Monty Python Speaks

by David Morgan

  Is that similar to stereotypical English behavior of not revealing emotions?

  CLEESE: Yes, the “British thing.” Because we keep our relationships more at a distance than I think some Americans do, people are often really depressed because they don’t want to make emotional contact when they meet; and also in the English culture, anger is not easily expressed, so that of course is a problem.

  Much of your work in Python is about the expression of anger through humor.

  CLEESE: Oh yes, but trying to get rid of it through art is nothing to do with solving the problem. People talk about art as being therapeutic. I think by and large that doesn’t work, which is why so many playwrights write the same play many, many times! They’re obsessing about themes, and I don’t really think they work them out by writing about them. A lot of people think that art is a kind of therapy. Well, maybe it stops people from going completely mad, but I don’t think it helps people very much.

  Does it help an audience?

  CLEESE: No, I don’t think so! I think very few things have any kind of lasting emotional effect. It’s like New Year’s resolutions, or weekend psychology courses, EST, those kinds of things. Robin Skynner once said to me, “Trying to change your life is like steering the Queen Elizabeth; you start turning the wheel, twenty minutes later the boat just slightly moves right.”

  Do you think it would be harder today than when Python started for the kind of innovation associated with Python to succeed?

  CLEESE: If you do something that’s genuinely original, it’s very hard for people to grab it. I asked a publicist, “What’s the hardest kind of movie to publicize?” And he said, “Anything original.” For it to find an audience, if it doesn’t have a good first Friday, basically you’re in trouble, whereas in the old days a movie could sit in a cinema for a time. I think one of the great things about A Fish Called Wanda was that we opened it in a very small number of cinemas—two in New York and one in L.A., I think—for the first two weeks, so people were slowly able to get used to the fact that it was a bit odd.

  So you’ve got this awful thing, that the first Friday is all-dependent on the publicity campaign—because by definition very few people have seen the movie—and if you have something that’s very original, that’s the thing that’s hardest to publicize. And if you don’t get a good first Friday, then it’s no longer possible to keep it in the movie house long enough for it to find an audience. So I think this is operating to some extent against originality.

  In 1984, Terry Gilliam directed Brazil, a neo-Orwellian look at a dystopian society, coauthored with Tom Stoppard and Charles McKeown. Sam Lowry (a petty bureaucrat played by Jonathan Pryce) upsets the system by trying to locate his dream girl, a woman suspected of having links to terrorists. Unknowingly helping Sam in his search is an old friend, Jack Lint, whose ambition has guided him far up the career ladder at the Ministry of Information, where he pulls in a paycheck by interrogating and torturing prisoners.

  Gilliam asked Michael Palin to play the role of Jack, trading on the actor’s affability in order to depict a likable but morally corrupt person. Their collaboration represented an exceptional example of humor being used to support and heighten dramatic ideas, in this case issues of loyalty and morality, leading to the film’s most chilling moment: when Jack encounters Sam himself strapped in the chair awaiting “information retrieval.”

  PALIN: I don’t think Terry did have me specifically in mind when he wrote Jack Lint. I think that probably Terry once he’d written it may have thought of me because we worked quite closely on Jabberwocky and Time Bandits and I think he felt sort of—not exactly morally obliged, just because we were good friends and had worked productively before—to offer me something on Brazil.

  Producer Arnon Milchan dangled before Terry the prospect of major stars, including Robert De Niro. De Niro was shown the script and said, of all the parts he’d like to do, Jack Lint was the one. So Terry said—this is Terry’s story anyway—“I’m sorry, my friend Mike is going to do that; you have to choose something else(!)” So that must be a rare example of De Niro being turned down.

  We talked about the nature of evil if you like, and the way it manifests itself. Terry and I both felt that it is a cliché and possibly an absurd generalization to think that all evil people look evil and have scars on their faces and go heh-heh-heh and all that. We felt that very often the most dangerous people are the ones who appear most plausible and most charming. So that was how we set about the idea of playing Jack Lint as someone who was everything that Jonathan Pryce’s character wasn’t: he was stable, he had a family, he was settled, comfortable, hardworking, charming, sociable—and utterly and totally unscrupulous. That was the way we felt we could bring out the evil in Jack Lint.

  I had a great problem with playing Jack, as I’d not really played a character like this before. It was also scheduled for the first day of shooting and it was about the most complicated scene in the film, which was really in retrospect a ridiculous bit of scheduling—you don’t schedule your hardest scene involving complicated character dialogue until your cast have had time to get to know who they’re playing, what they’re playing; you schedule some gentler stuff. But there we were, crack in. I’d just come from a week in the Belfast Festival doing a one-man show, so I was pretty exhausted, and we went in on day one and there was tremendous pressure to get the scene done, and get it done fast.

  Now, all sorts of things militated against that. I’d not worked with Jonathan before. He’s quite an intense actor, and I’m a—you know—Python actor; we’re intense for short periods, but basically we rely on the love and the comfort and the ease and the bouncing off lines one from another. Jonathan was searching for exactly how he should play his character, which was going to have to go through the entire film—he had another three months to go. I felt the whole atmosphere was a bit tight and tense and I wasn’t particularly happy with my performance by the end of the day (two days actually we spent).

  We got it down and we’d done a couple of more scenes as well, and people were saying, “Hey, we’ve got twelve pages of script under our belts. This is great, what a start!” I felt relieved that we’d done it, I thought we’d cracked it, but a little voice in the back of my mind said, “You know, this could be better.” So I was actually quite relieved when after a month or so, Terry said, “You know, there are some problems, it might be worth it trying this scene again.” And after I got over the hurt pride—couldn’t get it right the first time—I realized yes, there were things wrong, and maybe we’d be able to improve on it.

  We talked about it, and between us we came to the conclusion that the great thing about Jack is that he is a family man, that he is a personification of the good citizen. And there was no real indication of that in the first scene—it was just between the two of them. If we could have some elements of family life in it, sort of playing off Jack’s family, then that would make it all the more dark. So Terry said, “Well, let’s go straight into it, let’s give you a daughter.” My daughter at that time was only one year old, she wasn’t eligible. And Terry said, “Hey! I’ve got a daughter! I’ll get Holly to do it.”

  So several months after we’d shot the first scene we got back together again, and it just felt easier, it felt better. I enjoyed having Holly there, it gave me something to do, which enabled the jargon—Buttles and Tuttles and E-23 and B-24 and all that—and the sinister side of what Jack is saying to come out. You see there’s blood on his coat, you assume he’s orchestrated some awful torture. The next thing is he’s playing with his daughter and at the same time says, “Well, they have to be destroyed, you’d have to wipe him out,” and all that sort of thing.

  Palin with Jonathan Pryce in an unused scene from Brazil.

  Because that scene was eventually played with an element of humor, it actually concentrates the disturbing element much more. If it’s just desk-to-desk, it is more like a stock scene out of any thriller, and you’re not quite listening to the lines�
��you’re just observing the tension between the two people. If you’re laughing, then you’re becoming much more involved in the scene. I think an audience is beginning to feel a sort of catharsis—you know, we’ve all been children, a lot of them have children, they’ve been through that before—and suddenly the chilling line will come through: “There’s nothing I can do for you, that’s it.” I think it makes those lines much more memorable, makes Jack’s attitude much more memorable.

  It wasn’t necessary to put it all on the line: here’s a nasty man saying nasty things. Here is a nice man having a good time, but oh crikey! What he said! This is what it means, you know, when you’re away from the family background, you see exactly what the implications are, and they’re very unpleasant!

  I think it was quite audacious of Terry to play it with Holly; it really worked extremely well. I can remember when we were doing reverses on Holly, and Terry had the studio cleared and operated the camera, and Maggie was there, so it was this little family group, and me in the background. And that’s when she says the memorable line about “I won’t look at your willy.” So that felt very much better the second time around.

  There’s Violence to Be Done

  Having exceeded their creative and financial expectations on Brian, there was pressure (not all from within the group) to follow up their success with another film. Because the group’s members were going in different directions, however, they were limited in their ability to collaborate, pulled as they were by their own solo projects.

  Shortly after Life of Brian, the Pythons began meeting to discuss a new film, but by mid-1980 they were getting nowhere—dissatisfied with the disjointed nature of their schedule, the quantity of prime material, and the lack of a clear focus on the script. It was during this time that they were approached to make a stage appearance in Los Angeles, which they taped and ultimately released as a theatrical film (Monty Python Live at the Hollywood Bowl). The show was a mixture of Python warhorses (the “Dead Parrot” sketch), songs (many courtesy of Neil Innes), Gilliam animations, and film clips from Fliegender Zirkus. There was also other material both pre- and post-Python (such as an argument between the Pope and Michelangelo about why there are three Christs depicted in “The Last Supper”; and four wealthy Yorkshireman engaged in a friendly rivalry about whose childhood was the most impoverished—a classic sketch from At Last the 1948 Show).

  GILLIAM: There’s a forgetfulness in Python. I’m like an elephant: I remember all the bad bits where somebody trod on my toe, where revenge is going to be meted out at some point. Mike doesn’t; he remembers the fun and the good bits. It’s like, “He fucked us, Mike, you remember? He fucked us; why are you doing business with him, Mike?” And he’s, “Oh, really? Oh, I forgot all about that!”

  Like with Denis O’Brien, Mike kept working with Denis for a long time. Well, Denis did a lot of good things, but the Hollywood Bowl thing was the moment when they were offering us X amount of money to go and do a Hollywood Bowl, guaranteed, go in there, five days, in/out. Denis was our manager then, he decided to interfere, [and] he completely fucked it up. We had taped the shows, and the money we were guaranteed we didn’t get because Denis squandered it, wasted it, so we actually had to release the tape as a movie here in England to get the money that we’d hoped to get from the stage show; we didn’t want it to go out as a movie. That’s what he did. He used the money because he’s managing it, but I said, “Denis, you should have asked us if you were doing that.” He didn’t see any need to do that; our money was his money, and his money was his money, and he blew it. How can anybody work with somebody like that again? It’s crazy. Mike forgets!

  I remember the bad things, he remembers the good things and forgets the bad things. I wish I could remember more good things! Life would be more pleasant.

  I Didn’t Know an Acceptable Legal Phrase, M’Lud

  As a curious footnote to the Pythons’ estranged relationship with Denis O’Brien, Life of Brian eventually became the centerpiece of a legal action between the group and Paragon Entertainment, a Canadian company which had purchased Handmade Films in 1994. (Although noted as a quality producer of independent films, including Mona Lisa, Withnail and I, and A Private Function, Handmade suffered financial problems in the late eighties which led to a rift—and a lawsuit—between O’Brien and George Harrison. The company was dormant for a few years before Paragon bought the company’s library, including Brian.) As in the ABC case, the Pythons objected to cuts made in television showings of Brian when Paragon licensed it to Channel 4 in the U.K. The court action, resolved in early 1998, resulted in a victory for the Pythons, and they were awarded full ownership of the film.

  Cleese with Denis O’Brien at the Hollywood Bowl.

  GOLDSTONE: The ABC case enabled them to get the rights back to the entire series, which was a pretty unusual thing. But this was more about people who really felt very strongly about their work and objected to ABC cutting it and the BBC allowing it to be cut. Very few others would go to that sort of length. Even this Life of Brian case, it’s been enormously expensive and I don’t think anybody else would have gone to that length because you never know what the outcome would be—it wasn’t ever a clear-cut case.

  The great tragedy of the Paragon saga is that Handmade had kept all the outtakes and negatives of Life of Brian and then when Paragon bought it, they were very cheesy about a lot of things and weren’t prepared to continue to pay for storage of all this material, and without consulting us they junked it all. So when it came to doing the laserdisc version, there was very little to add on from scenes cut from the final release—like the Otto scene and the shepherds [who are oblivious to the angel’s appearance in the beginning]. The negs weren’t available; it was [only] the stuff that had been transferred onto video just by chance.

  THE MEANING OF LIFE

  The Grim Reaper on the set of The Meaning of Life.

  In Fact I Will Personally Make Sure You Have a Double Helping

  Dissatisfied on a business level with the Hollywood Bowl experience (Denis O’Brien ended his tenure as the Pythons’ manager shortly after), and remembering their success by holing up on a Caribbean island to work out the screenplay for Life of Brian, the Pythons tried again by departing for Jamaica, at which point the framework of Meaning of Life was realized.

  The film is a broad meditation on the perilousness and absurdity of human existence that comes across visually as a mix of Federico Fellini, Ingmar Bergman, and Busby Berkeley. Rather than feature a single narrative thread (as was the case with Brian), The Meaning of Life is a collection of sketches which provide many high points and some low ones, all reflecting a “Seven Stages of Man”-type framework. The topics covered range from the expected (Birth, Education, Fighting Each Other, Death) to the uncommon (Live Organ Transplants). Though the level of writing is quite high, there is an uneasy mix to the film as a whole (there is a certain repetition concerning dining, for example, as no fewer than eight scenes take place in restaurants, nightclubs, dinner parties, or at hastily erected dessert tables).

  As an indication of how far the Pythons had come in mastering the humor of excess, the film’s most memorable scene involves Mr. Creosote, a restaurant patron weighing more than all the Pythons put together, who proceeds to spew vomit throughout the establishment, orders every item on the menu, and then—upon topping off his meal with a dainty after-dinner mint—explodes.

  The most Pythonic element of the film is a linking device repeated throughout featuring the group as fish in a tank, whose laconic commentary on the film itself (“Not much happening at the moment, is there?”) is a delight.

  GOLDSTONE: The Meaning of Life definitely came about because Life of Brian had been very successful and there was pressure to come together again.

  Denis O’Brien managed the group subsequently for a short while, but that created problems because what he was able to do was realize the film dreams of the individuals—Time Bandits was the first one to be made under the Python/Hand
made relationship, and then The Missionary. Obviously, Eric had his own project that he wanted to do; I’m sure they all did. And ultimately Terry Gilliam and Michael Palin were the only people who benefited from that relationship.

  Denis constantly tried to see whether he could encourage them to write something [as a group], but by the time they did, the relationship [with him] became a bit acrimonious and it was really up to me again to get it together.

  All Mixed Up in a Bucket

  Was it difficult for the group to work together again after having concentrated on solo projects?

  IDLE: Not hard. John was the one who was reluctant; we simply started writing without him. But we found it hard to find a theme, even when he came aboard.

  JONES: That was the trouble, really, it was getting increasingly hard to get together, and it showed, I think. We’d meet and we’d read out material, then we wouldn’t meet again for another two months or something, and then we’d get together again, have another readout of material, and it seemed to be getting nowhere. I think we spent about a year doing that, meeting on and off and getting this pile of stuff together.

  I always said, “Let’s do a sketch show, I’m sure we could do a sketch film and make it work,” just to show we can. Because there was this feeling that maybe a sketch film you couldn’t sustain for more than an hour. And because we’d never done a sketch film—And Now for Something Completely Different I never really counted because I thought it was a bit half-assed, it wasn’t conceived as a film, really.