TERRY GILLIAM (1940)

MYTH MAKER

Epic is not only the perfect description for many Terry Gilliam’s films, but it also represents the ambitions of this visionary director whose off-screen battles are almost as legendary as those he brought to the screen. Most famously, he spent two decades trying to realise his adaptation of Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote.

Born in Minneapolis, Gilliam moved to London in the late 1960s and worked as a strip cartoonist for Help! magazine, where he met John Cleese. That association led to his becoming the ‘other member’ of the Monty Python team, often playing peripheral characters in sketches but providing the striking animation that linked them. It was a key element in making the show so unique, and the bawdy, youthful humour present in the series has remained a constant throughout much of Gilliam’s work.

Fantasy is a recurring element in Gilliam’s films, from its playful appearance in his earliest shorts to the layers of myth and the fantastic in The Man Who Killed Don Quixote (2018). His first attempt at feature filmmaking – codirecting Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975) with Terry Jones – set the standard that would continue with Jabberwocky (1977) and the entrancing Time Bandits (1981). These films betray the influence of Gilliam’s time with the Pythons: both comprise episodic narratives that play out like a series of interlinked sketches. Low-budget or grandly realised, Gilliam’s films evince a preference for lo-fi effects: puppetry and special effects over computer-generated worlds. When he has employed visual effects, the results have been underwhelming. The Brothers Grimm (2005), The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus (2009) and The Zero Theorum (2013) disappoint because they lack the elements that make the fabric of Gilliam’s worlds so tactile.

Officialdom, or the grey world of bureaucratic doublespeak, is anathema to Gilliam’s worldview, but a rich target in his work. It was first witnessed in his short that preceded The Meaning of Life (1983). The Crimson Permanent Assurance saw an aging business take on corporate giants in a wonderful fantasy featuring skyscrapers as ocean-going battleships. These faceless, pinstriped marauders have been a constant in Gilliam’s films and have come to represent the obstacles to him achieving his vision – nowhere more so than in his most fully realised and ‘Gilliam-esque’ film Brazil (1985): an epic, uncompromising, wildly ambitious yet idiosyncratic and deeply personal Orwellian masterpiece.