TERRY GILLIAM appreciation thread

Topic: TERRY GILLIAM appreciation thread

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Posted at June 27, 2013, 4:41 pm:

Director Spotlight: TERRY GILLIAM

An American transplant who lives in the U.K. and has a cinematic vision and style that is all his own, Terry Gilliam is one of the most inventive and distinctive filmmakers of the past thirty years, and though he makes movies that have large scope and ambitions, he manages to do it his way and work mostly outside the Hollywood system. This has been both a blessing and a curse. His independence has carved out cinematic triumphs and tragedies, with a couple of the messier incidents being that of legend. While his reputation as a maverick is well earned in some respects, he’s also a very efficient filmmaker who knows how to make magic on the big screen. His end products are wonderfully dark fantasies that aren’t necessarily “family friendly”, making them nightmares for a Studio to market, and his sensibility may keep him from ever being a true populist, but going on Gilliam's journeys is always an experience to covet.

Born in Minneapolis, Minnesota in 1940, as a youngster his imagination was first inspired by classic tales of adventure like Ivanhoe and Treasure Island. And of course he always loved to draw from an early age. When he was eleven his family moved to southern California, and as he turned into a teenager that boy from the heartland also developed a wickedly subversive sense of humor, which he loved to express visually. Among his major influences were Tex Avery's anarchic cartoons and Ernie Kovacs' surreal television comedy. Yet he was also a big jock who lettered in pole vaulting, was elected class president, Valedictorian and king of the Senior Prom. He got a scholarship to the small Occidental College in Los Angeles, where he initially majored in physics, but quickly changed to Art. However, personality conflicts with teachers in that department chased him out of there and he settled on Political Science. After giving architecture a brief spin but finding the compromise between art and commerce not something he wanted to deal with for a living, his first professional gig out of college in the entertainment industry was at the now long-defunct humor magazine Help! in New York, where he kind of fell into the job of assistant editor. There he was able to learn about cartooning and humor from the legendary Harvey Kurtzman, the man largely responsible for the success of MAD Magazine. Gilliam worked along side Kurtzman on Help! from 1962 until it folded in 1965.

From there he peddled his talents where he could as a freelance artist, with his stuff appearing in a variety of publications and advertising. But before that, the first thing he did was take some time off and backpack around Europe, which was an eye-opener culturally. On a subsequent trip to England he bluffed his way into Shepperton Studio where he wandered around the set of Oliver! and was impressed with and intrigued by the behind-the-scenes craftsmanship, which fuelled his lust for film. But he had no in for that industry and continued his cartooning. His love of England coupled with frustration over the nature of his career in the States and his disillusionment over the Vietnam War led to Gilliam expatriating himself and moving to London in 1967.

Any Python fan will know all the specifics of how Terry met John Cleese and was later thrown in with Michael Palin, Eric Idle and Terry Jones working on the BBC TV show "Do Not Adjust Your Set". And that eventually led to the forming of "Monty Python’s Flying Circus" in 1969, with Cleese, Idle, Jones, Palin and Graham Chapman. Without making this a Monty Python thread, Gilliam was an integral but special unit in the group, with his cartoons being one of the most identifiable aspects of that hugely successful and influential bit of TV and comic history. All the members credit Gilliam with being the ingredient which really helped shape the show's style, giving them the ability to start and stop sketches at any point knowing Terry's cartooning could bridge absolutely anything, which gave everybody else complete creative freedom to try anything and everything they could imagine. Gilliam would appear on-screen in sketches from time-to-time, but his main job was to do the animations, and in that he had a kind of individual power the others didn’t – the writing of the sketches and deciding which would be in or out any given week was left to the other Pythons, who had writing partnerships and cliques within the group. Gilliam was left alone to do his work as he saw fit.

The multi-cultural phenomenon of Python led to the movies. Their first effort, And Now for Something Completely Different (1971), was simply filmed versions of some of the best skits from the first two seasons of "Flying Circus", directed by the man who did the bulk of the series, Ian MacNaughton. Their second film, made after the series completed its run, was of course Monty Python & the Holy Grail (1975). The two Terrys, Gilliam and Jones, were the only two members of the troupe with real directing aspirations, so they co-helmed Grail. However, the group dynamics being what they were, having all known and worked together for years now, made it difficult for anybody to be in real control, much less having that duty split into two people. Gilliam naturally spent much of his time on the look of the film, while Jones tended to spend more time with the actors. The small-budgeted film managed to get made, and whatever behind-the-scenes difficulties there may have been they don’t show in the finished product, which is a comic masterpiece.

After the success of Grail, Terry Gilliam decided to try and make a movie on his own. Taking loose inspiration from the Lewis Carroll poem, Gilliam set out to make Jabberwocky (1977). Terry expanded upon what he was doing with the visuals and muddy, filthy, disgusting world of Grail, making a sometimes over-the-top portrait of Medieval life that has got to be much, much closer to reality than what was presented in Hollywood epics like El Cid, populated by beautiful movie stars in immaculate silk garb and shiny armor. The humor in Jabberwocky is still very Pythonesque, and it stars Michael Palin with a cameo role for Terry Jones. That and the fact that Grail and Jabberwocky do LOOK alike cause a natural comparison between the two. Jabberwocky is nowhere near the level of sustained comedic brilliance in Monty Python & the Holy Grail. Few films are. But if you take Jabberwocky on its own terms rather than looking at it as some sort of unofficial sequel to Grail (which it was never intended to be), it has a lot going for it. As a first solo film done on an incredibly small budget, it’s an impressive effort. Compared to his own more polished, technically sure and ambitious projects to come, Jabberwocky is like an ugly cousin. But any Gilliam fan should definitely check it out, and you may be surprised at how good it is.

On the third Python film, The Life of Brian (1979), rather than go back to the awkward dynamic from Grail Gilliam let Terry Jones take solo directing credit. Having worked as a director by himself now, Gilliam was not anxious to go back to a co-director situation. He also wasn’t looking forward to having to deal with all the variously fractured group dynamics again. But he was more than happy to work on this film, and he reveled in being in charge of the production design. I think the Biblical parody Life of Brian is Python’s crowning achievement, a razor sharp satire of religious fanaticism that is just as side-splittingly funny as "Flying Circus" and Holy Grail but also has their best sustained narrative.

Next Gilliam returned to some of the adventures and legends he had loved as a boy and what came out the other side was Time Bandits (1981), his first truly great film as a solo director. Written with Michael Palin, Time Bandits is the tale of a young boy named Kevin (Craig Warnock), who lives in the non-descript Middle Class sprawl of present-day suburban England with his disinterested consumer-obsessed parents. Kevin dreams of Robin Hood or working his way out of Daedalus’ Labyrinth or smoky epic war-torn battlefields. His dreams find him one night when a knight in full armor on a white steed comes bursting through his wardrobe and into his room before vanishing. He waits up on subsequent nights ready for anything to happen. What does happen is a band of dwarves stumble into his room, looking for a gateway. Turns out they have a map which they stole from the Supreme Being. The map shows holes in the fabric of time and space which allow one to travel the world in all different eras. The rowdy pack of six dwarves, led by the pushy Randall (David Rappaport), intend to use these doorways in time to plunder gold and riches. The Supreme Being (Sir Ralph Richardson) shows up looking for his map, and before he knows what is going on Kevin is swept along with this band of miscreants. Where and When they’ll land and Who they’ll meet is a series of inventive misadventures, and Kevin proves invaluable since he has a knowledge about these eras the would-be robbers do not. Along the way they meet Napoleon (Ian Holm), Robin Hood (John Cleese) and King Agamemnon (Sean Connery), among others (Michael Palin also has two cameos as characters in different time periods). Kevin and the Dwarves also have to contend with Evil (David Warner), who wants the map for himself so he can wreak havoc on the Supreme Being’s creation. Time Bandits is dark and weird and wonderful. It is essentially a kid’s movie, and most certainly children will enjoy it (I was eleven when I saw it in the theater, and it instantly became a favorite). But there’s also a level of wit and just plain creativity to it all that any adult can enjoy, maybe even more than the fantasy aspect for the kids.

Time Bandits was a surprise hit. Gilliam achieved his ambitious vision with a relatively modest budget of $5-million, while the film grossed over $42-million in the United States alone! That kind of ratio and ability to impressively make-do with so little will get the attention of a lot of Studio executives.

In the third and final Python picture The Meaning of Life (1983), Terry definitely wasn’t going to move backward after the success, financially and creatively, of Time Bandits. But he was allowed to direct one segment all his own, and as the script was inherently episodic it seemed they would be able to fit it in the middle of the film, as intended. His segment is called "The Crimson Permanent Assurance", is almost entirely visual and, unlike his role in "Flying Circus", this one is live-action. It tells the story of an office full of aged accountants in a totalitarian office who rebel against their slavish masters, fashioning weapons out of the office supplies, forcing the executives to walk the plank out of the high-rise. After seizing control of their company, they hoist sails on top of the building and set off to plunder other dreary workplaces. A simple satire of Corporations, but done in that distinctive Gilliam style. In the end, Terry’s piece was so different from the rest of The Meaning of Life that it was stuck onto the front of the picture, like a short subject of its own (though it is briefly and surprisingly reprised in the body of the film). Terry also spent so much time and money on "Crimson Permanent Assurance" that he didn’t exactly make the other five members of Python happy. But it works, and is in many ways a dry-run at some of the themes and techniques Gilliam would examine further in his next project.

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