Terry's Flying Circus

Seven lean years after his last completed film, director TERRY GILLIAM is in fighting form with two visionary new works

By Richard Corliss and James Inverne Monday, Aug. 01, 2005

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    Interference was a given, with Miramax--Dimension Films' Bob and Harvey Weinstein backing Grimm. The Weinsteins overruled Gilliam's choice of Samantha Morton as the female lead (they wanted a more conventionally beautiful actress, and got one in Lena Headey). They fired cinematographer Nicola Pecorini after six weeks (he was shooting too slowly, they said) and nixed a silly nose Damon was to wear (Bob says, "It would be the most expensive nose job in history"). "I'm used to riding roughshod over studio executives," Gilliam says, "but the Weinsteins rode roughshod over me." To Bob, it was just business. "Any film involves the making of 10,000 decisions," he says. "If you only concentrate on the few we had issues with, you ignore the 9,997 we left totally to Terry."

    Gilliam got so upset, the film was shut down for nearly two weeks. "I've never been in a situation like that," Damon recalls. "Terry was spitting rage at the system, at the Weinsteins. You can't try and impose big compromises on a visionary director like him. If you try to force him to do what you want creatively, he'll go nuclear." Now, with the release date fast approaching, the combatants have calmed down. "However difficult and painful it's been," Gilliam says, "everybody seems to like the film."

    Gilliam is no stranger to conflict. His 1985 movie, Brazil, looked set to gather dust on the shelves until he took out an ad in the trade paper Variety publicly asking the studio boss, "When are you going to release my movie?" He needles the moguls, yet he needs them--and he hates that. "Hollywood," he says, "is run by small-minded people who like chopping the legs off creative people. All they want to do is say no." Yet he acknowledges his wayward streak: "I'm so perverse that I go the opposite direction of whatever's going on at the moment."

    Born in Minneapolis and raised in Los Angeles, he lapped up the best of midcentury America's comic culture: the visual surrealism of Ernie Kovacs' TV shows, the lunatic satire of Harvey Kurtzman's Mad and Humbug comic books. Yet even then there was a zealot budding in him. He planned to become a missionary, until he had what he laughingly terms an "anti-epiphany" one day at Disneyland. Smartly dressed, he was turned away from the theme park by security guards for having long hair. "Suddenly this place I'd adored seemed in my animator's imagination like a cartoon Auschwitz," he recalls. "I knew I had to leave this country."

    Or at least L.A. He showed up at Kurtzman's door in New York City and was hired as an assistant at Help! magazine, where he helped organize photo comic strips. One of them starred a young British actor named John Cleese. Gilliam vagabonded to Paris and then London, where his sharply surreal animations for BBC comedy shows impressed Cleese and four other Oxbridge grads--the gang that became Monty Python. "We'd never seen anything like these brilliant cartoons before," recalls fellow Python Michael Palin, who has acted in four of Gilliam's features. "Wonderful pictures, like a church with spires coming off and rockets shooting out." Gilliam became the Python's animator, linking sketches with crazy, hilarious cartoons.

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