Gilliamesque

by Terry Gilliam

  We did have one big fight over whether Bruce Willis should beat up or kill a second guy, but other than that, I like to hope the experience of working with me wasn’t too disillusioning for them. (We may have set the bar a bit high for Richard LaGravanese, though – as The Fisher King was his first film, he left us thinking the writer being welcomed onto the set every day and treated with respect was normal.) My memory was fading even then, and I’ve never had the time to sit down and write a diary every night (not being cunning enough to realise – as Michael Palin did – that this was where the real money was all along), so given that something interesting usually seemed to happen in the course of the making of my films, we thought we might as well get it on record. Apart from anything else, this would give us evidence to refer back to in the event of any subsequent legal disputes. Hence The Hamster Factor, the feature-length documentary which was made on 12 Monkeys’ Philadelphia set.

  Fighting off strong local competition in the race to become Boswells to my Johnson were two graduate film students from Temple University named Louis Pepe and Keith Fulton. We gave them a digital camera, and I agreed to wear a mic every day and wander around swearing at everyone while forgetting it was on, and they came back to us with what I still think is an excellent and unusually honest documentary about the making of a film.

  The great thing about The Hamster Factor from my point of view is that it captures a key moment in the film-making process, which as far as I know had never previously had its moment in the spotlight. And that’s the National Research Group screenings. To me, from a creative point of view, that sequence is as scary as anything that happens in Pepe and Fulton’s next documentary, Lost in La Mancha. After the NRG screening of 12 Monkeys, you see my editor Mick Audsley and I enthusing about how well it’s gone while they’re handing out the response cards, and then I’m in the foyer being very polite to the producer Chuck Roven’s wife Dawn Steel (who’d been the Columbia executive responsible for shuffling Munchausen onto the back-burner after David Puttnam became a non-person, but luckily I am not one to hold grudges).

  I always do a cartoon for the cast and crew after a shoot. The sigh of relief encoded in the 12 Monkeys one is almost audible.

  Next day – Boom! Reality bites – we get the results from the screening back and they’re killing us. David and Jan who wrote the script are there as we look through them, and it’s like a wake. This is the point at which there’s enormous pressure on you to rip out your film’s guts on the Aztec altar of commercial compromise – the studio executives are like the high priests, handing you the ceremonial dagger. The great thing about 12 Monkeys was that we ignored everything they told us, and the film miraculously managed to still be successful. This was either a rousing vindication of the uncompromising spirit of true artists or clear evidence that pig-headed stupidity can actually win through, or most likely a bit of both.

  Two posters I did for cinematic events not organised by the National Research Group. A collage tribute to Hokvsai’s The Great Ware off Kanagawa for my poster for the 1991 London Film Festival.

  This time it’s Piero Della Francesca’s portrait of the Duchess of Urbino that is getting the treatment – the occasion being the film festival, which I am now the president of, near the house in Umbria that I bought in 1990 as a souvenir of BARON MUNCHAVSEN.

  Ever since the Holy Grail sound-effects debacle, I’ve been a great believer in screening my films for people from the earliest possible moment, not only to check people are laughing in the right places, but also because it’s the best way of seeing where you need little cuts, or extra lines to stop things sagging. The important thing is to solicit the audience’s opinions in an appropriate way afterwards. If they’re your friends, they’ll probably be very polite and you’ll have to take them to the pub and get them pissed before they’ll tell you what they really feel. The contrasting problem with the random groups of strangers the National Research Group bus-in from the shopping malls of America to represent what the public wants is that they’re not experiencing the film as they normally would, but rather as someone who has been told their opinion is important (i.e. a critic). That’s why the response sheets for Airplane! came back so negative – because no one wanted to admit to laughing at something so coarse.

  This is the moment in the process where you need people in the fox-hole who are ready to fight the last battle with you (although paradoxically I also find the presence of the odd panicking faint-heart can be useful too – it strengthens my resolve by giving me something to react against). All of this noise is hurtling at you, everybody’s got an opinion, and in a way editing all those opinions is as much of a challenge as editing the film was in the first place. When someone’s raising a particular issue, are they really talking about what they think they’re talking about, or is it actually an egg we laid fifteen minutes ago which is now coming home to roost in fully realised chicken form?

  The one thing I changed as a consequence of that horrendous 12 Monkeys screening was the scene where Bruce Willis has kidnapped Madeleine Stowe and they’re in the woods together, and we let the music push the emotion too quickly. Effectively the film was saying, ‘There’s romance in the air,’ but the audience wasn’t buying it, which was totally fair enough. Bruce was quite keen for us to emphasise the love-story angle, so that might have shaped the premature musical drift.

  When you’re trying to trick the studios into letting you make European art films on Hollywood money, having stars of his and Brad Pitt’s magnitude onside is a vital part of the equation. But once you’re actually cutting the film, you’re not thinking about Bruce or Brad so much, you’re really just asking yourself, ‘Is this working?’

  The actors are a long way away when you’re in the editing room, which can make things interesting when they see the finished cut. Robin Williams was really pissed off when we showed him The Fisher King, because there’s one very emotional scene outside Amanda Plummer’s flat where he’s taking her home for the first time and talking about having a hard-on the size of Florida. Robin worked his arse off on that scene and was really unhappy with me that he wasn’t in shot as he poured out his heart. The camera just stays on Amanda’s face as this tear begins to well up in her eye and then drops. ‘Robin, I don’t need to see what you’re doing,’ I reassured him, ‘because we’re seeing the result of what you’re doing, and that’s so much more powerful.’

  I’m not sure if he entirely bought that, but it’s often those kinds of bruising encounters which give a film its finest moments. There’s a funny argument between me and the producer Chuck Roven in The Hamster Factor about a scene which I really didn’t want to do. It comes right at the end of the film, where he wanted me to show that the boy had been changed by the experience of what he saw in the airport, but I was going to finish on the plane when the lady scientist from the future says ‘Hi’ to David Morse, who has just released the virus that will wipe out most of humanity.

  By that time, I was in ‘Fuck you, I’m the director’ mode, so I was doing everything I could to make it impossible. We were already on the edge of being over budget, so instead of problem-solving like I normally would, I set out to make the whole thing as difficult and expensive as possible, hoping that Chuck would just throw in the towel. I told him, ‘Alright, if you insist on doing this, we’re going to have to have a crane on top of another crane.’ It was just out of spite that I did that, but in the end this ludicrously extravagant shot which I only set up to piss the producer off worked beautifully and gives the film a much more emotional and well-rounded ending. It’s just connecting the circle a little bit more, so you see the boy watching the plane flying overhead which is actually (spoiler alert) the salvation of the future, although of course he doesn’t know that.

  This wasn’t a shot I planned, but the producer kept pushing me – which I like – and then something good which wouldn’t have happened otherwise came out of the friction between us. To me that’s a much more interesting way of understanding
how films are made than the hoary old myth (admittedly more prevalent among directors than anyone else) of the director as some kind of isolated heroic genius imposing his vision on the world. They’re always throwing the ‘auteur’ thing at me (which so many people so desperately want to believe in, because who doesn’t want to be God?), but my joke is that I’m not an auteur, I’m a ‘filteur’ – the thing on the end of the cigarette that lets certain toxins through, but not others.

  What I like about this picture is that Bruce Willis and Brad Pitt have been made up to look rough whereas I’ve got an actual black eye, having had my head kicked in front and back by a horse while out riding at the weekend. I like to do something as different to directing a movie as possible in any leisure time that may occasionally arise on a film shoot, just to clear my mind. By a strange coincidence, my assistant on 12 Monkeys was a former amateur jockey who’d had to spend almost a year in hospital being metallised after the horse she was riding missed a turn and ran straight into a building.

  It’s interesting looking at stills of Bruce: his essential Bruce-ness often doesn’t come through, because he’s saving it for the movie camera. Brad on the other hand makes no such distinction. He was fantastic on that film, even though it came just at the point in his career where he was becoming a huge star, so he would have been entitled to be distracted by all the attention he was getting. one of the things I’m always trying to do with my films is take really handsome guys and make them less good-looking on the big screen so I feel better. The women on the other hand – and Madeleine Stowe in 12 Monkeys was the perfect example – tend to be the ones on the set who get me through all the traumas of the production and generally make life bearable.

  The whole thing starts with me – even though at the beginning the majority of the ideas might be mine, when I gather together the rest of the team their ideas are invariably surprising, which starts a creative leapfrogging game amongst us; it’s my job to sort through and hopefully pick out the good ideas. My decisions won’t always be correct, but at least the fact that it’s me making them should give the result of me doing a series of things I didn’t originally intend a certain discernible personality. Although, that said, I do think our romantic impulse to individualise the term ‘artist’ causes a lot of the problems – Rubens had a bunch of assistants, Hockney probably has someone to do the grass, and you don’t think Damien Hirst pulls the wings off those butterflies all on his own, do you? What the artist does is bring the whole thing together and then take responsibility for the success or failure of the whole endeavour by signing his or her name to it.

  All of which threatens to bring us back to the absurdity of the ‘director’s cut’ again . . . If you even look at that phrase taken out of context you can see how ridiculous it is – after all, who else’s would it be? Before I go into another dyspeptic rant, this is probably an appropriate moment to acknowledge how different the grizzled, slightly world-weary version of me who appears in The Hamster Factor seems to the ultra-confident young (well, early forties) buck, fearlessly trading bon mots with Tom Stoppard in the more generic ‘making of’ short that accompanied Brazil, just a decade or so before. The reason for that is simple. I was a completely different person. When I look back at the Brazil me, he was still going strong – unstoppably even, at least in his own mind – whereas that’s not so much the case from the nineties onwards. Where did that other guy go? You could say it was Munchausen’s syndrome that did it for him . . . except that it wasn’t the syndrome, it was real.

  y initial meeting with Hunter S. Thompson was in the same place I’d first rubbed shoulders with Marlon Brando – the Chateau Marmont hotel in Los Angeles. This time it was me and Johnny Depp and Benicio Del Toro who were the welcoming party. Various people – including my (and Hunter’s) good friend Ralph Steadman – had been on at me for ages to make a film of his book Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, but previously I’d always said, ‘No’. What made the difference this time was Johnny and Benicio already being cast – I’d met Johnny briefly at Cannes the year before, thought he was incredible and really wanted to work with him.

  Hunter was busy playing Hunter Thompson, which was basically what he’d been doing for the past thirty years. The thing about him was, even when the whole act was starting to get wearisome, he still retained the capacity to flip the whole situation on its head and come out with something quite brilliant. I remember Ralph had just done his ‘Gonzo’ art book, and Hunter’s response was, ‘Hitler took the high road, Ralph, and you took the low road . . . ’, which I thought was very funny. And while I can’t say we forged an instant bond, at least the ice was broken more effectively than it had been with the film’s previous director, Alex Cox.

  Alex had gone up to Hunter’s place in Colorado, got himself physically thrown out and effectively lost the job, which was why Tony Grisoni and I now had to write a new script. I thought this was a total no-brainer – ‘Just do the fucking book.’ For me, Fear and Loathing said everything I felt about the end of the American dream, and there was a nice twist from a personal point of view in that it seemed to pick up the story of my former homeland from pretty much the emotional point at which I’d left it behind. The script was done in eight days (OK, with rewrites, ten days), and although we’d reckoned without the purists who would be mortally offended because we’d left out a comma or an exclamation mark, Hunter himself didn’t seem to have a problem with our efforts.

  Visiting him at his home in Aspen was a trifle nerve-wracking at first. Sitting in his canvas chair in his kitchen, Hunter was like a hurricane waiting just off-shore. Luckily there was no loss of life and limb during my visit. In fact, he was great, and watching him surrounded by acolytes and waiting for the world to come to him – he always seemed to be being filmed for some documentary or other – you could see that all this noise which came from his fearsome reputation was in fact a rather poignant strategy for distracting himself – and everybody else – from how long it was since he had actually done anything great. (I guess him running for sheriff had been the end of it, but I suppose he wasn’t the kind of guy who could just sit back quietly and let the world move on.)

  That said, the day he came down on the set to film his cameo on The Matrix flashback, I wanted to kill him. We had Harry Dean Stanton up in the judge’s tower at great expense and Hunter was throwing bread rolls at me and basically doing everything he could to draw attention to himself – just trying to make everyone say ‘Stop it, Hunter’, to prove what a maverick he was. Then, when the time actually did come for the Hunter show to start, he refused to sit where we’d put him because, ‘As a journalist, I’d always have to be on the edge of things.’

  So we’re all tip-toeing around him trying to get him in position – then Laila Nabulsi, his Palestinian ex-girlfriend who was one of the producers of the film, suggested we pick out the best-looking extra and seat her at the table he’s meant to be at. Of course, he’s over there like a shot, but then on the first take when Johnny walked past he’s too busy talking to her to notice him. Only on the second take was some small reaction registered, and then by the third he’d gone again. At that point, we just rolled our eyes and said, ‘OK, for fuck’s sake get him out of here.’ This is why I never normally work with material by living authors.

  Johnny would be late on set every morning, because he had to stay up all night talking to Hunter on the phone. He’d actually lived in his basement in Aspen for a while – just absorbing Hunter, stealing any kind of talisman he could touch or feel. He wore his shirts in the film, at the start of the shoot he even took his car – the Red Shark – and drove down to Vegas in it. Johnny really loved Hunter, and of course the feeling was mutual. There’s nothing better than being portrayed by someone who looks better than you do. In the end, Johnny’s performance was absolutely spot on. Some people complained that he was too much of a ‘caricature’, but they’d obviously never met Hunter.

  The only real problem I had on the set – Hunter excepted – was
that obviously Benicio Del Toro was every bit as much of a method actor as Johnny, and sometimes that would entail a certain amount of getting lost and fumbling around, and demanding a kind of attention which I didn’t necessarily have the time to give. So in the course of the shooting I probably found myself drifting ever more onto Johnny’s side, because that was easier, but looking back at the film now, I can see that Benicio was extraordinary. Ralph Steadman said he wasn’t sure if he could really be Gonzo because he didn’t quite have the humour and the lightness of touch, but what Benicio did have was the intensity – a kind of dangerous, animal quality, which worked brilliantly as a foil to Johnny.

  The shark stops for gas, which it did often – that car’s petrol consumption was outrageous.

  After she saw the film, Ruby Wax said she hated me because I’m the man who made Johnny Depp look ‘unfuckable’. I told her I was just trying to level the playing field for the rest of us.

  At last Benicio gets the director’s attention.

  There’s a scene in the North Star Café where Ellen Barkin (an amazing actress, who had been kind enough to forgive me for misguidedly dropping her from Brazil at the very last minute in favour of Kim Greist) was playing the waitress. Benicio wanted so much to put the pie in her face, but I just said ‘No, you can’t’, because if he had done, all of that strength of feeling would have been lost in the gesture. One of the things Johnny told me about Hunter was that he eats everything in his path – he will leave nothing unconsumed. So at the end of that scene when Benicio’s gone and Johnny looks at Ellen, and you can see he’s feeling embarrassed and guilty, he gets up with the plate of food in his hand as though he’s going to leave, but then turns round and puts it back on the table, almost as an offering.