Gilliamesque Page 18

  A regal-looking SEAN CONNERY looks untroubled by the Moroccan heat – relieved as he is not to be on horseback.

  ‘This is what Hollywood does to talent’ is clearly what’s in my mind as for as this promotional meat-grinder is concerned. ‘Get him, Mr Critical: how can he be so angry when he’s done so well?’ ‘Because some people are born angry and they will find any excuse to hang on to their rage.’

  he reason Time Bandits had happened in the first place was because I was trying to sell the idea of Brazil to Denis O’Brien, but he had absolutely no interest in it. That was what triggered me to say, ‘OK, if you don’t want me to do something for grown-ups, I’ll do a film for all the family.’ It took no powers of persuasion at all on my part to get that one through, and when Time Bandits ended up being the most successful film I – or HandMade – ever did in America, that inevitably led to me being offered all sorts of other Hollywood projects that I didn’t want to do.

  Before I and my new producer Arnon Milchan could finally get Brazil off the ground (just a couple of feet off the ground, obviously, we didn’t want to fly as high as the scale model of Jonathan Pryce would have to), there were two last big pieces to be fitted into the Monty Python jigsaw. There’d been a time somewhere around The Life of Brian when I’d started to become uncertain as to what my exact function in the group was, and the whole thing began to feel a bit frustrating. Obviously I knew I did the animations, but I wasn’t sure how many more of those I had in me, and I’d enjoyed being a solo helmsman so much that I didn’t really want to do timeshare at the wheel with Terry J. again.

  I think all six of us were pulling in different directions by that point, and even though there were inevitably mixed feelings when the group finally disbanded, I’m glad we had the sense to quit while we were still good. It’s always best to leave people wanting more – otherwise how can you justify getting back together for lucrative reunion shows in aid of Terry Jones’ mortgage thirty years later? And Live at the Hollywood Bowl in 1980 and then The Meaning of Life in 1983 made for a pretty good send-off.

  My wife Maggie made one of the great unheralded contributions to Hollywood Bowl. She’d been due to pop out our second child two weeks before, but somehow managed to keep her knees together till the shows were finished so I could get home to London in time for the birth. How best to commemorate this achievement? It seemed unfair to saddle the newborn with the name ‘Hollywood’ outright, in honour of the circumstances of her birth, so we went with Holly Dubois instead, which ensured that even as an infant she would be unknowingly playing to a gallery of multilingual sophisticates – a precocious foundation which she would build on by making an acclaimed big-screen debut in Brazil at the tender age of four.

  If an idea is worth using, it’s worth using twice. This illustration for an article about health farms in the LONDONER in 1968 had found me making an exploratory foray down the same mincemeat-y mineshaft. I have included it to prove that I didn’t steal the concept from Gerald Scarfe’s cartoons for PINK FLOYD’S THE WALL.

  Airbrushed tombstone for THE MEANING OF LIFE title sequence – subtlety, thy name is not Gilliam.

  For my last hurrah as a Monty Python animator, I decided to project the technical limitations that had served me so well on a truly metaphysical scale. This is God holding the world in his hands. Space is always hard, because if you’re going to move through it you’ve got to have stars close to you, and yet you don’t want them too big because otherwise they’ll clutter up the emptiness. I believe Stanley Kubrick faced a similar problem in 2001: A Space Odyssey, but I don’t think he got around it by flicking white paint on to shiny black paper with a toothbrush.

  This is not so much ‘after Leonardo’ as ‘Poundland daVinci’...

  The hungry train of human advancement is itself devoured by the filing cabinet of destiny – it’s the circle of life, folks.

  The creative dilemma I was wrestling with in the run-up to The Meaning of Life was defined not by the sophistication but the child-like crudity of the cutout methodology I’d defined as my own over the past decade and a half. While the artwork I’d done for the various Monty Python books and album sleeves had got progressively more elaborate, it was a mark of the elemental simplicity of my animation technique that I took it to the top right from the beginning. Beware of the Elephants, which was only the second or third of those animations that I ever did, was as good as anything that came later. It was a bit like working on Photoshop – I never got past page three or four of that particular manual, either.

  Perfect people for a perfect world – one cloned family unit, fresh off the production line.

  The truth was that even if some way of adding extra layers of nuance had presented itself, I wouldn’t have wanted to develop it. Partly because I lacked the patience, but largely because it felt like the brutal directness of what I’d done had been integral to its efficacy. It’s the same with certain kinds of music that resist additional ornamentation – why would you want to get more complicated than Chuck Berry or the Sex Pistols? So once I’d got bored of working within the restrictions that stopped my mind wandering, there was no option but for me to do something else.

  This was how The Crimson Permanent Assurance – my segment of The Meaning of Life – started out as an idea for an animation, but then became a live-action short. Perhaps partly as a result of this formative shape-shifting, it also ended up being my first experience of going over-budget. I don’t really know what the numbers were, but shortly after selflessly renouncing my directorial ambitions with regard to the film as a whole, I was deemed by the others to be totally out of control – drunk with power in charge of a limitless budget that no one had ever actually specified to me.

  My ‘Little Bo-Peep moment’, welcoming Mike and Eric to heaven I’m sure you’ll agree, she’s quite an enchanting girl.

  The basic story concerned a group of accountants who get angry with their new corporate masters of the universe and decide to become pirates on the high seas of international finance. If any amateur psychoanalysts out there wish to discern a subliminal echo of my own need to break out of my restricted role within Monty Python, I suppose it would be churlish of me to deny them this pleasure, but I don’t remember that line of thought surfacing consciously at the time. And rather than being a product of anxieties about my own advancing years (I had by this point reached the grand old age of forty-two) the decision to use eighty-year-old actors reflected my determination to do for the elderly what Time Bandits had done for dwarves, i.e. dramatically expand their employment opportunities. I’m that guy who’s all about helping the minorities . . . so long as they stay minorities of course – once they start becoming powerful, then it’s a different matter.

  The tone and feel of The Crimson Permanent Assurance were so different to the rest of the film that we had to remove it from its original slot in the middle of The Meaning of Life and run it as a separate mini-feature at the beginning, where it functioned like a sumptuous illustrated letter at the start of one of those medieval manuscripts I’m always banging on about, at the same time bearing witness to my increasingly marginal status within the group and growing willingness to fly the coop. Up on the big screens at the Cannes Film Festival, it looked fucking great – a real spectacle with genuine scale to it. Then when the actual film came on, it felt like you were watching TV, which given that this was how most people would ultimately end up seeing it, was probably for the best.

  This is my original drawing for the ‘Big Bang’ segment in Eric’s ‘Galaxy Song’, where the stars coalesce and become the space-Time continuum, they you suddenly realise that it’s a pair of breasts and she’s been impregnated in space. As an indication of my readiness to move on, I got some proper animations to do this one for me.

  The happy memory of Time Bandits’ big box-office numbers combined with the commercial and critical success of the last three Python films contrived to maximise my allure as a director and foster the general misconception of me as
someone who knew what I was doing. But as hard as Arnon and I milked that moment, we were still struggling to get a full enough bucket to sustain Brazil.

  If we’d been willing to do another time-travelling dwarf comedy, we’d have been awash with Hollywood doubloons, but having recklessly decided to exploit this moment of possibility to do the thing I’d wanted to do all along, getting the investment we needed was going to be much more of a challenge. I’d never been responsible for pitching a film before – other people had always been kind enough to do the money stuff for me – but this time Arnon and I were doing the rounds at Cannes.

  He was running the show, and I was the guy who came in like a trained monkey, leapt around and made a lot of chattering noises. You hope people are going to be swept along by your energy and enthusiasm, but more often what happens is the head honcho falls asleep. That’s happened to me a couple of times, once with Brazil and again when J K Rowling wanted me to direct the first Harry Potter film (an assignment I was ultimately happy not to get, as by all the accounts I’ve heard from people who did end up doing them, the studio sat on you so heavily it became a bit of a nightmare). The younger junior executives are sitting there all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, but the main guy is dozing – you’re just noise to him.

  We weren’t getting much traction on Arnon’s initial budget of £12 million, but then – in what turned out to be a counter-intuitive master-stroke – we put the price up, and the move from Oxford Street to Bond Street somehow did the trick for us. When I try to be devious, I generally fail, but sometimes when I’m out there as an innocent, it just happens. The thing that really sealed the deal was me turning down Enemy Mine – a big studio film that 20th Century Fox were desperate to get off the ground. Time Bandits had momentarily made me an A-list director, and now I was willing to say ‘No’ to a major studio project? The sado-masochistic logic of Hollywood decreed that the thing I’d turned them down for must now be something worth having.

  As to the exact nature of the project for which we now had the go-ahead, the screenplay of Brazil had gone through a complex process of refinement at the hands of myself, my old buddy Charles McKeown, and one of the great English playwrights, Tom Stoppard – as a Czech born in Singapore, he understands the English language and its twists and turns far better than the locals. Foreigners are always going to look at things with a sharper eye, which is how Antonioni came over and did such a great job on ‘Swinging London’ with Blow-Up.

  The practical process by which various drafts of the script evolved from the initial seed of me watching a beautiful sunset on a gloomy Welsh beach at Port Talbot is a story that has already been told in meticulous detail elsewhere. But the question of how Brazil related – and continues to relate – to its broader context, both personally and politically, is one in which I fondly imagine a fair amount of interest may remain.

  In my capacity as one-sixth of an internationally renowned comedy troupe, I had often worried that I might actually be undermining people’s abilities to change things. As any good commie from Lenin onwards would tell you, the secret of fomenting revolution is to let things get as bad as possible as quickly as possible, not to allow people to insulate themselves against the inequities of capitalism by having a good laugh at them. I believe the Roman satirist Juvenal knew this as the doctrine of bread and Flying Circuses.

  It wasn’t just the audience I was worried about – the emollient impact of all of this fun and laughter on my own counter-cultural instincts was no less a cause for concern. I think the underlying worry that comedy had given me a coward’s way out was one factor behind my occasional firebrand-like utterances about my departure from America in the late summer of 1967.

  Would I really have (as I’ve often said I might) joined a quasi-terrorist group like the Weathermen had I stayed? Probably not. It’s like Mick Jagger saying he ‘always wanted’ to be a journalist. Does he really lose sleep at night over the decision to become a globally adored rock ’n’ roll star rather than a Fleet Street hack? Somehow I doubt it, but the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence, however lush it might seem on yours to those looking over barbed-wire barriers of their own. I wanted to be a bomb-thrower and Mick wanted to pontificate about the state of the economy – if only we had followed our dreams!

  When you grow up – as I did – reading Grimms’ fairy tales and the Bible, there’s no question that you see it as your duty to change the world for the better. And I think that’s why, for all my frequent recourse to irony and/or sardonic sarcasm, my films have always been repositories of idealism – both in terms of the process of making them and of the subject matter of the films themselves. Cynicism can often be a way of covering up one’s own inability to do great deeds. In a way I think that was what had so drawn me to the British sense of humour, because the Brits had almost patented that response – they’d failed at an empire, but then by learning to accept failure and make fun of it, they’d almost turned that into a positive thing.

  One hangover from my missionary scholarship past has always been a sense of frustration that I haven’t done more important things, whether in terms of my own creative work or going out to Africa to save a village from worms. Once I’d made the break from Monty Python, it was probably inevitable that this side of me was going to come more to the fore. And by the early eighties, the feeling I’d managed to string out throughout most of the previous decade that the radical agenda of the sixties was somehow being advanced via other means (every time I’d go back to New York with Python, black people seemed to walk a little taller, homosexuals moved with a more unrepentant sashay, and the city in general just seemed a friendlier place than it had been) could no longer really be sustained.

  With Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher consolidating their initially shaky holds on power into an increasingly vice-like grip, it had become clear that the counter-cultural values that I’d taken as a consensus-in-waiting from the mid-1960s onwards were now in full-scale retreat. As far as those two great communicators were concerned, I could understand why all those public schoolboys in the British parliament loved to bend over and have Maggie’s voice crack across their arses like a briar switch, but Ronald Reagan – the Disneyland president – was just ridiculous.

  Here was someone who had never been anything more than a plausible front-man for any number of awful rich right-wing cabals. You never paid much attention to Ronnie Reagan – he was just kind of a joke. Then suddenly he was elected governor of California, and it seemed unthinkable that a B-movie actor could pull that off (there was certainly no way such a thing would ever happen again). When he spoke, he never really said anything, and yet somehow the lilting tones in which he said it reassured you that here was a guy who – despite all the incontrovertible evidence to the contrary – was actually on top of the situation.

  Burt Reynolds told me a story once about being invited to the White House when Ronnie and Nancy were in situ (this works best if you can read it in a Reagan voice): ‘Hey, Burt, you’ve gotta see in the dining room, there are all sorts of secret panels. Here, you just have to touch this and it opens up . . .’ Of course, he can’t find the secret button and is fumbling around all over the place until Nancy says (and this works best if you can read it in a Nancy voice): ‘Oh, Ronnie!’ and finds it immediately.

  Then Ronnie takes Burt up to the Lincoln bedroom and says, ‘I always feel so religious up here – really spiritual. I wonder, could you get down on your knees so we can pray together?’ So there Burt is, praying on the floor of the Lincoln bedroom. When he leaves, Nancy and Ronnie are on the porch of the White House with their arms round each other saying, ‘Whenever you’re in town, Burt, just drop in – it’d be great to see you.’ They’re just these two slightly lonely old people who are only supposed to be running the country – it’s not like there’s really that much to do, is there? It would all be quite sweet if it wasn’t for the awful geopolitical consequences of the kind of shit the people who actually were running the count
ry were getting up to.

  Preparatory collage for BRAZIL – upward motorway though high-rises.

  This was where Brazil came in, and not only because the thing that always intrigued me about the villainous Mr Helpmann was that he’s only the vice chairman, because to me there was nobody in charge. Brazil’s 1940s-inspired take on the future of 1980s Britain was located in exactly those places (like the spectacular Croydon power station) which had until recently been the engine-rooms of the empire, but were now – as Thatcher and Reagan’s free-market fundamentalism hastened the end of the industrial era – in the process of a painful transition through partial dereliction to their ultimate destiny as luxury flats. All these stunning places we shot in, which were effectively remnants of the industrial era, have now either gone or been turned into cathedrals of Britain’s lost imperial faith, like Tate Modern.

  Those looking back on Brazil from a twenty-first-century perspective have sometimes been kind enough to see its depiction of a world where people do little but watch old films on tiny screens, eat off-puttingly extravagant cuisine and have ill-advised plastic surgery in the shadow of constant terrorist threats as in some way ‘prophetic’. Keen as I am – with my messianic woodworking antecedents – to take on the mantle of prophet, I have to admit that all that stuff was already out there for those with eyes to see it in the mid-1980s. In those terms, I’d say Brazil was as much a documentary as it was a dystopia.