Typical. You wait seven years for a Terry Gilliam movie, then two come along at the same time. Following the collapse of The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, the abandoned movie the catastrophe-hit production of which was recorded for posterity in the award-winning documentary Lost in La Mancha, Gilliam is about to deliver a double whammy. Before the year is out, we will see both the epic fantasy The Brothers Grimm and the potentially controversial Tideland from the American-born, Anglophile director.
Never one to duck a challenge, Gilliam is currently in the final stages of postproduction on both films simultaneously. “Yeah,” he laughs, with his characteristic schoolboy giggle. “It’s fun having the two at the same time. We’ve been rushing from one end of England to the other. It stops me becoming too obsessive about either one.” Well, maybe. It could mean it simply doubles his obsessiveness.The director, nicknamed Captain Chaos by his friends in the industry, is a man who apparently spends his life searching the ground for gauntlets to pick up. He is, he says, becoming anxious at the prospect of returning to “real life” . “What am I going to do?” he wails. “I think I’m going to fall into the postnatal-depression stage.”
We are sitting behind a mixing desk in Air Studios, George Martin’s converted church complex, watching the composer Dario Marianelli finalising the last parts of the score for The Brothers Grimm, Gilliam’s personal take on the fairy stories and lives of the great fantasy-weavers. As Marianelli talks the orchestra through the fine-tuning, Gilliam fills in and occasionally erases numbers on a grid. “It’s the first time I’ve seen Su Doku,” he says. “It’s terrifying.”
Not half as terrifying as the clips from Grimm that he shows me that day. I watch three scenes of exquisite beauty and dark horror, a combination that typifies his approach to fantasy. A young girl is enveloped in a spider’s web issuing from a horse’s mouth; Heath Ledger is seduced by the mirror image of Monica Bellucci; a forest comes alive, and a white horse and its rider are lifted into the air by branches before the horse plummets to the ground. “It was a real horse,” says Gilliam, delighted at my reaction. “He was a stunt horse, and he could do that over and over again. We do have CGI effects, but I try to make things more messy. There is more reality in my fantasy. I want things to look as real as possible. The fantasy I work with is tactile.”
By way of illustration, he strokes the table top in the studio’s restaurant, where we snatch a plate of pasta in the lunch break. “My idea of fantasy is to take this and turn it 180 degrees. It’s a way of seeing things.”
Gilliam has been seeing things differently from most of us for several decades now. Following a childhood in rural Minneapolis, education in Los Angeles (political science at Occidental College) and work in New York (assistant editor on the adult humour/satire magazine Help!), he left America for good in 1967 and travelled with his English girlfriend to the UK. He spent time in advertising before making a fateful telephone call to a Brit he had met in America, who was making headway in television. His name was John Cleese.
The story of how Owl-Stretching Time finally emerged as Monty Python’s Flying Circus is well documented. Gilliam was not a “face” like the others, but his surreal animations helped define the Python brand. He has more or less been doing the same thing ever since, only with living actors and more noughts on the cheques. Sixty-five this year, he is looking a tad more grizzled and craggy now, but he retains the infectious energy and messianic glint of the adolescent adrenaline junkie that, one suspects, he has always been. I imagine a young Terence Vance Gilliam sitting alone in his bedroom at night, playing with toy knights in armour and conjuring dragons from floral wallpaper, turning to invisible friends to weave worlds beneath his bedclothes.
Is Gilliam still trading off childhood imagination? “I don’t think my fantasies have changed at all,” he says. “It’s being able to still be a kid. The problem is that life itself is less fascinating. There’s too much reality.” Life as a grown man is nowhere near as exciting as it was when he was a child, he ventures. “We lived in a rural part of Minneapolis. I was the eldest of three. Growing up in the countryside was magical. Across from our house was a swamp. Lots of trees were chopped down and fell into the swamp, and I was always crawling into things; caves and moss. I loved lying on the velvety carpet of moss — crawling back to the womb, obviously.
“Dad was a carpenter, so things were always being built around our house,” he adds. “We only had an outdoor toilet until I was eight or nine, a two-holer. In the winter, I was literally freezing my ass off. We built a treehouse that was three storeys high. We tried to jump from the top and swing on the power cables. We never did it, funnily enough.” One hesitates to imagine the consequences had he succeeded. “As kids, we didn’t just dream or read about it: we did this stuff. In the winter, we built igloos, and when you fell off your sledge, your tongue stuck to it with the cold and you had to walk home with it stuck to your face. Radio was the biggest thing — The Green Hornet, The Shadow. Those series fed the imagination. There was no television until I was 11.”
While Gilliam is one of cinema’s greatest living fantasists, his films are as far removed from the computer-generated Xbox antics of mainstream Hollywood fantasy as it is poss-ible to imagine. The imagery in The Brothers Grimm arises from illustrated books, woodcuts and exotic paintings. There are traces and echoes of Harry Clarke, Gustave Moreau and Klimt. The Brothers Grimm is also a fiendish entertainment, stuffed with images of Grand Guignol horror and spiked with anachronistic dialogue and jokes. The performances are operatically grotesque. It is also wilfully perverse. The mud monster, who sucks away the face of a young girl before morphing into a gingerbread man who eats his own arm, is just one of the more macabre delights; the appalling fate that befalls a fluffy white kitten in a dungeon that seems to have been designed jointly by Heath Robinson and Hieronymus Bosch is another. Laced with mud, blood and a sprinkling of steaming entrails, this has the feel and appearance of an industrial-sized Jabberwocky, with added fantasy. It’s a peculiarly British lunacy, and it is significant that Matt Damon and Ledger, as the Grimms, employ English accents throughout.
When I suggest to Gilliam that he could not indulge himself in these epic fantasy undertakings without the support of a solid family, he unhesitatingly agrees. One wonders just how long-suffering his wife, Maggie — a film make-up artist whom he married in 1973 — has had to be over the years, though there has never been anything but total support for the biggest kid in the family. As if to compensate for his peripatetic career, Gilliam has roped his three children, Amy, Holly and Harry, into his concrete fantasy.
“Maybe I’ve just been bad at getting them proper jobs,” he says, between forkfuls of cheesecake. “I really wanted them to make it on their own. I wanted them to prove to themselves that they could get a job without referencing the old man. Not that I’d ever want them to feel trapped. Amy has worked in several departments. She’s my assistant on this, and she’s great. Holly was working on Tideland in the summer, as a runner. Then she became first assistant director on the second unit just by working hard and showing flair. Harry is in Grimm, in a scene with Matt and Heath. I’ve probably ruined his life, because he wants to be an actor now. Maggie complains that I’m never around, and that she brought up the family as a single parent. But that’s why I like them to work with me. It’s the only way I get to see my children.”
The Hollywood clones consider Gilliam a high-risk gamble, an expensive fantasist whose budgets can spiral out of control. But The Adventures of Baron Munchausen was the only one of his movies that seriously overspent and underperformed. Most have been brought in on time and within budget, and invariably look far more expensive than they were. You get more bang for your bucks with Gilliam in charge, but you might also risk an ulcer or a stroke. Captain Chaos is an amusing nickname, but it might have serious repercussions. Is he a tough son of a bitch beneath it all? “I don’t like confrontation,” he says. “I hold a lot in for a long time, then I explode. I don’t think I’m tough, I just know what I believe in. In films, there are many people who have opinions without qualifications. I am collaborative. I try to protect the creative team from the guys outside.
I haven’t had as many fights as people think I have. But I am happy to maintain the myth, because people back off, and I don’t have confrontations. The bad side is that some people will say Gilliam is impossible to work with.”
It is no secret that his relationship with Grimm’s pro- ducers, Harvey and Bob Weinstein, became strained during the final stages of the movie. Things became so bad that he simply walked away from the project in postproduction in June and left them to get on with it. “I had to let the air clear. Somehow, the film Bob Weinstein had in his head wasn’t the film we made. All films are like this. You reach a point at the end when everyone is going crazy and starts talking about this ‘one’ thing that, if we can get it, will make everything right. It’s bullshit. But, after making Tideland, I came back for a few changes. Ironically, we ended up cutting out the most expensive scene in the movie. I didn’t want to do it — but we did, and I have to admit it is better for it.”
The best part about working with the Weinsteins, says Gilliam, is the selling process — at which they are true geniuses. “I said to Harvey, ‘I love watching you guys work. But I love watching from a distance.’ The great things are their passion and madness. But passion can make you mad. It says on the poster ‘From acclaimed director Terry Gilliam’. I think it should read ‘From reclaimed director Terry Gilliam’.”
He is still hopeful that he can eventually claw back the rights to Don Quixote, currently trapped in a kind of limbo. But he is not holding his breath. There is a certain fatalism in his tone when he discusses it, as if the catastrophe were somehow predestined. “Ideally, that would be the film I would do next spring. But who knows? I love ruins.
I love half-finished buildings. Maybe the half-finished Don Quixote is better than the one we would have made.”
The Brothers Grimm opens in America on Friday and in the UK on December 30; Tideland opens later in the year
