Having scored big with the immaculately conceived Fawlty Towers, John Cleese was the Python with the highest box-office value so might have been expected to take the lead role. Cleese says, ‘I was hoping to play Brian. I thought it would be much more interesting to try and sustain a role the whole way through a movie which, at the age of nearly 40, I’d never done. But, in the end, the others — and they were absolutely right — decided that it was much better to have Graham doing Brian and me doing the funny stuff. It was the correct decision on their part. I remember being disappointed for three or four hours, but it didn’t last, and I must say Graham did it tremendously well.’
The ‘funny stuff’ to which Cleese refers included roles such as a Roman centurion, a priest officiating at a public stoning as if he were a schoolmaster on an ill-disciplined rugby field, sending one of the crowd to the back for chucking a rock before the whistle (‘There’s always one, isn’t there?’) and, best of all, Reg, leader of the extremist People’s Front of Judea, a stinging dig at petty-minded, political, militant-style armchair revolutionaries who are all talk and no action.
The other Python members also play multiple characters; indeed, Monty Python’s Life of Brian boasts the best ensemble acting the team ever gave. Terry Jones is Brian’s putrefying hag of a mother Mandy (a Cleese/Chapman creation) and a hermit forced to break his 20-year vow of silence after Brian’s followers scoff all his juniper berries. Eric Idle pops up memorably as the endearing Mr Cheeky, described as ‘nice to the point of being brainless’, and a would-be transsexual revolutionary called Stan (though he prefers Loretta) who believes it’s every man’s right to have babies.
Terry Gilliam’s blood-and-thunder prophet and Neanderthal jailer are pure grotesques, which had been his stock in trade on the television show. He says of his acting, ‘I like not being recognised. I like hiding behind lots of make-up. I feel very ill at ease being me in a film or something that looks like me.’
Graham Chapman is the title character, Brian, a half-Jewish, half-Roman bastard, the result of his mother’s dalliance with a passing centurion. A keen drinker since university — an addiction that at its height saw him consume three pints of gin a day — Chapman was famed for his eccentric behaviour. Once, when presented with a showbusiness award at some swish function by Lord Mountbatten, Chapman crawled to the stage on all fours, clasped the prize between his teeth, squawked, then returned to his table. This was not normal behaviour, even for a comedian. On another occasion, he arrived for a university lecture dressed as a giant carrot, stood at the podium in utter silence for ten minutes, then left. Warned that if he continued drinking he’d be dead within a year, Chapman gave up the booze shortly before filming Life of Brian and turns in a truly memorable performance that’s all the more tragic since his fate was to be the most underachieving and underrated of all the Python team.
Finally, there’s Michael Palin, who steals the film from his colleagues with a veritable galaxy of memorable characters, notably an ex-leper finding it hard begging once Christ has cured him, but who still hops out of habit, and the effete Pontius Pilate who mispronounces his ‘R’s and defends his friend, Biggus Dickus, by proclaiming, ‘This man wanks as high as any man in Wome.’ How the actor kept a straight face handling such gems is a minor miracle. Well, actually he didn’t... Palin does admit to corpsing on film. ‘It’s when I’m talking to Chris Langham’s Roman sentry, you can see my mouth turn up as I’m biting the inside of my cheek trying to stop me laughing. One has to be professional about these things and realise that Pilate had to take himself absolutely seriously... there’s no glimmer of humour, except at his own jokes which were not really very funny.’
The first satisfactory draft of Brian arrived around July 1977 and proved so bulky that a great deal of material had to be jettisoned or else the film, joked the Pythons, would have lasted three-and-a-half days. In January 1978, the Pythons flew out for a two-week break in Barbados for some fine-tuning. Terry Jones recalls, ‘It had got by that stage very difficult to get everyone to concentrate. In the old days, people would come and spend the whole day and work, but it was getting increasingly difficult, people were always on the phone to accountants and other business partners. So the idea of shutting ourselves away for a fortnight... well, I thought it was a funny idea... but it actually worked out very well. We stayed in a very nice house all together so we could really concentrate, get rid of the rest of the world and just concentrate on writing the film.’
The odd interruption was provided by a steady stream of celebrity visitors like Mick Jagger and Keith Moon, a close friend of Chapman’s. The Who drummer and notorious hellraiser was to have appeared in Brian as a mad prophet, but sadly died a week before cameras rolled.
As luck would have it, Barry Spikings, Managing Director of EMI, who’d done rather well out of distributing Holy Grail, was holidaying on the island and got wind of the project. Back in London, he lost no time in telephoning John Goldstone. ‘I hear there’s a new Python film,’ he prompted eagerly. ‘We’d really like to see it and we’d be really interested in financing it.’
Goldstone told Spikings they were after £2 million, by far the highest budget any of the Pythons had worked with and considerably more than the paltry sum spent on Holy Grail, which was gloriously marketed as making ‘Ben Hur look like an epic’. Goldstone remembers, ‘Spikings called me back 24 hours later. He’d fallen out of bed reading the script he’d laughed so much and he wanted to make a deal.’ During the three-hour meeting, Goldstone insisted they were to have sole artistic control over the film and final cut approval, something EMI had never conceded before. Spikings agreed. The two men shook hands and celebrated the deal over a glass of champagne.
With backing secured, pre-production began in earnest and that meant finding a suitable location. Israel was out for a start, as Chapman was quick to inform reporters. ‘If we’d gone there with loads of crosses and nailed people to them, I think there would have been some objections.’ So the two Terrys, Gilliam and Jones, went on a recce of Tunisia and Morocco. Their biggest obstacle turned out to be a carpet Gilliam bought in Tunisia which he was busily tying up in the airport. Jones says, ‘We let somebody else go in our place in the queue as Terry tied up this carpet, and when it came to our turn they said, “Sorry, the flight’s closed.” I said, “What do you mean? We’ve been standing here, you can’t just close the flight.” So we couldn’t get on the plane to Morocco. I mean, I went berserk, eventually managing to demand to see the head of Royal Air Maroc and then started calling him names. I’d absolutely lost my rag at this stage and it ended up with the head of Royal Air Maroc taking his jacket off and we were about to have fisticuffs in the middle of the airport. Terribly funny now, but I was really livid.’
Driving around Morocco, it became clear that Tunisia was going to be the safer bet, not least because the President’s nephew had set up a film company next door to a series of grandiose sets left over from the television mini-series Jesus of Nazareth, which the Pythons brilliantly exploited, lending their film a look and scope that was truly epic but at little extra cost. Ironically, some of the locations scouted in Morocco Gilliam subsequently used for Time Bandits. Jones remarks, ‘Maybe Terry was quite keen to keep those places for himself, I don’t know. Anyway, we decided it was going to be simpler to do it in Tunisia.’
With the April start date looming, the pace of pre-production quickened. But there was to be a nasty surprise waiting in the wings. ‘We’d had a draft agreement from EMI,’ Goldstone recalls, ‘but there were still things to iron out, to clarify, but everything seemed to be going in the right direction. I’d set up a meeting with Barry Spikings really just to go through the final points of the contract. It turned out to be a very strange meeting. Barry seemed very negative about a lot of the points and I sensed there was something wrong. So I asked, “Well, what’s going on?” And he said that Bernie Delfont had given the script to Sir James Carreras, who was on the board and formerly the head of Hammer
Horror Films and a Catholic, and Jimmy had said to Bernie, “Bernie, this is blasphemous, we can’t possibly make this!” And Bernie had instructed Barry to give us the boot. So it was a bit of a shock.’
EMI tried to claim their dramatic U-turn was due to Python’s dogged insistence on artistic control and the company’s own financial constraints. The recent hiring and firing of The Sex Pistols had cost the company dear, as well as making them look like idiots. Whatever the reason, Lord Delfont never regretted his decision, even when the film scored a box-office bull’s-eye, believing as he did ‘that there are some subjects not to make — however talented the film-makers’. The ultimate irony of Delfont’s snub and George Harrison’s rescue job was that Life of Brian played in EMI cinemas in Britain and reaped a fortune for the beleaguered company. Adding salt to the wound, Harrison once travelled back from New York on the same flight as Delfont. After reading the film’s encouraging box-office figures in that week’s Variety, Harrison waved the trade paper at Delfont triumphantly, remarking, ‘Thanks for backing out.’
The question of who should direct Life of Brian came with barbed thorns and considerable baggage. The choice was between Terry 1 and Terry 2. Making the TV series, Gilliam and Jones seemed always to be of the same mind when it came to how things should be done, particularly on the technical side, harbouring as they did ambitions to carve out post-Python careers as directors. When Holy Grail came along, the pair jumped at the chance to co-direct it. Gilliam says, ‘But in the course of directing Grail, two things happened: I discovered Terry and I weren’t always as much in agreement as we both thought; and I also found directing the group a pain in the arse because I knew what we were trying to make it look like and to do that required certain things sometimes, and the guys didn’t like getting into uncomfortable positions for a good shot. I had been so much on my own doing animation for so long that I had no skills in convincing people to do things that they don’t want to do. So I often just said, “Fuck this! All right, you wrote it, fuck it, if you don’t want to do it. I’m trying to salvage your fucking script here, you don’t like it, fuck it.” There was one day I just walked away and went off in a huff, lay in the grass and Terry took over, so the advantage of two directors was considerable sometimes. But, in the end, we kind of decided that he would talk to them and I would stay back with the camera and deal with how we were shooting it. And the design was all my influence. And it kind of worked out reasonably well, that relationship.’
But too often the opposing directorial styles of Gilliam and Jones caused rifts on the Holy Grail set. Carol Cleveland, who acted in the film, comments, ‘Having two directors was not a good idea... you’re working with two maniacs, really. One maniac director’s enough, but to have two of them... so there were lots of rows.’ Cleveland was Python’s resident actress, the seventh member in all but name.
Travelling up to Scotland to film her sequence as Mother Superior in Grail’s Castle Anthrax sequence, she noticed an assortment of long faces among the crew and a squalid on-set atmosphere. Something was wrong. ‘The crew were just about ready to down tools literally that very day. And I could see why, because the way Jones and Gilliam worked was to designate different scenes between them, and on this particular one Terry Jones was doing the first half and Terry Gilliam the second. So Terry Jones had been around all morning with the crew putting my set together and then later on in the day Terry Gilliam comes along, takes one look and says, “No, no, no, don’t want that,” and tells this crew who had been working on it all day to change it all. And they were literally pulling their hair out.’
By the time of Life of Brian, Gilliam had already branched out as a solo director with the uneven but pictorially majestic Jabberwocky. ‘I did that on my own. I said, fuck, this is great. I don’t really like working with Python, we know each other too well. So after doing Jabberwocky on my own, that’s what I wanted to do. I just really felt directing Python, so much of the work is dogsbody work, just dealing with rather recalcitrant people.’ So the deal on Brian was for Gilliam to act as production designer and the other Terry to point the camera and say ‘Action’ a lot. Jones felt ‘it seemed like a better division of labour really for Terry Gilliam to concentrate on the look of the film. Production design was something he wanted to learn about anyway, so it was useful for him to learn that side of it. And that’s his great gift.’
However, even here the relationship was strained as sometimes Gilliam would design a set to be shot a certain way then despair when Jones lined up his camera from a different angle. Gilliam admits, ‘I changed my title from designer to resigner. No, I mean I love Life of Brian, I just didn’t have the patience or skills to deal with the others enough. Terry loved all that. Terry is a great ball of energy, he just leaps in there and has so much enthusiasm. He doesn’t seem to fall into the dark moody bits that I fall into. I get really crazed.
‘Directing a film for me is just hard work because it never seems to be as good as the idea in my head, so I’m constantly getting depressed and having terrible states. And Terry’s just so bubbly all the time. He works perfectly with the group.’
Six months after the withdrawal of EMI, filming on Monty Python’s Life of Brian got under way on 16 September 1978. The 41-day shoot progressed remarkably smoothly. Cleese comments, ‘It was extraordinarily efficient. I’ll always remember on the first day I played the priest in the stoning sequence. We got out there at 8 o’clock and by lunchtime we had the scene shot and I was in the hotel swimming pool. It was most extraordinary to have that finished by lunchtime. Usually, it takes about three days ’til you get to know everyone on set, it’s like moving to a new football team, you don’t know how people play, but Brian was different. Terry Jones was very well prepared and the camera and sound people were working like a well-oiled machine. I enjoyed making that film; everything was pointing in the right direction and there was a sense that we knew what we were doing. God smiles on some projects and he smiled on that one.’ Looking back on it today, all the Pythons remember the filming with fondness. Palin recalls, ‘It was all reasonably pleasant. I remember Graham Chapman was also the unit doctor; he used to administer medicines to people, he was really enjoying it. It was the most organised of the Python films, the one in which everybody pulled together. It was quite different in that way from Holy Grail which had the problem of two directors and Meaning of Life which wasn’t a totally co-operative effort.’
An early visitor to the set was George Harrison, keen to watch his comic heroes in action and perhaps curious to see how his money was being spent. Cleese remembers George coming out to Tunisia at one point ‘and he stayed for a day or two and had dinner with us. Denis O’Brien came along, too, although we didn’t know Denis very well. George was very easy to be around; of course, he knew Eric well, so I think he felt comfortable with the rest of us. It always felt very comfortable around him.’
Harrison even appears in the film, a hastily written blink-and-you’ll-miss-it part as Mr Papadopoulis. As Michael Palin commented in a brilliant speech he made at HandMade’s tenth anniversary party, ‘It marked the beginning and end of George Harrison’s film career. George had been persuaded to appear in a short cameo and was given the little-sought-after role of 314th Jewish Man in Kitchen during the scene in which Brian returns home and finds a huge Messiah-expectant crowd lying in wait for him. For George, the shock of finding himself in a crowd mobbing someone else was too much and he took early retirement and went back to his previous career as a musician.’ Another familiar face among the crowd is Spike Milligan. The former Goon happened to be staying in the same hotel as Cleese and, before he could raise any resistance, found himself playing one of Brian’s obsessional followers in the scene where they find his discarded sandal and treat it as a holy relic. After taking the master shot, Jones was in the process of organising close-ups when a miscreant cloud manoeuvred itself across the sun, halting work. After an hour, it still hadn’t budged. ‘At this point,’ says Terry Jones, ‘Milliga
n said he’d had enough, he was really on holiday, so he pissed off. And I don’t blame him at all, but it meant that we had to shoot the rest of the scene without Spike being there, so I couldn’t get any close-ups of him.’
As was achieved with the medieval era on Holy Grail, the torture, filth and hardship of biblical times is convincingly realised. No nicely manicured Hollywood extras here. Much of the film’s humour derives from the juxtaposition of historical settings and modern-day characters. Palin explains, ‘We just looked at the sort of people who would be around nowadays, so you had the agonising liberal centurion, who I play, who’s actually completely hopeless, riddled with awful guilt about what he’s doing, and yet he’s the one who’s actually sending people off to be nailed up. And there’s Eric’s cheeky Cockney. So we just put in a lot of fairly modern sort of London characters and that seemed to carry it through.’
Photographically, Life of Brian stands as the most accomplished Python film. Amazing then to learn that something like 60 per cent of it was shot using a hand-held camera. Jones says, ‘For some reason, I had a thing against putting cameras on tripods in those days.’ One of the more grandiose images, of a crowd swarming up the mount to hear a sermon from Christ as the sun slowly sets, wasn’t planned and came about purely by accident. The crew had been shooting all day on a deserted hillside when at 4.00pm the extras suddenly disappeared. With most being local women, the excuse was that they had to go home and cook their husbands’ dinners. ‘But we haven’t finished shooting!’ yelled Jones, sending his assistant director off to herd the largely unwilling crowd back up the hillside. Eric Idle was beside Jones and tapped him on the shoulder. ‘It looks terrific,’ he said. ‘Turn the camera on them quick.’ Jones frantically spun round and reeled off as much footage as he could of this mass migration of people scrambling back up the mount. And that’s the shot they used.
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