“You’ve got to work at maintaining your version of the

world. So start being alone!” An Interview with

Terry Gilliam
by Maša Peče

Maša Peče is a film festival organizer, mainly involved with the production and
organization of two core festivals in Slovenia: Kino Otok/Isola Cinema International
Film Festival and Animateka International Animation Film Festival. Living between
Ljubljana and Prague, she also cooperates in various capacities with other festivals,
organizations and institutions devoted to cinema, such as Art House cinema Kinodvor in
Ljubljana, Karlovy Vary International Film Festival and Art House cinema Světozor in
Prague, Czech Republic.

Just as his films spill back and forth over

the boundary between fantasy and reality, it seems that Terry Gilliam himself inhabits
contrasting worlds. Described as a visionary and a dreamer by both colleagues and
critics, he is in fact a meticulous and skilled craftsman; a conjurer of fantastical worlds of
fairytale knights and flying men, yet a keen critic and commentator with a wonderfully
acute sense of reality. At times brutally sincere, he is in no sense harmful or malevolent
in his intent. He is a lively host bursting with a healthy sense of humour, yet a zealous
prophet of his so-called aloneness. He is a little girl and an ageing Don Quixote. This
interview was conducted in August 2009 at the first edition of River Film Fest in Pisek,
Czech Republic, where Gilliam was a festival guest.

***

As in your films, there are some strange juxtapositions in your life. You say you
grew up on radio but then you studied Fine Arts. How do you jump from a verbal
inspiration to such a visual expression?

Actually, I ended up with Political Sciences. There was a period of Art for I think one
semester. But I didn’t like the Art History teacher, so I quit. And then I went to Political
Science, because it only had four required courses. And then you could take Drama and
Oriental Philosophy … So, I actually created or gave myself a very liberal education. But
the fact is Political Science was very important.

Yet, you ended up doing cartoons and illustrations.

I always did cartoons. Ever since I was a kid, I could always draw. Cartoons are great
because you get immediate feedback. Like, for instance, when I do my signature with a
little drawing and everybody goes, “Ooh! Ooh!” It feels good. So, that‘s why I do it. It’s
purely that.

Cartoons were always just easy. But when it came to graduating, I almost failed the Fine
Art course because I was busy doing other things. The things I did were good; I just
didn’t do enough. I talked the sculpture professor into giving me a D and not a FAIL.

The National Guard: was that something you just couldn’t get out of or something
you wanted to do?

You have to be either in the Army for two years or you can do National Guard, and you
go to summer camps every year for several years. But you can still have a life. You don’t
have to go in for two years solid.

But I cheated and got out of that. I cheat most of my life.

And you wanted to be a Presbyterian Missionary?

Oh, yeah. I went to college on a Presbyterian scholarship. That’s how I got through
college. In my family, Church was very big. Growing up in Minneapolis, they were
Lutherans and it was a basically Scandinavian community that we lived in. And Church
was the centre of the community. You know it was like it used to always be.

So, you don’t see Church as one of the bureaucracies or authoritarian regimes you
keep commenting on in your films?

No. It wasn’t the Catholic Church, it was Protestantism. And in that age Church was like
a community and that was great. I loved it.

Actually, I liked the Bible. I thought they were good stories, really good stories. And it
was just natural. I didn’t think about it: parents went to Church, children went to Church.
That’s what we did; that was our life. And like with everything, I become fairly
obsessive; I become a zealot.

When I get into anything, I’m very serious about it. So, I thought, “Well, you have to do
good things in the world.” I mean that’s a fairly reasonable thing. You don’t have to be
religious to decide you can make the world a better place.

And the Christian Missions in Africa are okay?

Well, some of them are okay. I don’t like the evangelical fundamentalist ones, but the
other ones are doing good work. They’re like any charity; they’re doing good work. So,
that’s fine.

Even in the late 18th century, the Churches were out everywhere in the world, but they
weren’t as dogmatic and they weren’t too busy trying to change the world in the way they
did in the 19th century. That’s when the Evangelicals went out to convert people to be
like ‘me’, with no interest in anybody else’s culture.

So, I was on the liberal side. I thought being a missionary would be good. I’d go out in
the world and educate and do some good things. But in Church I was always making
jokes and too many people didn’t like my jokes … about God. And I said, “What kind of
God is this you believe in that can’t take my jokes?”

What would be such a joke about God?

Oh, I don’t know. I just made fun of things. It’s always a way of testing what I find
important. If it’s important to me, I make jokes about it to see if it can stand it. And
apparently the God of the Presbyterians of Panorama City wasn’t strong enough to deal
with my jokes. [Laughs]

So, I said, “Enough of all this. I’m not going to talk to you people, because you’ve
stopped thinking.” And that to me is what’s important: to keep people thinking and not
just accepting what is in front of them. Most of my childhood was just accepting what
was there. And it was great; I didn’t have a problem. We lived in the country; it was a
wonderful life. Why wouldn’t I want to accept it?

And then, when you get older, you start seeing what the rest of the world is like and you
suddenly realize, “Oh, it’s not as nice as the world that I was in when I was a kid.” And
then you get angry at the things that are wrong in the world and you think, “Well, I’m
educated and I’m privileged enough to be able to read. I should be doing something to
make the world better than it is.” And that’s the thing with Monty Python [and the Flying
Circus]. It was trying to make people wake up. People are asleep most of the time, just
floating through life. They’re peasants. There’s nothing wrong with being a peasant. But,
if you’re a peasant that’s rampaging around the world like America was and causing – as
far as I am concerned – chaos, disaster and destruction, I felt responsible for being an
American and an intelligent American with an education. So I felt, “Well I’ve got to do
something.” And what I did was I left America. I quit. [Laughs]

You renounced your American citizenship in 2006. Was that a practical decision?

It was practical, mainly. I’d lived in England for 42 years and I was paying taxes in both
countries. This is stupid after a while. And I discovered that, when I die, the Americans
assess everything I own in the world. My wife would have to sell our house in England to
pay the taxes. And I said, “This is stupid. So, goodbye!”
When you first came to London, what was the Pythons’ perception of you? On the
one hand, you’re an American surrounded by such a British sense of humour. On
the other hand, often within feature-filmmaking circles, animation and illustration
is something that is frowned upon.

Well, it wasn’t Python at the time; they

were different groups. I knew John Cleese from my time in New York at Help! magazine.
So, he was one person I knew when I came to England, and the English girl I came with.
I was still working in magazines and I said to John, “Introduce me to somebody in
television, because I want to get out of magazine work!” And I met the producer of these
children’s shows that Mike [Palin], Eric [Idle] and Terry [Jones] were doing and blah
blah blah. That led to another programme that I was cartooning.

Then I solved a problem with an animation and that was the first time I’d ever done one
properly. It was done cheaply: I would cut out things and move them around. And
nobody had seen that before!

So, it’s on television with nine million people watching and, overnight, I’m an animator,
because nobody had seen anything like that. I mean, there had been that style of
animation out there for a long time, but it was only turning out in art houses and film
festivals. And, of course, nobody goes to those places really. [Laughs]

Suddenly I was in demand and I was being offered all sorts of other work. And that led to
another series of this children’s show with Mike, Terry and Eric. Everything grew in a
very organic way. There was no plan.

There were four of us on this children’s show, and then there were John and Graham
[Chapman]. John wanted to work with Mike; he got a deal at BBC and whoop! The six
people together – Python! And that was it.

They all loved what I was doing, because I was on the same comedic and intellectual
wavelength, but doing something very different with all this visual, violent and
nonsensical stuff. It just seemed to work.

Somebody told me this later, but the animations brought a lot of people to [Monty
Python’s Flying Circus], because they didn’t speak the English that well. It was the
animations that caught their attention and then they began to realize how brilliant the
show was.

It was just one of those things that I knew how to do. I can’t work my way up through a
system. I just pick up a fork and know how to use it. I’m lucky. [Laughs]

You said that being part of the most powerful country in the world made you feel
responsible, and that you needed a change of perspective. Did you get this in the
UK?

No, the change of perspective came when I hitchhiked around Europe. That’s when the
big leap came. I travelled all around Europe. I got down to Morocco and Turkey, so I
covered a big area and that’s when I realized, “Oh! The rest of the world doesn’t think
like Americans!” And the way the rest of the world perceives what America is doing was
even more of a shock. But what was funny about it was that I would defend America
even though I was completely against everything that America was doing. “Wait a
minute, that’s my country you’re talking about!” And then I realized this is bad. So,
within a few months I just changed and I said, “Look at this world out here and look at
what we’re doing to it.”

I went back to America for about a year and then I moved to England. And, living in
England, there is a very different perspective than being in America, even though the
English are so obsessed with America. The view is different there. And it takes two hours
and I’m here [in the Czech Republic]. So, you get a lot of different views very quickly.
[Laughs]

You say you are not an auteur but a filteur.

As a director, I guess my job is to represent the film. I’m not representing myself or
anybody else. When I start working, it is very much like I become the servant of this film
that’s trying to get made. I hate the fascistic, the hierarchical idea of filmmaking. I like to
be the most equal; a little bit more equal, but only a little bit. [Laughs] And I’m the filter.

When we’re working, all these different people are coming up with ideas, because they
have all these different jobs, and different ways of looking at the film. All the ideas come
to me and my job is to filter them. If they come with a better idea then mine, I’ll grab it.
It’s fantastic. I’ll get the credit for it in the end, so I might as well use it.

We’re all part of this great experiment we’ve never made before and we don’t know if
it’s going to work. Lots of people are involved in a positive way, rather than as in
Hollywood, where you are surrounded by nervous people. Fear rules Hollywood because
the executives are being paid enormous sums of money. What they’re afraid of is saying
“Yes” to anything they might get the blame for. That’s not a good environment to work
in.
My trick in movies is to always have one or two big stars in them. If the stars and myself
are in agreement, the studios can’t touch us. That’s how it really works, because they’re
not frightened of me, but they’re frightened of the stars. And that’s actually the only
reason why I get half the films done. Within the Hollywood system, the director – except
for a very few people like [Steven] Spielberg and [George] Lucas – is the second most
important character; the actors are the important thing. And that’s why I’ve always been
very careful with the actors that I work with, in a sense that they’re coming to me as
opposed to me begging them to be in the movie. In the end, it’s at least that they’re
accepting it’s the film that’s important not them and their careers.

When I’m making a film with Hollywood money, I tend to try to build a big-perimeter
fence around the playground. And inside this playground area we, the children – the
actors, the cameramen, everybody – get to play. That’s all we’re doing: we’re just
playing and getting paid decently to play. This is nice. And the trick is not to ever quite
grow up. Any good actor never grows up.

You say you tried to be a magician –

failed, but nevertheless tried – and in a way you are. On the other hand, there is this
meticulousness in your work: Ray Cooper calls you a “responsible enfant terrible”,
if there is such a thing, in the documentary Lost in La Mancha (Keith Fulton and
Louis Pepe, 2002). So, what are you: a craftsman or an artist?

What I like is craftsmanship; that’s where the real art is. Modern art is bullshit, most of it.
I have no interest in it. I’m interested in people who can really paint or really sculpt. And
then I see people with conceptual ideas, and that just doesn’t interest me. Craftsmanship
is really important to me. I mean, my father was a carpenter and he would build things
that were really beautiful! And so that was the beginning of it maybe. If you’re going to
do something, you do it really well and you learn how to do it.

When I worked on Help! [comic, 1965], Harvey Kurtzman was meticulous about the
drawings, the colours, everything. So, it was that kind of training. And then I suppose
there’s this inherent Protestantism in there. On the other hand, I wouldn’t say I was
serious, but I have always worked very hard. College was when I started breaking free. I
just started doing things for fun. And that was pretty good, too. You just loosen up along
the way. People need to learn to play. But you don’t just play from the beginning. You
have to learn skills, and craft and technique. Then you play! I don’t know how to make
films now. I just start and they get made. [Laughs]

People say to me, “Oh, come and teach.” I don’t know how to teach film. I don’t know
what I do. I just do it. And it’s because I’ve been working hard at learning all the skills.

Art to me works better when there are restrictions. There was a question the other day: “If
you had all the money in the world and the freedom to do whatever you wanted to do,
what would you do?” And I said: “I have no idea.” I was explaining that bombs really
work because they’re contained. If you want to do something explosive, something
powerful, the more contained it is. Then, poof, it goes! Now, I don’t like that. But I know
that the restrictions I have to work within, whether it’s money or time produce results that
are more interesting – not always, but more than you’d think.

If I had all the time, I’d want to do everything. I’m very greedy. And when I don’t have
focuses, I can go here and there, all at the same time, and that’s nothing. That’s just
formless.

So, even with expressing fantasy and the irrational, it still works better to be
meticulous?

Yes. Structure, forms – all those things – are important because they are a way of
communicating. You can talk about some of these things in a way that nobody would
understand. These people who just want to express themselves. But I’m trying to
communicate with people. That’s the difference. I do want to do it my way and tell my
stories, but I try to tell them in a way people will understand and respond to.

What is the more important aspect of film: the visual side, which is such a big part,
a signature, of your films, or the narrative, the message behind it?

They’re all important. If I can’t tell the story, and if the characters don’t work, I can just
throw it away.

Everybody talks about the visuals. I don’t think about them that much anymore. I plan it,
we work at it, we choose locations, we spend a lot of time on costumes … I do all the
work. And then we start shooting, and when we’re shooting I’m more interested in the
characters and trying to get the scene done in the day. [Laughs] I really am!

I mean, Ridley Scott will spend an hour just to get this thing here and that thing there and
then you look at his films … Visually, I think he’s the most extraordinary guy. He’s got
the best eye; it’s just beautiful what he does. But he spends so much time on these other
things that the actors don’t have space to perform in. Some actors like that, but a lot of
people don’t. And he ends up with these films that, in the end, he compromises, because
he’s gone over budget, the studio starts putting pressure on him and he does the cuts. But
the advantage he has over me is that he then gets to put the film out a few years later as
the Director’s Cut. What was the first one then? Oh, that was the Studio’s Cut? Oh
Ridley, what are you doing here? I mean, he’s brilliant, but there’s something that seems
to happen in his films. He’s been far more successful than me, yet I think there’s
something in his head that says it’s more important to make a successful film than to fight
for exactly what you think, what you believe.

In the latter stages of making a film, you’re tired. You’ve been around it too long. You’re
not sure whether it’s working, whether you’re expressing what you want, and it’s very
easy to be influenced by other people. Studio executives are very nervous, frightened
people, and if you say, “Oh god, okay, I’ll cut that out … okay, I’ll change that”, these
things are usually mistakes. I try to avoid that. [Laughs]

How about other films, directors, cinematographers? Which would you say
influenced you and which do you appreciate today?

Well, my influences are obviously Walt Disney … and Stanley Donen. There’s one that I
don’t normally say, but Singin’ in the Rain [directed with Gene Kelly, 1952] and Funny
Face [1957] are beautiful musicals.

And then we go to Buster Keaton and Woody Allen and [Luis] Buñuel and [Ingmar]
Bergman and [Federico] Fellini and [Akira] Kurosawa and blah blah blah. And [Stanley]
Kubrick! There’s a lot; I’m just eclectic.

Then, who do we like now? Guillermo del Toro, the Coen brothers. Who else is out
there? The guy [Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck] who made The Lives of Others
[Das Leben der Anderen, 2006]; that was wonderful. Are there any others that get me
excited? I don’t watch many films now; that’s my problem.

Europe needs to be producing more people. But the problem with Europe is, as soon as
anybody becomes in any way successful, they run off to America and they start making
their American films. What’s his name? Roland Emmerich. You take somebody who’s
grown up in a different culture and hopefully he has interesting things to say about the
world, different ways of looking at it. And he runs off and makes films that look just like
Steven Spielberg’s films. I mean, we have a Steven Spielberg already. I don’t know why
he does that. It’s very important to make films from different cultures.

That’s where France is interesting. I mean France does incredibly well; they all watch
French films.

And South America is doing nicely. I think some of the best work is coming out of South
America. The three amigos – Guillermo [del Toro], Alfonso Cuarón and [Alejandro
González] Iñárritu – came out of Mexico and Bingo! Guillermo is interesting because
he’s always been more a traditional filmmaker. It may be fantasy and all that, but he’s a
very controlled filmmaker and he’s very smart. So, him doing The Hobbit makes sense. I
can see he’s going to make an interesting job of it.
Alfonso swings between two things. Y tu mamá también, I loved it. Wow! And then he
goes and does Harry Potter [and the Prisoner of Azkaban, 2004]. But it is I think the best
Harry Potter that was done. At least there’s something going on there. But then this
Children of Men [2006]: I didn’t like it at all. I thought he was trying to do Brazil [1985]
without an understanding of what he’s doing.

Then there is Iñárritu with his stuff. But with Babel [2006] he could have cut out the
whole Japanese section and it would have been better. There just seem to be one too
many things there. I preferred it when he was doing Amores perros [2000]. But then
everybody wants to go to Hollywood. Everybody wants to be successful.

I didn’t see [Fernando] Meirelle’s last film, the Brazilian guy. What’s it called? The one
where everybody is blind, with Julianne Moore? [Blindness, 2008] And the guy who
made The Lives of Others is now out in Hollywood. Why in Hollywood?! Money is the
main problem. Because if you’ve got no money, you end up making a little art film that’s
never going to reach a big audience.

No others from non-English speaking countries?

I don’t know foreign people. [Laughs]

Were you joking about Disney?

No! Pinocchio [Hamilton Luske and Ben Sharpsteen, 1940] is one my favourite movies.
It’s on my Top Ten list. I think it’s a great, great, great movie.

Is this why the Pinocchio motif reoccurs in The Fisher King (1991)?

Pinocchio was actually in the script [written by Richard LaGravenese], but yeah …
[Laughs]

That’s also the film where it says: “Nietzsche says there are two kinds of people in
the world. People who are destined for greatness, like Walt Disney and Hitler. And
then there’s the rest of us.” So that’s kind of a negative take on Disney.

Hitler, he just went too far. He needed budget constraints! [Laughs]

That’s all? Otherwise he would have been a Disney?

No, I mean Hitler made a few mistakes along the way. But it’s hard to stop a guy when
everything’s on form and he doesn’t have anybody stopping him.

All artists have the potential of being Hitler, I think. I mean, there are some sensitive
artists. There’s Georgia O’Keefe: she wouldn’t be a Hitler. But there are too many other
people. And most of the film directors would be Hitlers if they had the chance.
Okay, you’re going to get yourself into trouble now.

Why are people so frightened? It’s like when I was in Germany at the Munich Film
Festival and we did a talk. And I said, “Why do you people keep apologizing for your
culture? German culture is fantastic! It made one ‘little’ mistake.” [Laughs]

19th century Germany was extraordinary in painting, in writing, in music. And when we
moved into the 1930s, it got really interesting; it was fantastic. But we ended up with this
little guy who …

I mean, his colour sense was good: black, red, white. These are good colours. His sense
of costumes was really good. They’re the best costumes!

When we were doing Python, we always wanted to play Nazis, because they had the best
costumes. The English army guys, their costumes were made of wool; they were horrible.
You know, just give me a good Nazi costume!

But it seems American film directors keep doing the same thing, prolonging the
obsession. Anybody who’s supposed to be a bad guy gets dressed up in a Nazi
uniform.

Yeah. But people are not thinking clearly about what happened with fascism and how it
worked. They’re all, “Oh, bad! Don’t think about it. Hitler, bad!” I mean, Hitler was a
monster, but how did that monster develop? That is what you want to know.

Do people talk about the Treaty of Versailles? At the end of the First World War, the
Germans got nailed. Okay, everybody deserved to be shot for the First World War,
frankly. The English, the French … they all created the situation that blew up in their
face. The Germans lost and there you have it. They made the beginning of what produced
Hitler. Because there was no money, the [war] reparations were the most brutal thing.

The thing that’s always interesting about guys like Hitler and [Augusto] Pinochet and
Margaret Thatcher, all the right-wing monsters, is that you can’t seem to blow them up.
People try to assassinate these people, but they never assassinate them. A left-wing guy
goes out there and, boom, he’s dead in two seconds. How it is that this works? I don’t
know, maybe God is a fascist. [Laughs]

How does it work that the good guys in Brazil wear these American SWAT Team
commando uniforms? It is a critique of American society?
 With the design of the thing, I kept
looking to ’30s and ’40s architecture, the monumental fascist architecture. And that was
partly because it was fascistic, but also because I like it. [Laughs] And the guys … I
wasn’t thinking. It was kind of almost as bad as Michael Jackson and his understanding
of iconography and the meaning of things. I just play with it. But there were images
where I think I was a little bit clearer about what I was doing. Michael never knew. And
[Muammar al-]Gaddafi doesn’t seem to know either these days. Did you see him when he
met [Silvio] Berlusconi recently? He turns up and he’s dressed like Michael Jackson in
the cap and the epaulettes and the security girls behind him all in uniforms. It was
outrageous! It was like Michael Jackson was there. It was just before he died. Maybe
that’s why he died; maybe he saw Gaddafi had taken over his image.

One last thing about this scene in Brazil with the soldiers or guards running on the
stairs and a turned over vacuum cleaner. Is it …

Yeah, it is. You know what that is.

Potemkin … (1)

Potemkin. Because the thing is, action always bores me. So I said, “Okay, let’s do
something funny here.” And then, rather than the baby carriage, it’s this vacuum cleaner.
[Laughs] And you know, anybody who knows Potemkin gets the joke. The rest of people
have no idea what’s going on there. [Laughs] But it was really out of boredom. Action
just bores me because everybody’s doing it. It’s endless. So, I thought, let’s find another
way.

Have you seen Public Enemies [2009]? It’s Michael Mann and technically it’s beautiful.
But you just don’t care. There’s no heart in it, no soul. It’s so much about how clever he
is. And this is the problem with a whole generation of directors that came out of America,
and that includes [Robert] Zemeckis and [James] Cameron. In different degrees, they all
want total control of the thing. And I hate that. I mean, Zemeckis now does motion
capture. He doesn’t have to go outside. But it’s this ridiculous world because it’s not
animation. This isn’t giving life to anything. It’s just very fake Frankenstein country, but
they love it.

Cameron is little bit more active. I went and saw him when they were working on Avatar
[2009] and he’s got this amazing system. He’s got a camera that is effectively a virtual
camera except that it’s a physical thing. He is still trying to do handheld virtual
moviemaking that is kind of interesting. [Laughs] But it has to be 3D now.

So, all you’re doing is learning how to use the machinery …

It’s a way of avoiding actors, that’s what it is. [Laughs]

In all your films, there are certain constant elements: dream worlds, fantasy worlds,
time travel, fantastical visual style. On the other hand, there are all these things that
seem to stem from your background in social sciences: with total institutions you
have Erving Goffman running around everywhere, the concept of Panopticum
repeats itself and so on. How much of the social scientist is still present in your
filmmaking?

It’s always there. I’m always thinking about it. In every film, I’m dealing with what I’m
feeling about what’s going on in the world at the moment. It’s a reaction to what the
world or an aspect of the world is about. Brazil was all about that particular period of
time, but it was transformed a bit by [George Orwell’s] Nineteen Eighty-Four, which I
hadn’t read. I never read it until I finished the film. But Nineteen Eighty-Four was in the
atmosphere. I just knew what it was, because everybody talked about it. It’s one of those
things: when people talk about something, most of them don’t know it, they haven’t seen
the film, they have only read a couple reviews. But they talk. That’s what I do all the
time. I go to the review section. Now if I go to a party I can at least comment on
something, even if I haven’t seen it. [Laughs] And I think too many people do that. So,
I’m just reacting to things.

Time Bandits [1981] was a reaction to the fact I couldn’t get Brazil made. [Laughs] I said,
“Okay, so I’ll write a family film.” And then you start playing with the idea. You have
the first idea: commit a crime and travel to a time before. That’s a nice simple idea. But
what I like most of all is that these guys who were God’s helpers decided heaven was a
boring place, and that it was much more fun to go into crime. Maybe that’s what I did,
when I left my involvement with Church: I went into crime, making movies, making
jokes. It’s a form of crime. [Laughs]

With each of the films, is there always a main message? Because with Jabberwocky
(1977) there’s still this feeling of collage, of different things assembled together.

Yes, because I’m trying to escape from Python, for one thing. But at the Taormina Film
Festival – Mike Palin and I went there with Jabberwocky – the discussions were
incredible, because they all said it was a comment on Thatcher. And I hadn’t thought
about it; it was sort of subconscious. But it was all about things like that. It was about the
unions of that time. Thatcher destroyed the unions, which was horrible. But I didn’t like
the unions either. The unions had become too powerful. So, you’ve got that in there.

Belong to a guild or else cut your foot of …

Yeah. And then you’ve got the craftsmen. The father’s a craftsman, but his son wants to
be a used car salesman, basically. He wants to go into business. That’s what was going on
under Thatcher, so it’s all there. And somebody in Taormina thought it was the most
powerful condemnation of Thatcher in Britain at that time. [Laughs]

So, as I said, I didn’t think about it at that time, but it was all subconsciously going on.
And the whole ‘enemy at the gate’ thing, ‘the tiger at the gate’. I grew up in America
with Communism as the tiger at the gate, so all that stuff is in there.

Time Bandits is a little bit more fun to be honest, but we did talk about things in it. And
than Brazil was fun. I said, “Now I’m just going to get down and talk about all the things
that are making me crazy.”

With The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1988), we have the idea of

rationalization against fantasy and imagination.

Yeah, so that continues. But Munchausen was more about escape. There is this thing with
Jackson [Jonathan Pryce] being a rational man, yes. Rational against fantasy: that’s what
we’ve got there. But it’s also about how lies may be closer to the truth than facts. That
was another thing that was in my head, so we got that in.

It was also about father and daughter. It was about me feeling old and about my daughter.
So, there’s the family thing as well. [Laughs]

What happened after that?

The Fisher King.

Shooting Munchausen was such a nightmare, but we ended up with a good film. Then it
was just buried by the studio. So, now I’m really depressed and I was like, “I’m never
going to make another film again. I just can’t stand it.” And I was offered The Fisher
King. When the script arrived, I read it and I thought it was fantastic. I understood those
characters, I loved the dialogue, I loved everything about it. And it was simple: it was
four people, basically. And it was Hollywood, so I thought, “Okay, I’ll put my head in
the lion’s mouth and see what happens. It can’t get worse than what happened on
Munchausen.” [Laughs]

Although it wasn’t your script, there is still social commentary, on yuppies,

arrogance, idealism, (in)sanity …

Oh, yeah! They were Richard LaGravenese’s ideas. But when I read it, I just wished I’d
written it, because I identified with it totally. So that was nice.

It was a nice change to go work in the belly of the beast and have a simple film and just
let the actors get a good cast together. It was also me trying to show the world that it isn’t
all about fantasy and visuals, it’s about characters! That’s what I’m really interested in.
And these were great characters. And so it was a huge success.

With Twelve Monkeys (1995), again the script is not yours. It was written by David
and Janet Peoples. And there is again the critique but we move into
environmentalist issues.

Yeah, and that’s why when I read a script it resonated with me. It’s about the things that
are going on in the world, and that I’m responding to. It was all there. In fact, when the
Ebola virus took off right after the film, I thought, “We’re there again, we’re right there!”
[Laughs] It was a prescient script.

I loved the idea of trying to make people

consider the thought that to save the world five billion people might die. People just
couldn’t believe that. They hated it. They almost blanked that idea out, that all these
people had to die for the human race to survive. Because the idea, especially in America
and the West, is that you live forever. Human life, the value of human life, is so great.

But now you know that the world demands that things change. The word “culling” comes
to mind. There’s going to be a culling of human beings soon. I don’t know what it will
be. David’s thing was that a plague will do it. War? Famine? These things, the old
favourites, are always there.

Basically, I think there are too many people. And it’s not just that there are too many
people; there are too many people who all want all these things that we have. That’s the
problem. It’s Malthusian: there’s population and resources and, when they hit imbalance,
look out boys and girls! Something’s going to happen. I don’t know what it’s going to be,
but it will.

I love the fact that they [David and Janet Peoples] had gone into this green zone, so that
nature’s fighting back with a plague. That was a brilliant script. To take La Jetée [Chris
Marker, 1962] and out of that create Twelve Monkeys – that was quite a great leap.

How much is the film yours?

It isn’t mine. What happened was they had a meeting with Chris Marker and they said:
“We don’t want to make a remake of your film. We want to be inspired by your film.”
And he was happy about that. And that was the deal, which I thought was right, because I
always say that La Jetée is this beautiful acorn and Twelve Monkeys is this big oak tree
going in all directions. They’re the same thing, but one is so concise and beautiful and the
other is big.

I didn’t change anything in the script; it was their script. Like when I did Richard’s script
in The Fisher King, I didn’t change it. What I actually did was I went back and looked at
his earlier scripts before the studio started “helping” him improve his script. And the only
thing I added was the waltz at Grand Central Station; that’s my bit. And the way I shot it
and what I chose to show is what’s different. Richard’s thing was more like a film that
Woody Allen would make. So, I took the basic ideas and to me everything has a
meaning. Jack’s place was originally just a loft in downtown Manhattan and that has no
meaning. But you put Jack [Jeff Bridges] in a razor building of steel and glass and that
says something. He’s dead already.

So, I take the ideas that are in there and put a visual idea behind it. The office building
that Lydia [Amanda Plummer] comes out of is this huge stone tower, a fortress. And it
could have just been a shop.

That’s what I do. I’m not changing the script or the ideas; I’m finding the ideas and I’m
putting them into a specific visual form.

The raggedy vision of the future in Twelve Monkeys, for example, is that yours?

Once we go into that, yes. The Fisher King was a normal Manhattan story and I turned it
into something more symbolic, visually. With Twelve Monkeys, it was all there and I just
started designing it. My biggest concern on Twelve Monkeys was that it was going to look
like Brazil. So, I tried to make it not look like Brazil. But it does look like Brazil.
[Laughs]

I was trying to find a way of creating this underground world, and what would be left.
And my first choice was to go into old power stations. In Philadelphia and Baltimore,
there were three that were actually available. They were just unused, because after in the
’50s all the industry moved out of those East Coast cities; they moved west. So, in a
sense, it was the past, and we went into the past and into this disused world.

The future is gloomy and dark, but you are always making light of the past, even the
Middle Ages are always funny.

Yeah, because I’ve got concerns about what the future is. I think we are living in a really
brilliant time, and I don’t know how much longer it’s going to last. We’re a few very
lucky generations, and I think mine was the luckiest. Being born in the ’40s, we were
babies, so the war didn’t mean anything. We came up through a period when we had less
things, so you had to work harder, but that’s normal; it’s no big deal. And then for the
’60s to explode like that. It was amazing time!

Now I find how everybody has things, but they have very few ideas anymore. People are
no longer individuals; they’re just becoming part of a great system. It scares me, that one.
[Laughs]

And your idea of the past?

I like the fact that we’re living now. There are certain aspects of the past that interest me,
because I don’t have a problem with living without all the nice things we have. When I
bought our house in France 35 years ago, it didn’t have electricity for seven years. I
didn’t want it. I just wanted to escape from the modern world. You know what is
interesting there? I was working on a film called A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s
Court, Mark Twain’s book, and there’s a really nice element in the book because it’s
about an American going into the past. And what I liked about it was the Knights go out
on these quests and they fight giants and dragons, but none of it’s really happening. What
they’re really doing is they’re fighting a really big dog or something, but, by the time
they get back to the castle, they start expanding. So, it’s about stories. And everybody
believes them, because life is more interesting that way. There’s a witch over there,
there’s an ogre, and suddenly you’ve got a world that’s full of fantastic, interesting
things! And that was the part of the film that I really wanted to concentrate on: how it
was more interesting to have these wonderful stories and this belief that there are
extraordinary, magical, outrageous things out there rather than a world which is all facts,
explainable. You can measure it and put it in a box.

Now the world doesn’t seem to be as exciting anymore for most people. We know too
much about it, and so people escape into movies, which is really bad. I’d rather have a
storyteller in the room telling a story. That’s different to going to the cinema, even
though going to the cinema was the storytelling that I grew up with, I suppose.

You say your films explore the borderline between reality and fantasy, which in
your words is between boredom and imagination. Is that how you perceive real life –
as tedious?

No, the real life is your imagination. It’s whether it’s your imagination or the imagination
you have been handed by the media, by television. It’s like my son, when he was twelve.
We live in a really nice part of London. The shops are a hundred metres away, but he was
afraid to go to the shops because the world he knew was the world on television. It was
about raping and pillaging and murder and robberies. In fact, most entertainment is that.
Movies are, too. And that was the world to him. This world, from the front door to the
shops, was the world he saw on television and he was frightened. Now that’s a
completely false world. That wasn’t the world that was out there. But it was his
imagination that had been created by television.
Okay, we all get created by what we watch and what we read. I mean, who doesn’t? But
then you’ve got to work at maintaining your version of the world.

That’s what I’m really worried about. You know, twittering. What is this? People are not
living their lives anymore. They’re sharing their lives to the point where you don’t exist
anymore. And that’s what worries me.

I had to do a thing for Nokia in Rome a couple of years a go – you know, the one with
video cameras. They were having a contest of making short films on these mobile phones
and there were two juries, and in one of them I was the head of the jury and the other was
Wim Wenders. And then we did a press conference down in Rome and Wim was very
smart. I didn’t realize how funny he was.

Now, my problem is – with telephones and these things, and everybody talking about
communication – I want to improve people’s ability to be alone and not communicate. If
you’re alone, you actually start finding out who you are. Give up your mobile phones,
your twittering things, everything, and stop being a part of a community. Start being
alone!

We need to be alone; that’s what I’ve been talking about recently. Because I think
everybody’s getting too involved in a too large a network. Which is very nice, it’s great!
But what is really interesting is to go and be on your own for a long time and discover
who you are. You’re not just a part of a community.

And so, in Rome, I didn’t know what to say. We were supposed to be selling mobile
phones. I hate mobile phones! [Laughs]

Does aloneness work in the cinema? A person is alone in the cinema in a way …

At home with television and a DVD, you’re even more alone. I’m encouraging watching
my films on television! [Laughs]

You don’t want to be alone all the time. But you want to be able to spend time without
communicating. I go to Italy and I’m there just on my own. I leave the family behind. My
wife is doing it in France. She just goes there to escape from things. You get away from
all the things that are pulling at you. And things start happening when you’re alone.

I hate twittering. Literally you just go: “I’m sitting in a restaurant having a good time.” I
mean, what is that? And people are spending all this time.

Do you know Eddie Izzard? He’s a brilliant comedian. He started twittering earlier this
year and in four months he has over 600,000 people following his twits. What are they
doing? What kind of lives do they have? Their lives are empty, I think. And the sooner
they die the better. [Laughs] No, sorry I didn’t mean that. That’s where the culling has to
start. I think it’s going to happen with twittering. I mean once we know where they all
are, that’s when we’ll send the hunters out. [Laughs]
Okay, back to film …

But we can save the world, come on! “Is he serious?”, they ask.

We were talking about the main idea behind each film. We left off at Twelve
Monkeys. What about Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998)?

It was a book that was chasing me for ten years. And it’s the perfect book for my
generation. I mean, we thought we were going to change the world, that we would open
everybody’s eyes to the goodness of things out there, blah blah blah. And then it all went
bad. The war was going on … So, that book was really an important book for me,
because, when I read it in 1971, I had left America and I was seriously in a situation
where I might have to back and go to Vietnam. I was about to give up my American
citizenship to avoid it. And that book was there and I went, “Oh yeah, I know what
you’re talking about.”

This is the part in the film where Hunter S. Thompson (Johnny Depp) talks about
Tim Leary and the illusions or delusions of the 1960s.

Oh, yeah. Well, Leary I always thought was a little bit of a conman, to be honest. He did
introduce the idea of acid. But it was done before that, you know, the doors of perception,
[Aldous] Huxley. Everybody had been there. But LSD in that particular form, Leary was
there and he went for it and brought a lot of people along.

During that period, with all that experimentation going on, you saw a lot of people pay
the price. But we actually leapt forward. You see, people were brave then, or stupid. But
that was much more interesting than what was going on in Vietnam, where you were
being killed for no purpose at all, for a war that was just absurd. The war was based on
complete misunderstanding of what communism was and how it worked. It was just the
stupidity of things. But America needs wars. I mean, when you’re world’s largest
weapons manufacturer, you’ve got to have those planes crashing, you’ve got to get rid of
the bombs so you can have new planes and new bombs. That’s how the industry and the
economy work. These are important things.

But that book was really important and they had sent me scripts over the years and I
always said no, because I was involved in my own things. And then this one just came
along. Alex Cox had already been fired, Johnny [Depp] and Benicio [Del Toro] were
already on board, and I wanted to work with Johnny and I said, “Let’s go, I will do it.”
And it was great. I really enjoyed making that movie. We had fun.

We just worked really hard and fast. We had a low budget. Not by European standards; it
was like $16, 17 million. But we were making this movie in Hollywood and Las Vegas.
And we just shot it very fast and I kept saying, “We’re sharks. We only look forward, we
can’t look back. Whatever we do, we’ve done it.” It was fun. And it’s a serious movie,
that’s what it is. [Laughs] It’s about the loss of a dream. That’s what’s at the heart of that
movie and, when that happens, what do you do? Well, you become monsters, you
become beasts, you go out there and you just rip it apart to reveal what the truth is after it
all went bad. It’s a sad movie, but there’s a lot of laughs along the way to ultimate
despair.

Now, The Brothers Grimm (2005). This is again …

… an interesting leap. I had several other projects that I had written the script for, like
Defective Detective, and I was working on a script called Good Omens, there was a lot of
stuff and nothing was happening. They just weren’t happening.

Then Chuck Roven, who had produced Twelve Monkeys, had this Brothers Grimm script.
I didn’t like it, but I needed a job. And his argument was right: “Terry how many years
have gone by? You’ve got to work. You’ve got to do something”. And I love the brothers
Grimm; I grew up with their stories.

So, Toni Grisoni and I did work on the

script. I got some things better, but other things were still there, because there was only
so much one could change. I thought at least I’ll be able to create a good world and have
some fun. And then we started. And, unfortunately, the studio pulled out, when we were
all in Prague, the entire crew. And what do you do now? Heath [Ledger] was on board,
Matt [Damon] was on board.

We were all sitting there ready to go, so the questions was: “What do we do now?”
Chuck was trying to raise money quickly from other sources and the Weinsteins came in.
And I had always said I would never work with them, because I just knew who they were
and what they were like. They do what they do and I do what I do. But they were there
and so it was a way of rescuing it, and I thought, “Well, maybe we can make it work.”
And then it just started going bad very quickly, because they started interfering with the
process before we even started shooting. The brothers Weinsteins have given us so many
great films and they’re fantastic salesmen, and they’re interesting producers, but they are
people who are good at those jobs and not at directing movies. And yet they want to be
filmmakers. They interfered more than I’ve ever been interfered with before. If I were
younger, we’d call it child abuse. [Laughs]

They created a situation at the beginning of the film that was very unpleasant. And so I
started working in not the happiest of moods. And they were still determined to control
me. And when they didn’t allow me to cast who I wanted [Robin Williams], I was getting
more and more upset. I don’t like this. And by the time Matt’s nose came up, that was it:
I just didn’t want to make the movie. I went to work on the first day of shooting and I just
wanted to go home.

Then, in the fourth week, my cameraman, Nicola Pecorini, who’s a very outspoken
person and says what he thinks, got fired. I thought, “This is my chance to get out of the
film”, but I was then told by my lawyer that it wasn’t as easy as that, so I had to continue.

It was not a good experience. But the good part of it was working with Matt and Heath
and the cast. We had a great time.

In the end, is it the film that Bob and Harvey Weinstein wanted?

No, it’s not the film they wanted and it’s not quite the film I wanted. It’s the film that is a
result of two people, or two groups of people, who aren’t working well together.

What did they want?

I don’t know what they wanted. How could I know what they wanted? They didn’t know
what they wanted. They wanted a big successful, wild adventure movie. They kept saying
they wanted a Terry Gilliam movie. But they really wanted a Terry Gilliam movie with
their involvement.

I mean, is Gangs of New York [2002] a good film? Marty [Scorsese] said almost the exact
same quote I said, without us knowing it: “They took the joy out of filmmaking.” There’s
just something about them, because they want to be filmmakers. But they’re not
filmmakers! They’re great salesmen, they’re great marketing people. They’re fantastic!
But they want to put their fingerprints on it so they can say it’s their film. And if you’re
working with people like Marty and me, you just can’t do that. It doesn’t work.

Grimm is not a bad film. I really like a lot of it, but it’s not the film I could have made
had I been in a more positive state of mind. I mean, by the time they fired Nicola and
Tom Sigel came on board, it was their choice. With Nicola, they were saying he’s too
slow. Tom was even slower. But it’s their guy. Not my problem! Their man, not my man.
That was my attitude. Tom’s a lovely guy, he’s a good cameraman, he lights beautifully,
but if he takes us months and months I don’t care. [Laughs] That’s not a good way to
work. That’s what most people work like and it’s a bad way of working. But there are
sections of that film I think are as good as anything I’ve done. And I can’t even think
what I would have done differently now. I just know that, had I been in a different mood,
we would have had more fun and there would be more things we would get our way.

Tideland. What grabbed you there?

The book. I read the book and thought, “This is fantastic.” It was just beautiful. Mitch
Cullin’s writing was brilliant. I loved the characters! Jeliza-Rose has this beautiful voice
of a child.

The book is written in the first person and Jeliza-Rose is older, writing back. I thought,
“No, I don’t want to do it that way.” In some ways, the book was safer because it’s in
retrospect; know the girl survives. In the film, I thought it would be more interesting if
you don’t know whether she’s going to survive. There’s more intensity in the air.

We wrote the script quite quickly because the book was so easy. It was all there. We just
edited it.

What would you say it’s mainly about? What’s this one’s message?

I was really trying to shake up people’s perception of certain things, like all the fears they
have of death, pædophiles, the vulnerability of children. It’s really about the resilience of
children, how strong they are and how you can put them through anything and they’ll
come out of it. I was so bored with everybody coming forward saying, “I was abused as a
child, I was a victim.” Anybody who wanted to get any sympathy or make themselves
interesting or even get in the press: “Ah, I was abused as a child!” I was so angry with the
world becoming a world where our heroes are the victims. Fuck that! [Laughs] It just
made me angry. Again it was a reaction to the world I saw around me and I just said,
“Let’s do it!” And we just assembled the best cast ever. I mean, the acting there is
brilliant. And to get my old buddy, Jeff [Bridges], to be a dead man … [Laughs]

You know what’s funny about Tideland? More and more people come forward now and
say, “Wow, that’s really good!” They didn’t see it back then, because the press hated it.
But more and more people are suddenly finding this movie and that’s why I love DVDs.
Movies don’t die, they’re out there. There’s no excuse now for people not knowing films,
because if you want to know about films … which I don’t. That’s why I don’t rent DVDs
or watch them. [Laughs] I’m trying to be alone, and I don’t want films interfering with
my aloneness.

Tideland has really strong female

characters. Normally, your main characters are male.
We just do what we understand.

I think Madeleine Stowe is brilliant [as Kathryn Railly] in Twelve Monkeys. She doesn’t
get enough credit. And, in Brazil, Kim Griest’s part [Jill Layton] was a much bigger part,
but it didn’t quite work out, so we had to cut it way down. She was written as an utterly
independent and smart character. And she just kind of couldn’t get it. So, we had to cut
back and back and back, and she ended up being a dream girl. That was not the original
intention.

The Fisher King! There are two great women’s parts. But that’s Richard’s writing. He
can write women’s parts. I can’t write them particularly well. So, there are beautiful
scenes, and Mercedes [Ruehl] and Amanda [Plummer] were just spectacular [as Anne
Napolitano and Lydia Sinclair].

With Mitch Cullin, it’s like with Richard: he can just write women. Tideland I think is
my most feminine film. [Laughs] I understand that little girl; I care.

I remember there was a French journalist who saw it for the first time and hated it. He
was a friend, so he said he’d give me the benefit of the doubt and he saw it the second
time and he loved it. He said he suddenly could see the movie and he thought it was the
most tender film I’d ever done. Isn’t it weird that he couldn’t see it the first time?

Do you think it has something to do with the film changing direction in the middle
when the taxidermy begins?

That’s where the fun starts. [Laughs]

Maybe some people are just not able to work their head around that.

But again they’re not reading what is being said here! Here’s a woman who was so
destroyed, but she’s got him back! I mean, okay, she’s got his skin back. [Laughs] But at
least she’s got something.

These are really desperate people, I thought. And that’s why I liked it, because it was so
extreme and so bizarre. But there was just tenderness and love under the whole thing.

With kids, the world isn’t formed yet for them. Things are coming at them. But I think
children are born positive. It’s how much you take that away. By the time they’re adults,
most of it it’s all been taken away. But some come through it.

I really try not to lie when I make films. Even if it’s going to be a dream reality, you’ve
got to pull the plug occasionally to remind people it’s a dream reality.

Now we have The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus (2009) and Don Quixote is back
on. What would you say about these two films regarding what drives them? What is
the message behind them?
Quixote’s easier because it’s a man that refuses to accept the reality that everybody else is
out there, even physical reality that is out there. He won’t accept any of it. He’s
determined to turn it into a more wonderful, extraordinary place. And it’s an old man
that’s trying to make something out of his life before he dies. Something! His last chance
to go out there and do something. I’m an old man now, so it’s perfect. But the weird thing
is I loved Quixote when I was a young man, so something’s wrong here. [Laughs]

That’s what we’re dealing with in Quixote and also how the Quixotes of this world, how
their madness, inspires other people to see the world in a slightly bigger, more interesting
way.

Actually, the movie is about something else as well. But when we get it done, I’ll talk
about it.

With Parnassus, I’ve always liked the idea of something from another time entering our
world – or whichever way it goes, it doesn’t matter. Here’s an old way of telling stories
and this old show comes into a modern town. Nobody is interested, because everything
about it is just so antique. But if you can get past the show and trust them to take you on a
journey of imagination, extraordinary things happen. And it’s your imagination that’s
being allowed to expand.

But then we put an element in there that a choice has to be made. Okay, you’ve had fun
now expanding your imagination, seeing all these other possibilities, but now you have to
make a choice. And there’s a right choice and then there’s a wrong choice, and you get
punished. Or, if you make the right choice …

You actually never see what happens when you make the right choice. You see the results
on people’s faces when they’re coming out, but you don’t know what really happens.
That’s up to everybody’s imagination.

At the centre of it, there’s this simple story of a man who does a deal with the Devil, and
at sixteen his daughter is going to be the Devil’s. But there’s a weird twist, and even the
trailer got it wrong, because Parnassus [Christopher Plummer] was immortal. He won
immortality in a bet with the Devil. But now he falls in love as a very, very old man and
he wants to be mortal again so he could be young and live and be in love. He gives up his
immortality for mortality and the price is his child at sixteen. So, that’s one step more
complicated than people are talking about. [Laughs]

There is always a child or a holy fool as you say. In some films, it’s evident who it is;
in others, not so much. So, who is the main hero in Brazil? We have Archibald
‘Harry’ Tuttle (Robert De Niro), the plumber; the activist, Jill Layton (Kim Greist);
and Sam Lowry (Jonathan Pryce), the dreamer.

He is the dreamer, and he is the fool. But he is not the holy fool, unfortunately. He’s just
a fool.
The film is about responsibility and he’s not taking responsibility for the job he does.
He’s right at the heart of the ministry and the ministry is this monstrous thing and he’s
busy daydreaming. So, that was just my comment about all people. [Laughs]

We all sort of grow up and we hide in our fantasy worlds, but there’s still a world out
there. You’re responsible for the world. And here’s a guy who is in the most powerful
position, and he could say, “Okay, I’m American”, but he’s not paying attention to what
is going on. He’s a member of the organization or the nation, but he’s not taking
responsibility for what that organization does. And he’s punished for it. He wasn’t even a
child; he was a juvenile. That’s the difference about Brazil: it’s not a child, it’s a juvenile.
It’s what most people are doing with Michel Bay’s films. [Laughs] The kind of films
we’re watching, these are juvenile things; they’re not adult and they’re not childlike.
Take WALL-E [Andrew Stanton, 2008]. Okay, that’s beautiful! Toy Story [John Lasseter,
1995], beautiful! We’re talking the world as seen through an innocent child’s eyes. And
those films, I think, are just stunning films. John Lasseter understands it. And those
people at Pixar, they understand, and they think of the world that way. But those are also
very smart films at the same time and that’s why I think they’re my favourite films.
That’s what I didn’t put down in my list! Pixar and John Lasseter. He’s a god to me.
[Laughs]

Although you say you don’t like this 3D CG business very much, instead of being
normal and ordinary the world becomes extraordinary.

But that’s not what they’re doing. They’re doing cartoons. What I don’t like is when
you’re trying to do naturalism, realism with it. It’s not that I don’t like it. It’s just that it
isn’t interesting after a while.

What I really hate now is things like Beowolf [Robert Zemeckis, 2007], with motion
capture. I hate it! Either you do cartoons that are an abstraction of the world, and you’re
free to do wonderful things. Or let’s deal with something that’s more natural and realistic.
Motion-capture stuff just allows the director to be the god he’s always really wanted to
be. The total god! [Laughs]

You’re saying the production of Parnassus and the plans for Quixote are still old
school?

No! Parnassus has got 650 CG shots in it. See, I don’t stick with any of my rules. Why
should I be limited with my dogmas? [Laughs] No, it’s because what you see in
Parnassus, every time you go through the mirror, is a different world. There was a very
simple, pragmatic thought behind it, because I didn’t have the money to make a $300
million film. So I thought, “$25 million dollars” – that’s the top for low-budget films in
America – “let’s do that.” I’m in the real world for the majority of the film. Then we go
through the mirror and then we get out again.

If you do something like King Kong [Peter Jackson, 2005], every shot has to be using CG
in it and it costs a fortune. That’s why you need hundreds of millions of dollars. And after
a while, even in King Kong, you just accept is as natural and normal. But I’d rather keep
surprising people. That’s what I think it’s really about. It’s back to magic. King Kong and
The Lord of the Rings [Jackson, 2001-3] are beautifully made. I’m not arguing against the
technique. I’m just saying I can’t afford to make films like that. [Laughs]

Who’s the childlike character in these films, the one who acts as a bridge connecting
us with a different perspective, with imagination?

I guess it’s probably Parnassus. It’s harder to see it, because there is young man who is in
a sense the innocent: Anton [Andrew Garfield]. But it’s Parnassus’s world, so he’s the
film, he’s the main character. It’s his story; let’s put it like that. But I’m not sure if I
believe him or not.

All through making the film, I thought he might have been a conman, and that everything
he says is bullshit, because I identify with him! [Laughs]

You identify with your characters, that’s obvious. So, who was the most Terry
Gilliam of them all?

I don’t know. Because it’s not just like I’m the main character, I’m actually all the
characters.

The good guys and the bad guys?

Oh yeah, I have to be. There’s always one

that is obviously the one I would like to be like more. And then there’s the other one
that’s a lot of fun. They’re all there and it gets more confusing in that sense that I can
identify with all of them. But at least I’ve got to like them and love them; I have to be
intrigued by them. They all become part of me.

It’s like when I’m working with the actors. I suppose I’m bringing out bits and pieces of
me with them. And the strange one was Jeff Bridges in The Fisher King, because what I
didn’t know was that Jeff was copying me, my movements, the way I do things. And I
didn’t even recognize me until the film was finished and somebody said, “That’s what
you do, Terry.” So that was a very interesting moment. He was watching and mimicking
me, and I didn’t see it. It was like when you take [Marcello] Mastroianni doing Fellini:
one is this really good looking movie star and the other guy’s the other guy. And Jeff was
great.
Do you consider some of your films to be closer to heart, to be more yours than
others?

I don’t really think about that anymore. I really don’t. One day I maybe have to do a
Terry Gilliam festival for myself. I’ll watch all the films and see, because I don’t watch
them if I can avoid it and I want to get to that point where I can actually watch them and
forget that I made them. But I can’t do that. That’s the thing that makes me crazy,
because I’d like to be able to experience one of my films like other people do. What I do
when I do look at them is say, “Oh, that’s really good!” I’m amazed by some of the
things. “Who did that?” I can’t imagine I did that or thought of doing it. And then other
times I’d say, “Why did that guy do that? That’s just bad, that’s really bad!” [Laughs]

But they all have a sort of moral lesson …

Yeah.

So, if with Brazil in 1984 it was the situation of 1984, what’s Good and what’s Evil
today? What are the things that must be commented on today?

Well, I think aloneness and twittering. [Laughs] That’s what I’ve been talking about. I
mean, I don’t sit down and make a list of things, but these are the things that are
obsessing me now.

In our first version of Quixote, we were obsessed with mobile phones. The phones would
just never stop in our early script. People were walking down the street, howling into
these things and always over the most petty things. You know, people communicating but
not communicating. We were obsessed with that, but we cut all that out. It’s old hat now.
It’s boring. [Laughs] But this twitter thing and aloneness: that’s what’s getting me now.

Is there some other mythic, legendary, literary hero you feel you need to explore?

Until I think of it, no. I mean it never worked like that. I don’t think that far ahead. I’ve
got a script that’s never been ripe about Theseus and the Minotaur. Doing a Greek
tragedy has always intrigued me. But, again, it’s taking stories that are already known. I
think is what I like doing, because then you can comment. And that’s the advantage.

Before let’s say the early ’60s, the Bible was the big-selling book in the world; everybody
knew those stories. So it was easy to make comments on. Now it’s a real problem,
because everybody has so many different stories. I don’t know what the stories are that
everybody knows. Except Die Hard, you know Bruce Willis, you know Star Wars … I
guess these are the stories, so people make comments about that. But they don’t interest
me as much as some of the older stories. Those stories are deeper, they are about more
profound things. So, they’re more fun to play with.

What about the pirates? You talk about good pirates. We already have pirates in
The Crimson Permanent Assurance (Gilliam, 1983).
Oh come on, pirates! I always wanted to make a pirate film. That’s why it made me so
crazy when Pirates of the Caribbean came out. I always wanted to do one of those
movies.

How come you never did a Peter Pan movie? I mean, the man flies and there are
pirates.

It’s got everything, but nobody asked me. Why wouldn’t you want to be a pirate? To be
on the high seas, free, a buccaneer, to live as you want and always robbing the people
who deserve to be robbed. The only problem with being a pirate is maybe that you get
trapped being a pirate for the rest of your life – like Johnny Depp. [Laughs] He’ll have to
be a pirate forever now.

With the title of Parnassus, we go to the Greek Mountain, the muses, poetry?

Poetry, the muse, art: all of that is there. But it turns out, and this is an interesting thing,
that when Hunter S. Thompson lived in San Francisco, he lived on Parnassus Street. It
just keeps coming in.

What is it with you and these coincidences? The mixing of reality and fiction
surrounding your actual films, the Brothers Grimm with the French and the
Germans, Quixote’s script with the French and the Germans, Brazil and Universal
Studios …

Oh, wait till you see Parnassus! It is a totally prescient film. There was a line in it that
Christopher Plummer didn’t want to say after Heath died, which was: “The world is full
of stories, comedies, romances – a tale of unforeseen death.” But every word in
Parnassus was written before Heath died. Wait till you see it. You’ll be out of your mind.
You can’t believe what the script is saying. It’s getting too close to home now. There’s
one big scene where Johnny [Depp] has a big speech and people thought we wrote this as
a eulogy to Heath. But it was written before.

There are so many of these bizarre cross-references. For instance, in Tideland there
is Noah (Jeff Bridges) on the bus all stoned saying, “We won’t be safe until we reach
grandma’s house.” Immediately, “Little Red Riding Hood” pops to mind and you
were editing the film while simultaneously editing Brothers Grimm. Did the line
jump over?

That’s funny. But that was all in the original book. These things start connecting. That’s
the first time I’ve thought about that.

Okay, here’s another one. Heath in Parnassus: before he appears, this Tarot card comes
up and it’s the hanged man, a man hanging upside down. The last image of Heath in The
Dark Knight [Christopher Nolan, 2008]: he’s hanging upside down. And I only spotted
that a month ago.
Do you sometimes become afraid of your powers?

No, I don’t believe they are. I just don’t know what it is. It’s this idea of morphic
resonance. You drop something and the vibrations go out and they keep reappearing. I
think it’s about being tuned into things. If you’re aware of the world, and you deal with it
and you talk about it, it’s going to happen, somewhere. It just happened a bit too close to
home this time.

Let’s talk about Tom Waits? He appeared in The Fisher King and his music was
supposed to be in Tideland?

I wanted to use his music in Tideland, and I was talking about possibly getting him to do
the score, but it didn’t happen. There are so many of his songs that get me started on a
film and then the thing didn’t quite work.

On Parnassus, I wanted to use one of his songs, but he didn’t want it, because he wanted
to be just an actor in the film. His music is extraordinary and I think he is the great
musical poet of America. And he does what I do: he deals with the darkest stuff and the
most beautiful stuff. He balances the two things. The most romantic songs, the most
frightening songs: it’s all there.

He’s very special. And it was just him playing the Devil. Nobody can do it better.
[Laughs]

The character Tony (Heath Ledger): would he have been somehow physically
transformed when going through the magic mirror even in the original script? It
seems an appropriate tool …

No. That’s why some people say that, somehow, the film is more magical now and more
extraordinary because of what happened. But Heath, he was so chameleon-like in what he
was doing in the film that, when he got to go through the mirror, I had no idea what he
was going to do. He prepared a lot of possibilities. I’ll never get to see that and I really
want to know what he was going to do. We just played a very sweet game together,
because he was surprising me every day, every shot almost. I was like, “What the fuck
are you doing now? Fantastic!” The month we shot with Heath, I was just holding on,
because he was flying. And it was just magical what he was doing. Because he wanted to
be a film director as well, so I was just letting him take over. [Laughs]

Heath Ledger died in the middle of the film. Now that’s a pretty extraordinary thing to
happen to anybody and especially to us who loved this man, because he was quite
extraordinary. I just said, “It’s finished, let’s go home. The curse of Gilliam continues.”
But luckily I was surrounded by people that said, “No, we’re going to finish it somehow.
Heath’s last performance will be on film, the world will see it.” So, the first thing I did –
because I didn’t have a plan yet – was I called Johnny Depp. And I said, “Johnny, I don’t
know what to do. We’re in a situation. Will you help out?” And he said, “I’m there.” And
then, after a week, we were throwing ideas around, we decided we would try to get three
actors to finish Heath’s part.

In Doctor Parnassus, there’s the magic

mirror and, when you go through it, you suddenly can enter your imagination, bigger than
you ever dreamed it. I made a decision that the first time we have a character go through
we’ll let his face change. And once you have his face change, we could argue that every
time the character that Heath played, Tony, goes through, we can put another face there.
And that’s what we did.

So, Johnny, Collin Farrell and Jude Law finished Heath’s part. And it was very difficult
because they were all doing other films. But they were extraordinarily brave, maybe even
foolish, to walk into a situation like that with no time to rehearse. They just turned up and
did it.

None of us knew whether it would work until the film was finished and we first showed it
to a few people. They thought that was the way the film was written. So, it was clear that
we managed to pull this thing off, but it was quite extraordinary.

It’s an act of love, that’s what it is. And it’s a fantastic film, because often acts of love
can be pretty boring. Ask my wife. [Laughs] But this one isn’t.

I must say something about Heath Ledger because there has been so much written about
it about The Dark Knight and how playing the Joker somehow twisted his mind. That’s
utter nonsense. He was laughing every time he’d come back from a day shooting the
Joker. He was just laughing because “he’d got away with murder again”! It was just great
fun. That was one of the greatest things when working with him. And it’s the same with
Johnny Depp. They play and the whole thing becomes fun. Because they are very
intelligent people, they prepare very seriously; they do all their research, they get it inside
of them and then they just throw it away and off we go. Camera turns: play time!

You say Parnassus is a compendium of things that got left behind from other
projects.

Yes and no. I keep all these ideas and, when I start a project, I start going through
everything and think, “Oh, that’s good. Why didn’t I do that?” Then, by the time you’re
finished, there’s probably not anything in there from the original inspiration, but that’s
how it starts. And this was a chance to do live action, to do period, to do cartoons. It’s all
in there.

You say that it is a fun and humorous story about the consequences of our personal
choices. So, if it’s about selling your child’s soul to the Devil, I am wondering how
this is fun and humorous.

Well, Parnassus was very smart and he was very old, so he thought he would never have
a kid at that age. There’s a whole line in there, about his wife who becomes pregnant at
sixty, a miracle. He thought he had beaten the Devil, he thought he was just being clever.
He wasn’t. [Laughs]

Is there an equation between Gilliam and Parnassus? How much is the character
you?

It’s me and it’s Charles McKeown, and then it’s the way Christopher Plummer does it. It
comes from saying, “Okay, this is the kind of character and let’s go with it.” It’s like with
any actor. What they’re playing is not them, but it is part of them. I work that way and I
just go down these roads and see what happens. [Laughs]

And how did Quixote come about?

I always thought about him. I’d never read the book; that’s the difference. It’s one thing
to have the Quixote in your head, and then you read the book and now we’ve got a
problem. This is such a massive, incredible piece of work. I think this is truly the first
modern novel. Pirandello learned everything he ever knew from Cervantes’ second book,
basically. And it was just always there.

So, I read the book. And that’s the thing: I think most people don’t read the book. They
know of the story of Quixote and Sancho and windmills. That’s it. It was after
Munchausen that I first started to think about it. And I called Jake Eberts, who was the
producer on Munchausen, and I said, “I’ve got two names and I need 20 million dollars.”
One was Quixote and the other was Gilliam. And he said, “You got the money.” And
then somebody else offered me more money and then blah blah blah. And then I just
made a mess of it. [Laughs]

How many times did you start the project?

I don’t know. When you see the documentary [Lost in La Mancha], there were two times,
but that was with a script that Toni (Grisoni) and I had written. So, it was actually three
times. And this is the fourth now.

And each time the script changed? How much has it changed now?
It’s really good now. It was bad before. [Laughs] The script was tied up in a legal
situation for seven years and everybody kept saying, “Well, just rewrite it.” And I said,
“No, it’s perfect. It’s the best thing we’ve ever written.” And I refused to rewrite it and I
didn’t even look at it. Then, nine months ago, we got the script back and I finally read it.
And it wasn’t nearly good enough to make the film. So, we’ve done a serious re-write.

The major change in it is about the two main characters. We changed not what they do
and who they are, but whereas before it was a modern advertising guy ending up in the
17th century, now he stays in the 21st century; he never moves. What we changed in the
story is that ten years earlier our advertising guy was making a little film. He was a keen
filmmaker before he got into commercials. And he came to Spain, to this little village and
he made his version of Quixote, with no money, very artistic. It went into festivals, won
lots of prizes and then he was picked out by an advertising company and now he makes
big money. So, he gave up his art for money. And now he’s back in Spain making a
commercial with Don Quixote in the commercial, and he realizes he’s not far from the
village where he shot his little film. He goes back and he realizes he’s actually destroyed
everybody’s lives. The guy who played Sancho became an alcoholic and died. There was
this young girl in the movie, a sort of symbol of innocence, who decided to become an
actress, went off to Madrid and ended up becoming a whore. And what happened to the
old guy who played Quixote? He went mad and he thinks he’s Don Quixote.

So, the same scenes are taking place, but they now have very different meaning. You
don’t have Don Quixote, but you’ve got a guy who thinks he’s Don Quixote, and he’s
going through exactly the same Don Quixote experiences. And it becomes more pathetic.
It’s so much better than what we were doing before.

And the cast has changed completely?

Unfortunately, none of the original cast will be part of it. Jean Rochefort still can’t sit on
a horse. Johnny [Depp] is occupied playing on Pirates 10, 12 and 13. So, we’re starting
fresh and it’s quite exciting. Hopefully, we’ll be shooting next spring, meeting actors
hunting for money. That’s where we are now.

Who is going to replace Rochefort, since you were so set on him, his face, his
manners? Is that why the characters changed?

No. But if the guy we’re talking to at the moment get’s the part, it will be a very different
Quixote. Guaranteed! I won’t say who it is, because the minute I say it, it won’t happen.
But it’ll be very different.

And the title The Man Who Killed Don Quixote …

It’s a poetic title. It could be read many different ways. [Laughs]

Is it the advertising guy who kills Don Quixote with his reality, by making him
realize he was insane, by making him turn sane, as a variation of the book?
In the book, the sanity kills Quixote in the end. No, this guy kills Quixote. There’s
murder in this one. There’s death, there’s actual death in here. But there’s death and
transfiguration. That’s what goes on. It’s a very transcendental ending.

Would you say that now, with Parnassus being out and Quixote on the way, you are
running the show, doing things that you want to be doing, and doing them your
way?

No, it’s been like that all along. Really,

I’ve always had control. I’ll tell you where it’s been: on Munchausen, I cut out five
minutes of the film. I didn’t change anything; I just trimmed it. The studios said that if I
got it down to two hours, they would be right behind me and they then just buried the
film. So, that was the first time I did it. But I never cut anything that’s important to me.
Even with Brazil, the American version, there are a couple of little changes, but they
don’t mean anything. So, I’ve really had control over that.

There are 5 versions of Brazil out there and they are all, as far as I am concerned, the
same film. There’s nothing that I cut out that I was unhappy about. I think it’s kind of
nice. But film lovers get obsessed about it: there must be the perfect version of the film,
only one, because everything else has been fiddled with or gets lost. But there’s many
ways of telling the same thing. There’s many ways of singing the same song, as long as
the song is not being changed in its essence. The Fisher King had nothing changed.
Twelve Monkeys had nothing changed. Fear and Loathing had nothing changed. So, it
was going well. And then along came The Brothers Grimm.

I didn’t physically have final cut on the film, and I went off and did Tideland, leaving it
behind. They asked me back and the deal I’d done was: “If you bring me back, I get final
cut.” So, the film that went out was the best I could do at that time. It’s my film, but it
suffered from the mood I was in when making it. Tideland? No problems there.

Basically, I’ve had a very easy run compared to everybody else.

How come you do so many other people’s scripts and novels? Since it does seem that
you enjoy making up scripts?

I was depressed when The Fisher King came up. I thought I’d never work after
Munchausen. So, that was it. And it really excited me, so that was great fun. And Twelve
Monkeys – great.
You know, they all become mine very quickly or else I become the script; it doesn’t
matter. I’m making the movie and I never feel I’m compromising. And Parnassus was
nice to just say, “Okay, I’m just going to do one of my own.” It was kind of a way to see
if I still could invent something from nothing. And it’s really good.

And you can …

And I can.

Because the reception in Cannes …

… was fantastic. I think we’re probably running at about ninety percent positive and ten
percent negative. Which is, for me, extraordinary! It just seems to be working and it’s
exciting. But, on the other hand, when we opened the Munich Film Festival, there was a
guy, a journalist I was talking to the next day, and he said when he was watching it there
was a guy in a suit next to him. At one point, the guy in the suit turned over and says,
“Nobody’s ever gonna wanna watch this film. Why do they make shit like this?” It
always amazes me how some people cannot see what we got on screen. It makes no sense
to them, it’s just a big mess, there’s no structure that they can understand.

There was a nice interview with Newsnight, which is a news programme on BBC, and it
was after the showing in Cannes and there were three people. There was one guy who
clearly saw himself as a very important intellectual. He didn’t like it at all; he hated it.
And then there was a lady and a guy, and they said it was fantastic, and they loved it.

Now, what was interesting was that the intellectual was trying to explain it very clearly.
And these other two people, who were very good, verbally, they didn’t waste words on it.
They said: “No, no it’s fantastic!” They didn’t want to sit down and do this intellectual
analysis of what was going on. They got it. The intellectual analyzer just struggled,
because he didn’t let go.

Learn to play; let the films come at you. Why sit there trying to get your review worked
out while you’re watching the film? Watch the film! And if you want to write a review,
you should be able to remember. And if you don’t, that’s the review you’ll write: “I sat
for two hours, I can’t remember anything.” That’s a good review. I mean, a good way of
writing a review.

I hate reviewers because they sit there writing with a little flashlight. Watch it! And then
write about it afterwards.

ENDNOTES

1. Bronenosets Potyomkin (Battleship Potemkin, Sergei Eisenstein, 1925).