"An hour of entertainment, an hour of nightmare and pain"- Digg talked to Terry Gilliam

It's probably a cliché to describe any filmmaker trying to do something different as an iconoclast, but in the case of Terry Gilliam, no other word seems to fit the bill quite as well. I mean, c'mon, here's a guy who makes kids movies in which a dog blows up. So do the leading kid's parents, but still... a dog!

‘Time Bandits', ‘Brazil', ‘Baron Munchausen', ‘The Fisher King', '12 Monkeys', ‘Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas', ‘The Brothers Grimm', ‘Tideland'... Alright, so the list isn't quite endless, but you better believe it's distinctive - nobody will ever mistake a Terry Gilliam film with anyone else's. Its sights and sounds can be exhausting and overbearing, but they are also consistently funny and insightful. You love them or hate them, but you cannot remain indifferent to them.

I had the chance to talk to Gilliam recently, about his work so far and about his expectations for the future - his own, and all of ours.

"Reviewers are like studio executives" - Gilliam and the critics

When your movies originally appear, reactions are usually very mixed, and then after a few years, people tend to look at them again and re-evaluate them, finding out they really were quite good. Why do you think this is?
I think the problem is with reviewers, not with my films. Reviewers are often trapped in clichéd ideas of what movies are, and what storytelling is. And when you deal with these things sort of differently, they respond by rejecting it or being confused by it. They watch too many films, is their problem.

Does that still bother you?
It doesn't bother me one way or the other. They've got the same reaction as a lot of studio executives. They always say: "Oh God, Terry, we love everything you've done in the past, but not this one. This one isn't for us, doesn't look like it's going to work." So there seems to be no difference between reviewers and studio executives.

And then in a few years, they're going to love what you've done recently?
Yeah, I'm quite bored with it actually, it's been going on like that for 25 years. It's so repetitive, it makes me crazy. I keep wanting to be surprised by people getting it the first time, but they don't. When you make a film that seems to take up the gauntlet, before it gets to the people, it has to pass first by the executives and then by the reviewers. It takes a while before it gets to the public. And people forget about this, they forget that my films get very mixed reviews.

I showed ‘Brazil' to a friend of mine recently. I asked him afterwards what he thought, and he said: "Ask me in two days." I asked him two days later and he said: "I loved it."
(laughs) I love that reaction, where people really aren't sure of what they think. This is something that I discovered in ‘Tideland' as well. It was actually very much like ‘Brazil', because those two pictures are the most extreme I've ever done, and so the reactions were extreme too.

"Enough other people make movies with cute kids" - Gilliam and childhood

Certain themes keep coming up in your films: childhood, dreams vs reality etc... As you start looking for stories to tell and movies to make, do you specifically go looking for material that incorporates those themes, or does it just happen?
I think it just happens. It's the result of ideas that are floating around in my head and have to get out, or scripts that I read that sort of hit nerve ends. I react very instinctively to things, I don't intellectualize everything. If I react to it, I go and do it.

One of those themes is childhood. You often make movies with children in them, but there's always a rough edge to them. There are no cute kiddies in the Terry Gilliam universe.
I think that enough other people make movies about that other universe, with the cute kids. Kids are cute, or can be cute, but that's a sort of sentimentalized version of childhood. I think it's more interesting to explore the other side. ‘Alice in Wonderland' is one of my favourite books. I hadn't read it in 20 years, but I read it again six months ago, and it's terrifying. Much more shocking and disturbing than anything I've ever done.

In ‘Tideland', much was made of a scene in which little Jeliza-Rose prepares a shot of heroine for her father. To what extent was Jodelle Ferland aware of what was really going on?
As much as a child can be. She doesn't have the experience an adult has, so when you introduce things like heroin and junkies, it means something else to a kid than to an adult. Junkies go through a lot of misery and pain, but there are also a lot of junkies who just get on with life. It doesn't destroy them, in fact it makes their life bearable. I don't moralize about that, and I don't think a child has any idea. In ‘Tideland', if she were preparing insuline for a diabetic parent, then that would be alright. But for the child, there's no difference. She's giving the parent what he needs to get through. It's about a girl who is a good daughter, looking after a parent.

Is there an evolution in that theme as opposed to ‘Brazil'? At the end of ‘Brazil', Sam Lowry goes mad and that's his happy ending: he doesn't have to live in that world anymore. In ‘Tideland', the parents take drugs to escape from reality and it kills them.
It's actually more alike to the ending of ‘Time Bandits', where I blow up the parents at the end. It's about children being able to survive without their parents, and exploring that idea. In ‘Time Bandits', the boy wanted to escape from his parents. And his final escape is their death, he's on his own. And in ‘Tideland', Jeliza-Rose is surrounded by these overbearing people, who make up her life. Except that she has this other life, which manages to pull her through. ‘Brazil' was me trying to make a happy ending out of madness. He may not be socially very interesting anymore, but in his own mind, he's living in a very happy world. I don't think madness is the worst thing that can happen to people.

"I don't know what the truth is anymore" - Gilliam and politics

Let's talk about ‘Brazil' for a moment. Today, a lot of people are calling that a visionary movie. People getting bags drawn over their heads and being carried off make me think about Guantanamo Bay.
I thought we were making a documentary at the time (laughs). All of that was going on, it just wasn't so transparent. Terrorism was rampant in the eighties: Bader-Meinhoff in Germany, Red Brigade in Italy... That was what people were talking about, planes were being hijacked, people were being incarcerated in South-American jails, where they actually did have to pay [as in ‘Brazil'] to be in jail. Almost everything in that film was true to what was going on in 1984. It just wasn't so popular as it is now, or so transparent. Now, we have Homeland Security in America, which is basically the Ministry of Information [the ominous government organisation controlling life in ‘Brazil']. Here's an organisation that, if there aren't terrorists, could probably invent them. They got a feeling that Iraq is the best place to be creating terrorists for the future, and so the system survives, because they have an enemy to justify the terrible expense. Like everything, these things have become more clichéd in the world. People are just dealing with sound bytes now, very few of them are thinking.
But things like the bags over people's heads and Guantanamo, that intrigued me, because I was thinking of something very different at the time, I was thinking about the time I worked at the post office, and the mail bags there.

‘Brazil' is like Kafka, only funnier. The power of a signed piece of paper is absolute, everything is made to be efficient, only nothing works.
I think that's the way the world works. Only everybody's too afraid to admit that. It's amazing how, on the one hand, things are incredibly well organised, technology is incredibly good, but it also fails all the time. It's as if people don't want to believe that. When ‘Brazil' came out, I was in Chicago giving a talk, and I was talking about how technology systems fail. And people found this hard to believe - this was 1985. And when we walked out of the lecture hall, we found everybody watching television because the space shuttle, the first Challenger, had just blown up. I said: "See, systems fail". That's what they do, and yet people want to believe in systems. That's one way of getting through life, I suppose, you believe in things.

Your illusions help you get through things?
Yeah, you live in a world of little lies, so you don't have to look into some dark rooms. Today, what's so difficult in life, is that there's so much information pouring in on us, 24 hours a day, there's no escaping it. 24-hour news on TV is the most outrageous thing, because there isn't 24 hours worth of news every day. And so you've got to create news. And I don't know what the truth is anymore. All I can talk about with any sense of truth, is what is going on around me. With everything else, you're caught in various stories that are being spun. And you have to make a guess - and all those stories are semi-fictitious. But they all kind of fall into categories that we can understand. I was talking to a guy the other night, who publishes poetry here in England, and he spent half his life dealing with Hamas in Palestine. The stories that I hear from him first-hand from Gaza, have nothing to do with what I'm reading in the newspapers.

How optimistic or how pessimistic would you say that you are about the future?
A nightmare! Things will keep changing, and people will either adapt or not adapt. Humans are pretty good at thinking up ways to survive. But we're also rapacious, we can't seem to stop ourselves. Humanity really can't control itself. That's why ultimately, we're in for a thrashing every so often. That's what world wars are, or plagues. And people think plagues are a thing of the past, they're not. They're going on all the time. Most people don't even remember that the flue epidemic after WWI killed more people than the war did. Wars occur when systems become so outdated or out of touch with whatever the reality is around them, that it collapses. And it usually collapses by one group of people attacking another group. There's a blood bath, and then people start to work at restoring the system again. Which is a really good period when everything's fresh, and new, and exciting. And then you see those systems become corrupt and bogged down in their own bureaucracy, not doing the job they're supposed to do. And eventually, the thing blows up and people face it again.

"I like their money and distribution, but not their ideas" - Gilliam and Hollywood

The movie business is a system in and of itself. In America today, you've got an entire secondary industry of independent films, coming out of Sundance. Would you say that it's become easier for independent films to get made and be released as opposed to, say, 20 years ago?
It doesn't feel that way to me, because you still have to get the attention of the public. Movies like ‘Little Miss Sunshine' got picked up by a major studio. Again, I can only talk about what happened to ‘Tideland'. We were a truly independent film, the production company, Recorded Picture Company, had no studio connection, and they had no money to plug the film. So nobody knew about it. And also, there's a very limited venue available for small films. I don't know what it's like in Belgium, but here in London, the choice of foreign films, small films, is really very small. I've been going to a lot of festivals with ‘Tideland', and saw all these films that will never get into theatres, certainly not in England.

Do you think that DVD can maybe make up for the chances that these movies don't get in theatres?
I think so. DVD is where word of mouth actually begins to work. On ‘Tideland', the majority of the reviews were negative. But now, daily I get Google Alerts, seeing what happens. And you notice people saying: "I read bad reviews, didn't think I was going to like it, didn't go see it, now I saw it on DVD and wow, it was fantastic". And they blog about that film, and the next day you notice more people have gone to see it. The DVD gives movies a chance to grow. Go back to ‘Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas': we were nothing in the box office in America, we didn't even make 10 million dollars. And on DVD, it's probably the biggest hit I've got.

Talking about ‘Fear and Loathing', that movie is basically chaos on film. As you're making that, do you ever wonder whether you'll lose your audience at a certain point, or do you just not care at that moment?
In that instance, I was just trying to make the book. I loved it, it's an important book. I tried to capture the sense of it, the feeling of it, do justice to it, be true to that. And if there was a film at the end of all that: great. If not: so be it, then it wasn't a film. ‘Tideland' was very much the same way: I was making the book. There is a structure in there, but it's not a normal structure. It was more about energy and ideas pouring out. But the main thing was to be true to the book. Hunter Thompson thought we achieved that, so that's all that matters to me.

You made ‘Fear and Loathing' right after ‘12 Monkeys', your biggest hit up to then. After ‘12 Monkeys', you were suddenly a Hollywood director. Making ‘Fear and Loathing' then, you know that you're giving up that reputation right there, don't you?
I don't honestly think about that. Whether people see me as a Hollywood director, an independent, that's just what people are writing about me, inventing their own stories. ‘Fear and Loathing' was all Hollywood money. I've always needed Hollywood money - well, not always, I started out with pop stars giving me money, for ‘The Holy Grail' and ‘Jabberwocky'. Ultimately, even on the ‘Life of Brian' and ‘Time Bandits', it was George Harrison, really, who acted as our patron. It was only after that I started getting involved with Hollywood money. It's their money and distribution I like, but not their control or ideas.

And that's the conflict that keeps coming back.
Yeah, because to take someone's money and then ignore the way they see the world is not what you're supposed to do. (laughs)

You must have had opportunities somewhere along the line to make ‘Lethal Weapon 5' or ‘The Mummy Part III', something like that, but you never did.
I do get sent these scripts, though less and less now. When the films I made were financially successful at the box office, I was getting offers for everything. Should I have made ‘Mr and Mrs Smith'? Should I have done ‘Aeon Flux'? Of course not. But I get those scripts, though they don't come very often now.

After ‘Tideland', they know you're never going to learn.
Right. (laughs)

"Critics only write about the flashy parts" - Gilliam and actors

You often cast very big stars like Bruce Willis, Brad Pitt, Johnny Depp, and then you give them the least star-like, least attractive role they've ever had in their lives.
(pleased with himself) Yup. (laughs) Again, that's my anti-Hollywood, anti-commercial mentality, where you take big, glamorous people and you just turn them upside down. Like Robert De Niro in ‘Brazil', I put a hood over his face.

You barely see him in the movie.
(laughs) Exactly! That's me being perverse for the sake of it, but it's also partly that that's what the character in the script demanded, he had to look like that. And the actors, in most cases, loved it. I didn't ask Brad [Pitt, in '12 Monkeys'] to put on the beady eye and chop his hair like that, that was all his idea. Because he was trying to escape from the image of ‘Legends of the Fall', with his long, beautiful blonde hair. I tend to find these actors at the point in their career when they're trying to escape whatever the image is that they're being packaged as.

And to what extent do you allow improvisation among the actors? When I'm watching Robin Williams in ‘The Fisher King', I'm wondering how much of that is scripted and how much of it just him going off.
Most of it's scripted. But in the case of Robin, you have to allow him some room to play. That's who he is. One of the reasons I wanted Jeff Bridges in ‘The Fisher King', is because he's so grounded and solid, and I knew he would hold Robin and myself down. Most of what Robin did in ‘The Fisher King' was scripted, but then there were scenes where he'd want to ad-lib. And I'd let him do that, and then say: "Okay, that bit worked, and the rest of it, forget about it." It was kind of like a pressure-valve, letting him get rid of some of his need to improvise. And then we'd pull him back to where he needed to be.

Jeff Bridges probably has the most thankless role in the movie: he has to carry the whole movie, and then Robin Williams runs away with it.
That was the joke of it: Robin's role was nominated for the Academy Award, and Jeff was ignored in the whole thing. And Jeff is the movie, he holds it together. And that's what amazes me about reviewers: they don't understand that. They write about the flashy part.

It was the same with Bruce Willis and Brad Pitt in ‘12 Monkeys': everyone was saying how great Brad Pitt was, while Bruce Willis was carrying the film.
Yeah, he was holding the whole thing together. And that's just the way it is. Ultimately, it's the actors that are the centre of the movie. With ‘Brazil' too, the reviews I read, certainly in England, didn't even mention Jonathan Pryce's performance. They were talking about the sets, the camerawork and everything. But the movie only works because Jonathan holds the thing together. I'm surprised at how reviewers, so-called critics, don't understand what makes a movie work.

That's the effect of having to see a movie and then an hour later having to justify your position on it.
That's why on ‘Tideland', I was telling the distributors to show the movie to reviewers a week before their deadline. So they had time to think about it.

"Go fix it yourself" - Gilliam and the need for control

You're known as a kind of control freak. Would you say that that's a fair image?
It's not, actually. Anybody who works with me knows that I know what I'm doing, and I know what I want, but I'm totally collaborative. Half the ideas on my movies are other people's ideas. I'm involved in every aspect of it, my fingerprints are all over everything, from the music to the costumes and set design. But it's all totally collaborative. So if we're doing costumes, the costume designer comes in with a lot of stuff and we bring the actor in and talk about it. For example, on ‘Fisher King' we spent three days deciding on Jeff [Bridges]'s clothes. We just sit there, the designer, myself and Jeff. We're playing. It's a way of discovering it. So, while I like to keep things under control, I'm not a control freak. (laughs)

The battle over ‘Brazil' was well-documented, but there were some conflicts over the editing of ‘The Brothers Grimm' as well. I was watching the DVD recently with your commentary on it, kind of waiting for the dirt on Harvey Weinstein, and I didn't get it, you didn't mention it.
(laughs) I was so bored with going on about Harvey at that point, I decided to ignore him. But the thing was, in editing ‘The Brothers Grimm', they really weren't involved, except for saying "No, we don't like it, no, we don't like it"... And so, the third time they said that, I said: "Fine, go fix it yourself." And I went off to make ‘Tideland'.

And by the time you'd made ‘Tideland', they'd fixed it?
No. They'd given up, because they couldn't do anything. Here's how ridiculous they were. It's a form of snobbery: they only wanted to work with award-winning directors and editors. I won't mention names, but the day I said "why don't you guys take the film and do what you want with it and then come back and talk to me", they called a certain famous director, saying that I didn't have time to finish my film, and they would like him to come in, look at it, write some new scenes and direct them. I called him when I heard this, saying, "I'm happy with the film", and he backed off. And then they got another, Academy-award winning editor, who I know and had shown the film, and they got him in and he said: "Well, I could change a couple of shots here and there, but basically, that's the film - it's there, it works. There's nothing I can do." And they basically threw him out of their office. "You're no use, get out". So they couldn't do anything. So, in the end, when I was editing ‘Tideland', they called me up and asked me to finish the film my way. The problem with ‘Brothers Grimm' started very early on, with heated debates over casting, and the business with Matt Damon's make-up [who famously was not allowed to wear a prosthetic nose], and the firing of [director of photography] Nicola Peccorini. Those are the moments that destroyed the joy of making that movie. Then it became a job, more than an obsession or a passion.

"Beyond Kafka" - Gilliam and the process

What is your fondest memory from a movie set?
(groans) Oh dear (laughs)

This is me asking these terribly general questions.
I know, it's tough, ‘cause I just don't hold on to these sorts of things. It's all a big blur to me. I love the process and I hate the process. I think maybe the best moment was the night ‘Out of Africa' was premiering in New York and the critics voted ‘Brazil' best picture, best director etc over ‘Out of Africa'. It never gets better than that. (laughs)

Just look at which of the two has survived, it's ‘Brazil'.
Yeah, I think it is. But what amazes me, is that I'll bump into people and ‘Baron Munchausen' is their favourite film, they just love it. And then the more ordinary people love ‘Fisher King' the most, because it's the most romantic. And then there are others who were kids when ‘Time Bandits' came out, and that's their favourite film because it hit them at the right age.

To me, it's still Brazil.
That's the one I'll probably have on my gravestone. (laughs)

And are you happy with that?
Yeah, it'll do.

Okay, the inevitable Don Quichote-question: how big are the chances of ever seeing ‘The Man Who Killed Don Quichote'? [After an attempt to make this film in 2000 failed due to weather conditions, lack of funds and illness of the lead actor, the script got stuck in a dragnet of legal entanglements. Gilliam has been trying to get it back ever since.]
We were just talking about it yesterday. We're involved in the most ridiculous world of French lawyers. We actually had a deal at the beginning of this year, and we thought: "Okay, we've got the script back". But it's still going on. One piece of paper has been signed which says they agree to continue talking about letting us film the script. But it's still a really absurd situation, beyond Kafka. It makes no sense. They're just sitting on this script that they can't do anything with. Because they can't do it without me. It belongs to a company that doesn't even exist anymore, all that exists are lawyers. But still, we work on it non-stop. It's coming to a point where I don't know what to do with it.

"The dustbin of history" - Gilliam and the web

After ‘Lost in La Mancha' [the documentary detailing the aborted shoot], there seemed to be a lot of good-will towards you, and then after ‘Brothers Grimm' and ‘Tideland', much of that seemed to disappear.
Yeah, don't trust your fans. That's what I've always said, and that's why I don't make movies for them. I make movies for myself. You can't count on people. Especially now with the way the web works. It's like a mob mentality at work. ‘Brothers Grimm' was definitely not the best film I've made, there's no doubt about that, but it's not a bad film. And there are parts of that film that I'm really proud of. But whatever the expectation was, it didn't live up to it, so they just turned. And then ‘Tideland' made so many people crazy, that they're now committing me to the dustbin of history. (laughs) And they write the most outrageous things, everybody's got opinions now, and everybody has an outlet for their opinions, which is interesting.

Like you have 24-hour news, the internet is 24-hour opinion.
Yeah. And much of it is just gossip, it's not based on much fact, in many cases. But there it is. So we have this noise around us, constantly. It was interesting, with ‘Tideland', that was the one film that I really kept all the reviews of, because I just want to see what it's like in five years time. But it's been very interesting to monitor that one, see what the reactions were. More people liked it than you'd think. It's quite extraordinary, and what I like, is that I can't predict who's going to like it, or why they don't like it. I've watched people coming out of that cinema with great big smiles on their faces, they are just in heaven. And other people are walking out vomiting.

A lot of your movies are love-it or hate-it affairs.
Yeah, and to me that's a good thing, at least it's a sign that I'm making something that's affecting people, it's touching nerve ends. It's doing something besides providing two hours of entertainment. I hope that within that, there's maybe an hour of entertainment, and an hour of nightmare and pain. For me, the only thing that matters is whether I can get money for the next film.

And is it working out now?
Well, this week is the critical week. By the end of the week, I think I'll know whether we have the financing for the next one.

A final question: if you had to pick one scene from your movies that would represent the quintessential Terry Gilliam film, what would that be?
Oh God... (laughs) You see, I don't watch my films. (thinks hard) Oh... shit. It must be somewhere in ‘Brazil', one of those scenes. (laughs) Maybe it's something like in ‘Brazil', when the restaurant blows up. And life goes on. People are just worried about getting dust in their food and trying to carry on their conversation. (laughs) I think that's pretty much my view of the world. It's the world we live in: in half of the world, there's wars going on, there's starvation, but basically, I'm concerned about the flavour in my latte at Starbucks. I think that's the way the world works.
And I think there's another really lovely one in ‘Tideland', when the girl is in the field, and the house tips and goes underwater. And she's swimming. That, to me, is beautiful. You're outside in this stunning nature. And then you descend underwater, where your father's floating, dead. It's all about contrast, about juxtaposing things that don't normally go together, and see what happens.

I always think that a lot of your work can be summed up in the Woody Allen-line "I've been struggling with reality for all of my life, but lately, I feel like I've been winning out".
(laughs) That's a nice one. Now, the question is: what does winning from reality mean, does it mean, living outside of reality?

The quote means winning from reality by living in it less and less.
But I don't want to. I like reality, I just like my version of reality. When people say that my work is about reality and fantasy, that's not really true, it's not about fantasy, it's about redefining reality. And trying to invent your own reality. Because it seems to me, we're surrounded by media telling us what reality is, but it's just their version of reality, and I just try to encourage people to try and find their own reality, that makes sense. It's not about escaping from the world, it's about recreating the world in a way that makes sense to them. That makes life worth living.

So that's not a sad thing, it's positive?
It's a totally positive thing, to me, you can't get through life unless you do that. People who get lost in other people's reality, or with the reality with which they're presented, they're not in touch with themselves. I'm not at all particularly Eastern in my philosophy, but I am, I suppose, because as the Hindus would say: it's all Maya, it's all illusion. Everybody's asking questions about the afterlife. Christians are on the rise, Muslims are on the rise, and they're all selling the afterlife. I'm interested in this one, because this one's all we've got, and you've got to make this one as beautiful and wondrous as you can.

Door Dennis Van Dessel 06/09/2007 - categorie : movie -

verstuur dit artikel aan een vriend    Share on Facebook

 Lees de reacties (2) van anderen of geef uw mening

  Reacties

great interview
Door www.zoutonline.nl op 17/09/2007 om 14:09

Dennis. It's a fantastic interview. However there are not many surprises, only proving how sincere Terry is. Still, I like to hear him blabbing.

Door lovely op 16/07/2008 om 05:42

Gefeliciteerd , een interview met 1 van de meest innovatieve regisseurs vd laatste jaren .
Vreemd dat hier niet meer reacties staan . Is dit interview trouwens ooit gepubliceerd in een krant/tijdschrift ?

  Reageren