Part of Dialogues & Film Retrospectives

Monty Python and the Holy Grail, 1975. Directed by Terry Gilliam. Photo courtesy of Columbia/Photofest.

As the only non-British member of Monty Python, Minnesota-born Terry Gilliam cemented himself not only as someone possessing a great sense of humor, but also as a successful filmmaker, screenwriter, animator, and actor. He may be most well known for codirecting the now cult classic Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1974) with his fellow Python Terry Jones. But Gilliam’s work reaches beyond his early successes. He is what the Nation’s film critic, Stuart Klawans, calls “a magically distinctive filmmaker,” having directed Jabberwocky (1977), Time Bandits (1981), Brazil (1985), The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1988), The Fisher King (1991), and 12 Monkeys (1995). Gilliam and Klawans discuss the director’s early career as a member of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, his prolific film career throughout the ’80s and into the late ’90s, and his most recent release, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998). Recorded in 1998.

• Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
• And Now for Something Completely Different
• Time Bandits
• Brazil
• Adventures of Baron Munchausin
• 12 Monkeys

If the film culture of the 1970s may be compared to a landscape dotted with odd life forms—here a butterfly, there a disembodied head with a Kaiser helmet and a mechanical jaw—all of them scuttling about with great individual purpose but no design, then Terry Gilliam was the giant foot that came squooshing down on their busyness.

How to account for his rude interruption? Here was an out-of-place American amid the English troupe of Monty Python’s Flying Circus; an animator working in live-action television; a director of television sketches breaking into the movies. Even though certain hierarchies weren’t enforced so rigidly in 1970s England as they were in the United States (where the filmmaker was an Author and the TV director a nonentity), Gilliam didn’t fit into any scheme. No doubt someone had to have directed Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1974)—so it must have been Gilliam, when it wasn’t Terry Jones. Anyway, that wasn’t really a movie, was it? Just a patchwork of TV sketches shot in 35mm. If you wanted people to call you a filmmaker, you had to give them a sustained vision.

Then Jabberwocky appeared in 1977—proof that a sustained vision had been there all along, in scattered pieces, which suddenly assembled themselves and crashed onto the screen like a contraption manufactured jointly by Lewis Carroll and George Orwell. The obsessions that emerged in this story of the perfect idiot and his doomed-in-advance quest have since become unmistakable: medievalism, legends, gadgets, lies, the longing for beauty, the failings of the body, the alliance of show biz and politics.

Time Bandits (1981) confirmed the obvious: Gilliam was a magically distinctive filmmaker, whose head happened to be filled with kings, generals, and scheming dwarfs. The picture also introduced a new formal element to his work: an elaborate production design. Just how elaborate would not be seen until 1985 and the famously vexed Brazil, the only movie ever to be named best picture of the year by the Los Angeles Film Critics Circle without actually being released. The anomaly of the award is matched by the singularity of the film’s freshness. Its vision of the future still looks new, which is to say old; along with the nearly contemporaneous Blade Runner, Brazil established the genre of the worn-out tomorrow. What’s more, the political models Brazil put onto the screen (as distinguished from the architectural) have also remained fresh. The film’s authority figures – bland and cheerful men, who might at any moment squoosh you as a “terrorist”—still seem as timelessly convincing as the snaking duct-work and magnifying-glass computers.

But enough of Gilliam’s themes and his visuals style. Let’s talk about actors. Where do these performances come from? In 12 Monkeys—that anomalous big-budget masterpiece, formed like a crystal around the string of Chris Marker’s La Jetee—Bruce Willis abruptly learned how to inhabit a character down to his pores, while Brad Pitt surprised everyone by lighting up like a pinball machine. It’s astonishing how many actors have given their best to Gilliam: Jonathan Pryce in Brazil; John Neville in The Adventures of Baron Munchausen; Jeff Bridges, Robin Williams, Amanda Plummer, and Mercedes Ruehl in The Fisher King; Michael Palin in everything.

Maybe that’s the biggest anomaly: the sense of generosity that comes off of the screen, when you see an actor’s cinema being allowed to continue in the midst of such image-centered filmmaking. Though Gilliam tends to overload his pictures—always driving with his full set of baggage toward that border where the person of conscience seems a lunatic, and the lunatic’s patter begins to sound persuasive—he somehow makes room in the car for a few marvelous passengers. How fortunate we are when we squeeze in, too.

─Stuart Klawans, September 1998

The Nation’s film critic Stuart Klawans is a New York Daily News columnist and regular contributor to the Village Voice, NPR, WBAI, Grand Street and the Times Literary Supplement. Klawans’s book Film Follies was nominated for a 1999 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism.