Gilliamesque

by Terry Gilliam

  We just invented that moment – it wasn’t in the book – but we were both so embedded in the characters that we felt in the right frame of mind to extemporise. The lizard tail and the underwater room were hatched in a similarly playful spirit – we just did them because we could. It was great fun working with someone like Johnny, who at his best is as fast as the Pythons. The news seemed to get out that the whole film was going well, because all these people like Cameron Diaz and Harry Dean Stanton and Lyle Lovett were agreeing to appear in cameo roles just because they wanted to be part of it.

  Johnny had put so much into his performance that showing him the finished film for the first time was quite traumatic. There were just a few of us watching it at the De Lane Lea screening room in Soho, but when the lights came up, Depp was nowhere to be seen. He’d snuck out during the credits and was in the bathroom throwing up. I think watching yourself on the screen can be quite horrifying for an actor, because if you’re as conscientious as he was at that stage then all you’re seeing is your failures and the things you don’t think you quite got right.

  Living carpets and reptilian transformations – who wouldn’t want to be part of this?

  Getting Hunter to see the film was like trying to lure a coyote into a phone booth. We were all terrified of him seeing the film and not liking it. It turned out he was even more terrified, and while we kept setting up screenings for him, he kept finding ways to duck them. In the end, we managed to corral him into a friend’s home screening room up in Aspen, and luckily – albeit I suppose inevitably, given his penchant for never going anywhere without a camera crew of some kind in tow – someone was there to film the moment when the lights came up and he was just lying on the floor, howling with laughter.

  We were pretty happy with that. Obviously then he had to come and fuck up the New York premiere by showing off and throwing one of those gigantic cartons of popcorn all over the place. Forget everyone else who has worked on the film, it’s Hunter’s night. My new right-hand man and cinematographer Nicola Pecorini and I were so pissed off that we left and went down to a local bar. Hunter was a weird one – I admired him enormously, but he was better appreciated at a distance.

  That film got one of the best reviews of my career – from a fifteen-year-old kid who said, ‘It’s not hypocritical.’ You can’t hope for better than that. In commercial terms, we thought we’d been very clever counter-programming next to Godzilla. Unfortunately, that giant irradiated dinosaur trampled all over us. On its initial release Fear and Loathing only made about $10 million in America and was thereby deemed to be ‘a disaster’, although as far as I was concerned this was lazy use of language. That word needed redefining in cinematic terms, and I was the man to do it.

  Laila Nabulsi’s mum got me an Egyptian galabeya – which really does protect you from the desert heat. It’s not just about looking cool, kids, it’s also about staying cool.

  Obviously the communists aren’t the main threat any more-now it’s the Islamists. But if the not-so-glorious day ever comes, I can always show them this picture from my Florence of Arabia phase in the Nevada desert…

  But before the time would finally come for me to be impaled on my own Quixotic windmill, a trio of non-celluloid calamities lay in wait – afflicting first me, and then the world. I will address these events in ascending order of geopolitical significance. The most footling was that I found myself subject to personal excoriation by that perennial middle-ranker among critical non-authorities, the Evening Standard’s Alexander Walker, for the crime of securing partial (and it was no more than 10 per cent of the overall budget) UK lottery funding for our European co-production of Don Quixote.

  Johnny Depp in THE MAN WHO KILLED DON QVIXOTE – what could possibly be more British than this?

  By the time Walker accused me of being the not-so-thin end of a sinister wedge of ‘Americans coming to Europe to grab funding’, I had been a law-abiding UK taxpayer for thirty-three years – more than half of my life. I’d come over here, taken your women, been a part of the most notoriously English of comedy groups – what more did I have to do to prove my Anglophile legitimacy? It was like the whole thing with HandMade Films, which we’d initially wanted to call ‘British HandMade Films’, but you had to apply somewhere special – possibly to the Queen’s Keeper of Patriotic Adjectives – to use that designation, and for some reason they turned us down. (George Harrison and Monty Python together? Who else did we need on board to make us British enough – Sir Laurence Olivier? Johnny Rotten?)

  Even setting aside the fact that a high proportion of the ‘British’ films for which Alex tub-thumped so patriotically were actually financed by American studios (which would therefore take the lion’s share of the revenue in the happy eventuality of there being any profits), surely any meaningful notion of what a British film might actually mean would be substantially based on the contributions of such ‘foreigners’ as Joseph Losey, Dick Lester and Stanley Kubrick anyway? And, perhaps, Hollywood should be thanking Hitler for many of its greatest filmmakers, Billy Wilder, Otto Preminger, Fred Zinnemann and Fritz Lang, who defined America from the 1940s to the ’60s.

  As so often when an outrageous journalistic slur is perpetrated, there was a personal grudge behind this one. When Time Bandits had come out, Alex had given us a very equivocal review, which was later generously overlooked by the person who asked him to do the blurb on the back of the video (which of course he was very happy to do, as there was a pay cheque involved). But I found out and asked if it might be possible to get someone who actually liked the film to help us promote it. This got back to Alex, who was such an old bitch that from then on he did everything he possibly could to make life difficult for us. Luckily natural justice intervened, in that Alex’s greatest excitement in life was the Filipino dictator-ess Imelda Marcos lending him an island which he had a film festival on . . . until the brave people of the Philippines rose up and overthrew her. And lo! Alexander Walker’s island was snatched from his grasp.

  A far sadder and graver illustration of humankind’s perfidious capacities was supplied by the vicious knife attack on my good friend George Harrison at his home near Henley on the night of 30 December 1999. As if the twentieth century hadn’t managed to pack in enough foul deeds, it saved one more for its penultimate night, when the ex-Beatle, philanthropist and film financer was stabbed more than thirty times by a mentally ill ex-heroin addict with a kitchen knife.

  George was someone who never really did anything but good, and was incredibly generous about supporting people whose work he approved of. He loved hanging out with his mates and playing music, and spent the rest of his time lovingly restoring the thirty-six acres of gardens at Friar Park – the magnificent Gothic revival mansion which he’d put up as collateral to enable us to make Life of Brian. And he didn’t just pay other people to do it for him and turn up every now and again to order them around like most rock stars would – he physically did it himself, basically turning himself into a manual labourer.

  Before he bought the place, it’d been a convent school – Serge Gainsbourg’s wife Jane Birkin had gone there. But by the time George arrived, all the artificial lakes had been filled up with rubbish and the alabaster fireplaces had been whitewashed. Restoring Friar Park became his life’s work. He’d be out there working every fucking day, and I didn’t blame him because it was an amazing place. All the lakes connected up and you could get in a boat and row down into these manmade caverns. It also had Europe’s largest alpine garden with a great Matterhorn in the middle of it with more caverns inside. Basically, it was an Edwardian Disneyland.

  My end-of-shoot drawing for the crew.

  In a way it was appropriate that the building helped finance The Life of Brian, because Frank Crisp, the Victorian lawyer and microscopist who’d been responsible for its lavish fittings, had himself been ardently anti-clerical. He’d designed the stonework to feature monks eating babies and even the brass light-switches were a monk’s head, so you tweaked the
nose when you turned them on or off. Old Frank must have been turning in his grave when the place became a convent school (and I don’t know if the nuns made special covers for the light switches) but I suppose the fact that one of its old girls was Jane Birkin of ‘Je t’aime’ infamy must have given him some posthumous comfort.

  Obviously George himself was a very spiritual person, but he never lost his wonderfully bitchy and sardonic Scouse sense of humour. Within twenty-four hours of receiving those horrible injuries, he’d given a quote to the hospital spokesman to the effect that the attacker ‘certainly wasn’t auditioning for the Travelling Wilburys’. And when I remember him pottering around Friar Park, it’s actually Voltaire’s Candide – a true Enlightenment talisman – that he reminds me of. George Harrison getting nearly killed by a maniac who was looking for Paul McCartney but turned up at the wrong house certainly confirmed the anti-Leibnizian suspicion that all is not for the best in the best of all possible worlds. And no one ever took Voltaire’s advice to ‘cultiver notre jardin’ more literally than George did.

  The legacy of the Enlightenment was getting a pretty rough time of it at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Tourists . . . terrorists . . . so closely related thanks to my bad enunciation. And by my holiday planning as well.

  Ten years before, I’d missed a great chance to holiday in Egypt because I was shooting The Fisher King . . . the first Gulf War was rolling into action but I was stuck making a movie. ‘What is he talking about?’, you are probably wondering. ‘The war wasn’t in Egypt, and he’s not a war correspondent.’

  Right on both counts. But I was desperate to go. The place was deserted. Thanks to the high standards of American education, many Americans seemed to think that Iraq was next door to Egypt and therefore possibly directly in the sights of their not-so-smart bombs. And just a few hours away the pyramids were waiting for me, without a tourist in sight. Heaven! But I was working. Damn!

  Years passed, until one day a busload of Dutch tourists taking in the ancient sites of Egypt was brutally ambushed and blown up by a gang of Muslim fundamentalists. With no film commitments, this was my chance. I grabbed my seventeen-year-old daughter Amy, and we rushed off to Cairo and points south. Security was high, the fundamentalists were busy celebrating, and the Nile was empty of tourists. Bliss. Utter bliss. The people were lovely, contrite, and delighted to see they hadn’t been abandoned. The bartering rates were generous . . . 200 camels for my daughter . . . a once-in-a-lifetime bargain! Impossible to say ‘No’. But, fortunately, blood turned out to be thicker than my burning desire for livestock.

  Sadly, we didn’t have too long to wait until my next happy holiday. I had planned to be in Marrakech, Morocco, at the beginning of October 2001. But the horror of 11 September changed all of that. Paranoia was rampant. All Arabs and Arab countries were suspect. All Muslims were the enemy.

  I had been to Morocco many times. We had shot part of Time Bandits there. But I found, despite all of my experiences in North Africa, I was having doubts. I was nervous. Everyone I knew was cancelling their travel plans. Fear of flying was universal. But it was my second daughter Holly’s birthday. And did I want her growing up with the kind of mindless fear that was raging all around us? No. The only way to deal with this was to leap into the darkness. Confront it head on. A slight change of destination took us to Fez, one of the most wondrous cities in the world. Tickets in hand, we hopped onto a Royal Air Morocco flight and into the semi-unknown.

  Just as Egypt had been during the first Gulf War, Morocco was empty of foreigners. The people of Fez welcomed us with open arms and empty shops. A city of apologies. Their sad, heartfelt, mantra was ‘Islam is Peace’. We completely agreed. We dined in strangers’ homes. We made new friends while prejudice and paranoia engulfed the West. In America, Homeland Security was conceived and beginning to metastatise. The future of fear was growing in the belly of George Dubya and Dick Cheney’s double-backed beast. The question was – and is – how many more of these wonderful holidays will my children have to take before the madness abates?

  The Windmills of My Mind – the latter stages of Orson Welles’ career were blighted by his failure to complete an ambitious cinematic adaptation of Don Quixote, but there was no way I was ever going to let that happen to me…

  The events of 9/11 would present several of the world’s most irrational despots – Osama Bin Laden, George Bush – with an insoluble ‘How do you follow that?’ dilemma. Luckily for me, I had already got my retaliation in first. With the calamitous late-2000 abandonment of The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, I had achieved the ultimate refinement of my cinematic methodology. Never mind all those years of ‘The process of the film becomes the subject of the film’ – that shit was old news. Why not take it one step further, to the point where the film itself did not even get made?

  With Don Quixote, my identification with the hero’s failure to attain his romantic dream was so total that the film itself became the balloon in the papier-mâché head. It turned out that the actual product was Lost in La Mancha – the documentary about the film not getting made. When I was much younger and fascinated by architecture, I had once designed an extension to our house in Panorama City which never got built. In this case, however, we built the extension before the house. (I’ve still not lost hope of completing the main building, but that’s how things tend to go with unattainable romantic ideals, isn’t it? If we do ever get to make it, people will probably only be disappointed that it’s not lived up to their ideal by being all about Don having fights with windmills anyway.)

  In the ‘comedy film’ (as it was once described to me by a woman at a film festival, who was appalled to subsequently discover that these mortifying events had actually taken place and were not an elaborate cinematic hoax) Lost in La Mancha, I played the part of Terry Gilliam – a role I’d been preparing for more or less effectively throughout my (then) sixty-or-so years on this earth. It was – quite literally – the performance of a lifetime, as I broke the hearts of audiences everywhere who suffered with me for all the artists in this pathetic, sad world.

  Tragedy makes the best comedy, always. Not that it was funny at the time LOST IN LA MANCHA captured some of the hazards we encountered – filming in an air force fly-zone, the lead actor struck down with ill-health, biblical floods on set … What they didn’t capture on camera were the lovzzards. They were flying overhead, just waiting for us to die. As Jean Rochefort and I seem to have just noticed here.

  On the set of DON QVIXOTE in a momentary interlude of actual filming.

  ‘What’s that sound?’ ‘Oh, it’s an unscheduled squadron of jet fighters . . .’

  The funny thing was that when the going really got tough, the documentarians – Louis Pepe and Keith Fulton, our Hamster Factor A-team – had actually wanted to piss off home. ‘Just keep fucking shooting, you jerks!’ I had to shout at them from the depths of my encroaching despair. ‘You might not have a film about the making of a movie, but at least you’ll have a film about the unmaking of one, and that might actually be much more interesting.’

  At the moment in the documentary where the tempest hits and everything’s washing away in the floods, there’s one shot where you can see the camera is looking out through the windscreen of a car. That’s because Louis and Keith were in there hiding, because they only had one camera and they didn’t want to get it wet. All the really interesting shots of the water spilling across the set came from the stuntman’s own hand-held camera – trained as he was to run towards the danger, he was out there filming like mad.

  Not an impromptu Hokey-Cokey, but teaching Johnny to walk with stones in his shoes…

  The film might not exist – at least, not at the time of writing but it really comes alive in the stills.

  I know this is a bit of a hobby horse of mine, but I really do think the Western world has given up something very important by losing touch with the Bible. Whether or not you actually believe in God doesn’t matter – it’s like the Greek m
yths . . . if you’ve not read them, you won’t understand what the world is actually like. What counts is ingesting this huge system of iconography and mythology at an impressionable age, which then gives you a template: ‘Oh, I see, the world’s falling into that pattern now.’

  On the set of Quixote, for example, I could become Job – a plague of boils might even have served as a valuable distraction when the news came through that my leading man Jean Rochefort’s extreme physical agony was going to make it impossible for him to sit on his horse – and an understanding of what it means to be tested is very useful when you find yourself in trying circumstances. For all its much-vaunted scientific rationality, I don’t know if the modern world appreciates that fact as well as it should. I’m as much to blame for this as anyone. Although whenever I’ve heard one of my children complaining that something ‘isn’t fair’, I’ve always tried to ask them, ‘What has “fair” got to do with it? What has happened to make you think you live in a just world? I blame the parents . . . it must be our fault for bringing you up too fairly and hiding you from reality.’

  DON QVIXOTE – graveyard of dreams… and belief (in film-making, if not the higher power). I must’ve been asked about the extent of my religious faith when I first went to Occidental College, because it was a Presbyterian scholarship, but I don’t think we ever had the talk about whether Jesus is of the same material as God, which may have been for the best, as these issues have killed a lot of people over the years. I was certainly never questioned about the Trinity. The idea of the oneness that can be three is a mystery I’ve never managed to quite get my head around (it always makes me think of the Three Musketeers, and then I get confused about D’Artagnan – the extra one, the lad from the country who joined up) . . . I suppose that’s why it’s a mystery.