Profile: Terry Gilliam

Terry Gilliam got his start being the most beloved guy in his high school and then he went on to do every job that anyone has ever fantasised about

He worked for Harvey Kurtzman on Harvey's longest-running post-Mad attempt at magazining. He was in Monty Python and did all those animations and distinctive visuals. Then he went on to make really big, great, depressing movies like Time Bandits, Brazil, 12 Monkeys, The Fisher King, and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Also George Harrison, aka the best Beatle, was his number-one fan. Gilliam is a genius. I think that so many things have come easily to him that he has to make the most difficult-to-film movies possible just to keep from getting bored.

The person who was originally supposed to conduct this interview died or something while working on a story in Detroit, and I was called up at the last minute to fill in. I didn't have time to do research although I'd spent much of my formative years obsessing over Terry Gilliam. That obsession waned once I started obsessing over how to be Terry Gilliam. So this interview contains some of the stock content that you get when you talk to someone as famous as him, but I also wanted to know about how, for him, depression and hope relate to making creative work. I don't know if I did a good job or not. I didn't see his last couple of films. I hope he didn't hang up the phone and say to himself, "What a jackass."

 

 

 

Vice: I'd like to start with something that's near and dear to me. I love Mad magazine and I love Harvey Kurtzman, so I'd like to ask you about growing up reading Mad and your eventual work with Harvey.

Terry Gilliam: Well, Mad was THE magazine when I was a teenager so far as I'm concerned. It was so smart and so funny and so... troublesome.

Vice: It was fantastic-the bomb in the mailbox on the letters page.

Terry Gilliam:Yeah, all that stuff was freeing. It was like, "Wow!" You couldn't wait for the next issue. And the art was brilliant. Jack Davis, Wally Wood, Willie Elder... It wasn't just destructive anarchy. It was really intelligent. They were brilliant at satirizing whatever was going on in the world, whether it was other comic strips, television, or movies. It was a fantastic, funny mirror held up to the world. So I became a huge fan of it and started learning how to cartoon like those guys. Wally Wood's women were so sexy that I felt that it was possibly a form of pornography, and I used to hide the magazine from my parents because I felt guilty.

Vice: That's how you know it's great art. I remember seeing the first six issues. My dad had them. I forget when the first issue came out. '52? '51? But it's still edgy today. The sex and anger are all on the surface.

Terry Gilliam:There was nothing else like it at the time, so there was nothing to compete with it. Every cartoonist I know from my generation was totally affected and influenced by it. Harvey became kind of a god for all of us.

Vice: You got to work for Harvey at Help! magazine along with Robert Crumb and some other greats.

Terry Gilliam: It was after Harvey walked out of Mad and his other magazines, Humbug and Trump, came and went. Help! was the one that seem to develop a life of its own. I was in college at the time, and some friends and I took over the school's art and literary journal and turned it into a humor magazine. Help! was in many ways the model. Our magazine was called Fang.

Vice: You went to Occidental College in Los Angeles, right?

Terry Gilliam:Yes. We started doing parodies of things like West Side Story. I sent a copy of our magazine to Harvey and he wrote back a nice letter and that was the end of it for me-I just had to go to New York and meet this guy. I wanted to be part of that world. I wrote him back saying that I was thinking of coming to New York after I graduated and he wrote back again saying, "Forget about it, there's nothing for you here, we're self-sufficient." And I said, "No, no, I'm coming."

Vice: Nice.

Terry Gilliam: It was really funny, that summer I had been reading a book called Act One. It's the autobiography of Moss Hart. He was an incredibly successful playwright. His story was of a callow youth going to New York to meet his hero and ending up being his partner in writing-and that's what happened to me. I met with Harvey at the Algonquin Hotel, which at that point was famous for the round table where Robert Benchley and Dorothy Parker and all these brilliant wits hung out in the 40s. I went up and knocked on the door of his suite, and it wasn't Harvey in there, but Willie Elder and Al Jaffee and Arnold Roth. All of these cartoonists were busy working on the first issue of Little Annie Fanny.

Vice: Oh my God.

Terry Gilliam: It was like walking onto Mount Olympus and there were the gods. Eventually Harvey turned up, and this is where luck enters the whole picture. The guy who was the assistant editor was quitting and they were looking for someone else to work for next to nothing. I was the kid standing there, and that's how it happened.

Vice: What's it like to meet and then work with someone you idolize?

Terry Gilliam: Well, for one thing they come off their godlike-status pedestals and become real people. Harvey was so meticulous in the way that he worked. He was a great teacher, but he also gave me incredible freedom. One of the things we used to do was take photographs or engravings and then caption them. I would spend ages down in the New York Public Library going through old photos and books. I learned so much-about art, about history-just by having to do this work. The magazine's staff was basically four people: Jim Warren, the publisher who we never saw, Harvey, myself, and Harry Chester, who was the production guy. Harvey would be up in his attic in Mount Vernon working away and I'd be down in his office administering with Harry Chester and his pasteup guys. Because I was the assistant editor of the magazine, all of these other young cartoonists were turning up in New York and hanging out with me. Whether it was Gilbert Shelton from Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers or Bob Crumb, we were all roughly the same age. I guess they thought I was more successful since I was the assistant editor of Help!, but I was getting paid $2 less a week than I would have if I had been on the dole. [laughs]

Vice: Help! is also where you met John Cleese, which kind of started you moving through the creative industries like a shark. I envy that a lot, for an artist in one lifetime to work and move through so many different fields and become masterful in them.

Terry Gilliam: What I really wanted to be was a film director. That was the goal, but I had no idea how you got there. I grew up in the San Fernando Valley, and it was there dangling just over the hills. From the summer camps I worked at, I knew all of these Hollywood kids-Danny Kaye's daughter, Hedy Lamarr's son, Burt Lancaster's daughters. I was a counselor at the camp while I was working my way through college. Hollywood was so close, but I just couldn't see how you worked up through a system like that.

Vice: But you did start building connections to that world through Help!

Terry Gilliam: Because of the fumettis-

Vice:We should just say, for those who don't know, that fumettis are comics that use photographs....

Terry Gilliam: Right. And we needed actors for them. I would go down to theaters in the Village. We were only paying $15 a day, but I kept meeting people through that. I met Cleese and Woody Allen that way.

Vice: Making fummetis must have taught you things that came in handy later, doing TV and then film.

Terry Gilliam: I produced the fumettis by organizing locations, costumes, and actors. I learned an awful lot. The thing about Harvey was that he always wanted to be a director, so the cartoons in Mad were very filmic. He used the frames like a camera.

Vice: What did you do after Help! folded?

Terry Gilliam: I hitchhiked my way across Europe. When I was coming back from Turkey and I didn't have enough money to return to the States, I stopped in Paris. I went to see a friend who was editing a magazine there and asked for a job so I could get money to go home and he said, "OK, I want you to fill up two pages with as many jokes as you can about snowmen." And so I sat in this tiny little hotel room in Paris freezing my ass off drawing snowmen, and it got me enough money to get a plane ticket. When I got back I didn't have any place to stay but Harvey's attic. [laughs] It was grand, it was a great time.

Vice: Wow. And when you got back, was that when John Cleese asked you to do animations for Monty Python?

Terry Gilliam: No. After living at Harvey's for a bit I moved to LA. Do you remember Joel Siegel, the film critic on Good Morning America? He was one of my best friends then, and he and I did a book called The Cocktail People. I think it made me 12 and a half dollars, but it did lead to Joel getting me a job at an advertising agency called Carson/Roberts. They invented two things: the smiley face and the phrase "Have a happy day." That's what the receptionists would say when you called. They inflicted that on the world. Joel and I worked there for a year, and when I'd had enough of it I wanted to move back to Europe since I had fallen in love with it. I was living with an English girl at the time, so the two of us came to London and I worked in magazines there for the better part of a year. Cleese was the one person I knew there, so I called him up one day. John, by then, was very well known on television there. I asked him to introduce me to someone in television since I wanted to get out of magazines. I met a producer who was working on Do Not Adjust Your Set, where Mike Palin, Terry Jones, and Eric Idle were writing and performing. The producer was an amateur cartoonist. He liked my cartoons and he bought a couple of written sketches from me. So I was thrust upon the other three, much to the chagrin of Mike and Terry. Suddenly I was in that group, and when I did a cartoon for them, that was the beginning of the connection.

Vice: Was it an animated cartoon?

Terry Gilliam: Yeah. Basically what happened was Eric and I became good friends and we started working on another show called We Have Ways of Making You Laugh. There were five or six of us who would sit around as the core group. I was the cartoonist. A guest would come on the show, I would finish off a caricature of them, and at the end the camera would mix to my drawing of the guest. One week I suggested doing an animated film. They gave me two weeks and £400 to make it. The only way to do that was to simply cut out the drawings and move them around.

Vice: So your famous stop-action collage style was a financial necessity at first.

Terry Gilliam: No one had ever seen anything like that on television before, and overnight I became an animator. [laughs] That started a second season of Do Not Adjust Your Set. There were six of us then, and that became Python.

Vice: Every year there's a kid in every middle school doing the dead-parrot sketch. It just never goes away. Kids who don't fit in always discover Monty Python.

Terry Gilliam: You know what's funny is that in the States they seem to start discovering it around 11 years old. That seems like such a young audience for it. But they suddenly bump into Python and I think the absurdity of the whole thing gets them going.

Vice: That's when I got into it. I didn't like what was popular culture at the time and Python made sense to me.

Terry Gilliam: That's what's interesting about Python-on one hand it's very intelligent and erudite stuff and on the other hand it's completely silly and juvenile. So it always appeals to smarter kids or more anarchic kids who have difficulty with authority. We were those people and we seem to pass on that attitude to new generations.

Vice: So yeah, I don't know what to ask because I know so much about Monty Python. [laughs] Maybe it's been talked about too much.

Terry Gilliam: There's so much that's been written about it. When we are interviewed there's kind of a set thing we say. I don't recall the nightmares and the terrible times. I only remember the good bits. It was a very special time because the BBC was so laissez-faire. Once they said "yes" we could just get on with it.

Vice: I don't think that really happens anymore.

Terry Gilliam: Well, you've got The Simpsons and South Park, and thank God for Family Guy, which is wonderful. Anyway, the BBC was an old and lazy organization that just let things happen, but now it's become terribly bureaucratic. It's full of executives. It's almost like a Hollywood studio. There are so many people making a living managing and making decisions and passing the buck down. When we were there, the producer would be given the go-ahead, there would be the money, and you would just do it.

Vice: Would you say that you get bored easily?

Terry Gilliam: I can get bored quite easily but then I get to doing something because I can't stand it. I occupy myself instead of going into a depression.

Vice: You just channel your positive energy?

Terry Gilliam: Yeah, though it gets harder as you get older because it's easier to get bored. Things are less surprising. But, being visually excitable, I can sit and look at something and be amazed at, like, a wood carving over here or the shade on this lamp. Taking in the world around me and enjoying it on a visual level gets me through a lot of the boring moments of life.

Vice: Do you get depressed, though?

Terry Gilliam: I get depressed a lot. I spend a lot of time being depressed. Rather than fighting it, I just go with it. I let the depression take me down to the bottom of the pit. When there's no lower to go, then suddenly you start crawling back up.

Vice: Sometimes a person who can confront depression and the grim aspects of life doesn't like other people. They don't want to talk to anyone, much less worry about selling an idea to a producer or an agent.

Terry Gilliam: You're probably right. But I actually do like people. I'm not frightened by them and they surprise me. And also, talking to you now or talking to a group of people, I'm slightly different from who I really am. I'm outside of myself, performing. Then I go back home and my wife gets to see the truth.

Vice: I can relate to that. And when you're by yourself and deprived of stimulus it's just you and your thoughts.

Terry Gilliam: But actually that's one thing that I'm fighting for so much now. Because of Facebook and Twitter and all this crap, people don't have time to be alone and confront themselves and who they really are. It's the thing that really worries me the most about the modern world. People just seem to be extensions of a social order now. We have a house in Italy with no telephone or television. My son would be there, and he was used to playing his video games and blah, blah, blah, and he'd go there and get bored. My wife would say, "Well, we have to do something to keep him entertained," and I'd say, "No, let him get bored and you'll see what happens." After about two days of boredom and saying "There's fuck all to do here," he started inventing things. He was creating a really interesting world, because he was involved in creating it. He wasn't just having it created for him. I think so much of what we do is now done for us. It's digested, it's handed to you. I like video games but I also think they're dangerous because of how much time and energy they consume. It's not the same as reading a book.

Vice: You also read a book at your own pace, while TV and video games keep going even if you stop.

Terry Gilliam: [laughs] Exactly. Then you're filled with this terrible feeling like [sinister voice], "They don't need you." Another thing is this: My son had the Tony Hawk video game and he was brilliant at it. Then he started skateboarding and he realized that it actually hurts. And this is what bothers me about so many of these video games. They've removed that element of pain. You just sit there and you watch your life force go down, but you're not experiencing pain. You're sat there flipping through the air, and then you try to go out and do it in the real world and: "Ouch!"

Vice: After Jabberwocky, you made Time Bandits, a movie that I loved a lot as a child. It sits in my mind along with Jim Henson's Labyrinth. I wanted to watch it over and over again. It's also one of your most positive films even though it has a lot of scary elements. I mean, the main character's parents die in the end!

Terry Gilliam: Part of it is the journey of a kid who has a lot of heroes. He goes through history meeting them, and he realizes that they are not quite what he thought they were-not quite so heroic-and ultimately he earns the right to stand on his own two feet. His parents should be listening to him as opposed to ignoring him.

Vice: It's a common theme in comics, too, like in Batman and Superman. Kids secretly want to kill their parents and be free of the restrictions they put on them. Anyway, just thinking about Time Bandits now makes me happy. And George Harrison was involved in the film. He was my favorite Beatle. I don't want to get off topic here, but can I ask you what George was like?

Terry Gilliam: He wasn't the quiet Beatle, which most people thought he was. He was very funny and outspoken. "Sardonic," I think, is the word. He was quite wicked and he was a great gardener. He spent the last 20 years of his life tending 37 acres of one of the greatest gardens in the world. He was spiritual but he could joke like the best, and he was the number-one Python fan.

Vice: Amazing.

Terry Gilliam: George was a special guy. You don't meet many like him because his feet were so firmly on the ground even though his head and his heart were floating high.

Vice: Time Bandits, to me, has a happy ending. The main character ends up free of his parents and I can imagine his adventures continuing. I also liked that Sean Connery, who played King Agamemnon earlier in the film, turns out to be a fireman at the end.

Terry Gilliam: Connery wasn't supposed to be there at the end. He was supposed to die when they have the big battle with Evil-all of these archers were going to turn up and Evil gets turned into a pincushion. Connery was supposed to be leading that group, and then he was supposed to be crushed by a falling column. But we'd run out of time with him. We only had X number of days with Connery, so I had to kill the character Fidgit instead, which was a better idea anyway.

Vice: Even though it gutted me when I was a child.

Terry Gilliam: So there was a point when I didn't quite have the ending of the film sorted out. I remember talking to Sean, and he had suggested that Agamemnon come back as the fireman. He was in tax exile, so he was just in London for a day on the way to his accountant when we grabbed him for literally an hour and got two shots of him, including the one in which he winks at the main character. It wasn't until a month or two later that I actually wrote the scenes around that. Films write themselves, ultimately.

Click here to read the Full interview with Terry Gilliam in Vice Magazine

 

 

 

 

Tags: terry gilliam vice magazine time bandits monty python 

comments 0