he Bible also lays a sure foundation in terms of how best to approach literary or cinematic source material (as opposed to HP Sauce material – for safe dining, always use a condiment). You have this text which many people view as something sacred and immutable, yet which is actually the product of lots of different people’s work and a huge number of different drafts, if only in terms of angry old men with beards excising all references to female disciples (this, incidentally, is roughly how Life of Brian script meetings went, and poor old Mary Magdalene was historically up against even worse odds than the Pythons’ woman for all seasonings, former Mad magazine Miss Teen Queen, Carol Cleveland).
In the twilight realm of artistic attribution, questions of authenticity tend to be a lot more complex than they might initially appear. For instance, people who tell you Don Quixote is dry as dust (and within this broad category I would definitely include the Spanish, who are taught the book at school and therefore grow up hating it) tend not to have read the Tobias Smollett translation. I haven’t read it either, but the important thing is, I know it exists.
The idea of simple replication has never really interested me. This is why I much prefer to refer to my probably inaccurate idea of something than the actuality of the thing itself. The relationships of both Brazil to George Orwell’s 1984 and 12 Monkeys to Chris Marker’s La Jetée (which we persuaded the Writers Guild of America to let us say our film was ‘inspired by’ rather than ‘based upon’) were deliberately developed along these lines, with me taking care not to read or watch the originals until after my films were finished. This way I can be confident I haven’t ripped anybody off, because what I’ve done is actually based on a pre-emptive foretaste, a recollection from the future – the memory I will have of these things once I’ve finally got around to reading or watching them.
If I choose to base what I’m doing at any given moment on the way I think I will remember having felt in ten years’ time, who’s to stop me? And if I keep saying these kinds of things for long enough, maybe one day there will turn out to be some truth in them. The only outcome I would lose sleep over is that I might be accused of being ‘post-tentious’ – pre-tentious is bad enough, but post-tentious would be a sickener.
Over time, I have definitely found that the closer you get to what you think is the essential core of something, the blurrier and more confusing your vision tends to become. For instance, when I set out to make The Brothers Grimm, I was very keen to strip away the extra layers of bogus gentility and ornamentation which I assumed the Grimms’ repertoire had acquired since it was first published. And then I found out that the whole success of the stories was entirely down to the brothers’ opportunistic bowdlerisation. Oh yes, this is good.
I made four of these characters for an installation in Berlin called Past People of Potsdamer Platz in 2006. They were headless and slightly larger than life-size, and when you looked into their neckholes you saw a monitor playing film of events in the history of the square, and a camera took a picture of your face which was then projected onto the entire wall of a modern office building alongside the visages of Potsdamer Platz’s earlier denizens.
First, they sent all their mates out collecting folk tales, then they wrote them down and tidied them up a bit for publication. But the first edition of the huge book that resulted didn’t sell too well – finding only an academic audience – so the Grimms began to make subtle alterations to suit the sensibilities of a middleclass reading public. For example, in ‘Rapunzel’ the way the witch originally realised something was wrong was by discovering her tower-bound captive was pregnant. It wasn’t just her hair she’d let down – the prince had fucked her! This particular rough edge was thoroughly smoothed over in time for the bestseller, and it wasn’t the only one.
The two films I ended up making in the years 2003–5 – my rarely screened Canadian child-in-jeopardy adventure Tideland being the other one – were both in their own different ways designed to make the point that it’s OK for kids (and adults for that matter) to be shocked and scared by fairy tales. Because life itself – as my experiences making The Brothers Grimm with the Weinstein brothers would confirm – actually is scary, and fairy tales are one of the strategies humankind has developed to prepare us for that.
Health Ledger was one of the those people who had so much energy he could’nt help but pass it on to the people around him – look at the speed my hands are moving, it’s like I’ve got wings!
My attempt to raise capital by marketing a selection of ‘great director’ sweatshirts proved tragically unsuccessful – perhaps it might’ve helped if I’d got Matt Damon to wear one.
Making one of these films was a revitalising experience of unfettered creative freedom, the other was basically quite miserable, although working with Matt Damon and Heath Ledger was a delight. The Brothers Grimm began to live up to the latter part of its name from the moment Chuck Roven and I were pitching it to MGM Studios.
Chuck and I put on a real show for the executive in question, and he just sat there watching us with his dead eyes then said, ‘Why do you want to make a film about animals eating children?’ It wasn’t a great start, but somehow we got the go-ahead anyway, only for MGM to pull out once we had all flown to Prague to do the ‘tech scout’, which is when you’ve done all your casting and found your locations and you’re driving the various heads of department – props guys, lighting people, grips – around to show them where you’re going to be filming. With no George Harrison around to save us any more, the vultures inevitably gathered at the roadside, scenting the cinematic carrion now splayed out on the road.
Although I’d sworn I would never work with the Weinsteins, the need for new backers had become sufficiently urgent for me to set those scruples aside. Around this time, I flew out to LA hoping to bump into Martin Scorsese at the Vanity Fair Oscars party, as one does. Marty had just finished making Gangs of New York with the Weinsteins. He said, ‘It’s a horrible experience, but if it’s the only way for you to make the film, you’ve got to do it,’ and he was right. There’s a point you reach with a project where the momentum is such that you don’t really have any option but to jump in with both feet, irrespective of whether what you’re jumping into is a shallow puddle or the San Andreas trench.
Because Matt would normally be the quieter guy, where Heath would be the one who everyone falls in love with when he walks in the room, I thought it would be fun to get them to play each other’s roles.
At last, here is my son Harry who, because he spouted the immortal words ‘The Brothers Grimm!’, was featured in the cinema trailer.
Given that The Brothers Grimm was my first film since the collapse of Don Quixote, I was feeling pretty beaten down at this stage, and I didn’t really feel I could afford to look the Weinsteins’ gift horse in the mouth, even though it was already standing on my foot. First, the Weinsteins wanted Heath Ledger out, but I insisted we weren’t going to do the film without him. Then we reworked the script a bit, although I’m not sure if we improved it. By the time we’d had to sacrifice Samantha Morton – who would have been amazing – in favour of their choice of Lena Headey, and they’d sacked my friend and cinematographer Nicola Pecorini (who was the one who had alerted me to how good Heath was in the first place), I basically felt like I was no longer responsible for what was happening. It was like I was back in the army, and ‘Not my problem, mate’ is a pretty bad attitude for a director to have on a film set.
Tideland couldn’t have been a happier contrast (even if the downside of working free of interference did turn out to be that hardly anyone got to see the film I was so proud of). And not only as a chance to get back in touch with my inner child, who I’d always suspected was a little girl . . . (I said something along those lines at the press conference and a lot of people were shocked, because they didn’t understand how I could be serious about my work and still joke about it. But from my point of view, doing that is the only way to survive the loss of control which is such an integra
l part of the publicity and review process – the post-partum depression phase of film-making, when you find out that you have been judged – otherwise it would drive me mad. Even if you describe a film as ‘the fourth part in a trilogy’ and everyone just ignores the gag and takes you at face value, at least you know you’ve had an impact on the conversation.)
This was the moment in IIDELAND when we lost the sympathy of half the audience. Jeff Bridges’ rock star is about to shoot up and the little girl has cooked up the heroin for him and filled the needle. She knows exactly what’s going to happen . . . We had an ex-junkie who was on methadone to advise us, and we knew we’d got it right when he said, ‘Oh fuck! That looks good.’
The idea of children always being these innocent, vulnerable little creatures is just bullshit. Children are made to bounce when you drop them. They’re designed to survive. That’s the dilemma as a parent – you’re so fearful that anything might happen to your kid, but once you follow that through you’re already saying they can’t look after themselves.
I’m not one of those people who thinks having children around keeps you young. The moment mine were born, I felt old and vulnerable and frightened that something bad would happen to them. I’d never really worried about things before, but suddenly all I wanted to do was be sure I would die before they did. I didn’t care when that was, so I suppose fatherhood had at least one positive side-effect in terms of making my own mortality (which I’d always been aware of, in fact I’ve thought about it every day since I was a kid) more palatable – ‘I better move fast if I want to beat the kids to the punch . . . ‘
When the circus comes to town you’ve got to get the elephants out, you’ve got to make noise
The week before Tideland opened I’d been doing interviews on radio and television in New York, but my daughter Amy pointed out there were no posters anywhere, no ads: ‘It’s coming out on Friday and there’s nothing anywhere. We’ve got to do something.’
So I got the Tideland poster and I mounted it on a piece of dirty old cardboard and scrawled ‘STUDIOLESS FILMMAKER. FAMILY TO SUPPORT. WILL DIRECT FOR FOOD’. Then we headed to the studio where they record The Daily Show. There’s always a big queue outside.
The distribution company had no money for decent ads, but they were driving me around in a big black limo! We arrive and park unseen around the corner. Amy goes to the front end of the queue with a video camera and starts filming as I come up from the back end with my sign, shaking a plastic cup with a few coins in it and crying, ‘God bless you, I’m an independent filmmaker but I’m dependent on your goodwill, sir.’ People turn away, refusing to look at this deadbeat. The security guys try to get me off the sidewalk and I resist – ‘Sir, it’s a public space, I have a right . . .’ Little by little people began to recognise me and by the end we had gathered a big crowd of fans, including the writers for the Jon Stewart show.
As we drove away in the limo, Amy filmed me counting my takings: ‘twenty-five dollars’. Later, we posted our efforts on the web, using Pink Floyd’s song ‘Money’. The joke was that, after my initial fee, that’s all the money I made from Tideland. But the film managed to survive.
When I decided to renounce my American citizenship (in 2006), I felt duty bound – if only as a sop to my imaginary late-sixties bomb-throwing Mick-Jagger-as-a-humble-stringer alternative self – to present it as a political gesture. In fact, the single biggest factor in my decision was the discovery that were I to die as a US citizen, America’s external revenue service profiteering division would assess the value of all my worldly goods for capital gains tax.
The house Maggie and I live in – which we’ve inhabited for thirty years – is probably (through no fault of our own, and entirely thanks to the insanity of the North London property market) now worth about twenty times the amount it was bought for. So if I breathe my last as a fellow citizen of Terry Jones and Michael Palin, my wife won’t have to pay any capital gains tax on it because it’s our primary residence. Whereas had I continued formally to throw in my lot with the land of Mark Twain and South Park, she’d be left with no option but to sell our family home to pay the death duties.
I’d had no qualms about paying taxes in two countries for forty years. I never minded contributing to the upkeep of roads and schools (never mind the American army, which had so generously given me an honourable discharge) in a country I no longer lived in – it gave me a warm fuzzy feeling when I did occasionally pop back to use the facilities. But while we were shooting Tideland and the 2004 presidential election returned George W for another bite at the White House cherry, that did feel like the political icing on a cake of financial self-interest as far as I was concerned. I couldn’t believe the American people would be so foolish and self-destructive, but once they had been, it became much harder to justify throwing my grieving widow out onto the streets on their behalf.
The actual process of becoming un-American was quite funny. First, I had to go down to the embassy and formally say, ‘I want to give up my US citizenship.’ Obviously I was trying to divest myself of something which long lines of people all around the world would give their right arms for, so it had to be done properly. It turned out the phrase ‘give up’ wasn’t the ‘correct’ one. The word I would have to use was ‘renounce’, which actually sounded far more powerful and violent and angry than I had originally intended.
It was a bit like in Brazil – ‘I’ll have a rare steak.’ ‘Say the number, please! You have to say the number!’ I had to fill out lots of forms and have a session with the diplomatic counsel, then go away for a month to consider in depth the insanity of what I was doing, before coming back to affirm that no, I still really, honestly didn’t want to be a US citizen any more. It was actually quite touching the way the people at the embassy kept trying to persuade me to reconsider, as if America’s worst fear was to be parted from its artistes, especially if they were one-sixth Python.
Being asked to direct a production of Hector Berlioz’s The Damnation of Faust by the English National Opera in 2011 was exciting and terrifying at the same time. I lost so much sleep over doing this, but it was a good school to go to as far as opera was concerned, and being in your seventies is no reason not to be acquiring new skills, or to stop being a go-Goethe.
I’ve always really liked German culture, which has tended to get dragged down in the eyes of the world by what happened after the Austrian corporal took charge. The idea was to use the story of Faust as a filter for the whole bloody aftermath of German romanticism, so the production could range from beautiful mountains to a Hungarian march, which took us into the First World War, to an Amen chorus as a backdrop to the rise of the Nazis – basically it was Goethe’s Cabaret with a dance sequence for Kristallnacht which even The Producers might have thought twice about.
The concept of ‘the Faustian bargain’ is one that everyone, not just film and opera directors, does well to keep in mind. In our production this cube which he carried on his back was Faust’s way of regulating and regimenting the world in the goose-steps of the Enlightenment. I should also acknowledge Tristram Kenton as copyright holder of these two photos, as it is important to give credit where credit is due.
Having somehow pulled off Faust, I foolishly thought I knew how to do opera. Then I spent almost two years thinking how to make Benvenuto Cellini. Like Faust it was an opera seldom staged. Even Berlioz had three failed attempts at it.
I’ve long been fascinated by Cellini’s autobiography, the only one by a Renaissance artist. He was a brilliant sculptor and goldsmith, but he was also a murderer, a liar, an arrogant bastard: ‘You’ve been given this gift, this talent and you’re destined to do something extraordinary. But everything conspires against it happening and you lose faith.’ Berlioz was that kind of character; Cellini was like that too. Can’t think why I identified with him so much.
Luckily, Leah Hausman, from whom I learned so much on Faust, was my co-director, but my old ‘Alice in Wonderland hubristic nightmare’ retur
ned: a hundred performers on-stage, singers, stilt walkers, jugglers, sword fights, giant carnival puppets, and lack of rehearsal time. It was identical to the madness Cellini went through as he attempted the impossibility of casting his famous statue of Perseus. He and I had become the same person!
Right up till the last minute, I knew we were not going to pull it off. But somehow the show opened. To five-star reviews, sold-out houses – and only eight performances. Opera makes no sense!
The thing about both The Hamster Factor and Lost in La Mancha that I’m most proud of, looking back, is that as uncomfortably close as those two documentaries are to the clogged and straining heart of the film-making process, you don’t leave them with any sense of that process having been demystified. In fact, if anything, by the end of them the actual creative moment is still more mysterious.
I don’t mean that in a The Agony and the Ecstasy kind of way, where Michelangelo – who was not gay by the way (at least, not the way he’s played by anti-gun-control zealot Charlton Heston) – gets his inspiration from laying back and looking up at the clouds: ‘Oh, it’s an elephant up there, or perhaps a pretty boy, maybe I’ll do that one instead . . . but I’m not gay.’ To me, the real mystery kicks in when I’m so focused on trying to drag as much of life or memory or whatever into one particular moment – whether the boundaries of that moment are defined by the camera’s viewfinder or the edges of the piece of paper I’m drawing on – that nothing else matters. The rest of the world disappears and anything, or anyone, that tries to get in the way has to be destroyed.
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