The Comics Journal: Interviews

Terry Gilliam
By Paul Wardle,
excerpted from The Comics Journal #182

Most people are aware of Terry Gilliam's career as a film director -- he's the mind behind critically-acclaimed film such as Time Bandits, The Fisher King, Brazil, and the science fiction thriller Twelve Monkeys. A great many people are aware of his membership in the legendary Monty Python group, where he was responsible for the fondly-remembered cartoon sequences which opened the show and bridged sketches. But not that many people are at all aware of Gilliam's beginnings as a cartoonist, working for Harvey Kurtzman's Help! humor magazine and maintaining a strong interest in the medium ever since.

Contributing Writer Paul Wardle visited the humorous, chatty filmmaker in the summer of 1995 in an interview arranged by the Journal. What follows are excerpts that cover Gilliams early days, some of his time with Python, and his thoughts on Twelve Monkeys.

"STAY PUT, KID"

PAUL WARDLE: What was your first job as an artist?

TERRY GILLIAM: First job... Jesus, I'm tryin' to remember.

WARDLE: And how old were you?

GILLIAM: That's what I'm trying to work out. I'm thinking there was something I did in college that actually earned me money as an artist. I can't remember. I may not have been an artist, but I was certainly a male model for the local men's wear shop in Panorama City. I must've been about 16.

WARDLE: I read somewhere that you worked for an advertising agency.

GILLIAM: Yeah, but that was all much later. I mean, Help! was the first real job I had in the art field. Before that I had jobs in the Chevrolet assembly plant...

WARDLE: Odd jobs and stuff.

GILLIAM: Yeah. I mean, these were jobs to get through college. You know, butcher shops and things like that.

WARDLE: Where did you go to college?

GILLIAM: Occidental College, outside Los Angeles. Eagle Rock, California. It was in my junior year, when I was working in the Chevrolet assembly plant. Night shift. That's when I said, "I quit. I'm never going to do this again." I got a job in a children's theater, building sets and painting myself green and being an ogre and all that. I said I'd never, never work for money again in my life. So maybe that was my first job as an artist [giggles], but I wasn't paid. It was really going to New York and meeting Harvey [Kurtzman] that got me a proper job.

WARDLE: So what made you decide to do that in the first place? How did you just suddenly show up in New York?

GILLIAM: Well, Harvey was the great idol of my generation. Mad comics inspired everything we ever did. Then when he began Help! magazine, I was in college at the time and started the college humor magazine and copied a lot of the kinds of things that Harvey was doing in Help!. Basically, we turned what was originally a high-class art and poetry magazine into a cheap comic.

WARDLE: What was the name of it?

GILLIAM: The magazine was called Fang. We were the Occidental Tigers, you see. I was the editor. I took over the magazine and converted it into this silly comic book. It used to come out about three times a year. We took it over and put it out six times in a semester. It was good fun. We were cartooning, writing, editing, everything, and I was sending copies of it to Harvey. He wrote me a nice letter back saying, "Terrific! Well done!" And that was it, so, having graduated from college with no idea what I was going to do, I decided to go to New York. In fact, it was funny because I was counseling up at a summer camp in the Sierras, and I was reading Act One, which was Moss Hart's autobiography. George S. Kaufman and Hart wrote great plays in the 1940s and 1950s, and Hart was writing about how he met his great hero, George Kaufman, and became his assistant.

WARDLE: George S. Kaufman used to write for the Marx Brothers, right?

GILLIAM: Yeah, and so I'm reading this book about a guy who goes to the Big Apple, meets his idol, and ends up working for him. And since I had nothing better to do, I decided to go to New York.

WARDLE: You just packed up everything and moved to New York without knowing what you were going to do when you got there?

GILLIAM: Yeah, basically. I'd written Harvey that I was going to come to New York and he wrote me a letter saying, "Stay put, kid. It's a big city, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Don't bother." And I just said, "Fuck it! I'm going to go." So I went off to New York and made an appointment to meet him. He was at the Algonquin Hotel.

WARDLE: Another Groucho Marx hang-out.

GILLIAM: There you go! The mighty round table of the Algonquin. I just couldn't believe it. So, I went up to this room for this meeting and knocked on the door. The door opens, and it's Arnold Roth. The whole room was full of all these great cartoonists! Al Jaffee, Arnold Roth, Willy Elder. They were all there, and they were doing the first ever Little Annie Fanny. This was the end of Harvey's career, as far as I was concerned. But there they all were, and the only way he could get them to all work was to stick them in this hotel room, lock the door, and keep 'em in there until this thing was done. So eventually Harvey turns up, we started talking, and it turned out that Chuck Alverson, who was the assistant editor of Help! was quitting, and they were looking for somebody to take his place. So I got the job.

WARDLE: What was it like working for Harvey? Was he a tough guy to work for, or was he very easygoing?

GILLIAM: It was easy 'cause he was a really sweet man, and basically Help! magazine consisted of Harvey and me as the editorial staff. Harry Chester was the production guy. He had his own production outfit and he would handle Help! production, and I was earning two dollars a week less than I would've earned on the dole.

WARDLE: But you were doing what you wanted.

GILLIAM: Right. So I was getting $50 a week basically, working for Harvey, and the magazine was coming out bi-monthly at the time, which left me a lot of time to do other things.

WARDLE: Gloria Steinem worked there too, didn't she?

GILLIAM: No, she was the first assistant editor of Help! She sort of hid this part of her career, which is a great pity because she was brilliant. The early Help!'s always had famous people on the cover, and that was Gloria who would get them on. Except I got Woody Allen. Gloria didn't get him, but she did get Dick Van Dyke.

WARDLE: You got John Cleese.

GILLIAM: Yeah, and Gloria was brilliant at getting famous people to be in Help! magazine. She was also brilliant at doing the caption pictures. Very funny lady.

WARDLE: How did you run into John Cleese and get him to be in that fumetti [photo story with word balloons], "Christopher's Punctured Romance," about the man who falls in lust with a Barbie doll?

GILLIAM: Well, the thing with fumettis is that we paid actors the giant sum of $15 a day to appear in these little photo stories. So we were very good at getting out-of-work actors, and John was appearing in Cambridge Circus, which had arrived in New York on the coattails of Beyond the Fringe. Now, unlike Beyond the Fringe, which was a big success, Cambridge Circus was not, and ended up in [Greenwich] Village Square East or one of those kinds of places, and I went and saw it. I thought it was wonderful, brilliant stuff, and John, as usual, just stood out from the crowd 'cause he was so grotesque.

WARDLE: So you've always had an affinity for British humor even before you came to England?

GILLIAM: Oh yeah. I was a big Anglophile. It was all the Ealing comedies with Terry-Thomas, Peter Sellers, Alistair Sim.

WARDLE: Were you a fan of The Goon Show as well?

GILLIAM: Yeah. The Goon Show you could only get on record. There were some discs going around. And then there was this short the Goons made that Richard Lester directed, which is the Running, Jumping, Standing Still film which again, I saw somewhere in New York and went, "Wow! This is great stuff!" It really just set me off. I don't know why I was such a fan of British humor. Maybe it was just sillier.

WARDLE: When I was in high school, I was exposed to it and just thought, "Wow, somebody who has the same sort of sense of humor that I have."

GILLIAM: I mean, what was funny was that before I left the States, the people I was working with were people like Joel Siegel, who's now a famous critic...

WARDLE: He'll be interviewing you in a couple of weeks, I hear.

GILLIAM: Yeah. [laughs] ... and Harry Shearer.

WARDLE: He's doing pretty well these days.

GILLIAM: Oh yeah, and we'd all come out of college humor magazines. So did Gilbert Shelton. What was amazing about Help!, although we didn't know it at the time, was that it was really the only national humor magazine that provided an outlet for all these cartoonists. So they were all coming through New York and invariably staying at my place 'cause I at least had a bed. So there would be Gilbert Shelton, Bob Crumb. I mean, the guys I never met were people like Jay Lynch and Skip Williamson. I never met them. They were sending stuff in. Paul Merta, who used to do great cartoons for Help!, ended up working for the defense department, building missiles.

WARDLE: That's kind of a conflict of interest, when you think of it.

GILLIAM: [laughter] No, I think he had a good sense of humor in whatever he did, whether it was bombing Laos or drawing cartoons.

Thy Pythons

WARDLE: Who of the Python group would you say you are closest to as a friend?

GILLIAM: It works in different ways. I suppose Mike. It's partly because Mike is everybody's best friend. There's something about Mike that becomes the cement that always kept us together. He's the one that, no matter how much we hate the others at any given point, everybody likes.

WARDLE: He's like the Ringo Starr of the group.

GILLIAM: [laughs] It's a strange one, and Terry and I have always felt very close on ideas.

WARDLE: Visual things.

GILLIAM: Yeah, and Eric and I stay very close because we were the ones that worked on our own during the show. The others, Mike and Terry, worked together, and John and Graham worked together, but Eric did his things and I did my things, so there is a bond between Eric and me. Also, Eric is the most American of the group. [laughter]

WARDLE: He's got a pretty thick English accent. How do you mean that?

GILLIAM: [giggles] I think he's the most keen on success. He's drawn to it. He likes the flash and glamour of America.

WARDLE: He even did an American sitcom.

GILLIAM: Well, that's it. That's why he's the most American. [giggles]

WARDLE: When the Monty Python show started to get popular, how did that fame change your personal life?

GILLIAM: I don't think it did. That was the great thing about the group, because it was a gang of six, and no matter how big any individual head got, there were always five others to knock it off. That's what kind of kept us in our places as individuals. As a group, we're pretty arrogant. [giggles] I just remember the moment when it happened, in a sense, and I panicked. It was at the end of the first [season] of shows, and there was a program called Late-Night Line-Up that went out at 11:00 at night. It was an interview show, and we were on it, being interviewed on television! Even though we had been doing a television series, this was too much to take. Suddenly I knew we were successful! We were famous! I remember grabbing my knapsack and rushing away from England to go down to Morocco, and really roughed it for a couple of weeks.

WARDLE: Just to put things in perspective?

GILLIAM: Yeah, because I thought, "This is getting to me."

WARDLE: How does it get to you now when it's much more so?

GILLIAM: It doesn't. Now it's just something I accept. I don't really think about it unless I'm doing interviews. But what's interesting is, while I was in Philadelphia filming Twelve Monkeys, I was getting recognized more than I ever have before because the [Monty Python] shows are on daily, and they kept running that 20th anniversary compilation, Parrot Sketch Not Included: Twenty Years of Monty Python. That came on several times and so I was visible. My face was on TV a lot. I was surprised by how often I was recognized.

WARDLE: Several documentaries came right at the end of Graham [Chapman]'s life -- that's another thing I was going to ask you. Not meaning to bring you down, but...

GILLIAM: Is he still alive?

WARDLE: [laughing] No, no, no.

GILLIAM: Is he still gay?

WARDLE: [laughing] No! Will you let me ask the question?! When he was in the group, he said he had a real problem with alcoholism. He drank 60 ounces of gin a day. Did that ever cause problems between him and other members of the group?

GILLIAM: Rampant! [laughter] Yeah, I mean, he was wonderful. If you were the target of the attack, it was awful, but if you were on the sidelines, it was brilliant! [laughter] It kept things going.

WARDLE: It's like when Groucho complained later in life that he couldn't insult anyone anymore because no matter how mean he was, the person would laugh and be honored that Groucho Marx had insulted them.

GILLIAM: Yeah. I mean, Graham kept things adventurous, because he was always a wild card. You didn't know what to expect. Sometimes it was outrageous and funny, sometimes it was just mean and nasty and uncalled-for, and it would leave different members in terrible states. I think it was good, because it actually kept the pot stirring, and I think that was great.

WARDLE: You mean the checks and balances of all these different personalities together.

GILLIAM: Yeah. That's what was always interesting. Graham was driving John [Cleese] crazy, because he wasn't carrying his weight as a writing partner.

WARDLE: It's strange that they worked so well together for so long, because they seem to be such different types of people.

GILLIAM: But that was the strength of the group in some ways. The differences were greater than the similarities. It kept a really strong internal tension pulling in different directions. When it stopped being like that, I think it lost a lot of its zing.

WARDLE: How did Graham's death affect you?

GILLIAM: What was so weird about it was that it came so quickly. On one hand there was Graham looking like shit and I thought he was dying, but then I'd see him in the hospital and he would say it was all gone. We were convinced it was just an act and he was going to outlive us all. [laughter]

WARDLE: It was a massive sketch he was writing.

GILLIAM: He was just asking for our sympathy and pity, because he wasn't doing other things well. Then suddenly there was this call that Graham was going into the hospital and they didn't think he was going to come out, and we said, "What?!" I mean, a couple of weeks earlier, everything had seemed dandy. I mean, he was really fucking weak, but he was a doctor and, being the doctor, he was just saying, "I'll take the tablets and everything will be fine." He was telling all of us that and he was telling himself that as well. I think he was surprised by it, because I think he thought he was going to pull through. I mean, he had just sold his story to the Sun: "How I kicked the Big C!" I don't know if they asked for the money back at the end of it, but they should have. [laughter] I mean, his timing was brilliant, to do it on the eve of the 20th anniversary of the first Monty Python show. As Mike said, "It was the first time he got his timing right." [laughter]

WARDLE: [laughing] I have a great quote from Graham Chapman about you. In 1987, he did a lecture tour, and I saw him at the Ryerson Theatre in Toronto. At the end they had a question period and someone asked about you. Chapman said, [I may be paraphrasing, but this is the way I remember it]: "Terry Gilliam is a very good visual person, but he's not very good at expressing himself verbally. He basically has two stock phrases that he uses for every occasion. Things are either 'Really great!' or else, they 'Really piss him off!'"

GILLIAM: [laughing all through quote] There we go. It was very important to be the token American and the token non-verbal one, because they felt better. I really pretended to be non-verbal, so they felt superior.

WARDLE: Having sat with you even for these few minutes, I can see that it's not the case.

GILLIAM: It's very funny, in fact with them I was always... I don't think I was intimidated, but I was always impressed by them, and they were better verbally. It was very hard to beat the Pythons verbally, so I never even tried to compete with them. As we first flew to Canada on the very first Python stage tour, I'm supposed to have said, "There's a whole bunch of water down there," as we were flying over the Great Lakes, and I didn't actually say that, but it just got built up into a running gag. It went on and on and on. It was very funny.

What was so bizarre about Graham was that he was very destructive, and he actually destroyed a lot of other people along the way. There was a point, a few years before he died, that I had completely gone off Graham. He was like Dorian Gray, and there was a portrait hanging in his house, but it wasn't a portrait. It was a real person, John Tomiczek, his ward, who was getting more and more scarred as Graham floated through life. What was good about him was that there was an incredible mixture of total selfishness and total generosity. There were extremes to Graham, and in the midst of it there was this man who just sort of sat there and puffed on his pipe. Sometimes Graham was the person that we could all agree was a total waste of time. "He's totally useless! He's not doing anything, and he's fucking up the sketches!" But then he would be brilliant. The moment that was interesting was when we discovered that Graham was the great lead man in the group, because we used to think that Mike was going to be the lead man in the group, like in Life of Brian and Holy Grail, as a lead actor.

WARDLE: And he did a great job in both films.

GILLIAM: Yeah. He was brilliant! But that's what was good. We actually spent a lot of time just going at each other, complaining about each other, not talking to each other, and yet the common respect that everybody held for each other held this thing together. That and Mike. [giggles] We were six people doing exactly what we wanted to do [with no interference].

Twelve Monkeys

WARDLE: Your new film is called Twelve Monkeys and it stars:

GILLIAM: Bruce [Willis], Brad [Pitt], and Madeleine Stowe.

WARDLE: What's the film about?

GILLIAM: That's the trouble. I don't know. Until we see it on Wednesday, I really don't know what it's going to be like. I know all the bits and pieces are all good in themselves. It's how they all string together. It was written by Dave and Jan Peoples. Dave wrote Unforgiven and Blade Runner, and it was inspired by this French film made in the 1960s. It was 27 minutes long, and all black and white stills. Basically, we've got a guy who may have come back from the future to find a virus before it mutates. This virus wiped out the planet in 1996, and the few survivors went underground and eventually made a life for themselves underground.

WARDLE: So, does this have anything to do with that monkey virus that they're talking about now?

GILLIAM: Well, it all managed to match very nicely. I actually think all the big virus stuff is part of a Universal marketing strategy that they have infected people out there so it will be advertising for the film. The question then becomes whether this character is mad, or else it's true. And then there's a psychiatrist who he kidnaps, who keeps trying to convince him that it's all in his mind.

WARDLE: Universal is putting this out? Don't you hate those people after what happened with Brazil?

GILLIAM: Yeah, but it gets even more ironic, because the producer is married to Dawn Steele who was at Columbia when we did Munchausen.

WARDLE: Why do these people want to keep working with you when they think you're such trouble?

GILLIAM: I keep saying, "What do you have to do to burn bridges in Hollywood?" Seems to be a difficult thing to achieve. Studio heads change. The guy who's now president, a guy named Casey Silver, is a big fan. He did a very brave thing, letting the beast back into the enclosure.

WARDLE: Was it your idea to use Bruce Willis and Brad Pitt?

GILLIAM: Those were not my first choices. I kept walking away from the film, because I thought it wasn't going to go anywhere. For a while, it didn't look like it was going to get made. The producer was very tenacious, and he just wouldn't let go. It reached a point where the studio was pushing for a star, because they think it's an art movie. They're desperate to have a big name in it, and Bruce's name came up. I thought it was a possibility, because I met him on Fisher King and I quite liked him. He's a better actor than he seems, on the screen.

WARDLE: When people back home who heard I was going to be doing this asked what you are doing these days, and I told them you were doing a film with Bruce Willis and Brad Pitt, they all went, "What... ?"

GILLIAM: They don't understand the perverseness. That's the great thing. That's also a reason to do it, it seems to me. If all the fans think I shouldn't be doing it, well fuck 'em! This is exactly what I should be doing. Constantly shifting perception is really important to me.

WARDLE: Reinvent yourself?

GILLIAM: Yeah, and reinvent people's perceptions of who Bruce and Brad are, as well. That's what intrigues me, because they're actually playing parts that are the opposite of anything they've ever played before. The ultimate trigger on this whole thing was that it had been four years since I'd been behind a camera. Fisher King was finished in 1990, and I was getting really twitchy, because the projects that I had been working on were all going nowhere, for a variety of reasons. I was getting more and more depressed, and I just wanted to do something. This was a script that I really liked, because it's very complicated. It's not a Hollywood movie by any standards. Bruce is really keen to change his career, because the action stuff is a real dead end. In the last few years you see him turning up in lots of little parts, playing a variety of character roles. Brad was begging to do it, and I wasn't so sure whether I wanted him. In the end, his enthusiasm sort of won me over. I'm always a sucker for that, getting someone like Brad to do something that's way beyond anything he's done before. If someone really wants to do it, and shows a lot of enthusiasm, I'll gamble on it.

It's like, "Do you want to be an actor or a 'star'?" Bruce is one of those guys who became a star very quickly. He leapt from television to film, and bingo! He was trapped. Brad, on the other hand, was not yet "the sexiest man in America" when we signed him on. The studio couldn't believe their luck! One of the big problems was, since we were shooting in the winter, we had to decide whether or not we should go with or without snow on the ground, because there were a lot of exteriors, and you've got to make a choice. I decided that whatever the ground looks like on the first weekend of shooting, we'll go with that. So, there was this beautiful snow and I decided we'd go with snow, and of course, that was the last time it snowed.

WARDLE: So, did you have to use fake snow?

GILLIAM: Yeah, all through it, which costs a lot of money and takes time.

WARDLE: Does it look real enough to compare with the real snow?

GILLIAM: Well, you've got to see the film and tell me. No, it's not as good as I wanted it. There was a lot of stuff that was very frustrating. It was a club-footed crew, limping along. It was a mixture of really good people and really lame people. This wasn't the problem on Munchausen. I had really good people, but there were the English and the Italians and they didn't get along. The Italians were brilliant! The production was what was appalling. The actual coordination, organization of the thing was a disaster, and we also had a brilliant but very slow lighting cameraman, Peppino [Giuseppe] Rotunno. He could only work at his pace and I couldn't change that. I almost left. At one point, I said, "It's him or me," but the idea of firing him is like firing the godfather. You can't do that. That's what films are like. You get into these situations, and they're not just simple little things. It doesn't work that way. You have to cast and crew the film very carefully. If you don't, you pay the price.

One of the reasons for doing Fisher King after Munchausen was to show everybody I was responsible. We went into it without final cut and putting up my fee as the completion guarantor. Then I had to do it again on this one [Twelve Monkeys], because the insurance company wanted a ridiculous percentage as a contingency. They said this was because all my films go over budget. Only one film went over budget, and the next film we did after that was back on budget. They said, "That doesn't count. That was a studio production. This one is an independent production." I have to prove myself again. So, this film is on budget, and that'd better be the end of that shit. If I hear it again, I'm going to kill someone. There are only a couple of insurance companies out there, and the other one is the one who insured me on Munchausen. They're not going to insure me!

WARDLE: [laughing] Yet you're working with Universal again.

GILLIAM: On Fisher King, the producers were going around saying that they were the ones that contained the wild beast. They like being the ones who can take this unruly talent and bring it into line.

WARDLE: Do you really think that you're unruly?

GILLIAM: No. I'm determined, and I do what I say. I always say things and they never believe me. On Fisher King, I sat down with the studio people and the producers and I said, "Here's how it works. You [the studio] have the film. You give it to the producers. They then give it to me and I give it to the actors and we shoot. Then, at the end of the shoot, I take it back from the actors, and then you're going to try to take it back from me and I'm not going to let you." I said this at the beginning of the film. Then, when it happens, they go crazy! I said, "I told you." [laughs]

WARDLE: Because you've been through it before. You've worked with yourself before. [laughter]

GILLIAM: You're right. Now you've got it. I've actually made a Terry Gilliam film before. [giggles] When I'm working I become very depressed because I know how complicated it's going to get.