Excerpt from "Gilliamesque" By Terry Gilliam.

8/20/2019 Excerpt from "Gilliamesque" By Terry Gilliam.

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he reason Time Bandits had happened in the first place was because I was trying to sell the idea of Brazil

to Denis O’Brien, but he had absolutely no interest in it. That was

what triggered me to say, ‘OK, if you don’t want me to do some-

thing for grown-ups, I’ll do a film for all the family.’ It took no pow-

ers of persuasion at all on my part to get that one through, and when Time

Bandits ended up being the most successful film I – or HandMade – ever did

in America, that inevitably led to me being offered all sorts of other Hollywood

projects that I didn’t want to do.

Before I and my new producer Arnon Milchan could finally get Brazil off the

ground (just a couple of feet off the ground, obviously, we didn’t want to fly as

high as the scale model of Jonathan Pryce would have to), there were two last

big pieces to be fitted into the Monty Python jigsaw. There’d been a time some-

where around The Life of Brian when I’d started to become uncertain as to what

my exact function in the group was, and the whole thing began to feel a bit

frustrating. Obviously I knew I did the animations, but I wasn’t sure how many

more of those I had in me, and I’d enjoyed being a solo helmsman so much that

I didn’t really want to do timeshare at the wheel with Terry J. again.

I think all six of us were pulling in different directions by that point, and

even though there were inevitably mixed feelings when the group finally dis-

banded, I’m glad we had the sense to quit while we were still good. It’s always

best to leave people wanting more – otherwise how can you justify get-

ting back together for lucrative reunion shows in aid of Terry

Jones’ mortgage thirty years later? And Live at the Hollywood

Bowl in 1980 and then The Meaning of Life in 1983 made for a

pretty good send-off.

My wife Maggie made one of the great unheralded con-

tributions to Hollywood Bowl. She’d been due to pop out our

second child two weeks before, but somehow managed to

keep her knees together till the shows were finished so I could

get home to London in time for the birth. How best to commemoratethis achievement? It seemed unfair to saddle the newborn with

¨

This ill ustration for an article abo ut health farm s

in the L ON D ON E R in 1968 had fo und m e m aking an

exploratory foray down the sam e m incem eat-y m ineshaft.

I have incl uded it to prove that I didn’t steal the concept

from Gerald Scarfe’s cartoons for PINK F LOYD’S TH E W A L L .


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the name ‘Hollywood’ outright, in honour of the

circumstances of her birth, so we went with Holly

Dubois instead, which ensured that even as an in-

fant she would be unknowingly playing to a gal-

lery of multilingual sophisticates – a precocious

foundation which she would build on by mak-

ing an acclaimed big-screen debut in Brazil at

the tender age of four.

œ ́

This is God holding the

world in his hands. Space

is always hard, because

if you’re going to move

through it you’ve gotto have stars close to

you, and yet you don’t

want them too big because

otherwise they’ll clutter

up the emptiness. I

believe Stanley Kubrick

faced a similar problem

in 2001: A Space Odyssey ,

but I don’t think he got

around it by flicking white

paint on to shiny black

paper with a toothbrush.


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The creative dilemma I was wrestling with in the run-up to The Meaning of

Life was defined not by the sophistication but the child-like crudity of the cut-

out methodology I’d defined as my own over the past decade and a half. While

the artwork I’d done for the various Monty Python books and album sleeves

had got progressively more elaborate, it was a mark of the elemental simplicity

of my animation technique that I took it to the top right from the beginning.

Beware of the Elephants , which was only the second or third of those animations

that I ever did, was as good as anything that came later. It was a bit like working

on Photoshop – I never got past page three or four of that particular manual,

either.

The truth was that even if some way of adding extra layers ofnuance had presented itself, I wouldn’t have wanted to develop it. Partly

because I lacked the patience, but largely because it felt like the brutal

directness of what I’d done had been integral to its efficacy. It’s the

same with certain kinds of music that resist additional ornamenta-

tion – why would you want to get more complicated than Chuck Berryor the Sex Pistols? So once I’d got bored of working within the restric-

tions that stopped my mind wandering, there was no option but for me

to do something else.

This was how The Crimson Permanent Assurance – my segment

of The Meaning of Life – started out as an idea for an animation, but


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then became a live-action short. Perhaps partly as a

result of this formative shape-shifting, it also ended

up being my first experience of going over-budget.

I don’t really know what the numbers were, but

shortly after selflessly renouncing my directorial

ambitions with regard to the film as a whole, I was

deemed by the others to be totally out of control – drunk

with power in charge of a limitless budget that no one

had ever actually specified to me.

The basic story concerned a group of accountants

who get angry with their new corporate masters

of the universe and decide to become pirates

on the high seas of international finance. If any

amateur psychoanalysts out there wish to discern a subliminal echo of

my own need to break out of my restricted role within Monty Python, I

suppose it would be churlish of me to deny them this pleasure, but I don’t

remember that line of thought surfacing consciously at the time. And

rather than being a product of anxieties about my own advancing years

(I had by this point reached the grand old age of forty-two) the decision to

use eighty-year-old actors reflected my determination to do for the elderly

what Time Bandits had done for dwarves, i.e. dramatically expand their

employment opportunities. I’m that guy who’s all about helping the minorities

. . . so long as they stay minorities of course – once they start becoming powerful,

then it’s a different matter.

The tone and feel of The Crimson Permanent Assurance were so different to

the rest of the film that we had to remove it from its original slot in the middle

of The Meaning of Life and run it as a separate mini-feature at the beginning,

where it functioned like a sumptuous illustrated letter at the start of one of

those medieval manuscripts I’m always banging on about, at the same time

bearing witness to my increasingly

marginal status within the group andgrowing willingness to fly the coop.

Up on the big screens at the Cannes

Film Festival, it looked fucking great –

a real spectacle with genuine scale to

it. Then when the actual film came on,


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it felt like you were watching TV, which given that this was how most people

would ultimately end up seeing it, was probably for the best.

The happy memory of Time Bandits ’ big box-office numbers combined with the commercial and critical success of the last

three Python films contrived to maximise my allure as a director and foster the

general misconception of me as someone who knew what I was doing. But ashard as Arnon and I milked that moment, we were still struggling to get a full

enough bucket to sustain Brazil.

If we’d been willing to do another time-travelling dwarf comedy, we’d have

been awash with Hollywood doubloons, but having recklessly decided to

exploit this moment of possibility to do the thing I’d wanted to do all along,

œ ́


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getting the investment we needed was going to be much more of a challenge.

I’d never been responsible for pitching a film before – other people had always

been kind enough to do the money stuff for me – but this time Arnon and I were

doing the rounds at Cannes.

He was running the show , and I was the guy who came in likea trained monkey, leapt around and made a lot of chattering noises. You hope

people are going to be swept along by your energy and enthusiasm, but more

often what happens is the head honcho falls asleep. That’s happened to me a

couple of times, once with Brazil and again when J K Rowling wanted me to

direct the first Harry Potter film (an assignment I was ultimately happy not to

get, as by all the accounts I’ve heard from people who did end up doing them,

the studio sat on you so heavily it became a bit of a nightmare). The younger

junior executives are sitting there all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, but the

main guy is dozing – you’re just noise to him.

We weren’t getting much traction on Arnon’s initial budget of £12 million,

but then – in what turned out to be a counter-intuitive master-stroke – we put

the price up, and the move from Oxford Street to Bond Street somehow did the

trick for us. When I try to be devious, I generally fail, but sometimes when I’m

out there as an innocent, it just happens. The thing that really sealed the deal

was me turning down Enemy Mine – a big studio film that 20th Century Fox

were desperate to get off the ground. Time Bandits had momentarily made me

an A-list director, and now I was willing to say ‘No’ to a major studio project?

The sado-masochistic logic of Hollywood decreed that the thing I’d turned

them down for must now be something worth having.

As to the exact nature of the project for which we now had the go-ahead, the

screenplay of Brazil had gone through a complex process of refinement at the

hands of myself, my old buddy Charles McKeown, and one of the great English

playwrights, Tom Stoppard – as a Czech born in Singapore, he understands the

English language and its twists and turns far better than the locals. Foreigners

are always going to look at things with a sharper eye, which is how Antonionicame over and did such a great job on ‘Swinging London’ with Blow-Up.

The practical process by which various drafts of the script evolved from the

initial seed of me watching a beautiful sunset on a gloomy Welsh beach at Port

Talbot is a story that has already been told in meticulous detail elsewhere. But

the question of how Brazil related – and continues to relate – to its broader

Excerpt from "Gilliamesque" By Terry Gilliam.

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