KR: Do you know anything about the project that we’re doing?
TG: Well, it seems to be a book about somebody called me.
KR: Yes, that’s exactly right. This will be called The Cinema of Terry Gilliam: It’s a Mad World. We hope you like the word ‘mad’ in there. We thought it was appropriate somehow.
TG: [Laughs]
KR: It came about … I’ve edited this with two of my colleagues from the US, Jeff Birkenstein and Anna Froula. We were editing a book about 9/11, actually, about post-9/11 culture…
TG: And you thought of me.
KR: What happened was that one of the abstracts was on Brazil, and we thought, well, that was made in 1985, and we hadn’t seen it for a while. So we all sat and watched Brazil and realized that the guy was quite right. It was an incredibly prophetic film about our post-9/11 culture, so we included it in our 9/11 book. And when we were watching the movie and drinking beer and eating pizza, Jeff said, ‘Hey! Somebody should write a book about this guy.’ So, here we are. A couple of years later, we now have eleven essays on most of your major films, actually, right up to Doctor Parnassus.
TG: Fantastic.
KR: We asked all of our contributors that if they met you, what would they want to ask you, so we’ve got a few questions … Jeff wrote about Time Bandits, and it was an incredibly important film for him when he was growing up, and he wanted to know, in all your movies about children, are the children really the adults? And also, when you make a movie with only adults, are they about children anyway?
TG: I suppose they’re all about children and holy fools. I think it comes down to a very simple thing. It’s the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale, ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’. Of all the people watching the king process, only one, a child, sees the truth, and that’s the fact the king is naked, and it’s all been a con. And I always thought children just seem to see the world with unfiltered eyes. As we get older, we put filters on everything. We seem to think that we have the standard. We put things in boxes, just a more controlled set of experiments, I suppose, and I just think kids don’t. They can put their finger on the truth much more accurately than all of our wise men. I think that way even in films with just adults in them, there’s usually somebody in there who is the childlike one, or the holy fool, one of the two.
KR: The Fisher King would be a really good example of that. We thought you might say something like that.
TG: That’s probably one of the essays already.
KR: No, not really, but thank you.
TG: Basically what I don’t do is change my attitude towards life very often.
KR: We were wondering about that, actually. Only because two of us write about post-war films, and we’re very interested in post-9/11 culture and wondered whether that had affected your thinking and your filmmaking, that great terrible moment, or whether you have just kept the same kind of themes going. It seemed Parnassus had a kind of edge to it around politics.
TG: Parnassus is a little bit more about me – well, Parnassus links to Munchausen. It’s really about getting older and thinking that the things I want to say nobody wants to listen to. It’s about that really in a more general sense. It’s about how the world seems to pay little attention to wonder, the wonders that are around them, they’re so fixated on what I think are banal things and such immediate things, things that have just to do with the moment, as opposed to experiencing the moment. You can’t exactly experience the moment ‘cause you’ve got to tweet about the moment. It’s a frenzy going on out there. I think to really enjoy the world and to really look at it you’ve got to isolate yourself. I’m pushing aloneness these days. Loneliness, aloneness. People break the social contract. I’ve got into the anti-social contract where you pull away from all the noise. Have you ever read Don DeLillo’s book White Noise?
KR: No, I haven’t.
TG: It’s a great one. It’s honest. It’s about the tsunami of pointless information that just fills the head all the time and how it just dominates everything. And it’s stopping people from really standing back and looking, and I suppose I always want to encourage people to do that or to allow themselves to be surprised and shaken out of their worldview.
KR: I understand. I’ve always thought that nowadays everyone’s got a soundtrack to their life, ‘cause wherever you go there’s music playing, right?
TG: I know! It’s terrifying.
KR: It’s not necessarily the soundtrack you’ve got going on in your head either.
TG: I left New York actually for England eventually, because in New York it was like being on a Roman warship where all the rowers are rowing to the beat of his drum. And the drum was the beat of the city being tamed and I wanted to work to a different beat, a different rhythm, and I couldn’t while I lived in New York. It was overpowering, the beat of the city, so I left.
KR: I can understand that. On a different note, though everything’s always connected, I think for you and your work. What do you think about steampunk?
TG: I never thought about steampunk until I started seeing stuff on the web about steampunk, and it always related to my films. So I was poking around in some of the steampunk websites, and I seemed to be one of the patron saints of it.
KR: Absolutely. Anna certainly thinks so. She’s written an essay for the book about the way you use steampunk.
TG: That was invented after we started playing around. I’ve always had a fascination with older technology because I can understand it. I can actually do something about it. When a computer goes down you have to buy a new one. I don’t know how to fix those things, but an old mechanical steam-driven thing, you understand exactly how it works and the possibility of fixing it.
KR: So you didn’t read Gibson, then?
TG: That is interesting. Is that where it comes from?
KR: Yeah.
TG: Neuromancer’s the only book of his that I’ve ever read. I don’t think steampunk is mentioned in there.
KR: Well, I tell you what. When it’s finished we’ll send your agent a copy of the book, and if you have a moment…
TG: I’ll read all about myself and what I seem to do.
KR: And what you’ve created. Isn’t that funny? That’s really ironic, isn’t it?
TG: To be honest, I do find it very interesting that I read what people write about the stuff I’ve done, and I find it amazing that they’re really writing about their interpretations and their impressions about what I was doing, what I was thinking. I find intriguing that the films, well, they do exactly what I want them to do, they encourage other people’s imaginations to take flight and so the films become their films and not mine.
KR: Well, I think that’s a real strength in the films, though. I think that is why they’ve got legs. Now, thinking about your audiences, do you want them to get political or think about oppression? I’m thinking about Brazil, Twelve Monkeys – the films that really think about the establishment. Are you interested in thinking about politicizing your audience? Or is it just your vision again?
TG: Again, I graduated university in political science, so I’ve read a lot of books, so they’re stuck in my head and it comes out, yes. I do rail against the system all the time. Sometimes I’m right even; sometimes I’m wrong. It’s political in a broader sense and more about getting people to think and to look at the world around them and try to understand it and not just be trapped by buzzwords and knee-jerk reactions to things. It’s the connections that intrigue me, and, always inevitably, it’s either escape from society or one is part of society and, for me, that’s always a difficult choice. And if you’re part of society I think you should really understand how it works and the things that are wrong, try to do something about it. It doesn’t always mean you’ll succeed. But there’s a line I’m always pleased we left in, when the Supreme Being is taking the Time Bandits back to heaven, and one of them, Fidget, says, well, can’t Kevin the boy come with us? He says, no, he’s got to stay here and carry on the fight. It’s that, it’s just carrying on the fight. It’s not that you win the fight or that one side is necessarily good and the other evil; it’s just that there has to be a balance maintained and the intelligent person, hopefully, can help right the balance. Let’s put it that way: it’s swung too far the wrong way.
KR: Right, right, well certainly, those films create a lot of discussion in the classroom, so, hopefully you’re pleased to know that.
TG: Well, that’s great, I couldn’t be happier, people talking about them, arguing about them, fighting about them. That’s good, if I’ve made something interesting happening.
KR: You have and those two films in particular, Twelve Monkeys and Brazil, are still the two films that really speak to the students. Certainly, David Price, who wrote about Brazil for us for Reframing 9/11, thinks that Brazil is prophetic. Did you think about it again after, well you must go through airports a lot, do you think about Brazil when you’re being searched, and going through all the security?
TG: [Laughs] Well, when I was in America promoting Tideland, I was considering suing George W. Bush and Dick Cheney for the illegal and unauthorised remake of Brazil … Brazil was, to me, commenting on the times we were in. It was very much a documentary, I think. Everything in there was happening at that point. It’s just now it’s become bigger and more in your face and more intrusive, and that’s all. There was much more terrorism going on then, in the 80s than there is now, so this is the joke of it. But what is interesting is, really, there’s no past anymore. People just don’t seem to pay attention to what happened before, and there was a much more violent time. The IRA was busy bombing London, the Baader-Meinhof gang was rampaging around Germany, the Red Brigade in Italy. In Argentina and places in South America, you had to pay for your incarceration and even your torture. So all of these things were going on and they are going on now. I don’t know, there’s probably less terrorism now. There’s certainly a more heavy-handed State, and, certainly, the Homeland Security is the Ministry of Information, and if there aren’t terrorists we will make terrorists.
There is a piece I’ve just read recently, about whatever is happening with all the arrests or even convictions in America, or lack of convictions, for terrorist acts. And the majority of them, or maybe not the majority – let’s not over-state it – half of them, were all initiated by the FBI encouraging people to do certain things. And as soon as they did they were arrested. That’s very different than people going out on their own and doing something. So, that’s the Ministry creating terrorists when nothing else is out there to blow things up.
KR: Well thank you. That’s really helpful. My students make those kinds of points really, about the torture, of course, the explicit use of torture in Brazil, when we’re not torturing anymore.
TG: Really? Oh, really, that’s good to hear. That’s the one thing I was wrong about in Brazil: we don’t torture anymore. I think Brazil stopped torturing going on.
KR: [Laughs] Apparently.
TG: People will always torture.
KR: Yes.
TG: I mean that’s the horrible fact of it. It’s about how much you can limit and how much you can remove the hypocrisy of governments, but it’s not going to stop. Because it’s fun for some people who don’t get proper jobs. [Laughs] I never got into torture but I haven’t got proper jobs either.
KR: Just thinking about war again, we used Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas as a focus for the introduction of the book, and it seems that you were definitely creating a visual relationship between Vietnam in Fear and Loathing and possibly the first Gulf War. Now is that us over-reading your text?
TG: It wasn’t the Gulf War, but it was dealing with the Vietnam War. I mean, there are funny things in there, if you look carefully. We’ve got people in there with Vietcong uniforms, and all sorts of little references. If you’re very, very crazy and want to waste your time looking for them you can find them.
KR: We did that! We kept stopping the DVD. We are those people. That’s exactly what Anna and I did.
TG: [Laughs] That’s why I don’t like film courses [laughs], because they waste people’s time with things like that.
KR: It was in the evening, we were drinking beer, it was fine.
TG: Well, as long as you were drinking, that’s fine.
KR: You mentioned before, and obviously we’ve looked at all your books (with Ian Christie, for instance), that the spark for Brazil came from a seventeenth-century document that you stumbled across. How much do you poke around researching your films, or are you just reading for your own joy and then things happen for your films?
TG: Well, both. I read constantly, and basically what I do with it is forget it. I couldn’t tell you what I read last week, but it’s obviously going in there, and what I hope is that it comes out in some form. So I read a lot and I get intrigued by things. Things spark me off, and then I start doing a lot of research. I read as much around the subject as I can to discover things; that’s how it works. I think I am desperate to maintain a sense of serendipity. It’s what I do. It’s one of the things that bothers me about the web. Even though it works wonderfully, I find when I use a dictionary on the web it makes me crazy when I don’t spell the word right or I only find that one word. If I go to my Oxford Dictionary and open it up, I bump into a lot of things along the way when I hunt for the word I’m after.
KR: I’m going to quote you when I talk about research to my students – that’s perfect! They might listen to you.
TG: I mean, Wikipedia’s great for other things, ‘cause when I did this opera last year at the English National Opera, The Damnation of Faust, I found extraordinary things on Wikipedia by just hunting in a funny little way, that worked, but it’s online dictionaries that make me crazy. I like the book.
KR: I don’t want to be rude, but I’m 50 and I’m thinking back on my life already. You’re 71, is that right?
TG: That’s not rude, that’s just pathetic.
KR: Yeah, oh, I’m sorry. [Laughs] Do you look back and think, ‘Could I have done something else or more or less or…?’
TG: Yeah, I could have done much more if I hadn’t been so pig-headed about wanting to do just what I wanted to do, that’s the price you pay to do what you want to do and control the stuff. You do less, I suppose, because it’s film. It’s very funny, at the moment; my daughter has become an archivist around the house here, going through all my work. She has everything I’ve ever done put in boxes.
KR: Right. Well, some film student will love that one day.
TG: Well, hopefully, because I’m just discovering all this stuff I’ve done, and I don’t linger in the past. It doesn’t interest me. It’s done. It’s finished. It’s what happened. The future is, well, actually, the future is getting shorter. That’s the good thing, so I don’t have to worry as much about the future as I used to. And mainly, it’s just what’s happening right now. How is a day going? How is this week going to be? And it gets very frustrating if I’m not doing what I want to do, which is making films. And I find, it’s the money at the moment that is very difficult. The film business, unless you’re spending 100 million or 200 million or under 10 million, the middle ground is really difficult. It’s just like the world in that one sense … film budgets reflect society perfectly. The rich, a very small number, have huge amounts of money to play with and the poor are always the poor. But the middle ground is the one that’s squeezed. So, here we are.
KR: So, have you got a new project running?
TG: Well, no. For the last eight months I’ve been trying to resuscitate Quixote.
KR: Oh, you have!
TG: Yeah.
KR: Well, we did hear that, but … wow.
TG: I don’t know, eight months gone with nothing to show for it.
KR: So, you’re not out on the street begging again.
TG: Yeah. I mean, that’s exactly how it works. The money may happen, but it may not. I think it isn’t going to happen. Too many things are running against us at the moment. But it’s just the way it is. I watch other people, good friends, people like Stephen Frears. He’s not as obsessed as I am. He likes making movies. I like getting my ideas onto film. There’s a big difference.
KR: Is that because you are an artist?
TG: Listen, there’s nothing great about being an artist, if that’s indeed what I am. I’m just a prisoner of my own limitations, is what it is. I’m trapped. There’s obviously some little creature inside of me that only wants to do what it wants to do. Me, I’d rather keep busy doing anything, but this other guy won’t let me. I don’t have a choice.
KR: That’s an interesting idea, if you think about it like that.
TG: It’s why whenever I talk to film students, I say, ‘You‘ve got a choice. Either you can go out and be a film director, or a director, or you can be what I think is a filmmaker. And they’re different.’ Last night, I went to see Avengers Assemble, because I wanted to see what it was like. And I go down to Finchley Road. I get in there with all the kids. It must look pretty odd, this old guy in the middle of all these teenagers. But I was curious, and it’s an incredibly well-made object. There’s no question about it. It’s very smart at times. It’s got some wonderful actors in it. It’s technically extraordinary. And, there it is. BUT it’s not the individual voice I try to listen to or try to be. And, therefore, I like reading books, because it’s a single voice writing them. Obviously not your book about me, because that’s obviously a lot of people babbling. [Laughs]
KR: [Laughs] We are babbling, too. That is what we do.
TG: I know, books babbling.
KR: We get paid to babble, too, which is just marvellous.
TG: I love brooks and streams, they babble.
KR: Yeah, that’s us.
KR: I met Alan Parker last week and he did this fantastic impression of you, actually, because he was talking about having been asked to potentially direct Harry Potter, and that you were also asked to do it. And he was saying that you told the studio, ‘Let’s make it dark! Let’s scare the shit out of the children!’
TG: Well, exactly. I remember, when Warner Brothers was talking to him, he said, ‘Why are you talking to me? The guy that should be doing this is Gilliam.’
KR: And then you scared them to death.
TG: Well, that’s the thing. We know what we’re good at. We know what we’re capable of. We know what our skills are. But the Hollywood system doesn’t know what people’s skills or talents are. They just know who’s been successful last week. And it gets worse. [A successful director] used to be good for three films, before you had to go and beg on the streets. Now, if the last one didn’t work, you’re begging again. It’s simple now.
KR: OK, Terry, that’s been absolutely fantastic. Thank you so much.
TG: I hope you publish this.
KR: We will. It’s going to come out next year. Like films, there’s more time in postproduction than there is in production.
TG: Yes.
KR: So, when it’s out, I will obviously send [you] a copy. If you like, we’ll sign it for you, how ‘bout that?
TG: [Laughs]
KR: That’s different, huh?
TG: Alrighty…