Monty Python Speaks

by David Morgan

  Well, That’s Cast Rather a Gloom over the Evening, Hasn’t It?

  GILLIAM: It was a funny experience, Meaning of Life. I really felt more separated because I was in my little world, hopping in occasionally to do something in the other. We were no longer working as this tight unit, like on Brian. I think by Meaning of Life the writing was much more separate, everyone was doing their own thing more, and then we just stitched it together.

  DOYLE: One of the things about sketch films is you must end well. Like my old jazz teacher used to say, “Your applause on the end of a jazz song is how long you hold the last note.” So you must leave them with a good memory at the end of a sketch film because they haven’t got an overall experience of the thing; they just think it’s been fun if they feel fun as they leave the cinema.

  Now we get to Creosote, fine—the funniest scene in the film, everybody is rolling around laughing. We then [go into] the restaurant clearing up, and then we have a shaggy dog story: a waiter saying, “Come, follow me.” Now the audience is [still] laughing because Creosote’s funny, but in fact that [next sketch] is killing us: we are slowly dying as that scene is going on. And we get to the end [of that scene where] we tell the audience to “Fuck off!” That’s what he says to them. “You’ve just seen the best scene in the film, and now I’m going to tell you the answer to the meaning of life, follow me, follow me, follow me,” tells us his life story, then he says “Fuck off!”

  Death. We have killed our audience.

  After Creosote, we need to be out of that film as quickly as possible with our best stuff and only our best stuff. My feeling is that Creosote exploding should have been the precursor to Death: the guy chased by the women jumping off the cliff, quickly [moving] into the Grim Reaper coming around the dinner table. Everything should be about Death. Also, the audience are expecting gags in your credits; that film had nothing, just a piece of music with a TV floating away. What we should have had was the credits would start, and then we reprise Creosote [with the] cleaning up going on in the restaurant. So they’re cleaning up the restaurant, and the guy says, “Listen, since we’re right at the end of the film now, I’ll tell you what the meaning of life is.” So the credits are rolling, rolling—we had loads of stuff of him walking and saying, “Follow me, follow me,” all the way through the credits—the credits finish, he’s still saying, “Follow me!” Half the audience are standing in the aisle waiting to hear the meaning of life, and you run it for as long as you like! And then the guy tells you to “Fuck off!” That would have been the ending that would have made that film.

  Idle as the waiter, who may actually know the meaning of life.

  I don’t think you can tell an audience to fuck off and then try to keep them after that point! The other thing is, by reprising the Creosote restaurant we would have reminded everybody about the funniest thing in the film.

  Was that suggested structure seriously considered?

  DOYLE: Well, I talked to Terry Jones and he liked what the cleaning lady was saying—he played the cleaning lady—and he felt it would detract from it by putting it at the end of the film. The others weren’t around and they never heard about it. So I just didn’t get anywhere with the idea, and I couldn’t convince Terry that that was the way to go.

  I have these horrible thoughts of where films can be better; they sort of stick with me. I don’t think you can get Holy Grail much better, I don’t think you can get Life of Brian much better—Otto would have helped a little. [But] Meaning of Life could have been a better film.

  PALIN: I tend to think that the only creative work thrives on economy, in a sense. More money doesn’t mean better comedy, I don’t think it ever has; I think it’s quite irrelevant. The best comedy is some sort of complaint or conflict, anyway—that’s what it’s about—so it’s probably better if the comedy writers are up against it than if they’re being softened up with large amounts of money, because then you become formulaic. And I think that was important to me in the early Python shows, because we didn’t have much money and we had lots and lots of ideas. [We tried to] find how we could put these ideas across, so people worked incredibly hard, Gilliam especially on his animation. There are some costumes and all that, being clearly inventive, and that spirit of invention was very, very important. I think possibly as we came to the third series, got a little bit more money and were more accepted, maybe the invention weakened a little, but it might be just that we’d done so much.

  My assessment looking back on it was that it was the first couple of series that really all of us were flying on all cylinders. There was a tremendous amount of work put into each show, because we said, “We’ve got this freedom, we don’t have much money, but we’re going to fill these shows brim-full, we’re going to make them so rich.” And then as it got to the third series, things just became a little bit more indulgent, possibly slightly more repetitive. And I think again with the films, probably in its way Holy Grail was much more inventive than The Meaning of Life, which had more money—if we’d wanted a battlefield we could have one, with plenty of soldiers and all that sort of thing. And so, yes, I think that when Python was forced to be inventive for whatever reason—a lack of funds, usually—that’s when we were at our best.

  It’s not a general rule, because I think there were things that we did in The Meaning of Life—for instance, the “Sperm Song”—which we couldn’t have done unless we had some money. And that was a really good use of money; whereas before it would have been just a neat idea, we made it into something with quite a towering impression, a sequence to stand in comparison with the best Hollywood musical sequences. And you could only do that with a bit of money.

  Thankless acting assignment, from “Find the Fish.”

  CLEESE: Everything that was good about Life of Brian was bad about Meaning of Life. Life of Brian, we knew instinctively what we were writing about, everybody was writing well, the story (which we’re not very good at) developed remarkably easily and organically, we knew that we were on to something good and funny and meaningful, and the shooting process was a joy—except the last few days when I got a rotten chest infection—I remember saying to someone, “Being crucified is bad enough, it’s no fun when you have the flu as well.”

  That was a great project, and then we made a terrible mistake: When Life of Brian came out and it was such a big hit (a very big hit by our standards), Denis O’Brien said to us—and it remains to this day the single most misleading bit of information I’ve ever been given—“If you guys make another film almost straight away, you’ll never have to work again in your lives.” And that was very attractive to me, because work is not my strong suit. And so we started trying to create a film, even though we needed a break from each other—not because we weren’t getting on, but we just needed to regenerate. We went straight into writing Meaning of Life, we broke up for a time and went off and did our own projects, we got back together, we wrote again, we broke again, we got back together and on and on and on. And all we did was accumulate material, a third of which was really good, a third of which was okay, a third of which I thought was not good enough.

  I’m not entirely sure how pleased I am that we did it. I thought it was a very scrappy, rather unsatisfactory film, and for every good bit of material I thought there were several bits that weren’t. I never thought it really came together, and I thought it was a perfect example of us starting on something before we were ready. And also at the end I disagreed with a number of the editorial decisions that the group had made, and I thought, well, at my age (by that time I was forty-three), I’ve reached the point where I ought to be making my own mistakes and not other people’s.

  I think there was a general sense that it had not been a very satisfactory experience, and while I don’t remember a conscious decision being made not to make another film, I think it was like when you go to a restaurant that isn’t very good: you don’t actually say, “I’m never going back there again,” you just suddenly discover three years later that you
’ve never been drawn back. I think it was like that.

  GOLDSTONE: It didn’t do more [business] than Life of Brian because in a way it didn’t satisfy the way Life of Brian did. Its individual moments were great, but the feeling people had coming out of the cinema wasn’t the one that they came out of Life of Brian with. It’s a film that they could sit through again and again and pick up on certain moments, but I think in terms of consumer satisfaction they were disappointed, and that’s very important in terms of word of mouth and the success of a film. Also, it didn’t have really the same kind of notoriety because the subject matter was very broad.

  I reckon after Meaning of Life the chances of them doing another film are really slim. It may be the fact that Meaning of Life didn’t work as well, but also there’s the realization historically that it had taken two or three years to write and prepare each film, and to have to make that kind of commitment became virtually impossible for all of them to do.

  GILLIAM: It was work habits that had changed. We weren’t all at the same level trying to work just for the show. I mean, lifestyles were getting in the way: “I’m a Hollywood Star, I need this…” It’s not [that] one is right or wrong, it’s just they’re different ways of working. Work habits: that’s the only way I can describe it.

  How do you think their work characterized the Pythons themselves?

  GOLDSTONE: They always had integrity and commitment to what they did. They wouldn’t compromise, and were able to see that vision through. I’m sure that pays off because it’s truth. It’s not pandering to what’s thought to be the commercial way of doing things. It’s not just second-guessing what an audience will like. You do what you feel is right; sometimes it doesn’t work, but it’s that kind of commitment that clearly has worked for them.

  I’ve never really thought about this before, but although Meaning of Life was uncompromising, probably because of what was happening to the group at the time, and the kind of tensions that existed, they somehow didn’t quite see it through in the way they had the previous work. It’s the sort of film that peaks too early, and it’s downhill to the end—you can’t do that. It may reflect something that was happening internally, a feeling that the interest was waning. That’s the nature of screenwriting, where the third act often does not live up to the first two.

  They wouldn’t proceed with a movie until they all felt that the script was ready; that in itself was just so rare. In American movies an awful lot of work is invested in development of a project—or overdevelopment! In England it isn’t the case; screenplays are generally underwritten except in a few rare examples.

  It’s such a miracle that films get made, and a lot of the influence has been television, which is never as diligent. Because they need to fill time slots, they will go with a second draft rather than a fourteenth, and it shows. But the films that have really broken through, interestingly, have been subject to very substantial writing and rewriting: Four Weddings and a Funeral, A Fish Called Wanda. The Full Monty was a long writing process, and I think that has something to say about the credibility of the project, as to what really has gone into it. When a film is put under scrutiny, every blemish will come through if it hasn’t been properly thought [out].

  Things are getting better here in terms of screenwriting, but it’s never been a part of our history. We’ve had a culture that has always been theater and (to a certain extent) television. Cinema is not the language that we think in, and it’s only been since a new generation has been influenced by American cinema and has recognized something about film grammar that it is getting better and better.

  So just that experience of the intensity of the writing and rewriting of Python scripts is a very good lesson.

  PALIN: I think the fact that we’d struggled for a long time to get a script together, we were writing from almost as soon as we’d done Brian. And there were tons of stuff; far more material was thrown away during the writing of Meaning of Life than any other thing we’d done on Python. Tons of stuff just didn’t quite work out. So yeah, in the end I suppose there was a feeling that we have to see it through because we’d invested so much time in the writing of it, [but] it never happened as neatly or organically as the other films. And although there are a number of things in Meaning of Life which are really exceptionally good—I mean, Mr. Creosote and the “Sperm Song,” and there’s a scene where Graham and Eric talk about contraception, which is just one of my favorite things—I didn’t feel as a whole it was very satisfactory. It doesn’t leave in your mind that wonderful world that Brian and Grail did, which was a pity. And Terry Gilliam’s [work] wasn’t assimilated in the way it should have been. I don’t think to be honest it was the best use of Terry. I like The Crimson Permanent Assurance, but it was too long and too heavy and it should have been somehow integrated into the film.

  At the 1983 Cannes Film Festival, The Meaning of Life received the Jury Prize, a rarity for a comic film.

  GILLIAM: I don’t know what Cannes did. We made a splash there, but I never got a feeling that [because of that] the writing about what we did was any more serious or not. Cannes to me was just a funny time to be inundated with all this madness, where the twenty-four hours of your day, the big day (when you’ve got the press conference and the show), everywhere you move there’s a photographer, there’s a microphone, you’re the center of it, and the next day, nothing! You don’t exist the next day. That was the best thing to learn in Cannes: the fleetingness of fame. Twenty-four hours is what you get in Cannes and then it’s over!

  The best memory I have of Cannes was at the Carlton Terrace. I see Terry coming down through the interior part of it, there’s a video crew coming, he’s grabbing people and saying, “¿qué Monty Python? ¿qué Monty Python?” And people were responding or not responding, and he was just gone, and he actually grabbed me without even recognizing who I was and kept on talking to me: “Who is Monty Python?” And I looked at him and then he finally recognized it was me, and I started taking my trousers down! And in the midst of all this, suddenly I feel this heat on my back, it was like the sun was burning, it was really hot. And I turned around and it was Jerry Lewis, beet-red, staring, just angry because we were in his way. We were in France and the camera was interested in us, and paying no attention to Jerry Lewis, and he hated us. It was just a great moment.

  I could actually feel the heat coming off of this man, this face was ugly, so full of hatred, it was amazing. That’s my memory of Cannes, and also being there in the black ties and all that, and projectile vomiting on screen. And the audience went with it, that’s what was really funny, because we didn’t know, we thought they might just be so outraged. So that was good.

  And then the prize—I was off doing something else. Terry was the one that went back and got it. I’ve never really registered it, to be quite honest. It’s like, “Oh, we got a prize, good.” And that’s about it. I think I’ve got a thing in its plastic folder still stuck up on the wall that [says] we’d won something. It was just really strange.

  IDLE: It was the only studio picture we did, which means it will never go into profit!

  LE MORTE D’ARTHUR

  Forget About Your Sin—Give the Audience a Grin

  In his naked account of his life and friendships, A Liar’s Autobiography (published in 1980), Chapman wrote unapologetically about where the turns of fate had taken him, but seemed proud that he had in fact stood up to alcohol, which had grown to dominate him. His was a life marked by flirtations with disaster, whether it was engaging in obnoxious or rude behavior in order to shock those in attendance, or indulging in hedonistic or death-defying thrills.

  In the late 1980s, Chapman began touring (mainly at college campuses) with a one-man show that was a convivial mixture of reminiscences, jokes, and performance art. A typical start for the show would be his request to the audience for ten seconds’ worth of shouted abuse (“It would certainly save a lot of time later on”). He made several guest appearances on American television, hosted a series
on Cinemax, and worked on various projects, including a screenplay loosely based on the exploits of the Dangerous Sports Club, and an unsold pilot for an NBC series, Jake’s Journey.

  On October 4, 1989, almost twenty years to the day since the first broadcast of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, Graham Chapman passed away at the age of forty-eight, following an extended battle against cancer. Having been weakened by his lengthy dance with alcoholism (he had started drinking at age fourteen), Chapman’s late recovery from substance abuse perhaps had convinced him that his fight against cancer would prove equally successful. But his uncompromising lifestyle, which had earlier introduced a strain in his relationships with the other Pythons, seemed to forebode an early, tragic end. The death of Chapman also mirrored the dissolution of the group as a performing entity, for by that time Python existed pretty much only in reruns and in CD compilations of previously recorded albums.

  How did your relationship with Graham change when you were no longer writing with him regularly?

  CLEESE: Well, I think that there was a time when Graham felt, because we were a writing pair, that we were like a kind of professional marriage. And I remember in 1971 I lost some money on an unwise investment; I opened a health club and the guy who was running the health club dropped dead about three weeks after it opened, and it was all predicated on his participation. It was terrible, [but] I needed some money rapidly. And I spoke to Humphrey Barclay, who was doing Doctor at Large, and since Graham and I had done the pilot episode of that, I said to Humphrey, “Can I write some episodes?” And when Graham found out I was writing on my own he was terribly upset, rather as though I wasn’t allowed to, like I was cheating on him. As though it was simply not in the cards for me to be able to go off and do something on my own. And I remember thinking, “Why would he feel that?” He felt very upset and complained to people about it, as though I was doing something morally wrong.