Gilliamesque

by Terry Gilliam

  GILLIAMESQUE. Copyright © 2015 by Terry Gilliam. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  Curation & Project Management: HDG Projects Ltd

  Design: gray318

  Art direction: Rafaela Romaya

  p. 8, Terry Gilliam and Johnny Depp, The Man Who Killed Don Quixote © 2000 Francois Duhamel; p. 10, Ernie Kovacs © Fred Hermansky/NBCUniversal/Getty Images; Sid Caesar © NBC/MBCU Photo Bank via Getty Images; p. 25, MAD magazine covers © DC Comics; p. 60, Algonquin Hotel lobby © Barry Winiker via Getty Images; p. 72, sketchbook report © Robert Crumb; p. 102, El Cordobes © Hulton Archive via Getty Images; p. 173, Nude on a Sofa by Francois Boucher, photo © bpk/Bayerische Staatsgemaldesämmlungen; p. 184, Time Bandits © Criterion Collection; p. 196, Terry Gilliam as Little Bo Peep in The Meaning of Life © 1983 Universal Studios. All Rights Reserved. Courtesy of Universal Studios; p. 218, John Neville and Sarah Polley, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen © 1989 Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Courtesy of Columbia Pictures; p. 223, three The Adventures of Baron Munchausen images © Sergio Strizzi, courtesy of Contrasto Agency; p. 228, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen cast © 1989 Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Courtesy of Columbia Pictures; p. 248, Terry Gilliam and Johnny Depp, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas © Peter Mountain; p. 248, Benicio Del Toro © Peter Mountain; p. 251, Johnny Depp, The Man Who Killed Don Quixote © 2000 Francois Duhamel; pp. 257–9, six The Man Who Killed Don Quixote images © 2000 Francois Duhamel; pp. 260–1, Terry Gilliam, The Man Who Killed Don Quixote © 2005 HanWay Films/Photos by Francois Duhamel; pp. 265–7, five The Brothers Grimm images © 2005 Dimension Films/Photos by Francois Duhamel; pp. 268–9, three Tideland images © 2005 HanWay Films/Photos by Francois Duhamel; p. 272, two Faust images © Tristram Kenton; p. 273, two Cellini images © ENO/Richard Hubert Smith; p. 273, Cellini poster © ENO, illustration by James Straffon; p. 274, Terry Gilliam, The Brothers Grimm © 2005 Dimension Films/Photos by Francois Duhamel; p. 276, Christopher Plummer and Lily Cole, The Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus © 2008 Liam Daniels; p. 277, Terry Gilliam and Amy Gilliam © Dave Hogan via Getty Images; pp. 280–1, three Zero Theorem images courtesy of Voltage Pictures; p. 282, Monty Python Live (Mostly) entrance © Ralph Larmann; p. 283, Monty Python Live (Mostly) ‘Spanish Inquisition’ © Dave J. Hogan via Getty Images; p. 284, Monty Python stamp © Royal Mail Group Ltd, 2015; p. 288, Gilliam family © David M. Bennett via Getty Images.

  Except where explicitly stated, all images of the members of Monty Python are courtesy of Python (Monty) Pictures Ltd.

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2014959494

  EPUB Edition DECEMBER 2015 ISBN: 9780062477972

  Print Edition ISBN: 9780062380746

  This is not the book that my daughter, Holly, and I intended. The plan was to produce a large, expensive, high-class coffee-table book of my artwork for the Cognoscenti of Fine Art. It would include a choice selection of historical tidbits for those who could read. Unfortunately, once the tape recorder started rolling I couldn’t stop babbling, and we have ended up with something closer to a Grand Theft Auto-biography: a high-speed car chase through my life with lots of skids and crashes, many of the best moments whizzing by in a blur. As a result, I have had to insert handwritten or typed notes to adjust the story, apologise for the egocentric nature of the reminiscences, name the ignored, fill in the glaring gaps, or just try to get control of my story-telling self. The Cognoscenti will have to buy something else for their coffee tables.

  Unlike my good friend Michael Palin – who knew where the real pot of gold was buried from the very beginning – I have never bothered to keep a diary and, as my wife Maggie never tires of reminding me, such memory as I do have left is dangerously – if not actionably – selective. On top of this, as the years have passed, more and more of those I’ve relied upon to be custodians of our shared but forgotten experiences – wonderful warm slabs of my life – have been sadly laid out on cold slabs of their own.

  It’s in looking back on the lavish gifts of love and creative collaboration which other people – in harness with providence – have continued to recklessly foist on me that I come as close as I am ever likely to get to true humility. And since I haven’t tested the accuracy or otherwise of my alleged memories by cross-checking them with any of my small – and ever-dwindling – number of living friends and relatives, you’ll just have to take my word for it that the account that follows is 100% undisputed objective fact.

  ANOTHER WARNING! If you are the type of reader who is looking for cuddly tales of domestic and family bliss, be prepared for disappointment. Those are mine to keep.

  CONTENTS

  1 Going to California

  2 Rock ’n’ Roll High School

  3 Camelot

  4 Help!

  5 Army Dreamer

  6 There’s a Riot Going On

  7 London is the Place For Me

  8 Interstellar Overdrive (Take 6)

  9 Performance

  10 Always Look on the Bright Side of Life

  11 Brazil

  12 Jump into the Fire

  13 Old Man

  14 Desolation Row

  15 All Things Must Pass

  End Credits

  Index

  About the Author

  About the Publisher

  was always frightened to take acid – even in Los Angeles in 1966–7, when everyone seemed to be doing it. You could see the way it was fucking people’s minds up right from the start, and being lucky enough to have occasionally accessed the realm of the imagination LSD was meant to take you to without chemical assistance, I wanted to make sure the itinerary for those visits stayed strictly under my own control.

  At that time I was living in a glass house on stilts in Laurel Canyon, and my main concern was that I didn’t really know where the ground was. I’d long had an absolute conviction that I could fly – not soaring high through the clouds like I’d later get a scale model of Jonathan Pryce to do in Brazil, but skimming along happily just a few feet off the ground. The sense-memory I had of flying at that height was so intense that it was hard to believe it only came from dreams, and I suspected that one tab of acid was all it would take to get me demonstrating my supposed aerial prowess from an upper window with potentially fatal consequences.

  People have sometimes accused me of not being able to distinguish dreams from reality, and it’s true that when it came to my recurring night-flights of fancy I had been mercifully spared the process of (literally!) disillusionment where you wake up thinking ‘That really happened,’ but then the vision gradually leaves you. I suppose if the mind really is more powerful than the body, then my brain could have convinced all those little muscles that this momentous event had earned its place in their individual memories – which is pretty much how it works for phantom limbs, but in that case you’re dealing with a nervous system trained over a long period of time to assume that certain things are going on down below.

  Maybe all dreams of flying are just your subconscious response to the fact that your dad threw you up in the air a lot as a little kid. I know Freud would offer another, earthier interpretation, but I was never a big fan of his, being more of a Jungian myself. A Neil Jungian, that is. I’ve always really loved Neil’s music – Buffalo Springfield, Crazy Horse
, all of it – as well as identifying strongly with his no-bullshit approach to the human psyche. So fuck you, Sigmund, I’m sticking with the ‘dad throwing you up in the air a lot’ theorem.

  The first chance my dad got to throw me up in the air was in November 1940. I was born a month after John Lennon and half a year before my fellow Minnesotan Bob Dylan (who took a while to realise that was what his name should be). In American terms I was a pre-war baby, because the land of my birth decided to sit out the first few dances of the Second World War, until the Japs marked our card at Pearl Harbor.

  My dad, James (‘Gill’) Gilliam – who’d been in the last operational cavalry unit of the US army for a while before the war – tried to re-enlist, but they told him he was too old and his horse-riding skills would be no use against the Nazi blitzkrieg. In any case, his primary duty was to throw me up in the air a lot, so I’d have an excuse for all those flying dreams in later life. As a consequence of this enlightened intervention on the part of the US military (which would not be the last benevolent decision it would make on behalf of the male Gilliams, but more of that later), the war had no impact on my early life at all.

  There was none of that formative trauma which is normally so vital to the evolution of the artistic mind (although that absence would in itself become traumatic in later life, proving a serious obstacle to any attempt to pass myself off as a Renaissance man). I arrived two years before my sister Sherry and eight-and-a-bit before my brother Scott, so I’d made sure my feet were firmly under the table before any competition arrived. I was smart, happy and in good health – in short all the things you’d want in a child. I’d later joke (and if a man can’t use material he’s been road-testing all his life in his own memoir, when can he?) that my father was a carpenter and my mother was a virgin, so what other choice did I have than to be the chosen one?

  I love the out-of-focus-ness of this kid. I was moving too fast for the cameras even then. My mum’s hair is the subject of the piece – look at those precise curls, and that’s a really good parting – but the object of her attention is, well, what exactly? My parents appreciated what they had, and they always admired the creature, but they could never quite grasp the true nature of its identity . . . There’s an element of vanity about Mrs Beatrice Gilliam that I find very interesting in retrospect. The meticulousness of her parting once almost got her lured off the straight and narrow. In the mid-1930s, when she was working in a Minneapolis restaurant called Hasty Tasty, a smartly dressed woman kept admiring her hair and asking if she would come and do her and her friends’ the same way, and my mum found out afterwards that this potential client was the wife of the notorious Minneapolis gangster ‘Kid’ Cann who used to procure local women for him and his good friend Al Capone.

  There are a few family pictures of us outside rented houses in Minneapolis, but the first home I actually have memories of is the one at Medicine Lake, out of the city, which my parents bought and moved us to when I was four. The house was basically a summer cottage – not made for 40-degrees-below-zero winters, and not really meant to be lived in at all in the cold season, but it was all they could afford at the time, so we made the best of it. I remember my dad insulating the whole place and digging out the basement.

  We lived there for several years with an outside toilet, which we called a ‘biffy’. It was a two-holer – presumably to delineate us from the poor people, who only had one hole. You’d think we might’ve complained about having to troop out there in Arctic conditions, but it was normal to us. That’s the great thing about kids – normal is normal, so what are you complaining about? That’s just the way the world is.

  Years later, once I’d run away to join Monty Python’s Flying Circus, I used to drive my parents crazy by referring to myself as ‘poor white trash’. They hated me doing that, because they weren’t poor white trash – they worked very hard. We didn’t have much money, but we never felt ourselves to be poor.

  My dad did lots of different jobs to keep the grizzlies from the door. At one point he worked on the Alaskan highway – driving earth-movers – at another as a coffee salesman. Either way, he was away a lot, and the template of a hearth maintained by the mother, and a father who comes back from his travels as a glamorous figure, is one I have tried to build upon as an adult – to the extent that my wife Maggie claims she raised our three children as a one-parent family.

  It’s intriguing how these patterns repeat themselves without one necessarily being aware of it. I never realised I was away that much when my kids were young, and similarly when I was growing up, I never felt like my dad wasn’t around. Even if L Ron Hubbard himself were to audit me, I don’t think he could come up with a memory of an absent father. Because Dad was always building stuff and fixing things up, we were constantly aware of his presence. Who could forget the day he finished work on the inside toilet and made a tree-house out of the remains of the old biffy?

  The thing I remember most clearly about the winters was when Dad would tie an inner tube to the back of the car and whoosh me around the lake, whiplashing all over the place, shouting at the top of my voice. That was fantastic.

  Those three destructive little words ‘health and safety’ had yet to reach Minnesota. My dad took me out shooting from a very early age. We had three shotguns in the house – a 12-gauge, a 16-gauge and a 22. They were definitely there for hunting rather than protecting us from the evils of the world. You’d go out and get what you needed for the table, and then come back and pluck the pheasant or gut the sunfish you’d caught by driving onto the frozen lake, drilling a hole and plonking your line down.

  Look at the wisdom in this child’s eyes. And that’s obviously a nice man standing behind him. My dad died in 1982, and what still intrigues me about him is that even though he was always doing things, and his work was normally very physical, he was incredibly kind and gentle. He wasn’t pushy and aggressive and ambitious, like me, whereas my mother was the controlling and organising force. You can see there’s real power in her, and she was definitely the disciplinarian of the house. If I had to be whipped – which I did sometimes (let’s say if I was defending my tree house with a bow and arrow, and someone inadvertently got hit in the eye King Harold-style) – my dad would do it, but it wouldn’t be his idea. I don’t ever remember feeling that I’d been punished unfairly; getting spanked with a belt every now and again was just what happened. It wasn’t just locking you in your room – what would be the point of that? There had to be something physical. I think there’s something a little crazy about the age we live in now where you’re not supposed to smack a kid or even shout at them. Maybe this is more true of boys than girls, but the need for physical limitations is very strong when you’re growing up, because you’re always pushing at them.

  Of course, the ice brought its own hazards. When you were out sledding and went over a bump, it was so cold that if your tongue touched the metal it would get frozen stuck. You’d have to walk all the way home holding the sled up to your face and hopefully get some hot water to get the thing off. That was some horrible shit, but it was absolutely standard.

  Luckily, the dog falling on my head was more of a oneoff. In winter, when the snow ploughs would come down the road outside and heap the snow and ice up onto the side, we would tunnel into it to make a cave to play in. One day a dog climbed up on top of it and took a piss, and the piss melted the snow and suddenly the whole thing – dog plus piss – came down on my and my friends’ heads. It was all quite elemental, but the great thing about growing up in the country is that you can’t avoid learning about the functions that our bodies have, and the fact that animals have insides, and that we eat them and they die. Frogs’ legs were a great local delicacy in Minnesota – you hold him by the back legs, then whack him with a knife or an axe as he tries to jump, and you’ve got a nutritious snack. Food is immediate. There’s a living creature, there’s a dead creature, and there’s a full creature slightly higher up the food chain. This is knowledge that has served m
e very well creatively.

  Sometimes we’d go to a relative’s farm on Sundays, and we’d see chickens get their heads cut off and still be running around afterwards. As a kid there is nothing more entertaining than that, because you are actually seeing life after death. These youthful farmyard experiences don’t make you callous, they just give you a respectful understanding of how cruel nature can be. One of my clearest – and most upsetting – childhood memories is of a mother garter snake being run over by a car, and me finding its belly split open and all these baby snakes swarming out across the road to their inevitable doom. Clearly this particular snake was trying to evolve into a mammal as it crossed the road.

  I’ve always wondered how city kids learn these things. Obviously nature’s still there underneath all the tin cans and the breeze blocks, but its workings are harder to discern when cats and dogs are the only animals you come into regular contact with.

  I like how confident I am in the saddle here - you can see it’s not the first pig I’ve ridden.

  An ambivalence about the relationship between the rural and the urban has been a major underlying theme of the films I’ve made. On the one hand, I love cities for their architecture and as hothouses of culture and art. On the other, I hate them as man-made excrescences conspiring to obscure our view of the natural world.

  I’ve tried to do my bit over the years to bridge that gap. While we were making Jabberwocky, I wanted to find some actual animal tissues for the skin of the monster, so I went to visit an abattoir near Shepperton in West London. When you’ve watched a big old cow walk in there on four legs, very much alive, there’s something really shocking about the moment when it’s given the bolt to the head, and this thing with all its muscles and its energy just turns to dead weight. To add to the fun, it was a small family-run abattoir – what Americans call a ‘mom-and-pop operation’. So when the carcass was hoisted up in the air and all the intestines were coming out, who was there to clear up but this kid of ten or eleven who was home on his school holidays? Watching him scoop up all the slops and the blood, I did think that anyone who eats meat (as I do) should spend a few hours in a place like that at some point in their lives, just to understand the process you’re part of.