by David Morgan
And I’d been saying it ought to be somebody’s life story. We were looking for a sort of archetypal idea to hang our material onto, really.
We had this pile of material we put into some shape, it was a bit like Bunuel’s The Discreet Charm of the Bourgoisie, where he kept turning into a dream. We went to Jamaica to write so we could have two weeks without being interrupted. We all read it on the plane over there, and I think all our hearts sank—we just thought, “It isn’t working, this repetitive thing just doesn’t go.” I remember waking up in Jamaica [with] this sinking feeling in my stomach, the first time I’d had it since 1969 and the early days of editing, this feeling that something was wrong. We’d been talking, talking, going around in circles and not getting anywhere, and this was our third day by this time, and I thought, “What have I got that nobody else has got?” And I suddenly remembered I’d packed a script in which our continuity girl had done her timings, and her timings were different from ours—they were longer. The material that we all thought was “A” material was 74 minutes or something by her timing; by ours it was like 50 minutes. And hers was probably more accurate.
Rehearsals and blue-screen filming of the fish.
So when we got down to breakfast, I said, “I’ve got a proposal,” and Mike said he’d got a proposal. Mike’s proposal was that we should all pack up and go home and turn it into a TV series. And my proposal was, “What are we worried about? Because by these timings if we’ve got seventy-four minutes of ace material, we’ve only got to write another twenty minutes—surely we could do that. And it’s somebody’s life story, I’m sure!”
And they were all, “Yeah, yeah, yeah…” And then somebody said it could be anybody’s life story. And Eric said, “Yeah, we could call it The Meaning of Life.” That’s it! Just over that breakfast it suddenly came up. I didn’t come up with the idea, but I came up with the impetus, and then somebody else came up with the idea of “Let’s do it as the Seven Ages of Man,” and somebody came up with The Meaning of Life as the title, and then we knew where we were going. We then started putting the material into that kind of shape.
IDLE: We never found the theme till the end. I think it would have been perfect if we had given it one extra draft and it had become the Seven Ages of Man as well, with the story of one person, growing up at various ages through time. We nearly got there, but again John was reluctant to meet, so we just went ahead and shot it anyway. It still has great stuff in it and is still marvelously offensive!
GILLIAM: I actually think we didn’t do the film we should have done. There was Monty Python’s World War III, which I thought had some wonderful stuff in there, with all the soldiers wearing advertising, like race car drivers—ads are being taken out on all the soldiers, on the weapons, everything. It was the whole commercialization of war and atrocities, basically, and we played around with that for a long time; we incorporated some of the war stuff in Meaning of Life.
But then the one that I really liked was a whole Python film that was a court case. We were in the dock and the prosecution was trying to prove that what we were watching, this film we had made, is not a film, it’s a tax dodge. “Your Honor, a case in point: here’s a scene, it’s supposed to be Scott of the Antarctic, but it’s taking place in Bermuda. Now why is this, Your Honor?” And so we’d be running all these wonderful sketches and ideas and then keep cutting back to the court case, which is trying to prove that this is a tax dodge. At the same time we were actually going to take advertising in the film, we would get sponsors and we’d do ads in the film, and so we’d literally get paid lots of money for doing these ads, and we thought we could finance this thing with all the presales of all the advertising we were going to do in it, and make an incredibly funny film, and [have] this weird connecting thing of this court case commenting on the very film that we’re watching and what it is and what it isn’t, and why it is or isn’t a “film.” In the end we were going to be found guilty, that in fact what people had been sitting watching was not a film, it was a tax dodge, and then we were all going to be punished! And that’s where in Meaning of Life, where Graham’s chased to death by half-naked girls, that was in fact going to be one of the deaths.
Anyway, we decided on The Meaning of Life, which basically ended up being the Seven Stages of Man or whatever. And it’s fine, we at least take on a good title! I think the stages of man we got in there is very, very slight, to say the least. But the material in the film is some of the best stuff we’ve ever done. Also the performances are just fantastic. But to me, it’s less of a film than the other ones.
I bumped into Henry Jaglom, who thinks it’s a total masterpiece. I bumped into Mike Nichols; he says it’s a true masterpiece. So I’m getting these people running around who are saying that and I don’t know what to make of it; because when it’s good, it’s really good, but there’re real shitty bits that just don’t work!
GOLDSTONE: When I went out to raise the money for Meaning of Life, it was already a given that the Pythons would have to have final cut and artistic control—that precedent had been set. It already existed on Holy Grail (because there was nobody to question it) and Life of Brian. Also what they were very keen about by then was having proper fees up front, which we hadn’t done substantially in the others—certainly not on Holy Grail—so that needed a major studio to do that level of fee.
The actual title The Meaning of Life didn’t come in until a bit later; it was called Monty Python’s Fish Film or something like that.
There was a little bidding war; I mean, every studio wanted the next Python film, and I just felt Universal was the most easygoing in a way. It was being run by Ned Tannen at the time. They were having these huge hits, doing all these teenage movies and doing very well with them. We were very confident about who they were and [they] didn’t mind letting filmmakers get on with it.
It was kind of interesting how the thing happened as well; I didn’t show them the screenplay, I just did one page, which was the lyrics of a song that Eric had written about what was going to be in this movie, and they bought it on that.
Things had changed internally though in Python by then. This was now 1982, and they’d all been doing their own things for a while, so this new movie somehow wasn’t done with quite the same blinding commitment as the earlier ones. There were distractions. There was no one inherent problem, but there was kind of a latitude that was not quite as pioneering. Although there’s some great stuff, classic sequences, as a whole it still is a series of sketches [without] the narrative drive that Brian had.
NANCY LEWIS: On The Meaning of Life, they brought me over to be the director of Python Relations, because they wanted the fish thing and all of that to be kept fairly undercover, and not ruin the jokes. And then they moved the release date back and put it out earlier than expected, so all the sort of long-term publicity things we planned? Threw them out the window.
I think it was a difficult movie for some of them. John was getting bored, [but] they were all very involved. They would all go along to the dailies, as I recall, more so I think than actors might ordinarily on something on which they were just performing. They actually worked wonderfully together. There is a wonderful chemistry between them, I think they feed off each other—certainly they did performance-wise.
Ah! And What Sort of Thing Is That?
The first big set-piece of the film involved hordes of Catholics—men, women, children, nuns, stilt-walkers, cadavers!—singing and dancing, Annie-like, in praise of the Church’s prohibition against contraception (“Every sperm is sacred…”). The outlandish design of the sketch is itself a spoof of Hollywood musicals, but the vicarious kick of the number is to see tiny children actually singing the word “sperm.” It reminds one of a Lenny Bruce monologue about the desensitization of language—when words are robbed of their power to shock, the speaker is thoroughly robbed of his power over others.
How was directing children in those sequences?
JONES: It wasn’t difficult at all.
Once the parents had all read the script and knew what the children would be doing and what they were singing, then it was fine. It didn’t worry the children. I mean, the kids either knew what it was or they didn’t know, and if they didn’t know then it was no problem. They weren’t embarrassed. In fact, the little girl was terrific; she was miming to one of the other girls who had a great voice who was about twelve—she actually sang that bit—and the six-year-old was miming to that, but we had about four takes of her doing it and she was absolutely spot-on every time.
There was only one bit we changed in deference to the nannies who were there. Mike had to do all this stuff about, “If I wore a little rubber thing on the end of my cock we wouldn’t be in the trouble we are in now.” And in fact he said to the children “on the end of my sock.” And then we put “cock” in at the dubbing.
Arlene Phillips was the choreographer. We weren’t deliberately parodying anything. It was in a very Oliver! style, although I’m not sure I’ve even seen Oliver! But I know what it’s like! Arlene came up with ideas and I sort of came up with ideas and then we designed each shot, really.
I’d not had any schooling in directing, really, but I just find story-boarding helps you know where you are. I’m not really good at thinking on my feet, so I want to sort out everything first. The way I work, I first draw pathetic little pictures, diagram sketches, really, of each scene. It helps me in things like realizing I needed kids up the top of the frame, and so a staircase needs to go around the room [instead of] the left-hand side to make the room look full of children.
Exterior shot of Mr. Creosote, with auxilary transportation.
I’ve gone through the script and I usually have my storyboard numbers and shot numbers in the script as well, roughly, so I know what it’s covering. And then when we’re shooting, I write the slate number on my drawing, and then I even put the take numbers in, so I’ve got this wonderful ready reference. When we’re editing, I can just look at the scene and say, “Oh, we want shot so-and-so, there it is, and we want take number so-and-so of that.” It’s much better than the normal way where they’ve got two books, one in slate order—1, 2, 3, 4—and the other in script order. My method, you can see immediately what shots you’re looking for.
In the Creosote scene our production designer came up with a revamp of one of the other sets, a restaurant set earlier on, and I said, “Oh, it’s not big enough.” So he did another, bigger one, and I said, “No, no, it isn’t big enough.” I said it’s like one of London’s clubs, [or] like La Coupole in Paris. Eventually he and I went around London to see what I meant. I think we got to the RAC Club, and I said, “It’s this sort of size, this is the kind of thing.” And he immediately said, “Oh, I know, we can do it in Porchester Street Baths and dress it up like a restaurant.” I couldn’t really think why I wanted it to be such a big restaurant, but I think if it were a small restaurant it would be too claustrophobic. You wanted these events to be going on disturbing some of the people around Mr. Creosote, but not everybody in the restaurant.
Plus he has to fit in there!
JONES: That’s right! Cresosote was quite hard. I was a bit nervous about doing that, actually; originally I said Terry Gilliam ought to do it, and then Terry persuaded me that I ought to do it. I was a bit worried because it was a big makeup job, three and a half hours.
And of course the biggest thing was to get the vomit to look real. I didn’t want it to squirt out, I wanted it to sort of bludge out—go Blurp! We had a device, a tube that didn’t go into my mouth, it was at the side of the mouth, and I had to be at [an] absolute right angle. It looked fine when we tested it and everything, we shot the first day, and then we went to see the rushes, it didn’t work. What we hadn’t realized was that when the liquid came out of the side, there was a shadow from my face on the liquid, so you saw it wasn’t coming out of my mouth.
So we were a bit alarmed when we saw that, and thought, “Fuck, it’s not working.” But Richard Conway, our special effects guy, got a fail-safe device which actually went into my mouth. Although it came out as more of a spray, you had no fears [of detection].
Jones in mid-makeup as Mr. Creosote.
Still, there’s one shot where my mouth shut and the stuff’s coming out! I think just after when John is hovering over me with the menu, and it’s just come out and hit the menu and at some point I shut my mouth and there was still stuff coming out but nobody really noticed!
We had a big catapult; we had to throw it at the crowd. We knew the trajectory, we’d worked out where it would land. The catapult held like twenty or thirty gallons and hit everything spot-on. But for that we had to select the extras with the cheap costumes!
LEWIS: That was really quite glorious, Mr. Creosote. They mixed up this sort of vegetable mixture and Russian salad dressing, and they were shooting for a couple of days at least in this hall, and the place was to be used for a wedding afterwards. It was very hot, it smelled so dreadful, by the end of the shoot you couldn’t open that room because [with] the heat and this mixture sitting there, it was one of the most revolting things! That smell comes back to me now, it was terrible! I often wondered how the wedding went. They must have managed to get it out. I’m sure when they rented [the place], they just wrote these things down in their books: “Ah, couple days’ filming, fine…wedding the next day, fine…”
People Are Not Wearing Enough Hats
GILLIAM: The Crimson Permanent Assurance, this idea of this building setting sail and all that, is a romantic idea that these little old guys can take on these modern monsters. It’s a bit like Saddam Hussein taking on America; it’s a foolish, romantic idea. And I sort of give them their moment, and they defeat them, but in the end it’s a silly idea and they fall off the edge of the earth! Because it doesn’t really work that way in the real world.
It was originally a cartoon, and I just felt, I don’t want to do that. By then I was so terribly keen to escape from animation. I wanted to convince them that I could make my own little film—which was initially within the body of the main film. I had my own sound stage, my own everything. They were making their film over there and I was making mine. I still did bits of animation just to justify my supposed “real” job, but Crimson Permanent was just right because I got to play with models, taking stuff that we’d done in Time Bandits and stuff which hopefully we’d be able to do in Brazil and play with them. And I really enjoyed doing that.
The Crimson Permanent Assurance skirting the shoals of bankruptcy, barely.
JONES: We originally thought he was doing a five-minute animation, it was only when we heard that Terry wanted another million dollars or whatever it was, we suddenly realized it was a whole different feature going on! We kept going to his studio next door, and he had these huge sets compared to what we had.
Gilliam on the galley slave set of Crimson Permanent Assurance.
GILLIAM: But what was interesting afterwards when we started cutting it down, it just wouldn’t stay in the film. And I cut it shorter and shorter, and the others kept saying, “No, it’s still too long.” The rhythms of it are just totally different rhythms than Python rhythms, it’s not like that—it’s very long!
JONES: Of course, that originally came about three-quarters of a way through the film, and it never worked when it came there. We’d show the film, and everybody would say, “Well, yeah, hate that pirate number.” And Terry said, “I think it would work at the beginning of the film.”
GILLIAM: I made the quantum leap—just pull it outside the film—and then it became a better idea. Because not only is it a short subject before the film, but then it attacks the main film later on; you win both ways.
Still the great thing with Python was that we were able to do this, to have that kind of freedom to just pull things apart completely, change the shape of the form or whatever.
CLEESE: I was annoyed with him because he went over budget and instead of producing what we’d asked for (which I think was seven minutes), I think he produce
d twenty-three! I thought he was capable of being completely overtaken by his artistic ego and losing boundaries almost completely. And I felt annoyed with John Goldstone, the producer, that John would not restrain him.
GOLDSTONE: The one major problem on Meaning of Life was the Terry Gilliam sequence, which did run out of control. I think everyone was a bit pissed off at what he was doing, because he was clearly spending more money than we’d ever reckoned with. Actually, somehow we did manage to contain it within the money that Universal had given us, but it cost far too much for what it was.
The atmosphere was strained, I must say, because it was difficult to justify. And then to find that it didn’t work within the context of the film was a bit of a disappointment as well. One of the problems was that it was so grand in itself it didn’t fit within the scale of the rest of the film, and so this decision was made to make it the short that preceded it. Probably is the most expensive short ever made!
JONES: It was quite obvious that the pirate stuff had to come at the beginning, once we’d done it like that. The only trouble was that then the beginning of Meaning of Life, which was the hospital stuff, suffered. The hospital scenes were never as funny as they were when we kicked straight off with them; they always had a huge reaction, and they didn’t get quite such a big reaction after The Crimson Permanent Assurance.
GILLIAM: When I saw it in Cannes, Crimson Permanent comes on a huge screen, great sound, it’s like we’re in a big film, we’re in a movie! And then the film comes on and it’s like television, like big television. Now what’s interesting is when you see it on video, Crimson Permanent doesn’t quite do it as far as I’m concerned, but the rest of the film is perfect. It seems to me it’s the right scale; the television screen is the perfect scale to see it. It’s like Marty Scorsese’s King of Comedy. I saw it on the big screen, had mixed feelings; saw it on television, and said, “Yeah, that’s it.” I don’t quite understand how it all works, [but] this sense of scale is really important.
