Gilliamesque

by Terry Gilliam

  I can be pretty indignant once I get on my artistic high-horse, whereas Mike is much more naturally charming. He was the gentle persuader while I was the impassioned one, fighting for truth, justice and the American way. The judge was quite wry – after the trial was over, his clerk asked us to come back to his chambers and we found out he was a Python fan. The turning point in the case came when he said, ‘Let’s look at this,’ so we sat down next to him in what would normally have been the jury box – we might as well have had popcorn – and we showed our version, and then ABC showed theirs.

  It obviously made sense for it to be done that way – the original version first, and then the doctored one ABC were proposing to show after – but it showed what idiots the network people were that they didn’t protest, because the contrast between the reactions in the court room totally played in our favour. Obviously everyone was laughing at the first screening, but by the time we got to the second, it was old material, so if anything, the destructive impact of the deletions was exaggerated.

  This 1968 Nova illustration showcased a clear eye for the harsh realities of money and power broking which would stand me in good stead in my dealings with more moneymen. One thing I did learn from my time spent at Hollywood’s sharp end is that there’s only one other town in America like it, and that’s Washington. The two places function in exactly the same way – they’re all about being seen at the right places, and all the real business is done over breakfast. In Washington obviously you’re looking at lobbyists rather than agents, but the primacy of getting the deal done over the likely benefits (or otherwise) to mankind seems to be the same whether what’s being punted is an oil deal or a blockbuster sequel.

  The problem was that it was too late in the process for us to have cried foul (the shows were scheduled to be shown in a couple of weeks, and you can’t tamper with TV schedules in a capitalist society), so the initial judgement went against us, except in allowing us to put a disclaimer at the front of the show – which obviously we had a fair amount of fun with, to the extent that ABC then appealed the disclaimer (which they’d bowdlerised anyway), and then we appealed their appeal. In the course of a last appeal – and I don’t know why this hadn’t come up before – our original contract with the BBC came into play. There was a clause in that (which Terry Jones had insisted on – good work, Terry) stipulating that our material had to go out exactly as we made it, so it turned out that the BBC had no right to sell the shows on to ABC without that guarantee, and there was no option for the two broadcasting Goliaths other than to settle out of court with the six comedy Davids.

  Not only did this result have important implications in terms of evening up the power balance between programme-makers and TV networks, it also secured our financial future. The BBC ended up handing over the rights to the shows everywhere in the world except the UK. This Python pension fund still pays the bills for all those years in between me making movies, when I can’t get a job. It’s allowed me the freedom to hold on between films until something that I actually want to do comes along, no doubt saving the world from a slew of inferior cinematic product in the process.

  There is certainly satisfaction to be had from getting major broadcasting corporations to foot the bill for your artistic freedom, but we did have to fight for it, and the great thing was, it felt like the good guys were winning. I know the seventies are often seen as a period when many of the new freedoms and possibilities of the previous decade were closed down, but it didn’t feel that way to us. Far from a period of retrenchment and stasis, this was a time when – for me at least – the underlying attitudes of the counter-culture were just as relevant as ever, and our business was finding new doors to push open wherever and whenever possible.

  If there was anything we could do to fuck up the way the BBC normally did things, then fuck it, why not? I guess the political amphitheatre had been reduced in size from the broad front of the sixties’ wider battles for social, racial and sexual equality, to a much more compact enclave within the broadcasting and film industries, but still, at least as far as I was concerned, it was the same struggle. And as if to show that we still had the stomach for a fight as the eighties hoved into view, Monty Python decided to build on the sure foundation of The Holy Grail by incurring the wrath of organised Christianity.

  The LIFE OF BRIAN Gang (1) ∼ preparing to unite Malcom Muggeridge and the Bishop of Southwark in opprobrium.

  The seed that grew into Life of Brian was Eric imagining a cheesy biblical epic called ‘Jesus Christ – Lust for Glory’. This was a joke that made us all laugh, but it would never have become a film without the intercession of another contact Eric Idle made for us, appropriately enough a member of the band whose most outspoken member had once mischievously claimed they were in danger of becoming ‘bigger than Jesus’ (an idea which was not well received in America).

  Eric and I had been out in LA promoting The Holy Grail when we first met George Harrison. It was at some kind of music business function or other (I wish the aptly named Idle would hurry up and write his autobiography, so I can find out which – I know it wasn’t the Grammys). I remember the great session drummer Jim Keltner was there too, because he turned out to have gone to high school with Carol Cleveland. Eric and George quickly – and inevitably, given his penchant for embracing the great and the good (as he embraced me at the dawn of Python even when my connection to those two illustrious cadres was tenuous at best) – became friends, so once we’d all returned to England we would often be invited out to George’s house at Friar Park.

  He might have been ‘The Quiet One’ as far as The Beatles were concerned, but in the course of these visits, it soon became clear that he was the number one Python fan on the planet. He knew all the sketches backwards and forwards, and was kind enough to say on several occasions that he thought our impact on comedy was analogous to The Beatles’ on music. His insistence that the spirit of the Fab Four had somehow passed on to us was obviously immensely flattering, but it also tied in quite neatly with his religious beliefs, not only because we started pretty much when they ended, but also because we shared several of the same points of origin – in the form of the Goons and Richard Lester – and ‘everything is connected’, as Hare Krishna devotees are often wont to say.

  How George came to save Brian was that the whole thing was ready to go – all the pre-production was done, and the crew were leaving for Tunisia on the Thursday – when EMI, who up until that point had been really keen to finance us, suddenly pulled the plug. All the flights were stopped – everything was on hold. What happened was that Bernie Delfont finally read the script – the pulling of the plug and the reading of the script were definitely connected. Just as so much of the rest of the world would once the film was finally released, he thought it was blasphemous, and decided to pass on the opportunity to provoke a special personalised pogrom.

  We were still left with the small matter of a major overseas film production to finance. For a while we ran around asking everyone for money without having much luck, until Eric asked George if he was interested. George just said ‘done’ and that was it.

  If only the rest of Life of Brian’s power-structure had been so happily free of complexity. Terry J. wanted the two of us to co-direct again, but I didn’t want to do that any more, having been spoilt for such collaborative endeavours by the taste of absolute power (or the closest a film director can get to it – which isn’t as close as you might think, because everything you do is totally dependent on other people anyway) I’d enjoyed on Jabberwocky. So we agreed a compromise that I would become the designer.

  The LIFE OF BRIAN Gang (2) ∼ on location in Tunisia, within easy reach of Franco Zeffirelli’s old sets for JESUS OF NAZARETH (of which we made liberal use). I’ve managed to get somewhere near the middle of this one for a change, right down at the bottom, with Maggie holding our first child Amy three people to my left (or my right, as you’re looking at it). I like the way Pythons are dotted randomly about with pretty m
uch everyone else in their normal clothes except Cleese-y who seems to have found his biblical robes very much to his liking.

  As was probably inevitable, I eventually changed from designer to resigner, because if you expend a huge amount of energy designing something that costs money and someone doesn’t shoot it in the way you know it should be shot, then you are (or at least I am) going to get frustrated. The aesthetic foundation of this frustration was the same as it had been on The Holy Grail – if you’re doing a comedy that plays off a particular tradition (in this case the ‘sword and sandal’ epics I’d loved so well in my youth), then it has to be believable as an outgrowth of that tradition, which means it has to have a certain scope and quality to it.

  On the handful of scenes I did actually end up directing – the arrival of the three wise men at the village being one – I worked really hard to give them those moments of epic scale. It’s not that Terry’s way of doing it was wrong, just that his default setting was to shoot everything more like TV, and as a result there were certain points – particularly the Pilate scene, where we’d built this outrageous set with a rectilinear Roman room inside this three-storey Jewish hovel that you don’t really get to see – where I felt important images were lost.

  Looking back, I can see that as much as I might stamp my little artistic feet about the ways it could have been improved, Life of Brian not only got made but it also turned out brilliantly. In my more reasonable moments I will even concede that in the end we probably got quite a good balance between my grandiose ambitions and baroque angles, and Terry J.’s more nuts-and-bolts sensibility.

  The LIFE OF BRIAN Gang (3) ~ with model of spaceship. We’s worked on THE HOLY GRAIL in Henry Moore’s old studio but by that time Mike and I and Julian Doyle had taken on two former banana warehouses in Neal’s Yard, covent Garden, and set up a recording studio for Andre Jacqueman on the ground floor, and Peerless Camera Company (my FX company with Kent Houston) down in the basement. The studio room was 20 foot by 24, and we shot all of the space sequences upon which George Lucas would later compliment me in there. That room was also home to the sequence in Time Bandits when they re approaching Raglan Castle on their little coracle, which we did by rocking them back and forward on some inner tubes in front of black drapes.

  Of all the Python films, it was Life of Brian that we had the most fun on – it was certainly the one with the most improvised material. And when the film came out and caused so much trouble, I was in heaven. The fact that the Catholics, the Protestants and the Jews were all simultaneously marching in protest at the film’s sacrilegious treatment of important religious themes was just the icing on the cake. It takes a lot to bring those guys together, and we had done it by the simple expedient of causing them all offence at the same time. There was a whole page in Variety about the protests, and each religion got a couple of columns to admit that the inappropriateness of what we had done was something they could all agree on. It was fucking great. Obviously Muslims didn’t exist then, otherwise they would’ve been in on it too.

  Here I am back on my own again ~ with the ruins of the spaceship in Tunisia, and then at home with the alien in South Hin Park, Hampstead.

  It was wonderful to be accused of blasphemy, because it meant we knew we had irritated all the right people – everything Jesus had done for me had paid off. And because teaming up with George Harrison had served us so well, at the end of the process we formed HandMade Films together – which was basically Python and George, with Denis O’Brien managing both parties.

  The complexities of HandMade’s financial arrangements could be (and, indeed, have been) the subject of a whole book on their own, so I’m not going to delve into them too deeply with regard to how Time Bandits came together. One of the fascinating things about film-making is that as a director, you’re constantly having fifty or sixty conversations at once – and I don’t mean just the ones you’re having with yourself. The producers, the actors, the guy doing the lights, they all have their own different version of the film, and what’s intriguing is that you become the conduit whereby all these different versions come crashing together and then ultimately develop into something else.

  Sometimes they merge and move on, at others the confluence of these different conceptions is not so harmonious. But there’s invariably a strange moment of surprise when you proceed from thinking you’re all on the same course to realising how different what everyone wants is. There was a particularly vivid one of those incidents on Time Bandits, when I was talking to my old friend, the great percussionist/actor and adviser Ray Cooper (who at the time was head of production at HandMade) about how we were going to do the music, and I suddenly realised Denis O’Brien was expecting that George Harrison was going to contribute a bunch of songs – basically coming up with his version of ‘Hi-ho, Hi-ho, It’s Off To Work We Go’, and turning the film into a live-action Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

  When we were still developing TIME BANDITS, one of the reasons studies gave for turning it down was that nobody wanted to watch dwarves. Or so they said. Thankfully that proved not to be the case. Forty years later HandMade Films was approached by Hollywood to license a new Time Bandits. It was pitched as a franchise of three films and they were offering huge amounts of $$$$. Their only stipulation was . . . NO dwarves!!! (A simple ‘Fuck off!’ from yours truly nixed another Hollywood producer’s dream.)

  Negotiating your way through these encroaching crowds of disparate and often conflicting perceptions is no less of a challenge than marshalling a theoretically inadequate number of extras into a plausible and satisfying crowd scene. In both cases there’s a measure of trickery involved in delivering the illusion of a lot of people whose attention is all focused in one direction. When we were filming Time Bandits in Morocco, Sean Connery was up on the platform about to throw the Minotaur’s severed head off into the crowd, and we only had maybe seventy-five people, all of whom I had to cram together in a little bit of space way down below in the courtyard. There was nobody in the whole vast area between them and the edge of the platform, but if you do it right, the perspective gives you the illusion.

  I’d had to manage the same situation in Jabberwocky, when Michael Palin was standing in the long queue waiting to get into the town. In reality, all those people were standing maybe seven or eight feet apart, but I just lined them up very carefully with the camera at the right distance to make them overlap so it looked like a huge crowd. Some of these are an animator’s tricks, some of them are a magician’s, but they all boil down to what I consider to be one of the key skills in film-making – translating objects or people as drawn in my storyboards from two into three dimensions, and then understanding how they’re going to behave once they get there.

  A vital aspect of the shift from two dimensions into three is learning to deal with the difference between how you’ve imagined an actor is going to be and who they actually are. You’ve got to get the angles right here, too – dealing with leading men and women is no less of a skill than making a cupboard. Generally it’s just a matter of letting them know you’ve listened to what they’ve said. At that point they feel like they’ve pissed on your territory so we all know who’s boss, and from that point on they’ll be co-operation personified.

  With some people, it’s just a question of making a single adjustment, as with Sean Connery’s command: ‘Don’t film me getting on that horse.’ This was on our first of fourteen days of shooting, which is obviously not the moment to alienate Sean Connery. Plus you realise he’s not saying it to be a diva, he just knows he’s getting on a bit and probably isn’t going to look his best hauling himself up into the saddle, so you end up cutting to the kid and suddenly Sean is on the horse throwing him down the canteen and it all works fine. Real time is not what film-making is about – whatever keeps the pace moving is what you do, and if it keeps the star happy, so much the better. Necessity might be the mother of invention, but restriction is the mother of efficiency.

  These are some
of the rough sketches for the ‘giant with ship on his head’ scenes in TIME BANDITS. Obviously, there’s a strong Thief of Baghdad element about them. That film is always there inside my head, waiting to burst out at any moment – it scarred me. And here’s the finished version, in a collage for the poster.

  Of course, not every charismatic screen presence is as straightforward to deal with as Sean Connery. Casting Ralph Richardson in the role of God in Time Bandits did nothing to temper the grand old man’s despotic tendencies. He was always playing games and testing people – before he’d even agreed to take the role, I had to go over to his place in Regent’s Park on a Sunday morning, where he started doing impersonations of the music-hall entertainer Little Titch, which it was incumbent on me to recognise. Another time he suggested the Supreme Being should pull out a pair of dividers like a pair God used in a William Blake painting, but luckily I knew about the medieval manuscript that had inspired it. Bingo!

  At each of these moments you’re scoring points, and if you don’t score enough he’s going to be a nightmare. Ralph told me about a time when Jack Gold was directing him in something and he insisted that Jack – who was terrified of motorbikes – come for a ride with him, put him on the back of his bike and roared off around Regent’s Park at an insane speed.

  Nothing like that happened to me, but we did get into an absurd metaphysical debate about what God would wear. Ralph felt that God should be wearing a light linen suit, ‘because he’s so close to the sun’, but I knew what he really meant was that he’d worn something quite similar in Far from the Madding Crowd, and wouldn’t it be nice to wear it again? I said I felt God would be dressed more like a fusty headmaster, and one day – somewhat miraculously – Ralph turned up at the studio wearing exactly what I’d wanted. I knew he was testing me again, so the whole way through lunch he was waiting for me to talk about it, but I never did, until at the end he cracked and asked, ‘What do you think of the outfit?’ At that point, it was finally safe for me to say, ‘It’ll do.’