Profile of Terry Gilliam on Famous Like Me

Terence Vance Gilliam (born November 22, 1940) is a film director and a member of the Monty Python comedy group. Born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, he now lives in England and has dual American/British citizenship.

Early life

Gilliam graduated from Occidental College in Los Angeles, where he was a member of the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity.

Animation

Terry Gilliam started his career as an animator and strip cartoonist; one of his early photographic strips for Harvey Kurtzman's Help! featured John Cleese. Moving to England, he animated features for Do Not Adjust Your Set and then joined Monty Python's Flying Circus at its formation, as the only non-British member. He was the principal artist-animator of the surreal cartoons which frequently linked the show's sketches together, and defined the group's visual language in other mediums. He also appeared in several sketches and played side parts in the films.

Gilliam's Monty Python animations have a distinctive style. He mixed his own art, characterized by soft gradients and odd bulbous shapes, with backgrounds and moving cutouts from antique photographs, mostly from the Victorian era. The style has been mimicked repeatedly throughout the years: in the children's television cartoon Angela Anaconda, a series of television commercials for Guinness Beer, the Nickelodeon series You Can't Do That On Television, the Jibjab political cartoons, and the television history series Terry Jones' Medieval Lives.

Directing

Terry Gilliam went on to become a film director. His films are usually highly imaginative and fantastical. Most of his movies include plotlines that seem to occur in the characters' imaginations, raising questions about the definition of sanity. He often shows his opposition to bureaucracy and authoritarian regimes. He also distinguishes higher and lower layers of society with a disturbing and ironic style. His movies usually feature a fight or struggle against a great power which may be an emotional situation, a human-made idol, or even the person himself, and the situations do not always end happily. There is usually a paranoid and dark atmosphere and unusual characters who once were normal members of society. His scripts feature a dark sense of humour and often end with a dark twist.

His films have a distinctive look, often recognizable from just a short clip; Roger Ebert has said "his world is always hallucinatory in its richness of detail." There is often a baroqueness about the movies, with, for instance, computer monitors in one film equipped with magnifying lenses, and in another a red knight covered with flapping bits of cloth. He also is given to incongruous juxtapositions, say of beauty and ugliness, or antique and modern.

Gilliam has acquired the reputation of making extremely expensive movies beset with production problems. After the lengthy quarrelling with Universal Studios over Brazil, Gilliam's next picture, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, cost around US$46 million, and then earned only about US$8 million in US ticket sales. A decade later, Gilliam attempted to film The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, budgeted at US$32.1 million, among the highest-budgeted films to only use European financing; but in the first week of shooting, the actor playing Don Quixote (Jean Rochefort) suffered a herniated disc and the entire film was cancelled, resulting in a US$15 million insurance claim. Gilliam's reputation in this regard has been sufficient for the satirical newspaper The Onion to run a news article entitled "Terry Gilliam Barbecue Plagued By Production Delays".

Films directed

• Monty Python and the Holy Grail (co-directed with Terry Jones) (1975)
• Jabberwocky (1977)
• Time Bandits (1981)
• The Crimson Permanent Assurance (1983) - A short supporting feature that accompanied Monty Python's The Meaning of Life
• Brazil (1985)
• The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1988)
• The Fisher King (1991)
• Twelve Monkeys (1995) - Inspired by Chris Marker's La Jetée.
• Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998)
• The Brothers Grimm (2005)
• Tideland (2006)

He has several projects in various states of development, including an adaptation of Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett's comic fantasy novel Good Omens.

Gilliam's unsuccessful efforts in 1999 and 2000 to film The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, based on Miguel Cervantes' Don Quixote, were the subject of the 2002 documentary Lost In La Mancha. His two efforts to film the Watchmen comics, in 1989 and 1996, were also unsuccessful.

Gilliam and Harry Potter

J. K. Rowling, the author of the Harry Potter series of books, is a fan of Gilliam's work. Consequently, Gilliam was Rowling's first choice for the director of the first Harry Potter film in 2000. Warner Brothers refused to consider Gilliam as director, instead selecting Chris Columbus for the role. Recently, Gilliam stated in relation to this episode "I was the perfect guy to do Harry Potter. I remember leaving the meeting, getting in my car, and driving for about two hours along Mulholland Drive just so angry. I mean, Chris Columbus' versions are terrible. Just dull. Pedestrian."

The Secret Tournament

In 2002, Gilliam directed a series of Television Advertisements called The Secret Tournament. The advertisements were part of Nike's World Cup campaign and featured a secret three-on-three tournament between the world's best players inside a huge tanker ship. The Elvis Presley song "A Little Less Conversation" plays over the top of the advertisements. The advertisements were hugely popular and critically acclaimed.

Bibliography

• Gilliam, Terry and Christie, Ian (Ed.) (1999). Gilliam On Gilliam. Faber & Faber. ISBN 0571191908

Further reading

Further information about Terry Gilliam can be found in the following book:

• From Fringe to Flying Circus - 'Celebrating a Unique Generation of Comedy 1960-1980' - Roger Wilmut, Eyre Methuen Ltd, 1980.

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