Gilliamesque Read online

  Right from the off, I found being in sole charge of the director’s chair to be more a source of excitement than of anxiety. I like and need a certain amount of pressure when I’m doing a job – it keeps me focused and prioritising, rather than lapsing into a miasma of excess possibility. Make do and mend was certainly our watchword on Jabberwocky. Apart from short location shoots at Caerphilly and Chepstow castles, most of the film was shot on the old Oliver! set at Shepperton, with a few helpful remnants salvaged from a German film version of The Marriage of Figaro to make it look less familiar.

  However stretched we were for time, that was no excuse not to prepare caerphilly.

  We bunged the Germans a bit of money not to tear down their set, and then revamped it. No one would’ve known where it came from once we’d finished with it, and it would have been nice to have been allowed to do the same with the fantastic huge fibre-glass sewer that Blake Edwards had been using on the Pink Panther film he was making at the time. But his people kept getting wind of the possibility that we might re-use some of their old stuff and deliberately set fire to it to stop us. That really pissed me off, because it was so wasteful.

  We’d have to wait a few years to get some small revenge on Mr Edwards (when he wanted to produce Life of Brian and we didn’t let him, despite having enjoyed a delightful evening in the company of Blake and his wife Julie Andrews, whose unusually potent sexual allure was lost on none of us in person), but they do say that particular meal is best served straight from the chiller. In the meantime, we had a lot of black cloth to do shadowy recesses with, and I had made a couple of box-windows with very deep reveals that we could throw light through, to give the impression of a thick castle wall. We also had a small number of four-by-eight rubber pieces that we could move around as flagstones, and from that point on the bulk of efforts and financial reserves could go into making Max Wall’s throne look convincing.

  Far from being intimidating, the presence at Shepperton Studios of ‘proper’ actors such as illustrious stage and small-screen veterans Max Wall and John Le Mesurier was actually a huge relief, because these people had been trained to respect their director, a novelty which I found delightful. Especially with someone like Max, who was in his seventies by then, but if I said, ‘Lie down here and we’re going to cover you with a pile of dust,’ he’d just do it, whereas too many of the Pythons abjured such physically demanding assignments. I never really blamed them for their obstructive attitude – I think it was just that they knew who I was, so why would they respond any differently? Whereas by the time I was doing Jabberwocky, Monty Python and the Holy Grail had come out and been quite successful, and Terry Jones and I had our names up on the silver screen right after the words, ‘Directed by’, so the pros just assumed I knew what I was doing.

  Max Wall is remembered now as a much-loved figure, but he’d gone through a bad patch in his life when he’d been widely hated – and effectively black-listed in professional terms – for being known to have had an affair when such things weren’t publicly allowed. As a consequence he was quite a sad, lonely guy from day to day, but in terms of his attitude to his work, he was just a joy. I think he loved the fact that he was suddenly playing one of the leads in a movie, and he and John Le Mes’ – who’d long been great fans of each other, but had not previously met – just kind of fell in love, which was why I encouraged them to let their characters develop into a couple of old queens bringing a bit of sweet, funny tenderness to the autumn years of their on-screen relationship.

  Laying down the law to Michael Palin: as a director, I find that one of the keys to retaining my actor’s respect is to always come on set dressed appropriately for a man in a position of authority.

  Harry H. Corbett took a bit more handling, because he was a complicated character and probably his own worst enemy in the long run, but once you’d got the hang of him, he was fine. I’ve tended to be very cautious about who I’ve worked with over the years – I’ve got to feel that they’re people I’m going to be able to have fun with, who are really committed to what we’re doing and aren’t going to pull the kind of bullshit that I read about all the time in other people’s biographies. But my personal experience has often been that the guys who are the most notorious for being difficult actually aren’t, they’re just very intelligent people who have been treated like cattle and respond quite badly to that.

  Strangely, the only trouble I got from anyone on that film was one of the lower-echelon actors, who at one point told me he would ‘rather show his cock’ than pick his nose, which was an important bit of business that was actually in the script. I remember thinking, ‘What the fuck is this?’ But in my experience (now as then) there’s never really any point in getting angry on a film set, and if a scene is going to end up in a lengthy battle and eat up what little time is available I’ll just change the script.

  One of the most exciting challenges presented by Jabberwocky was translating the monster from two into three dimensions. Val Charlton – who’d helped build the fairy boat in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, and would later construct the three-headed griffin in The Adventures of Baron Munchausen – was my right-hand woman on this job, which inevitably got patched together long after the eleventh hour and after the SFX man had effectively had a breakdown.

  It turned out that the secret of the Jabberwock was to have the guy in the suit standing backwards, so the legs articulated the way a bird’s would. I was obsessed with disguising the fact that a man was inside, but the biggest problem was that the claws were too floppy. We ended up shooting them in reverse, because somehow when they lifted off the ground and you reversed the shot convincingly, it looked like they were really slamming down hard.

  Those kind of magical chance discoveries make any amount of frantic scrabbling around in a quarry in the wilds of mid-Wales worthwhile. When I look back at these sequences, they’re all quite chaotic and – inevitably – a long way short of what we’d hoped for, with a fair amount of ‘cut to monster going “Aaargh”’ happening, but at least we managed to give the whole thing a certain sense of scale, if only by making a miniature suit of armour and putting a little kid squeezed inside.

  It would be wrong to go on any longer without acknowledging the huge contribution of one of the friends I have learned much from – Julian Doyle. He’d been the production manager on Holy Grail and, knowing more about the practical side of film-making than either Terry J. or myself, was always finding ways to deal with the problems besetting us – whether this meant throwing toy animals into the air in his back garden (later to be matted into the scene at the castle when Arthur and his knights are pelted with a cow and various poultry) or squatting on the floor of his sitting room shooting ‘The Book of the Film’ by candlelight.

  A veritable Julian of all trades, he worked on every Python film from The Holy Grail to The Meaning of Life and all of mine up until The Fisher King, his credits ranging through pre-production (his notes on my scripts were always particularly good in helping me to focus) to shooting and editing, with stints as writer, director and cameraman confirming him as one of the unsung heroes of my career’s cinematic phase. As Jabberwocky got my post-Python bandwagon rolling, he was the one greasing the wheels.

  We beat the Alien people to that ‘skin stretching like vagina’ thing by two whole years.

  Draft poster for JABBERWOCKY – never mind BOSCH and BREVGHEL, when is GILLIAM the Questionable going to doff his cup to ALICE IN WONDERLAND illustrator John Tenniel?

  hen Jabberwocky came out, Jubilee punk rock year of 1977, I got pilloried in much of the press because the reviews all said it wasn’t as good as The Holy Grail. Things were especially parlous in New York, where I’d managed to make a bad situation worse by writing a note to the New York critics saying this wasn’t in fact a Monty Python film but rather an homage to Breughel and Bosch. The fact that I should have mentioned two such great artists in connection with my (in their opinion) juvenile scatological crap obviously made them crazy, and all
the reviews were about Gilliam the Questionable, rather than (Max Wall’s character) Bruno the Questionable.

  As painful as it was at the time, this mini-furore probably did serve some purpose in helping to define me as a separate – albeit somewhat embattled – entity outside the Monty Python group. It also established my superior art history credentials to those of the self-styled Big Apple critical elite, as – duh! – anyone who has the smallest familiarity with the aforementioned Pieter and Hieronymus knows that those two artists are about as juvenile and scatological as you can possibly get. And since half the images in the film were stolen from them, it seemed only fair to give them a bit of credit.

  The funny thing about Jabberwocky was, whenever it went anywhere that people hadn’t been primed to expect another Holy Grail or had never heard of Monty Python, it actually did very well. Even Python fans seemed to be taken aback by the level of filth, though. I remember one screening where this obsessive Python fan with a spotty face and green teeth (I’m not saying they all looked like that, it just so happened that this one did) came up and pronounced himself ‘deeply offended by the sheer ugliness of it all’. I wonder who he saw in the morning as he brushed his teeth. Cary Grant?

  In a way I was quite happy with that reaction, as one of the most important things about Jabberwocky to me was that it should be anti-American film-making – not in an explicitly political way, but in terms of being the opposite of the Hollywood distorting mirror I’d grown up with, whereby all the pores were mysteriously gone from the skin and everyone’s teeth shone like Doris Day and Rock Hudson’s. You could say that in my determination to have everyone with crooked teeth and surrounded by great piles of ordure, I’d become more British than the British. I suppose when you make a conscious choice in terms of your national identity, you are bound to cleave to it more strongly than when it’s just what you’re born with.

  The one thing I most wanted to do with Jabberwocky – and in this at least I think I succeeded – was to make it as tactile as possible. I also really liked the idea of two fairy tales in collision, so you have what’s traditionally a happy ending, where Michael Palin gets to marry the princess and rule half the kingdom, but it’s the wrong happy ending, because in this case he wanted to marry the fat girl next door who ate potatoes and treated him like shit. It was the sheer perversity of this which I loved, and I suppose again there’s something quite un-American about that. I was Senator Joseph McCarthy’s worst nightmare – a prom king with a grudge.

  The adversarial character of my professional relationship with my ancestral homeland had been established way back in 1971, when I was working on The Marty Feldman Comedy Machine for ABC. That show was produced by Larry Gelbart – the man who wrote for Sid Caesar, Jonathan Winters, and even Danny Kaye (my how the circles connect) and then gave the world the great TV series M*A*S*H – and, by the same curious British invasion logic that obliged Jimi Hendrix to make it big in London first before he could go to Monterey, the whole series was made in a big, ugly tower block on the North Circular. A couple of my fellow Pythons turned down writing gigs on it, because they didn’t fancy going into the office from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., five days a week, but I was happy to be commissioned to do the title sequence and half an hour of animation.

  This is the plug-in-and-play tittle plate I did for Marty. He himself was difficult to photograph because his eyes pointed in different directions.

  Perhaps inevitably, given that this show was being made for notoriously uptight American TV network ABC (who will figure again later in this tale), it was the occasion of my first proper run-in with the censors. I’d written this piece of animation, which I was quite pleased with, about the balance of fat within nature – the idea being that as one country puts on weight, another will inevitably be getting thinner. I broadened it out (as it were) so that when someone diets, that sets fat free to roam around looking for a home, and this turned out to be a great platform for visual gags, like the guy who’s lingering, leaning against a lamp-post and a big blob of fat comes around the corner and scoots up his trouser leg, causing instant obesity, and making the malingerer topple over and roll down the street.

  The row started with a famous Boucher nude that I’d cut out. ABC’s in-house censor – who happened to be a bit on the extra-large side herself, but I’m sure that in no way affected her judgement – insisted that the lovely buttock-dividing crack of the model’s arse (it was a rear view) would have to be covered. By this time, I was really making hay with Ronnie Barker’s Victorian nudes, so I chose a frontally seated one, cut holes where the breasts should be, and protected the modesty of the lady’s groin by cutting out a triangular-shaped hole, then submitted it to ABC and said, ‘OK, if you don’t want me to show the naughty bits, we can just not show them.’ The response was a resounding ‘No’. So it was ruled that I could neither show the naughty bits nor even not show them! I remember joking with Barry Levinson, who was one of a number of film-directors-to-be working as writers on that show, that the only way we could get this stuff through would be if he ‘took one for the team’ and shagged the censor. He wasn’t man enough to mount that Everest and so the fat animation did the only thing it could do and tossed itself off, which was probably all the censor did anyway.

  Whenever I run up against that kind of bureaucracy – in whatever form it comes – I just seem to go berserk. My next response was to give ABC a minute-long sequence of animation where there was no movement whatsoever. It started with an empty landscape and this unseen guy’s voice saying he’s got this really great dog who does incredible tricks. He calls the dog into shot and asks the dog to roll over and play dead and then this very long off-screen argument ensues about whether the dog has moved or not (which it hadn’t). In the end the guy thinks he sees some movement and this big hammer comes down and smashes the dog, as if to say, ‘Alright, you want animation? I’ll show you how it’s done.’

  It wasn’t just the fact that someone had said ‘No’ to me that elicited this strong reaction. I wouldn’t have objected if something I did had been rejected for not being sufficiently funny or well-realised. It was the manifest absurdity of saying that a classical painting could not be seen on TV that riled me. In this situation, I was being a traditionalist, not an iconoclast: ‘What is this new framework you’re imposing which means the public now can’t see something they could have looked at in a gallery in Victorian times? Tell me what your rules are, because I don’t understand them.’

  I used yellow paper and red ink – ‘Kerchunk, Kerchunk, Kerchunk’ – stamp ’em up, cut ’em out and then layer them like old theatrical waves … I believe that’s how they do it in China too.

  The ABC censor had no objection to representations of chinese communists – so long as their arse cheeks were fully covered. I made this rubber stamp because I needed a sea of loyal party members that Chairman MAO could swim through I was ahead of ANTONY GORMLEY at that point.

  That’s what drives me so crazy now about living in the age when the language of ‘appropriateness’ rules with an iron fist. Every time I hear that word ‘inappropriate’, something curdles inside of me, like when American schools removed thirty pages of Anne Frank’s diaries because she had the temerity to mention her genitalia (apparently there were ‘lips inside of lips’ but she couldn’t see because there was ‘hair in the way’).

  All the right-wing parents were screaming the ‘I’-word, but if you’re going to teach kids about sex, you might as well use Anne Frank to do it. She’s the perfect role model. On the one hand there’s the undercurrent of jeopardy – ‘Don’t touch those bits, or the Nazis will get you.’ On the other, her circumstances were different enough to those of the average good Christian American school-child to give you a bit of leeway – ‘It’s OK, she was Jewish, not like you.’

  Over the years I took great delight in refining my response to the absurdities of censorship, with at least one Monty Python animation super-imposing Lord Longford’s face over the genital area of Mic
helangelo’s David to make the censor the thing that was being censored. It wasn’t just the moving of near-the-knuckle material a little further away from the knuckle to which I took profound moral exception, but any kind of outside interference in the material we’d worked so hard on. I suppose the BBC had given us delusions of self-determination by leaving us so much to our own devices when we were making the show. And in 1976, when we got wind of ABC (them again!) compressing six shows into two 60-minute ‘specials’, editing out 24 minutes of ‘unsuitable’ material to make room for adverts, the opportunity arose to put those delusions to the test.

  ABC couldn’t understand what we were complaining about when we sued them – weren’t they offering us a much larger audience, so why should we care about our show being bowdlerised? But I was adamant about things like that, and I wasn’t the only one offering to lead the resistance against Monty Python’s more malleable tendency – Terry J. was just as insistent. In the end it was the eternally plausible Michael Palin and I who took the case to court. I hadn’t yet shed my American citizenship, which was handy as there had to be a Yank on the affidavit for our case to be heard.

  The case itself – satisfyingly abbreviated on Wikipedia as ‘Gilliam v. American Broadcasting’ – was definitely a big deal. There we were in the same courthouse where Nixon’s former Attorney General John Mitchell had a year or so before become the first holder of that office ever to be given a prison sentence (for his role in trying to cover up the Watergate scandal). The room of judgement itself was the full Perry Mason deal – oak-panelled with 40-foot-high ceilings – and Mike and I definitely looked upon it as a performance space.