Very Naughty Boys [EBK]

by Robert Sellers

  It seemed a cosy and potentially lucrative arrangement. O’Brien had the Pythons under his wing, both as a group entity and as individual performers, giving HandMade the potential of churning out the occasional Python project, plus movies that might star one or more of the team, as well as other product to keep the whole enterprise ticking over. It looked like the start of something great, and for the Pythons maybe the chance to get back at an industry who had ignored their admittedly small but important contribution to UK cinema. Cleese observes, ‘The British film business is quite selective about what it recognises as the British film business. It never treated the Pythons as though they were any part of it. Maybe it was because we didn’t go to all the dinners. But we were always regarded as some sort of slightly separate group, and I never quite understood that.’ Gilliam agrees that ‘Python comedy is always a second-rate art. Alexander Walker did a book on British cinema in the Seventies and Python was a footnote, that’s all we were! When I go to Brussels, people there say Python was British cinema in the Seventies. In a way it’s good that we’re treated like shit because it keeps us angry. If we were accepted, we would just get like John and we’d make films like Fierce Creatures.’

  And it was Gilliam who was the first to exploit the new situation, which was no great surprise to Idle. ‘Gilliam’s never slow to seize an opportunity to get money.’ A partner in the emerging HandMade company, Gilliam was way ahead of the other Pythons in grasping the fact that, in the shape of Harrison and O’Brien, here was access to the cash he needed to become the kind of film-maker he’d always wanted to be. All that was missing was the right idea.

  3

  MIDGETS AND VILLAINS

  Ever since Jabberwocky, Terry Gilliam had a vision, bleak and Orwellian, of a pen-pusher’s Utopia. He christened the script The Ministry before changing his mind and calling it Brazil: ‘After Life of Brian, we just started talking about projects and I was trying to sell Denis on Brazil and he didn’t have any understanding at all of what I was trying to do there.’ So out of sheer frustration that his pet project was going nowhere fast, Gilliam sat down with the sole intention of making a movie that at least had a chance of being financed, and one that the whole family could enjoy. But it was to be the antithesis of your average children’s film, a return to the Brothers Grimm and the darker world of fantasy. In other words, a kid’s film with fangs!

  The idea for Time Bandits was born over the course of one brainstorming weekend in November 1979. Gilliam says, ‘I wanted to do this whole film from a kid’s point of view, making a child the hero. But I didn’t think that a kid could carry a whole movie, so I decided to put a gang around him, people the same height, and off it went, it just sort of grew from that.’ Gilliam loved the notion of this rapscallion band of midgets from heaven who’d been part of creation, toiling away in the tree and shrubbery department, thoroughly pissed off with their lot and turning to crime. Stealing a map of the universe that pinpoints all the various rips in the fabric of time and space with the intention of jetting between centuries to loot the art treasures of history, they crash-land inside the twentieth-century bedroom of an 11-year-old boy called Kevin and take him on a series of adventures, meeting the likes of Napoleon, Robin Hood, Agamemnon and the Devil himself.

  O’Brien was entranced by the idea, no doubt impressed by Gilliam’s enthusiastic pitch in which he not only described the plot but acted the whole thing out, too. It was a ‘go’ project. Next, Gilliam recruited one of his Python colleagues to help with the scripting chores. Michael Palin recalls, ‘He came round to the house one afternoon with this bit of paper and said, “Look, this is it, Time Bandits. Do you want to write it?” So that’s how it started. I really liked the idea of another collaboration with Terry. I’d enjoyed doing Jabberwocky and I do admire him and his work. He’s got a wonderful imagination, Terry, an ability to get it out of his head and on to film. I really admire that. And I think the scale of how he wants to do things is matched by an intelligence that runs through it as well, and there aren’t many people quite like that.’

  It was going to be a race, though, with less than two months to complete the script as plans were already under way to shoot during the summer of 1980. But there was one minor problem. Palin said to O’Brien, ‘I can’t start on the script for another month because I’m doing a Great Railway Journeys series for the BBC,’ which elicited the response, ‘What! A Great Railway Journey? Michael, I love railroads, too but, I mean, a railway journey for the BBC? This is a Hollywood movie we’re about to make.’

  Getting finance, however, proved impossible. O’Brien took the finished screenplay to Los Angeles but nobody wanted to know. ‘Who the hell is Terry Gilliam, anyway?’ seemed to be the Hollywood reasoning. Palin comments, ‘You look back and Time Bandits was very successful but, at the time, very few people were falling over themselves to do Terry Gilliam films. Terry had made Jabberwocky, which was a marvellous film, but a dark and unusual film. So Time Bandits was quite a risk.’ In the end, Harrison and O’Brien decided to back it totally themselves, again mortgaging the office in Cadogan Square to raise the required $5 million.

  In the Python universe, Palin had written most of his material in conjunction with Terry Jones. The pair also collaborated on the successful Ripping Yarns comedy series for the BBC. So it was largely a new experience writing with Gilliam, one that Palin found pleasurably stimulating. Together, they made a formidable creative team with Gilliam’s more darkly surreal humour nicely counterbalanced by Palin’s more affably absurd approach. ‘Terry’s into fantasy more,’ observes Palin, ‘and I’m slightly more realistic in that I like writing real, rounded, threedimensional characters. I wouldn’t write about horses going through wardrobes in a child’s bedroom because I wouldn’t know quite how you do that, but Terry does because he’s not afraid of the potential of cinema in any way; he will test himself all the time with wonderful and inventive visual effects which he would just throw in, and I wouldn’t have done that... you have to know what you can get away with.’

  With the main story already planned out by Gilliam, this left only the dialogue to be worked out and for the characters to have flesh put on their bones. ‘It was like writing a series of small playlets within the framework that Terry had created,’ Palin adds. ‘I had to create as succinctly as possible a whole raft of different historical characters who only had maybe ten minutes to establish themselves. And also to create characters for the Time Bandits themselves, their relationship with the boy and the fact that they weren’t a kooky little bunch of dwarfs. We didn’t want that at all; we wanted them all to be quite disagreeable, argumentative, as bad tempered as anyone else.’

  When it came to describing the character of Agamemnon, the stage direction simply read: ‘The Greek warrior removes his helmet, revealing himself to be none other than Sean Connery, or an actor of equal but cheaper stature.’ It was largely put in as a joke. Gilliam says, ‘We’d no idea we’d ever manage to get Sean. You wanted somebody who was a big surprise and a major star in what we thought was this small, little movie. The shock value of somebody as big as James Bond, Sean Connery, was what we were after. I just couldn’t think of anyone else who had the qualities Connery has. Agamemnon had to be a hero, a king and he also had to be a father figure to the boy. We wanted a hero and Connery’s a hero.’

  With his eye firmly on the international box office, O’Brien took Gilliam’s stage direction literally and set out to snare Connery at any cost. He caught up with him on a golf course. Luck was on O’Brien’s side as Connery happened to be a big Python fan and was both intrigued by the idea and sympathetic to HandMade’s struggle to find backing. The Hollywood star recalls, ‘I was amazed that Terry Gilliam had such a problem raising only five million. I did the picture for nothing but a piece of the gross.’

  Gilliam was gobsmacked when O’Brien called him up with the news that Connery was on board and the director’s first encounter with the superstar at London’s Grosvenor Hotel remains vi
vid to this day. ‘When you first meet Sean, he’s overwhelming; he’s the only star that I’ve ever met who is as big as he appears on screen. He’s actually more intimidating and more impressive in real life. He’s just like this great mountain, a giant. And he doesn’t suffer fools at all. I wouldn’t ever want to cross Sean. All he’s got to do is growl at you for a minute and you’re reduced to quivering jelly.’

  But the casting of Connery also created the first of numerous flash points between Gilliam and O’Brien that later were to reach volcanic proportions. Gilliam’s perspective was, ‘Denis gets full credit for Connery being in the film, that was his great casting contribution. But the deal that Denis was going to do with Sean was for not much money up front but this huge gross percentage which was going to come out of my percentage. So if it had been done, Sean would’ve been collecting all this money and I would never get it because it would always go to Sean first. And this was my manager who was doing this deal! I thought, This is great! Luckily, Anne James, who was running the Python office before and became our manager afterwards, spotted this one and said, “Terry, don’t do it.” Denis’s job as my manager was to look after me, but he seemed at times more interested in looking after Connery at that point; there’s a future in Sean, who knows if there’s a future in me? Anyway, that got resolved.’

  The only proviso to Connery signing was that all his scenes had to be shot during a brief break in late May before work started on his main picture of the year, Outland. This pushed forward the schedule drastically, leaving Gilliam to organise costumes, props, a skeleton crew and the Time Bandits themselves all in double-quick time. The dwarf auditions were held at the Neal’s Yard offices that Gilliam and Palin shared in London’s Covent Garden. Gilliam recalls, ‘We used to have these two old banana warehouses, Georgian buildings, very small with incredibly steep stairs going up to the first floor where the office was and these little guys would come up for auditions. You’d hear, clunk, clunk, and a little head would appear at the bottom of the door.’

  With dwarf actors fairly thin on the ground, Gilliam succeeded in assembling a highly talented troupe that included David Rappaport, who’d worked on television and subsequently appeared with Sean Connery in Richard Lester’s Cuba, and Kenny Baker (the man inside Star Wars’ R2D2), part of a vaudevillian-style double-act with fellow cast member Jack Purvis. Gilliam credits Palin with breathing life into the various dwarf personas, achieved more often than not by imbuing them with the real-life characteristics of the actor. Gilliam says, ‘Randal, played by Rappaport, was always the leader. Strutter, who was the lieutenant, was always bitching and moaning but he didn’t really have the stuff to be the leader; he’d stab you in the back if he had a chance. Fidget was Kenny Baker, we made him the cute one, the one that everybody liked, but in a sense that’s the way he is, so we were definitely using their real characters in some sense. Jack Purvis was in many ways the most heroic of the guys; there was something about Jack that was always the strongest and the best and so he became that character. Og is the stupid one and Vermin is, well, just vermin, really. So it was a combination of having some characters that were rather well established in the writing, and the others just grew out of who they were.’

  The whole notion of casting a film with dwarfs came from Gilliam’s memories of growing up in the San Fernando valley where a circus used to roll into town each year and local kids would find odd-job work with them. ‘One year, I did the freak show tent so I got to see all these extraordinary people sitting around being ordinary and it really fascinated me, so that stuck with me. I just love the idea of taking guys that are small and treating them like heroes, treating them like Alan Ladd, almost as tall as Alan Ladd, I think he was about three inches taller than those guys. That’s what the joy of doing it was and giving these guys a chance to get out of their fucking Womble costumes and R2D2 tin cans and be people. And they all rose to the occasion, they were all brilliant.’

  As May arrived, Gilliam found himself up a mountain in Morocco, it was 120°F and his young male lead Craig Warnock, chosen from hundreds of applicants to play Kevin, had not only never made a film before but faced with acting opposite James Bond had completely frozen. It was panic time. Gilliam, who hadn’t directed since Jabberwocky four years earlier and was still to a large degree learning his craft, was lumbered with pages of elaborate storyboards that were proving impossible to film. It was Connery who saved the day.

  ‘Listen,’ he said, pulling Gilliam to one side. ‘Here’s what you do. Shoot my stuff first, get me out of the way and then you can have all the time you need with the lad.’

  Gilliam heeded Connery’s advice, admitting later that he wouldn’t have got through the Moroccan shoot without his encouragement. He came away from the experience impressed by the Scot’s professionalism and down-to-earth persona. ‘There was no starriness about Sean, he was just one of the people working on the film. He was totally at ease with everybody, there was no sense of hierarchy. When we made Time Bandits, it was a time when his career was going through a bad patch. Also, I think he was feeling guilty that he hadn’t been maybe the father he should have been to his son, that this was a chance for him to be a surrogate father to the young boy.’

  With an unknown adolescent leading player, backed up by a myriad of anonymous midgets, the film was seen as something of a gamble so it was decided to play safe and cast ‘name’ actors in the historical roles. Palin had written the part of Robin Hood with himself in mind, but it was O’Brien’s idea to bring in John Cleese. Indeed, O’Brien desperately wanted all of the Pythons to be in the film. Palin remembers that ‘Terry didn’t want Time Bandits to be a Python film. You see, Jabberwocky had been called a Python film and the other Python members were quite touchy about that, Eric especially and rightly so, because it wasn’t a Python film. And as Time Bandits was not intended to be written by the rest of the Pythons, the idea of having all the group in it would have added real confusion. I don’t think Denis ever quite understood that, that there was a feeling within Python that it was very important that only Python films should be given the Python name, that is when you had everyone in them. But they wanted John in the film; this was all financial, it’s about money and John’s still the most tempting Python to investors, so we adapted the Robin Hood part for John. I wasn’t annoyed, it wasn’t a central role; I gave away a role which I know I could have done but John I think did it better in the end. It then meant I had to write myself the part with Shelley Duvall. We just invented this pair of star-crossed lovers. Denis insisted that I should be in it, and any other friends of Terry that were around, so Shelley Duvall was around and these two characters were very quickly cobbled together.’

  Cleese himself, who’d found the script ‘a very funny piece of writing’, was oblivious to these backstage machinations. ‘I was only slightly discomfited to discover, several months later, what no one had told me at the time, which was that Michael had written that part for himself. I really had not known this. I think Denis applied a bit of pressure to Michael; obviously Denis was looking for my reasonably well-known name, and Michael consequently had to play another part which wasn’t as good as Robin Hood.’

  Cleese’s entire appearance in Lincoln green tights runs to just five minutes and he was only on location in Epping Forest (standing in for Sherwood) for two days, ‘...which is about, as far as I’m concerned, the ideal amount of time to film for. You know, the first day’s fun and then you get bored at tea-time on the second day. I’ve never particularly loved the process of filming, it’s so slow. But I got on well with Gilliam and liked the people that I was working with, including dear David Rappaport. And I got fascinated by how quickly one adapted to the fact that these guys were midgets. It seemed very strange for a few hours and by the second day you were just sitting chatting to them. It sounds condescending, but in one’s own mind they’d just become like anyone else. It didn’t take very long.’

  Miles away from the dashing brawn of Errol Flynn, this R
obin Hood is frightfully polite and well spoken, seemingly oblivious of his grime-ridden surroundings and the Bruegel-esque peasantry, based as it was on the Duke of Kent. Cleese explains, ‘I remembered that utterly meaningless procedure by which, before football matches, the Duke of Kent or somebody similar would appear from a tunnel and shake hands with all the players. It always struck me as the most extraordinary ritual, the complete futility of that walking up and down thing, you know, are you looking forward to the match, those sorts of questions. It was like the fact they used to sing ‘Abide with Me’ at the Cup Final. When I asked why, somebody said, “It’s the Queen Mother’s favourite song.” I remember thinking, I didn’t know the Queen Mother was playing in the Cup Final, or indeed refereeing it. It’s one of those extraordinary manifestations of British traditional behaviour that leaves one almost reeling in an attempt to understand its significance.’

  However good Cleese is as Robin Hood, and he is good, his decision to appear in the film was not altogether an altruistic one. Steve Abbott observes that ‘there was no question that Time Bandits was basically sold to John Cleese as a financial thing. He was sold the Robin Hood part as something that was tax efficient. It was my first major professional clash with Denis because he used a financial report I’d prepared for John without me being there, he used my figures, my report, to persuade John to do a film for tax reasons. And there’s nothing wrong with that; Denis was playing to his strength, he was good at tax planning.’