Terry Gilliam Films
The Directing Career of the Former Monty Python Animator
Sep 14, 2009 Jonathan Squirrell
Gilliam was the odd-one-out amongst the Monty Python team. The only American, and a animator where the others were writers and performers. But while working on Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975) Gilliam discovered his talents could be used not just in small scale animations, but in full-blown movies.
Gilliam was quick to exploit the fame and fortune he had found as a Python, and made his debut as a director in his own right in 1977, with Jabberwocky, a comedy fantasy inspired by the beloved Lewis Carroll poem of the same name. The film, which starred British comedy talent such as Harry H Corbett and John Le Mesurier, as well as Python’s Terry Jones and Michael Palin, was packed with inventive madness, and more of the same was to follow.
Gilliam Shows Promise as a Director
Following another Python film, The Life of Brian, in 1979, during which he shared directing duties with Terry Jones, Gilliam once more found himself at the helm of a movie in 1981. Time Bandits, which Gilliam co-wrote with Michael Palin, and in which Palin and another Python, John Cleese, appeared, was another odd-ball adventure story, this time featuring time-travelling dwarves. A final Python film, The Meaning of Life, followed in 1983, this time directed solely by Jones, with Gilliam concentrating his efforts on a supposedly short film to be used as an introduction. This turned into the vastly over-budget pirate tale The Crimson Permanent Assurance, which gave a full demonstration of Gilliam’s incredible visual imagination.
Gilliam’s next project showed a marked change of direction however. Brazil (1985) was co-written with the play-write Tom Stoppard, and was set an overly-bureaucratic yet technologically backward distopia. This darkly comic sci-fi fantasy starred Robert Di Niro, and the only link with the past came from an appearance by Michael Palin. Gilliam was beginning to make a name for himself in his own right as an interesting film maker.
His next outing, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen in 1988, was more in keeping with earlier work. The Baron, the ultimate teller of tall tales, was the perfect subject for Gilliam’s feverish mind, and the adventures were given breath-taking life, earning the film four Oscar nominations. The cast featured Charles McKeown, who had co-written the film with Gilliam, and there was also a role for Eric Idle.
Black Comedy from Terry Gilliam
Gilliam then returned to darker territory with The Fisher King (1991) a disturbing but blackly comic drama starring Jeff Bridges. The story centred around a DJ’s quest for redemption, and, in an odd throw back to the Python days, the quest by a madman for the Holy Grail. Next came another dystopian science fiction thriller, Twelve Monkeys (1995) Like Time Bandits, the film centred around the theme of time travel, but the convoluted and twisting plot had little else in common with the family fantasy that had preceded it.
1998 saw the uniting of Gilliam with another psychedelic mind, that of Hunter S Thompson. Gilliam co-wrote the script and directed Fear of Loathing in Las Vegas, a visually explosive adaptation of the gonzo journalist’s cult book. The movie, which starred Johnny Depp and Benicio Tel Toro, as well as rising stars Tobey MacGuire and Christina Ricci, soon garnered a similarly zealous following. Another book Gilliam longed to adapt was Don Quixote, but his attempts were dogged with bad luck and difficulty, and the film was never made. The story of his ill-fated attempt is told in the 2002 documentary film Lost in La Mancha. Gilliam still retained an interest in the character, however, and The Man Who Killed Don Quixote is in post production, due out in 2011.
Terry Gilliam Working with Heath Ledger
After the acclaim and success of his films in the nineties, Gilliam has had less fortune since the turn of the century. Following the Don Quixote debacle came The Brothers Grimm in 2005, but neither an inventive plot featuring con men and fairy tales, nor the presence of acting talent such as Heath Ledger and Matt Damon could lift the film to the heights expected of Gilliam. Tideland (also 2005) was even less successful commercially, although the strange tale of a little girls overactive imagination, has, like many of Gilliam’s works, achieved a certain cult status.
Gilliam’s latest release, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus (2009) was struck by tragedy with the sudden death of its star, Heath Ledger, during filming. The film was completed with Johnny Depp, Jude Law and Colin Farrell each taking turns at stepping into Ledger’s shoes, and the sad and strange series of events seems destined to overshadow the movie itself. A typically Gilliamesque fantasy-adventure-mystery, set in the world of a travelling theatre, The Imaginarium once again falls short of the directors best work, while hinting that his immense talent remains intact, waiting only for the right project to burst forth again.
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