Gilliamesque

by Terry Gilliam

  Gilliam père et fils or in this case, given that we were in Bavaria where we filmed two special German-Language Python shows, vater and Sohn. Dad and Mum were over from America, and I think this was the first time they’d seen their son being filmed, which was a novelty they seemed to enjoy (though obviously my costume was nothing new to them). I like my dad’s hat and permanent-press trousers combination – truly the 1970s were the golden age of manmade fibres.

  No one could have accused us of flying too close to the sun with our first Monty Python film project. And Now for Something Completely Different was essentially a compilation of re-shot sketches from the first two series, packaged up as a film and mostly paid for by Playboy Club entrepreneur Victor Lownes. But we got the chance to show our mettle when Columbia Pictures, the American studio, came to us and insisted we had to eliminate ‘Upper Class Twit of the Year’ (which was the last sequence), because no one on the other side of the Atlantic would understand it.

  In the same way that St Paul became the most zealous of Christians after he’d stopped persecuting them, I – the American – was as determined as any (and more determined than most) of my English colleagues that the Britishness of Python should not be compromised. If we’d watered it down, as some faint-hearts argued we should (exhibiting the excess of in-breeding that led to the loss of the empire – what they needed was some foreign blood to stiffen that old ramrod back), we’d have lost the opportunity to elevate our American audience with something real, in favour of giving them a muddled version of something transatlantic, which all too often became the British way in subsequent years.

  When we stood firm, the studio upped the ante by saying that if we left that sketch in as the end of the film, they ‘couldn’t guarantee its success in America’. This was how they put it, and with that statement they effectively guaranteed the film’s lack of success.

  Although And Now for Something . . . failed in the States, it did well in the UK, paving the way for a more full-blooded initiation into the pleasures and pain of film-making. For me, Monty Python and the Holy Grail would be a chance to revisit the enchanted medieval landscape of the Gilliam family’s garden in Panorama City, where the swords were made from eucalyptus branches and helmets from family-size ice-cream tubs – cut out the slot for the eyes and away you go, but try not to get whacked with a wooden shield, because that really hurts. We were able to call upon a bigger budget now, but not by much.

  Terry Jones and I had become very frustrated working on the first film, because we both thought we could do a better job of directing it than the Python TV veteran Ian MacNaughton. So when the time came to make The Holy Grail, we offered our services to the others as a kind of directorial dream-team. At first, we were full of confidence: ‘Of course we can do a film.’ It was only once the process actually started that we realised how much we still had to learn.

  The locations weren’t the problem – at least, not at first. Terry J. and I covered the whole country looking for every medieval castle available, and I was happy to find I had a pretty good nose for them. It’s hard to describe without trespassing into the dubious territory of the paranormal, but some kind of topographical magnetism – it’s almost like a cinematic leyline – did seem to tell me when they were just around the corner. Experiments have been done in planetariums that prove that dung-beetles rolling their shit through the night guide their path by the Milky Way, and that’s pretty much how I’ve worked ever since when it comes to location hunting.

  It was inevitable that the rest of the group would have some difficulty coping with the idea of Terry J. and I having any kind of authority over them. But the speed with which the ‘them against us’ divide opened up took us both by surprise. We weren’t even that bossy, but someone’s got to tell people where to stand, and in which direction to point the camera. Graham was the worst, because he and Ian had been drinking partners. He used to get really pissed at night and be incredibly brutal: ‘Why isn’t Ian directing this thing? Ian was great, but this is a shambles . . .’

  From the facial expressions here, I would guess Terry J. is trying to retain his authoritative demeanour while I query his directorial vision. Note also a rare in shot appearance by Maggie Weston, the power behind the throne (or in this case, the camera), who had also given me that excellent me dieval haircut.

  What made such victimisation especially hard to take was that the rest of us were all working so hard (in our own young, naive and determined ways) to plough on through the endless series of crises with which we seemed to be beset. And yet Graham – the tough guy, Mr Extreme Sportsman, who thought we were all amateurs – couldn’t even bring himself to walk across the (admittedly quite rickety) rope bridge we’d got the great mountaineer Hamish MacInnes (a.k.a. ‘The Warden of Glencoe’) to set up for us. The answer was simple – the Demon Drink.

  Look at the change in my appearance after just two weeks’ filming! Luckily my new straggly wild-man look was exactly the one I needed to play the bridge-keeper. That’s Graham and Terry J. in the armour, Roger Pratt (who went on to be the cinematographer on Brazil and 12 Monkeys) is pointing in a different direction to me, and crouching off to the side, the brilliant cameraman Terry Bedford is ignoring everything I say.

  When we needed a sheep for the taunters to throw off the ramparts onto Arthur and Bedevere, someone from the art department spotted a dead one by the side of the road, which had people vomiting when they tried to move the carcass. The next morning, Tommy Raeburn the props guy was down by the lake’s edge, heroically gutting it and filling it with stuffing. We were making do with what reality was throwing up.

  The most urgent problem we had to face came when we discovered that the castles we’d chosen with such care – most of which were owned by the National Trust – wouldn’t allow filming. We finally found a privately owned alternative – the one that’s out in the water at the end of the film – and on the day we were supposed to be shooting, the guy with the key (who was the son of the owner) had to fly up from London to let us in.

  In the TV series, the squishing foot from the Bronzino painting almost became a cue to cut back and forth between the unconscious mind and the world of physical reality. The disruptive interventions I make on screen in Monty Python and the Holy Grail – via the Beast of Aaarrgh, or as Patsy, pointing out to the others that Camelot is only a model when they’re still trying to play it straight – probably stemmed less from any counter-cultural or surrealist ideology than from my status as the member of the group most responsible for ensuring that what we were filming made sense on a physical level. It was just a way of solving problems.

  We only ended up doing that ridiculous thing with the cut-out because we got banished from the real castle, so come on, let’s comment on it and admit it’s only a model. There’s no point pretending this is anything other than what it is. The same thing happened with the Black Beast, when the animator suffers a fatal heart attack – I just didn’t know how the hell else to get out of that situation in narrative terms, other than to break the whole thing apart and step outside it.

  This certainly wasn’t – as some have surmised – a coded message that I’d had enough of doing animations for Monty Python, because at that point I was still going strong. I can’t remember exactly how or why I came across the book on images in the margins of medieval manuscripts that was one of the main inspirations for much of my work on Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Chance is always waiting for a little door to open so it can sneak in, and finding that stuff wasn’t just a red-letter day for me, it was an illustrated red-letter day, in which a strange half-goat creature could clearly be seen pissing on a cat.

  The Beast of Aaarrgh – narrative problem-solver-in-chief.

  The basis of it all was that these miserable monks who had to sit there repeatedly rewriting the Bible just got bored out of their minds and started doodling. I loved the way the little characters they’d create – imaginary animals called ‘nondescripts’ (logically enough, because they
hadn’t ever been described) – started out trapped in the decorated letters at the start of each document and then spilled out along the margins like a guerrilla army. Some of them related directly to the text, but some of them were just fucking around (an illustrative template which readers may already have noted has also been applied as a respectful tribute within this very volume), and half the fun was telling which was which. Basically, these illustrations were the medieval ancestors of Out of the Inkwell; conclusive proof, if more were needed, that – at least as far as ‘post-modernism’ is concerned – there’s nothing new under the sun.

  Sketches for pythonian non – descripts – not without good reason have the medieval drawings that inspired them been called ‘The New Yorker Cartoons of, their day’.

  The extensive parallels between the way these images flourished on the edge of the main story and my own marginal status within Monty Python (and, indeed, the broader human race) will no doubt be evident to all. But there was also a sense in which they related to the work of the group as a whole – we were all gigglers at the back of the class, the same way those monks had been. And it turned out that conjuring up an army of mischievous non-descripts was a great deal easier than getting my fellow Pythons to do what they were told.

  It had been a hard day’s knight.

  One particular crisis while shooting Monty Python and the Holy Grail came when we had to dig a hole to get the camera in the right place to film for a special effects shot that involved animals being thrown over the battlements. The others didn’t understand the importance of having to kneel uncomfortably, aligning them beneath the level of the parapet so later I could get a clean matte, and the heated debate which ensued culminated in me proclaiming, ‘You wrote this sketch and I’m just trying to make it work!’ Then I stomped off in high dudgeon to lie down in the tall grass. At this point it was a good job that we had two directors, as it meant the other Terry could take over while I quietly processed the realisation that perhaps I didn’t want to direct Monty Python films any more.

  Unfortunately, this one wasn’t quite finished yet. The last scenes we had to shoot were the Black Knight stuff, which was done back down in London, in Epping Forest. There was only me, John, Graham and Terry J. left at this point, until Terry and I got in a stalemate about reshooting part of the scene because a background was too dark (he thought it was, I knew it wasn’t), so I grabbed Maggie and we drove away on holiday together to head off the serious fight which would have undoubtedly broken out otherwise.

  By this stage – unbeknownst to my disputatious colleagues – Maggie had forced me into marriage with the time-honoured ‘we get hitched or that’s it’ manoeuvre. Prior to being confronted with this stark ultimatum, my idea of what being a grown-up entailed had stopped at buying a car and owning my own hi-fi – surely that was sufficient? I hated the idea of a wedding as a public event rather than a private thing between two people, so the deal was that we got married, but we didn’t tell anybody. This was how we’d ended up at Belsize Park registry office with Maggie’s parents (but not mine, who remained in the dark about it all for ages, as did the Pythons) and her mother’s borrowed ring. While I appreciate that this stripped-down ceremony would probably not constitute many other people’s idea of love’s young dream (I was only thirty-two after all – still little more than a child), the fact that Maggie and I are still together more than forty years on suggests we must have been doing something right.

  As a further down-payment on adulthood, Maggie and I had taken out a mortgage on an £8,000 flat on the top floor of Sandwell Mansions on West End Lane in West Hampstead. The first thing I’d done there was start ripping walls out to make space, which left us with a big front room divided by the stud work of the former wall, so you could see through it like a rood screen. We’d painted our entrance hall a waspish shade of yellow which I was very enamoured of, and there was a big skylight from which I hung a rope-ladder, so we could get out onto the roof. At that time I also developed a big thing about shifting rooms by 45 degrees, as there was a light-well at that angle in the corner of the bedroom, so I’d built the sleeping platform out on a diagonal too.

  This 1968 illustration for The Londoner turned out to be a prophetic foretaste of the nature of my marriage five, years later, albeit with the gender roles reversed.

  If I could turn anything to take it off the square then I would – I suppose as a reaction against my father having been a Mason. And when The Holy Grail went into the edit, my urge to keep things slightly off the straight and narrow expressed itself via me coming back to the edit room to re-cut scenes at night, without Terry J. necessarily knowing.

  This is probably as good a time as any for me to make a full confession. There were times when the film’s editor John Hackney came to me complaining that Terry was choosing the wrong shots – he seemed to be making his choice based on his memory of the feeling on the day the scene was shot rather than what was actually captured on film. I agreed with John, and we would go in and swap the shot for one that contained the actual information the scene demanded. The next day Terry never seemed to notice our late-night interventions, but my come-uppance was just around the corner.

  We mixed the sound for a first screening for ‘the money people’ – a somewhat less strait-laced group than that designation normally suggests, as Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Chrysalis and Charisma records (the latter being the label that put out our albums) had all chipped in, partly to support us and partly as a creative tax strategy. Unfortunately, large numbers of people walked out disappointed. This was largely my fault, because I was so intent on creating a realistic atmosphere that I’d over-egged the sound effects to the detriment of the dialogue.

  This was the moment of reckoning, as the four non-Terrys – especially Graham, who hated what we’d done with a passion (he’d known we’d fuck up, and now we had) – turned on their two directors. The guilt was shared between us, but if not the lion’s share then at least the cheetah’s share of it was mine, as I had been the one most responsible for over-cooking the sound. Going back through the whole thing and sorting it all out was a straightforward enough job, but still, it was my worst professional moment since having to cancel the Camp Roosevelt production of Alice in Wonderland. In retrospect, I’m curious as to whether the ‘sound effects’ version was really as bad as we thought it was – I find it hard to believe I could have been that destructive – but sadly there’s no way of bringing that one back, not even on Blu-Ray.

  Luckily, once all the sound issues were resolved, what we had on our hands was unquestionably ‘one of the greatest films of all time’. The New York opening was a big event for me, having left that city eight years before in something less than a blaze of glory. The night before the premiere, we had met some bright, new comedians who within a few months were to become Saturday Night Live – Bill Murray, Dan Ackroyd and Gilda Radner. Then the next day someone called us and said you’d better get down here. When we turned up at Cinema 1 on Third Avenue, the queue went right round the block. Astonishing! And there, politely lining up with everyone else, were the soon-to-be SNL people.

  Equally memorable was watching the audience’s reaction when the Black Knight’s arms and legs were being chopped off. No one laughed – everyone was gasping in horror. The Vietnam War was really going down the toilet by 1975, and the fact that the humour in the scene lay not in the violence itself, but rather in the Black Knight’s attitude to it, was being lost on everyone. Two arms and one leg had to come off before they finally started laughing.

  At the start of The Holy Grail, I’d enjoyed the idea – and the fact – of Terry J. and I doing something as a pair. But the more we worked together, the clearer it became that we had divergent ideas about the best ways to go about things, and I soon got tired of trying to persuade the rest of the group of the inherent rightness of my approach. I’ve never been any good at getting my point of view across in those kinds of situations, and tend to subside all too readily into a seemingly
random sequence of simian grunts.

  I think I’d also started to suspect that comedy wasn’t of quite such paramount importance to me as it was to the others. I thought it was just as important to get the mud and the squalor of the setting right, so an exchange like ‘How do you know he’s a king?’, ‘He hasn’t got shit all over him’, could really resonate. As far as I was concerned, if we hadn’t managed to make something with a coherently real and gritty feel to it, we’d have been left with just a collection of sketches (like Spamalot years later). In short, while the time had not yet come to formally disband the gang of six, there were a lot of other things I wanted to be able to do in movie-making, and it was clear to me the only way to get them done was to go it alone.

  I had a couple of false starts, both with a Beatles-y flavour. A Hard Day’s Night director Richard Lester – who I’d been excited to see in action back in California a few years before, when Glenys and I did a story for the Evening Standard about the making of Petunia, which Dick (as his friends know him) was filming with Julie Christie – approached me with a script he wanted me to work on. It was exciting to meet the man behind The Running, Jumping & Standing Still Film, but nothing really came of it. Then a producer called Sandy Lieberson asked me to direct a musical film called All This and World War III, which was going to use a lot of Beatles songs.

  Jabberwocky storyboards took ‘back-to-basics’ to the next level.

  Much as I loved The Beatles, I found that idea quite hard to get excited about. Sandy could see I wasn’t happy with it, and asked if there was anything I’d rather do instead. So I swept him off his feet with my in-depth plan for Jabberwocky – ‘Here’s the eight-line poem, we’ve got a monster, let’s go!’ – called in my old Help!-mate Chuck Alverson (who I’d lured into the Lester project) to co-write the screenplay, and prepared to have a second crack at the world of knights and peasants, but this time without my fellow Pythons getting in the way. (Mike excepted, as he was always a breeze to deal with, so I decided to bring him along for the ride . . . Oh yes, and also Terry J., who was to be eaten by the monster even before the title sequence.)