After Connery and Cleese were snared, the rest of the cast fell conveniently into place. As Mr and Mrs Ogre, a seafaring husband and wife cannibal team, it was hoped to pair Peter Vaughn with Katherine Helmond. Gilliam notes that ‘the studios had no interest in Katherine because she was a TV star in Soap — that doesn’t count — and so I settled on Ruth Gordon, but she managed to break her leg on a Clint Eastwood movie, so she was out and I got Katherine.’ In came Ian Holm, complete with cod-French accent, as a height-conscious Napoleon, and Ralph Richardson as God, played like a fusty old boarding-school headmaster. Great casting, and dear Ralph took it all oh so seriously, marking out his lines in red ink and occasionally saying, with absolute assurance, ‘God wouldn’t say that.’
‘Suddenly out of the blue getting people like Sean Connery and Ralph Richardson, just wonderful,’ says Michael Palin. ‘All these wonderful people I never thought I’d ever write anything for. It was quite a challenge to get things right for them, but Richardson rewrote most of his scenes, in a sort of gentlemanly ruthless way. I tried to get Richardson to do one of the Ripping Yarns because I thought he was such a funny, quirky actor. I think the God we created for him was probably from my school days, a 1950s post-imperial God, a bit cheesed off with the way history had gone.’
With Richardson installed as God, the only question remaining was: who should play the Prince of Darkness? ‘Originally, I offered the Devil to Jonathan Pryce,’ says Gilliam, ‘but he obliged to take a very large shilling from another film that went nowhere rather than the penny we were offering.’ Instead, Gilliam cast David Warner, whose wildly pantomimic personification of evil is the film’s scene-stealer.
Time Bandits was a successful, if highly pressurised, shoot. Some rewriting did go on, mainly to combat problems that arose during filming, like ideas being too costly or difficult to realise. Gilliam referred to the script as being organic, forever trying to keep up with the production. The biggest casualty was a lengthy sequence that preceded the dwarfs entry to the Devil’s Fortress of Ultimate Darkness. Gilliam explains, ‘The gang had escaped from a giant and were trying to get their bearings when suddenly this tendril wraps around Og and drags him into this cave. Inside, the bandits find these two desiccated old women knitting away and this tendril is in fact a bit of their yarn. What they’re knitting are huge spider webs all over the place and the spider webs are full of young, good-looking knights in shining armour, pretty boys that they’re keeping stored for their use. And under their great broad skirts they have eight feet and they scuttle along the floor. They’re just sitting there looking for new boyfriends and our gang have to escape. So we shot that scene, and it’s a really good scene, but it’s gone now, destroyed, it doesn’t exist anywhere. I’ve got one bad Polaroid of it, that’s all.’
Other fascinating missing scenes included Kevin waking up at night to find his bedroom flooded with water and a pirate ship sailing through his window, and the bandits in twenty-second-century London. ‘They rob a bank and it’s a silly thing where they’re too short, the bank teller can’t see them,’ Gilliam observes. ‘It was a silly sequence and we cut it out before we shot.’
Gilliam, though, still regrets losing the spider women but by then he had insufficient money to shoot the two linking scenes that had been written to go either side of it. That left the problem of how to get the dwarfs into the Fortress of Ultimate Darkness. ‘We had to make a quantum leap. How do we get from A to B as quickly as possible. The answer is, you’re there already, you just can’t see it, it’s an invisible barrier.’ A new scene was hurriedly written in which the bandits, lost and disorganised, turn on Randal who, in defence, hurls a skull at them, shattering the invisible barrier and thus leading the way ahead. It was a brilliant piece of improvising that reflected what was really happening amongst the actors who’d all been on a ‘hate David Rappaport’ campaign for weeks. Gilliam remembers, ‘That scene is about those characters and so we made Dave Rappaport that little shit, which was what everybody felt. So in that scene if you look at them, they really aren’t acting any more, they’re really going to get the fucker.’
Throughout filming, Rappaport had built up huge resentment between himself and the other dwarf actors by not wishing to be associated with them. ‘Rappaport saw himself as different from the rest of the gang, because he wasn’t a dwarf, he was a great actor,’ Gilliam says. ‘I said, “No, no. Dave, you’re a really wonderful 4ft 1in actor; you’ve got to put the two things together, you cannot separate one from the other, Dave.” He was actually different from the rest, he wouldn’t sit with them. If it was lunch, he’d be near John Cleese, with the “actors”.’
Perhaps the biggest moment of desperation came as filming drew to a close and Gilliam realised he didn’t have an ending. Connery was limited to just 14 days on the film, for tax reasons, and his time had already been used up. This was pretty bad luck as Agamemnon was due to take a central role in the climactic Good vs Evil battle, dying the kind of hero’s death reserved only for A-list stars. Gilliam was stumped. Then it came to him — since he couldn’t kill Agamemnon, why not snuff out one of the midgets? ‘So I said, “Let’s kill the cute one.” And so we killed Fidget. And the good thing about Fidget dying is that Kenny Baker and Jack Purvis were a stand-up comic duo, so I thought, Kill the guy’s partner and you’ve got something going. That led to a great emotional scene with Purvis as Wally raging against the Devil.’
Next, Gilliam was reminded of something Connery said at their initial meeting, a desire to return in the film’s final moments as a fireman who rescues Kevin from his burning home: ‘So I got Sean the one day he was back in the country... I think he was seeing his accountant... and he had like a couple of hours in between meetings. We got him over to Lee International studios in Wembley and put him in a fireman’s outfit. All I had was a fire truck as a bit of a set and we got two shots of him, one of putting the boy down and then another getting into the cabin, looking back and winking.’ It was a nice final touch.
The making of Time Bandits turned out to be the phoney war; the real blood and guts began once the film entered the editing stage. Gilliam says, ‘Denis started interfering. His skill was that he was brilliant at economical jugglings, but this is always the problem with anybody from the financial or executive side of film-making, they think they’re creative, too. I mean, they’re creative in their area, which is the stuff we can’t do, but somehow they can’t seem to ever stop at that. Denis doesn’t understand the other part of the process. But that’s when they all come in, during post-production; not just Denis, because now there’s an object, a finite thing, you can see it, you can have an opinion about it, everybody can have an opinion about it, then the question is, is their opinion more useful, more interesting, more correct than the film-maker’s opinion?’
The first ripples of discontent surfaced when O’Brien insisted that Gilliam change the film’s ending where Kevin’s mother and father are killed. ‘You can’t blow up parents at the end of a children’s film!’ exploded O’Brien. Gilliam stood his ground. ‘That’s the whole point. No one’s done it before.’ But O’Brien was insistent. ‘It’ll alienate the audience.’ Gilliam was ready for that one. ‘The audience is kids and every kid has this fantasy about getting rid of his parents.’ To solve the argument, a special screening for a bunch of youngsters was arranged and the first one out, a particularly precocious five-year-old boy, was asked what his favourite moment of the film was. ‘The parents being blown up!’ He whooped with delight.
The next battleground was over the music. O’Brien wanted to pepper Time Bandits with a batch of new George Harrison compositions, plus what Gilliam describes as ‘Heigh Ho’ songs that would render the work like some warped version of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Ray Cooper had been drafted in to help supervise the score. ‘I’d never met Ray before,’ Gilliam says. ‘I think his main function was to try to convince me to put a lot of these songs all over the film so it was a musical. Ray and I agreed within
the first two or three minutes that this was a bad idea, this was not what the film was trying to do.’
The two men formed a solid friendship from that moment. ‘We sort of got joined at the hip at that point,’ says Cooper. ‘And so far I’ve been a part of every one of his films, which is a great privilege. He’s a very masterly, interesting, crazy person to be around, manic and wonderful, always that spark is electrifying. And Time Bandits with Michael Palin writing, the two of them together, I wish they would do that again, it was a stroke of genius. All of Terry’s innovation, animation techniques, everything he’d learnt came to full fruition for Time Bandits, and therefore for HandMade, which then was on a real wave.’
The pressure of post-production meetings between Gilliam and O’Brien reached a head one afternoon at Ray Cooper’s home when Gilliam completely lost his rag, seized a print of the film with one hand and with a nail in the other barked into O’Brien’s face, ‘Here’s this nail, here’s the negative. I’m going to rip it down the middle, ’cos I made it, I can destroy it!’ Gilliam had become utterly exasperated by this stage with O’Brien’s behaviour, always seemingly on his back about the film, bringing up a succession of problems. ‘We had huge fights,’ remembers Gilliam. ‘It just became like bashing a head against a brick wall, but I was the brick wall and he was the head, that was the stupid thing. I kept saying, “No, don’t go there, Denis.” And he’d go — Wham! “Stop it, Denis.” And eventually I started screaming at him, “You’re a fucking idiot, Denis. I’ve told you time and time again your brains are bashed out all over this wall that I am and you won’t stop.” That was the first time that I was aware of his pig-headedness, how he couldn’t back off. When I get possessive and protective of my films, George can see it and Ray, OK, just step back, there’s no way of dealing with Terry at this point, let it rest for a day or two. Denis could never do that, he just was convinced of his own rightness all the time — so was I, but I think my credentials were a little bit better in that area. He doesn’t actually understand how an artist works. George and Ray do, they’ve been there.’
It’s striking how Gilliam refused to budge on anything with O’Brien over Time Bandits, even eliciting mild exasperation from one of his most ardent admirers, George Harrison, who told the director, ‘You remind me of John Lennon, you’re so difficult, so bolshie. Can’t you just compromise?’ It was the thing that Gilliam was most proud of that Harrison ever said to him. Harrison’s other major critique over that incident took the form of his one and only song for Time Bandits, which plays over the end titles. Gilliam remembers, ‘What I discovered after the event was that that song is George’s notes to me about my attitude on the film. On the lyric, there’s something about apologies. He felt I owed Denis and him some apologies because I was so unbending in the way I approached things. It’s really funny because I enjoyed listening to the song but at the time I had no idea it was George writing his notes to me.’ Some of the lyrics read ‘Greedy feeling, wheeling dealing. Losing what you won. See the dream come undone,’ and most revealingly, ‘...all you owe is apologies.’
Eric Idle actually believes that some of the gloss came off the HandMade wagon for Harrison as a direct result of Time Bandits’ turbulent post-production. ‘I think George fell out of love with it when he made Time Bandits because he just realised what Gilliam was really like. You try to discuss a budget with Terry Gilliam, it’s kind of ridiculous. Terry is completely mono, he’s taken several businesses out of existence. Several companies have fallen victim to the Gilliam piracy.’
Palin, too, is a little critical of his Python colleague in the inflexible approach he took on that film. ‘I think Terry is very keen to get things exactly the way he wants them. I’m much more prepared to sort of duck and dive, to weave around a system which I know is never going to be perfect. You’ve got to be able to deal with people, you’ve got to make a little deal here, step back there, go forward there and decide how you are actually going to get to do the work you want to do.’
When their relationship had irretrievably broken down, Gilliam’s parting shot to O’Brien was a gift of two small brass balls. ‘Denis had been spending so much time in LA he’d developed all these habits — “Put your balls on the table” — that sort of macho talk. One Christmas after Time Bandits, I felt nice for a moment and had these two brass balls made and put them into a beautiful box. I actually made the lining of the box crushed velvet and a little brass label that hung there and said “For putting on the table”. And I sent them to Denis. And he sent it back saying, “I think you’ll need these more than I do.” He didn’t get the joke or accept the thing and I thought, This is stupid.’
The ultimate cost of Gilliam’s spats with O’Brien over Time Bandits was that it turned out to be the only film he ever directed for HandMade. A major regret, because in many respects Gilliam was the archetype HandMade director. His childlike exuberance for the film-making process encapsulated what HandMade initially stood for — films made by artists, individuals, not corporations, not committees. Gilliam’s attitude towards cinema at that time was almost to treat it as if it were a cottage industry, some eccentric hobby one pottered about doing in a garden shed on weekends.
This was especially true of his approach to special effects. Certainly he was out to prove such magical feats and images could be achieved for little money as opposed to the millions spent on, say, Star Wars. The madcap space-ship sequence in Life of Brian, for example, was shot on a shoestring in his Neal’s Yard office. Months later, Gilliam actually bumped into George Lucas who raved about it. ‘Yeah. OK. We did it for a fiver,’ Gilliam replied nonchalantly.
It’s ironic that, in recent times, Gilliam has become best known for his profligacy rather than his artistry, mainly due to the budgetary problems incurred on The Adventures of Baron Munchausen. Back in the era of Time Bandits, he spoke passionately about a desire to steer away from computers, to fiddle about physically with the celluloid himself, to feel his fingerprints literally on the work, so that his movies were, in a revealing quote, ‘more handmade than other films’. The loss of Gilliam as a director to O’Brien and Harrison and to HandMade Films was great indeed.
Despite all the post-production headaches, Gilliam delivered a hugely original, visually imaginative feast with Time Bandits. Part historical comedy, part fantasy, part knockabout farce, all for $5 million at a time when other films were spending several times as much with far less to show for it. His desire to bridge the gap between live action and the surreal nature and inventiveness of his animation had been spectacularly achieved in a movie that was not only a landmark for HandMade but for the director himself.
When it opened in London on 16 July 1981 against stiff opposition from the latest Bond opus For Your Eyes Only and Raiders of the Lost Ark, reviews were positive. ‘It is, without doubt, the most thoroughly satisfying, frightening, comical, even educational children’s film in years,’ raved the Sunday Times. ‘Fantasy film-making of the highest order. I doubt whether we will see imagination of such staggering brilliance on the screen again for a long while to come,’ reported Starburst. But, surprisingly, Time Bandits underperformed at the UK box office and the blame was laid squarely at the door of O’Brien. Gilliam asserts, ‘He marketed it in England like the next Python film. And this is the thing that Denis kept doing. Life of Brian went out and was marketed in a certain way and he did the exact same thing with Time Bandits. I said, “It’s not Python, it’s a kids’ film, you’ve got to sell it differently.” He didn’t do it. It was like he’d learn the wrong lessons, he couldn’t distinguish why you can’t do Time Bandits like Life of Brian. They’re different animals.’
Gilliam was determined the same mistake wouldn’t be repeated in America. But first they had to sell it over there and no one wanted to know. Gilliam recalls, ‘I don’t know whether Denis was asking too much money for it or just the studios didn’t get it... it could have been a combination of both. In the end, he went to Avco-Embassy, which was the mi
niest of the majors, or the majorist of the minis, offering them a deal where they would pay nothing for the film but we would use their distribution system. Denis and George also had to guarantee $5 million on prints and advertising.’
The deal struck with Avco was unprecedented and highly innovative in the way it was structured. Steve Abbott notes that ‘Denis negotiated the most killer deal imaginable, I mean, the killer deal. In order to make Avco make the deal, he did the outrageous step of putting up money for prints and advertising — no one did this at the time — took the most enormous risk, and when it came in, he made fortunes from it.’
HandMade, not Avco-Embassy, also controlled how the film was campaigned ahead of its November opening. Gilliam designed the release poster himself but ran into trouble over the content of the TV trailers. He was astonished to learn they weren’t allowed to show dwarfs, ‘because people don’t like dwarfs,’ Gilliam was reliably informed by the publicity people, to which he angrily retorted, ‘They’re not dwarfs, they’re Time Bandits!!’ He adds, ‘That campaign got into a big battle because there had been a recent film called Under the Rainbow about the making of The Wizard of Oz starring Chevy Chase, and because it bombed they blamed the dwarfs!’
Gilliam instead came up with the inspired notion of carrying out three separate ad campaigns, one for the Python fans, one for the kids and one for the family audience. It worked a treat as Time Bandits went straight to the top of the box-office charts, raking in an impressive $6.5 million in its first three days. Its performance was remarkable, despite Time magazine’s prediction that it would befuddle moviegoers and not earn a dime, a view not shared by the majority of US critics who heaped praise on the film. The LA Herald Examiner proclaimed, ‘Deserves to be called a classic’, while the LA Times wrote, ‘One of the great fantasy-fulfilment adventure films’. ‘The Wizard of Oz of the ’80s’, said US magazine.
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