Terry Gilliam

[DarkImbecile]

Terry Gilliam (1940 -)



"I really want to encourage a kind of fantasy, a kind of magic. I love the term magic realism, whoever invented it — I do actually like it because it says certain things. It's about expanding how you see the world. I think we live in an age where we're just hammered, hammered to think this is what the world is... and it's not the world. The world is a million possible things."

Filmography
Features
Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975)
Jabberwocky (1977)
Time Bandits (1981)
The Meaning of Life [co-director] (1983)
Brazil (1985)
The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1988)
The Fisher King (1991)
Twelve Monkeys (1995)
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (2000)
The Brothers Grimm (2005)
Tideland (2005)
The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus (2009)
The Zero Theorem (2014)
The Man Who Killed Don Quixote (2018)

Shorts
"Storytime" (1968)
"Miracle of Flight" (1975)
"The Crimson Permanent Assurance" (1983)
"The Legend of Hallowdega" (2010)
"The Wholly Family" (2011)

Books
The Battle of Brazil: Terry Gilliam v. Universal Pictures in the Fight to the Final Cut by Jack Mathews (1987)
Dark Knights and Holy Fools: The Art and Films of Terry Gilliam: From Before Python to beyond Fear and Loathing by Bob McCabe (1999)
Gilliam on Gilliam by Ian Christie (2000)
Terry Gilliam: Interviews by David Sterritt and Lucille Rhodes (2004)
Dreams and Nightmares: Terry Gilliam, The Brothers Grimm & Other Cautionary Tales of Hollywood by Bob McCabe (2006)
Terry Gilliam by Peter Marks (2009)
The Cinema of Terry Gilliam: It's a Mad World by Jeff Birkenstein, Anna Froula, and Karen Randell, eds. (2013)
Terry Gilliam's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: The Untold Story by Gene Gregorits (2014)
Gilliamesque: A Pre-posthumous Memoir by Terry Gilliam (2015)
Tilting at Windmills: The Films of Terry Gilliam by Scott Colbert (2015)

Web Resources
Dreams: The Terry Gilliam Fanzine
Cinephilia & Beyond's collection articles, videos, links, and scripts for Gilliam's films
Senses of Cinema biography, bibliography, and collection of links
1981 interview with Gerald Peary, Parent's Choice Magazine
1996 interview with Bruce Willis and David Stratton, The Movie Show
2003 interview with Terry Gross, NPR
2009 interview with Nick Gazin, Vice
2009 interview with Maša Peče, Senses of Cinema
2014 interview with David Ehrlich, The Dissolve
2014 audio interview with Rian Johnson (Part 1), Talkhouse
2014 audio interview with Rian Johnson (Part 2), Talkhouse
2015 interview with Chris Wallace, Interview Magazine
2018 interview with Matt fagerholm, RogerEbert.com

Forum Resources
Terry Gilliam on DVD
903 Jabberwocky
37 Time Bandits
51 Brazil
764 The Fisher King
12 Monkeys
175 Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
Tideland (Terry Gilliam, 2005)
The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus (Terry Gilliam, 2009)
The Zero Theorem (Terry Gilliam, 2014)
The Man Who Killed Don Quixote (Terry Gilliam, 2018)

[black&huge]

Is it ok to say he’s not that good? Even 12 Monkeys is fairly mediocre.

I'll just go the full step and say he never made a great movie.

[Lost Highway]

It's OK to say so but I also think it's OK to say you're very wrong. It might not reach Marker's heights but 12 Monkeys is a great movie. I'll say everything post Fear and Loathing ranges from mediocre to bad (haven't seen Tideland, partial to Imaginarium) but this looks like a return to former. I'll watch almost anything with Pryce and Driver

12 Monkeys is his best film, I love how it honors Marker by including an homage to Vertigo in a nod to Sans soleil. Like all of Gilliams films, it’s somewhat flawed by Gilliam‘s tendency for excess (Brad Pitt‘s performance) but together with The Fisher King it’s his most controlled film.

For all it’s production problems, on the other end is The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, which may be the most out of control Gilliam movie but it’s often very beautiful. I prefer it to Brazil which has a good first half but then feels like getting whacked around the head for another hour. All three major movie versions of Baron Münchhausen are visually astonishing and Gillliam was no doubt strongly influenced by Josef von Báky’s and Karel Zeman‘s adaptations.

I like The Fisher King but I find its two female supporting characters (Mercedes Ruehl and Amanda Plummer are fantastic !) far more interesting than its two male protagonists.

Starting with Fear and Loathing his films have become increasingly unwatchable for me.

I‘m not sure whether Gilliam has ever made a “great” film but I also don’t think he was ever mediocre.

[thirtyframesasecond]

Is it ok to say he’s not that good? Even 12 Monkeys is fairly mediocre.

I'll just go the full step and say he never made a great movie.

I really liked Time Bandits, but haven't seen it for around two decades.

[JSC]

I think Gilliam's most fruitful period was essentially between Jabberwocky
and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. The films he has made since then
have been rather meandering and formless (The Brothers Grimm, The
Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, for example).

[hearthesilence]

I haven't seen his first, but disregarding Monty Python (often hilarious, but more like compilations of skits and jokes than fully realized films), films #2-4 are his best. All excellent, and not only does he get better and more imaginative with each one, he seems to mature as well. He's already well into adulthood by the time he's making these, but Time Bandits is designed as a boy's fantasy, Brazil feels like the type of film a disillusioned, cynical teen or young adult would make, and my favorite The Adventures of Baron Munchausen is the grand type of fantasy an older man would make (and does center on an older man).

After that, his work has merit, but they don't rise to the same peaks. The Fisher King is a wonderful interpretation - everything really good about it came from him and the excellent performances from Bridges, Williams and Ruehl and it makes up for the fact that the script and story is pretty dopey. 12 Monkeys looks great but I was never convinced that it had anything insightful to add to Chris Marker's original film. I haven't seen his recent work but I know people who really like The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus and will eventually see it.

[Cold Bishop]

Parnassus and Zero Theorem have merits but, much like Tim Burton, I feel Gilliam was undone by easy access to CGI (doubly so since he doesn't have big budgets). There's no sense of wonder or awe to his fantasy-scapes the way even the opening of Meaning of Life has.

I do remember feeling that Tideland was unjustly ignored at the time.

[Roscoe]

I liked TIDELAND a good deal, a messy discomfiting work that got unfairly dismissed because it made a lot of reviewers really uncomfortable. PARNASSUS is just a mess -- it's not so much Heath Ledger's passing that was the problem, but the fact of his being cast at all: the movie only begins to work when Colin Farrell takes over the role, bringing a basic warmth and humanity to the role that Ledger just wasn't supplying.

And ZERO THEOREM was sunk by a flimsy script that felt like a retread of BRAZIL. I've got hopes for QUIXOTE, but the ubiquitous Adam Driver isn't making me enthusiastic. We'll see.

[DarkImbecile]

Even by Gilliam’s standards of late, this Independent interview is a lot

[Brian C]

I feel like the article is kinda worthless without the transcript though - way too much summarizing, especially of the interviewer’s words, to know what was really said.

And I don’t necessarily mean that as a defense of Gilliam, perfectly possible the writer cleaned up what he said a little and he’d come across even worse in the full transcript. Just saying that I have a hard time taking articles like this at face value.

[ford]

Even by Gilliam’s standards of late, this Independent interview is a lot

Gilliam has always held bourgeois propriety in contempt from a sort of ill-defined anarcho-left position. That's been a constant with him. He is identifying corporate wokeness as the latest iteration of that class's very narrowly defined moral crusade and thus rebuking it. As he's always done.

I feel like the article is kinda worthless without the transcript though - way too much summarizing, especially of the interviewer’s words, to know what was really said.

And I don’t necessarily mean that as a defense of Gilliam, perfectly possible the writer cleaned up what he said a little and he’d come across even worse in the full transcript. Just saying that I have a hard time taking articles like this at face value.

This is what young writers do now to get clicks: bait famous people into saying "outrageous" things (or reframe long interviews around such topics), hopefully rack up rage-induced page-views and social media shares. We saw this recently with Goldblum and Scarlet Johansson and their "shocking" takes on Woody Allen, and it's been a standard shtick of David Marchese's in New York magazine for some time (Norm McDonald and Martin Short come to mind).

It's very cynical and very boring and very much of a product of American professional class liberalism's 3-5 year fit of hysteria.

[Yakushima]

An excellent interview with Gilliam about The Man Who Killed Don Quixote and many other things - from Dreams.

[beamish14]

Gilliam at 80-part of the British Film Institute's latest fundraising initiative

[Walter Kurtz]

I like Twelve Monkeys, Zero Theorem and Don Quixote MUCH more than Time Bandits, Munchausen and Loathing. I don't know what that says about Criterion's taste or mine. Monkeys, Theorem and Quixote deal with more advanced thematics. The others are just rather silly movies.

If Criterion prefers silliness why didn't they release Python? It's Gilliam's brilliant meta-comedy bookend to his Quixote meta-dramedy. I still remember seeing this film for the first time during a film comedy class and laughing my ass off during the opening credits. No one else was laughing. Then I laughed again at the end when everyone else was actually pissed how the movie ended.

I don't know what to make of that either.

[therewillbeblus]

Its impressions have waned over time, but when I was younger I thought Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was an incredibly effective adaptation of its source material. I recall laughing hysterically at it before trying any substances, and then, a few years later, feeling crippling agitations at the horrific relatability in vulnerable loss of functionality and cognitive ability depicted on screen. I think Gilliam reflects the nonlinearity of drug use blackouts in his film grammar in a way that aggressively picks at the uncomfortable blend in dark comedy. Yes, sometimes it's silly, but that's intentional and also only part of the shell covering the sadness and terror behind it all. That's not to say it's about some "advanced thematics" anyone's missing, but not every movie has to be (of course), and sometimes the sensations produced by enmeshed tones are the theme, just translated and processed using alternative senses than the typical cognitive or emotional ones we're accustomed to use to locate themes.

[Walter Kurtz]

I've never enjoyed big party scenes ala Babylon, Gatsby etc where everyone's drunk, high etc. I walked into a party about midnight after work once when I was a kid and everyone was falling down drunk. Not very enjoyable when you're not in the same state.

That's why Loathing didn't work for me. But I've always loved Steadman's drawings and I once saw a Fear & Loathing play where he painted all the backdrops and there was a red convertible on a low-rise stage. My girlfriend and I were in the front row about five feet from the car and we were interacting with the actors.

Now that was fun because it was immersive... you were inside the drama... and we were both high before the play started.

[therewillbeblus]

To be fair, if you were in the same state as the characters in that movie, you either wouldn’t remember anything about it or would be so acutely terrified and disoriented that the film’s mirroring activity would incite anxiety or confirm your paranoia, so neither would be positive experiences! I agree that being around people who are inebriated when you are not is one of the absolute worst ordinary social situations to find oneself in, but sobriety with some familiarity to the experience of the characters is often necessary to appreciate two competing tones at once. Just like how watching a movie about characters processing grief works best if you are not acutely suffering yourself (the myopia of which may draw comparisons, alienate you from the characters’ experiences, etc.) but can relate to their pain because you’ve suffered before too. I think holding that broad relatability with some distance from the state itself makes surrogate engagement in movies work so well, though there are certainly cases where flooding us is the intended and optimal effect

[Roscoe]

I liked MAN WHO KILLED DON QUIXOTE more when it was called THE FISHER KING, and I didn't like it much when it was called FISHER KING either.

FEAR AND LOATHING I saw in first release, in a small theatre in a multiplex in Chelsea NYC, and I found that the movie trailed me out on the subway ride home, the freakshow was on the C train to midtown, and it remains the only movie to give me a contact high. A recent re-watch had me enjoying it a lot more than I had originally, somehow I was in a better place for it recently than I was when it first came out.

[Walter Kurtz]

if you were in the same state as the characters in that movie, you either wouldn’t remember anything about it or would be so acutely terrified and disoriented that the film’s mirroring activity

I didn't say i was in the same state. I said we were high. If we were in the same state they would have kicked us out of the theater. Being high put us both in a trance that... at least for me... made me laugh at the absurdity i was being surrounded in. So... 0% state... not so fun. 100% state... you don't even see what's in front of you (and they'd kick you out anyway.) 20% state? Just enough to laugh at it all.

At least for me. Diff strokes diff folks.

[therewillbeblus]

I was referring to the first paragraph you wrote more generally about being in the same state as what’s being depicted on screen. Wasn’t meant to be a challenge, just extrapolating that logic to this film in particular was funny, but I knew what you meant.