But what creative team (or marriage of true minds) hasn’t had its clashes and disputes? (‘I didn’t want to be involved anymore,’ sulks Cleese). We must ignore this. What matters are the pictures and cartoons provided by the Pythons’ single undisputed genius, Terry Gilliam. His animations are the only aspect of Monty Python to have lasted — and you can see in them the origins of his imaginative style (half-Dali, half-Hogarth) which would later become the Baron Münchhausen film (an underrated masterpiece) or the nightmarish Brazil. Executive producers, too, will recognise a frantic temperament which spelled disaster for the recent Don Quixote project. ‘I would start projects,’ Gilliam says, ‘and discover too late that I was not going to be able to pull them off in time . . . I was working seven days a week like a madman. It was all just stuff, paper images. At three or four in the morning you get pretty funny’ — and not only funny ha-ha but funny peculiar too.
Gilliam was a million miles away from the Weston-super-Mare genteelisms and chartered accountancy decency, and it shows. The son of Lutherans and Presbyterians in Minnesota, he designed and built sets for school plays and floats for carnivals. He worked in a children’s theatre, painting himself green to play an ogre. He has the talent and megalomania of Orson Welles. As I write this he is in Prague (a city invented with Gilliam in mind), making a film about the Brothers Grimm. His crew contains people who laboured this summer on my Peter Sellers shoot at Shepperton — Gilliam veterans who are fiercely loyal to him. ‘This is not funny!’ pronounced Roman Polanski when he saw Monty Python. Quite so — but worth it to have got Gilliam going.
Comments
There are currently no comments for this article.