films comes from the kind of trailer-speak where the man with deep voice says, ‘We are going into the mind of Terry Gilliam . . .’ Fuck! That’s the last place Terry Gilliam wants to be. In fact, that’s the reason he makes films – so he doesn’t have to be in there. This is also why I find it so mystifying when people bracket me and Tim Burton together – because we’re so completely different in our approaches to what might broadly be called ‘fantasy’. The point of the worlds he makes is that they’re complete: the trees all look one way and the grass looks another. It’s beautiful – wonderful stuff. But what I do is all about the messy, weird, unexpected things that only come out of the way reality works. Whether i
t’s an argument with a producer, or money or time running out, these are the pressures that restrain your greed for all possibilities and enable you to focus on what can actually be achieved.
With 12 Monkeys, I again felt a real sense of responsibility with regard to David and Jan Peoples’ script, just because I liked it so much. David had scripted Blade Runner, and he also did The Unforgiven – which was originally written for Dustin Hoffman at the time of Little Big Man, but then it didn’t happen until Clint Eastwood picked up the option. So it was almost fifteen years later when David got a call from Clint asking, ‘Do you want to see your movie?’ He went to a screening and there it was – not just brilliant, but word perfect as he wrote it. It’s good if one of those best-case scenarios can come to pass for a screenwriter every now and again, because the hope keeps the rest of them hungry.
The first time I met Bruce Willis we talked about the scene in DIE HARD where he was picking glass out of his feet. I told him how refreshing and interesting I thought it was to see the man who was supposed to be the big tough guy showing that kind of vulnerability, and he told me, ‘Well, that was my idea.’ So when we were preparing to do 12 Monkeys I said, ‘I don’t want Bruce the superstar, I just want Bruce the actor – you’ve got to come with nothing, nobody, zip . . .’ Of course, he responded to that in his own way – by bringing a pantechnicon with a gym in it to the set – but in terms of his actual performance, he certainly delivered. And if he had any reservations about being hoisted into a suit which looked a bit like a condom, he never shared them with me.
A 12 MONKEYS grafitti stencil used to deface the World’s walls as part of the film’s guerilla marketing campaign.
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