By Alex Hudson
June 9, 2003
Terry Gilliam’s wonderfully twisted movies have one overriding commonality: they're all spoofs of the odyssey. Instead of Herculean heroes we get dimwitted buffoons. Instead of insurmountable obstacles we get killer bunnies and Knights Who Say "Ni!"
From his days as the lone American in Monty Python to his legendary battles with studio bosses to his current regrouping of his directing powers, Terry Gilliam’s personal odyssey is as unbelievably bizarre as any found in his movies.
Hollywood Dreams
Gilliam’s odyssey began in Minnesota, where he enjoyed a Tom Sawyeresque childhood. His idyllic path changed course when his family moved to movie country, California. Growing up in the shadows of the studios, Gilliam nurtured Hollywood dreams with his drawing and cartooning. He shook his dreams long enough to attend nearby Occidental College, studying physics then politics, but the dreams returned.
Gilliam followed his dreams to New York, finding creative solace working for his idol, Harvey (creator of MAD) Kurtzman on Help! - a satiric magazine that included old movie stills with hip new captions. Gilliam refined his dark humor and quirky artistic sensibility but his work at Help! was as creatively rewarding as it was financially unrewarding. Gilliam returned to Los Angeles, landing a well-paid job in advertising. But again craving an artistic outlet and with experience in the magazine field, Gilliam moved to London to become art director of the Londoner. One day he met John Cleese, who was doing a photo shoot for the magazine.
And Now for Something Completely Different
Call it destiny, call it luck, Terry Gilliam’s unholy union with John Cleese, along with funnymen Terry Jones, Eric Idle, Michael Palin and Graham Chapman, ignited unending creativity and humor. Monty Python’s Flying Circus sparked televisions and minds with their anarchic spirit, brutal mockery and intelligent silliness.
Gilliam wrote and performed in skits for Flying Circus, but his main responsibility was creating the whole visual style of the Python universe. Gilliam’s surreal animations, which juxtaposed classical art pieces with pop images with random designs, visually articulated the absurdist nature of Monty Python.
The comedy troupe made their first feature-length movie, And Now for Something Completely Different, providing Gilliam invaluable insight into the moviemaking process. A collection of reworked sketches from the first and second seasons of Flying Circus, the intent of the movie was to give American audiences their first look at Python buffoonery as the television show had yet to air stateside.
It’s Only A Flesh Wound
After their fifth and final season of Flying Circus, the group embarked on their most ambitious project to date. Monty Python and the Holy Grail took Monty Python to higher highs and lower lows. With the learning experience of And Now for Something Completely Different under their belt, Gilliam and Terry Jones felt confident enough to co-direct Holy Grail, with Gilliam gravitating towards the technical and visual aspects of the movie and Jones concentrating on the actors.
Monty Python and the Holy Grail, like Monty Python itself, spirals zanily from sketch to sketch, loosely integrating the various misadventures under the guise of a quest. The lack of budget plays to the film's advantage, as the decrepit medieval locations actually look like decrepit medieval locations. The verisimilitude heightens the laughs when, for instance, we see the Pythons prancing about banging coconut shells together to create the sound of clanking horse hoofs (they couldn't afford horses).
The nonexistent budget was an unforeseen blessing for Gilliam; he had artistic free reign and creative solutions were constantly necessary to compensate for lack of funding. The freedom also allowed Gilliam to pepper the film with his animations, bookending segments to create a warped fairy tale.
Idiot’s Odyssey
The dreamlike success of Monty Python brought Gilliam name recognition but he was eager to distinguish himself as a director. He turned to Lewis Carroll’s poem Jabberwocky for inspiration. Gilliam adored Carroll’s works for their made-up words and sense of the absurd, with the seven verse Jabberwocky rich in both. Gilliam expands Jabberwocky into another fool’s medieval odyssey. Dullard Dennis Cooper, played by Pythonite Michael Palin, stumbles from folly to folly oblivious to his own obliviousness.
Like Holy Grail, Jabberwocky above all spoofs the odyssey. Throughout his films, Gilliam maintains the classical framework of the odyssey but subverts expectation at every turn. When the Trojan Horse is delivered in Holy Grail there is, comically, nobody inside. When Dennis battles the Jabberwocky he defeats him not by brain or brawn but sheer luck - the beast falls on his sword.
Gilliam cleverly conceived a plot device to transport his odyssey to as many places and times as possible. Time Bandits is the lovable journey of a boy and a band of thieving midgets who leap through time, stealing from the likes of Napoleon, Robin Hood, and Agamemnon. Told from the boy's perspective, Gilliam’s journey again brings neither insight nor growth; the boy's heroes are frauds. Deftly made on a mere $5 million budget, which Beatle George Harrison’s Handmade Studios funded, Time Bandits earned over $40 million in the United States.
Happiness: We're All In It Together
Gilliam’s low-cost hit lifted him to the ephemeral realm of artistic freedom, with Hollywood studios opening their arms to embrace his next project (no major studio was the least bit interested in Time Bandits). Sid Sheinberg-run Universal Studios gladly agreed to fund the majority of Gilliam’s dream project, Brazil.
Using dark comedy to underscore the brutality of a corrupt system, Brazil is at once hypnotic and disturbing. Overwhelming and sensory-overloading, Brazil bombards the viewer with a world of needless consumption, never-ending advertising, and bureaucratic asphyxiation. This is our world, but exaggerated enough for Gilliam to explode the walls of imagination; showing the hopeless dreams of a meager soul in their full, doomed glory.
Chasing the girl of his dreams, Sam Lowry (Jonathan Pryce) floats along a Kafkaesque journey through bureaucratic excess. Lost in his own mind, Sam is the latest in the long line of Gilliam heroes who drift across the divide of reality and fantasy on a road to nowhere.
Sheinberg watched the rough cut of Brazil, amazed at the "bravado filmmaking" but equally galled at the lack of commerciality. Bleak, brutal, and beautiful - Brazil was not easily marketable and Sheinberg ordered Gilliam to cut the film. Meanwhile, Sheinberg had his own editors busily chopping Brazil up, replacing darker scenes and the false happy ending with lighter scenes and a happy ending.
Subverting the entire point of the film, Gilliam fought Universal head-on to release his version of his film. Sheinberg would not relent, content to sit on Universal's $9 million investment. A lengthy, personal battle ensued culminating in Gilliam taking a full-page ad out in Variety asking this question: Dear Sid Sheinberg, When will you release my film, Brazil? Gilliam staged private screenings of Brazil for critics, resulting in the film winning the LA Film Critics Association Best Picture Award, despite the film not having been released in theaters yet. Red-faced, Sheinberg finally relented, dumping just 112 prints of Brazil into few theaters with minimal marketing push.
How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Madness
The irony of Universal trying to suppress Gilliam from releasing his film about a system trying to crush individuality is almost too absurd to believe. The ordeal of Brazil tempered his fast ascent, but an undaunted Gilliam eagerly pursued The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, his most sprawling, chaotic, big-budget epic yet. Perhaps too frenzied, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen pushes the Gilliam universe to the most extreme bounds of filmable cinema.
Nonlinear and visually expansive, Munchausen focuses the Gilliam all-or-nothing journey purely in the mind of the fantastic. Based on the tall tales of the real life Baron Karl Friedrich Hieronymous von Munchausen, the movie is a springboard for Gilliam’s overzealous imagination; the escapist splendor of his vision never more elaborately realized. But the movie found no audience, only making $8 million on a then-huge $40 million budget, hindering studio's willingness to fund subsequent Gilliam films.
Gilliam redeemed his reputation with The Fisher King and Twelve Monkeys; the former film rehabbed his bruised critical standing while the latter film mended his commercial status. Both studio films explore mental instability, with Gilliam invoking a narrative style of controlled loss of control. Gilliam wrote neither film, but his newfound attraction to characters simultaneously fighting and embracing their madness reverberates Gilliam’s maddening inability to get studios to fund his projects.
Most directors have films stall or go unmade but few have had as many as Gilliam. Among his infamous projects-gone-awry are The Defective Detective, The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, A Scanner Darkly, Watchmen, Theseus and The Minotaur, The Crowded Room. Amidst toiling on recent unmade films, Gilliam’s name was called to direct Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, replacing director Alex Cox (Sid and Nancy) at the last moment. An ideal fit for the material, Gilliam turned Thompson’s trippy, unwieldy story of depravity into a sickeningly hilarious glimpse into an altered mind.
Already five years removed from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Gilliam’s next film journey will be that of The Brothers Grimm, with Matt Damon and Heath Ledger to star as the famous fairytale scribe siblings.
Artist's Journey
Deliberately or not, the path taken by Gilliam to make each of his films invariably mirrors the path taken by his protagonists. In his early movies his heroes naively journeyed through pratfalls just as Gilliam navigated the tricky obstacle course of no-budget filmmaking. By Brazil, Gilliam found himself in a position no different from Sam Lowry; a corporate slave indebted to the system that was depriving him of his dream. Gilliam’s recent films, made with technical precision reposit the odyssey as plunges into alternate perception and even madness; the only refuge for Gilliam, and his heroes, is outside reality.
There is no truer cinematic visionary than Terry Gilliam. Gilliam’s feverish dreamscapes of endless imagination behold fantastical worlds of discovery. With eight films, Terry Gilliam has established a legacy of visual transcendence, uncompromising uniqueness and narrative density that few directors, if any, can rival. Like his roguish anti-heroes, Terry Gilliam traveled unreal journeys to tell unreal stories, letting us escape with him through the gateway of imagination.
View other columns by Alex Hudson
