Gilliamesque

by Terry Gilliam

  I think that being able to concentrate all my attention on a single goal is maybe my one real talent (along with my amazing ability never to learn to do things properly, so everything is always done at a basic elemental level with no grasp of theory whatsoever – that’s another skill which can’t be taught). The intense clarity of those periods of total engagement is so wonderful that when they end you – or at least, I – feel completely blurry and out of focus. At that point I tend to go into an intense depression that lasts maybe six months, and I’ve got to let it run its full course because otherwise it never quite goes away. I can only come back up once I’ve actually touched the bottom.

  Wandering alone in the forest of cinematic despond… Or on the set of THE BROTHERS GRIMM… or both.

  As debilitating – and frequent – as these depressive interludes are, I’ve never been tempted to try to stave them off with psychoanalysis. I realise this probably sounds very superstitious, but I’ve never read Freud for the same reason – because I wouldn’t want to mess with what gives me the good stuff. I know I’ve got all sorts of weird fucking shit floating around up there in my head, but I don’t want to analyse it – I want to put it to work. And I think there’s a further aspect of my protestant diligence ethic which also militates against any form of therapy. Given that I’m lucky enough to earn my living through creative work – already a profoundly self-centred occupation – in that context, buying myself an imaginary friend to talk through my problems with would seem to be taking self-indulgence to a ridiculous level.

  Temperamentally, I’ve always been inclined to admire the no-nonsense self-reliance of craftsmen more than the self-indulgent whimsicality of artists. Obviously a lot of that does go back to my father, and I presume my lifelong fascination with the character of the wood-carver’s son Pinocchio (this wooden thing who desperately wants to be a person, but we’re only interested in him because he is made of wood) comes from the same source. At my most self-pitying moments in the midst of one wide-screen disaster or another, I have been known to visualise myself as a kind of Pinocchio messiah who takes on the sins of the world, and then gets nailed to himself.

  ‘Freud Analysed’ illustration, published in The Mirror magazine 11 October 1969, the same week MONTY PYTHON’S FLYING CIRCUS made it TV debut. And no, Sigmund, I don’t want to hear your theory as to why I might not be having flying dreams any more.

  The ultimate ‘Dear Jean’ letter – a Get Well Soon card to Monsieur Rochefort.

  Losing one leading man in the middle of filming – as we did when Jean Rochefort’s double herniated disc killed Quixote – was very bad luck. Losing two was starting to look like carelessness. I wish I could say that somehow wrestling The Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus onto the screen after Heath Ledger died in the middle of the shoot was the heroic last stand of a director who refused to bow down to the dictates of a malevolent destiny. But it wasn’t really like that.

  Everyone was utterly stunned when the news of Heath’s death came through – it was beyond horrible. It was impossible, unbelievable, unbearable. Not only had we lost a wise and joyous friend, a part of our family, but an extraordinary talent who, I have no doubt, would have been the greatest of his generation. I just said, ‘I don’t give a fuck about the film. I give up. It’s finished. I’m old and tired and worn out and I want to go home.’ Luckily, I surround myself with people who don’t listen to anything I say. My daughter Amy – who was one of the film’s producers – Nicola Pecorini and my friend Ray Cooper kept telling me, ‘You can’t do that, you’ve got to finish it for Heath.’ Whatever arguments they used took a full week and a half – or maybe even two – to rouse me from my slough of despond. Even then, I didn’t personally have the strength and resilience to find a way forward, they just pushed me to the point where I had no other choice, so it became the line of least resistance.

  With Lily Cole and Christopher Plummer on the set of DR PARNASSVS – only two of the three people in this photo are in costume.

  My thought process started off like this: ‘OK, you’ve got to get someone to replace Heath, but there’s no one person who is good enough, and even if there was, I don’t want to work with him even if he was available – which he won’t be at this short notice – and we don’t have time to re-do the whole film.’ Then I realised, ‘He goes through the magic mirror three times, so maybe we could get three different actors to play him.’ I was partly thinking of Luis Buñuel’s That Obscure Object of Desire, where two different actresses play the same character, but mainly about how if the part was divided into three, Heath’s three replacements would only need to turn up for a few days.

  Early drawing of DR PARNASSVS’s Stage The spooky resemblance to similar draughtsman-like groundwork for abandoned summer-camp production of Alice in Wonderland almost half a century before may or may not have been an omen.

  I’m very determined and will, foolishly, go head-to-head with any brick wall. But lately there are more times when I just give up and become totally and depressively fatalistic. That’s when people like my daughters Amy and Holly become vital. Viz: Parnassus. It was Amy who just wouldn’t let me let the film die.

  It’s amazing how often the most satisfying and effective solutions to seemingly insurmountable film-making problems turn out to be completely counter-intuitive. If you need someone to play a giant, it’s always best to ask a fat short-arse. And if you’re agonisingly short of one A-list male lead, why not just get three to replace him?

  I was determined that it was only going to be people who really knew and loved Heath, so my first call was to Johnny Depp, who said he would do anything to help. His promise stopped the frantic retreat of the money people, who knew the film would never be finished, and bought us time to get Jude Law and Colin Farrell to join the ride to the rescue. Not only was it extraordinary for those three to step in at such short notice, they gave their fees to Heath’s daughter. Heath’s spirit seemed to be infusing all of us. In fact, when we finished Dr Parnassus I thought it was one of the best things I’d ever done.

  I remember watching it all the way through and thinking, ‘This is so good – I can’t make a better film than that.’ As it turned out, not as many people as I’d hoped agreed with me, and Sony Classics, the American distribution company, didn’t help by barely promoting the film despite the stellar cast (unlike the Italians, who did a bang-up job, making almost twice the money in Italy that we did in the US). At times like that, you do find yourself wondering ‘What’s going on here? Have I been wrong, and they’ve been right all along?’ But then you – or at least, I – just think, ‘Fuck ’em.’

  I hate people that think what purports to be reality is truth; one of the reasons theatres Keep turning up in my films is partly a warning. I’m saying, ‘It’s not necessarily real but it may be more truthful.’

  What’s happening in cinema today is that Stan Lee has become God. You’d think I’d be in favour with this all-powerful movie deity, given that I got his daughter a job on Jabberwocky. I’d met Stan through Harvey Kurtzman while working at Help! – he was a lovely guy, although I have no clear memory of him other than that he looked exactly like Stan Lee – and he asked if I could find her something. I ended up getting her a potentially quite testing gig as Max Wall’s PA. So maybe he’s never forgiven me for that.

  Either way, as the computer-game element in films comes more to the fore, less and less is allowed to be left to the imagination. I remember my son Harry being really into those Tony Hawk skateboard games when he was growing up. He felt like he’d really experienced what it was like to use a skateboard, but when he actually got a real one, he was surprised to find that reality kept getting in the way and gravity was a much stricter (not to say more painful) teacher than Tony.

  I’m no better. Nothing is more fun than Grand Theft Auto, and you certainly wouldn’t want a lift home from me after I’ve been playing it. (Maybe computer games are just nature’s way of saying there are too many people. Somebody’s got to insti
tute the cull, because Thomas Malthus’ unholy trinity of wars, plagues and famines aren’t quite doing the job any more.) But it’s the same with any half-decent movie that has high-speed action sequences, and as a director I can’t really argue that films don’t seriously affect people, because why would I bother making them otherwise?

  Of course, having a lot of gunplay in a movie or a computer game doesn’t automatically turn people into serial killers, in the same way comic books didn’t automatically change kids into communists (although arguably they did have that effect on me) back in the 1950s, when Harvey Kurtzman was being excoriated as a pernicious influence on America’s youth. But I do still love that quote Al Jaffee gave a few years back, when he said, ‘Mad was designed to corrupt the minds of children, and from what I’m gathering from the minds of people all over, we succeeded.’

  One of the many funny things about comic books is that the Catholic Church invented them. I discovered this in Rome when I saw the way they used to have the texts the priest would read from unfurling over the lectern – almost like a scroll – with a series of ornate illustrations across the bottom, upside down on the page, but the right way up for the illiterate church-goers (which was most of them), who could then follow the action in pictorial form while the man in the dress chuntered on in Latin.

  Now that Marvel comics dominate the film industry, comic books are King, so if you’re got to believe in something, why not BATMAN THE REEDEMER?

  This pioneering use of frame-by-frame storytelling was not just the origin of the graphic novel, it also – imagery being all the more important when you’re illiterate – foreshadowed the current relationship between Hollywood and the American public. It’s amazing the kind of prophetic nuggets you can come up with sometimes if you go digging around in the distant past. That’s why whatever kind of story I’m dealing with, I’ve often found that the best way to connect the past, the present and the future is just to mix the three of them up.

  Tom Stoppard and I had been talking a few years earlier about how we could make a BRAZIL about NOW. Neither of us knew how to do it. The world has become increasingly amorphous, unfocused. In ZERO THEOREM I played with the idea of solitude as the focus: a man disconnected from the connected world. ‘Alone but never lonely.’

  Cable TV is where the talent is heading today: writers, directors even movie stars have moved to HBO, Netflix. More interesting stories are being told than in the cinema. Personally I prefer the big cinema screen, but have you seen the size of the TVs you can buy today? I sit very close.

  In The Zero Theorem we had a billboard proclaiming ‘The Future Has Come And Gone – Where Were You?’ but the joke was on us. Many of the futuristic ideas we incorporated in the film were passé by the time we finished. We had made a period film! It’s as if the future is coming to us faster than we are heading to it.

  I think it was the author William Gibson who suggested that global stocks of cognitive dissonance are currently so high they threaten to make the traditional idea of science fiction redundant. And once you reach my age, you tend to find that the individual days become really long, but the years get shorter, which only distorts your temporal perspective still further.

  Looking back, it seems my life has been a series of continually looping circles, almost Eastern in their spinning. One thing connects with another, and the same things keep re-happening. I don’t even want to understand it, I just know it’s a fact.

  The 2014 Python live reunion gave me a similar feeling. Suddenly we’re back as a group, working together day after day, performing the old sketches. The intervening thirty years had disappeared completely. It was like ‘What the fuck has happened? I’m back playing a buffoon. I thought I was supposed to be a “serious film director”. Have you not seen my reviews?!’

  Nevertheless, it was fun to be outrageous again and the audience response was astonishing. Back when I was directing Faust there had also been standing ovations. Ray Cooper said, ‘Isn’t that a wonderful feeling?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, it’s terrific. I just don’t want to become addicted to it.’ I don’t want to need it.

  But, the truth is I am keen to please people, as many as possible. I want them to love what I do, but that desperate ‘I’ is kept chained, gagged, and locked in a lead-lined box under my bed. It’s why we live 6,000 miles away from Hollywood. I fear that if I spent time there I would succumb. ‘Yes, sir, I would love to sell out . . . If only you’d give me a chance!’, but that other ‘I’, that Gilliam and his ‘reputation’, have put paid to that.

  You see, that Gilliam doesn’t want the responsibility of having to please all the people all the time. He just wants to be able to make the things that thrill him.

  He’s delighted when a film or a show does well critically and financially, but he doesn’t want that to be the measure of success. It’s the object, it’s the thing he made, that counts, not the applause. The applause fades away, he will be gone, but the things he made will remain.

  Of course, no amount of playing with narrative time-frames or split personalities will shake you free from the essential human chronology of life and death. I’ve got it in my will to be put in a cardboard coffin, though Maggie’s insisting on wrapping it in a blue ribbon, and then buried on our hill in Italy, with an oak sapling planted in my chest. The old plan – because Highgate Cemetery is at the bottom of our garden in London – was that I’d be cremated and then they’d throw the ashes over the wall. Either way, it’s important to be prepared. I’ve never been one of those people who’s ill at ease with the prospect of their own mortality – death is the only thing in your life that’s actually guaranteed to happen, so you might as well be ready for it.

  RESVRRECTION PYTHON: News of our deaths had been exaggerated.

  Here we see the serious and retiring auteur at work, immune to the attention-seeking tendencies of the other Pythons.

  I wanted to call the live show ‘One foot in the grave.’ We settled on ‘One down, five to go’.

  At last, the Royal stamp of approval! We are First Class and available at your local post office (UK residents only).

  Four years ago, on one of the very rare occasions that I have ever tried to do anything useful in the garden – almost as if to ensure that my wife would never ask me again – I went to change a blade on the lawnmower and it slipped and cut through an artery and several tendons. My hand was a mess, and my daughter Holly had to drive me to the Whittington hospital, which is just down the hill from our house.

  Unfortunately, it was the weekend of the Highgate Pond Square festival, and the streets were gridlocked. So there I am with this tourniquet twisted round my arm – which I’m holding out of the window of Holly’s Mini, trying to keep the blood which is spurting out off the upholstery – she’s honking the horn and I’m shouting, ‘Get the fuck out of the way!’ but still no one’s moving. The fact that I’m wearing Bermuda shorts and flip-flops only intensifies our resemblance to one of Ralph Steadman’s illustrations for Fear and Loathing.

  Finally we make it to the Whittington hospital and the lady on the desk just carries on talking on the phone even as my life-blood is draining away on the floor. I guess this kind of shit is normal to her. As they’re wrapping my arm up in bandages to try and staunch the flow, I’m looking up at the ceiling and all these wires are hanging down off it. A very nice Iranian doctor comes in and says, ‘I don’t think we should operate in here, it’s too dirty.’ So they bind me up as best they can, give me this little chit and put me in one of the minicabs which is waiting outside because that is cheaper than using an ambulance. The cab driver is telling me all his tales as if this is just a normal cab ride. Eventually he gets me to UCH down on the Euston Road, and after I’ve been sent back out the front door and round the side a couple of times, because I came in the wrong entrance, I finally get the treatment I need.

  An early 1990s Valentine to Maggie (she gets one every year, that’s how deny-eyed I am) with Amy, Holly and a caped Harry in attendance to testif
y to the enduring romance of family life.

  Of course all the people who looked after me were fucking great, but you couldn’t actually invent the stupidity of the delivery system – ducts would have been a step forward. At one point I started to tell the doctor, ‘You’ve got to be careful, I make my living with this hand.’ But Maggie said, ‘Shut up, you’re making him nervous.’

  2007’s Valentine Jihadist viewed the lovers’ festival from a somewhat more TERMINAL perspective.

  That was the first and (so far) only time I’ve had a general anaesthetic. Inevitably the guys who were giving it to me were Python fans, and they were joking about the gruesome scene that might await me when I woke up, but as it turned out it was the most perfect experience – totally cinematic, but not so much a dream sequence, more a jump cut. There you are being wheeled down the corridors on the gurney, the doors of the operating theatre open in front of you, then the next thing you see is a close-up of a big face saying, ‘How do you feel?’

  For forty-five minutes of my life in-between, there was nothing – it was as blank as the tape at the start or end of a reel – and that’s what I assume death is like. I’ll tell you something. From my experience, it’s not so bad.

  And so it’s Goodbye from the Gilliams.

  Ok … I know it’s a bit cuddly, but we all deserve something for staying awake this long.

  The lie at the heart of an autobiography is the billing. As quasi-autobiographer I’m given top billing, but the truth is that T. Gilliam’s Life is a product of all the people along the way that did the hard work: pushing it, stumbling over it, picking it up and carrying it, and too often just getting in the way of it. Some are big parts worthy of equal billing, some vital supporting roles, others are bustling extras providing a sense of scale and colour. Whatever role they played they gave my life the laughter, drama, and meaning that made it worth living. Nevertheless, I’m still the only one who gets his name in the title.