Q&A With Terry Gilliam

Dav

As has been posted here before, Terry Gilliam is in Dublin on Friday attending the Jameson Dublin Film Festival for the Premiere of his new film The Zero Theorem.

The Zero Theorem is a sci-fi movie directed by Terry Gilliam (Brazil, Twelve Monkeys).

An eccentric and reclusive computer genius plagued with existential angst works on a mysterious project aimed at discovering the purpose of existence—or the lack thereof—once and for all. However, it is only once he experiences the power of love and desire that he is able to understand his very reason for being.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rae7_O_6EtU

I'm sure many of you remember Darragh Doyle from his time as Community Manager here on Boards. Well thanks to his work with Sony Pictures Ireland we have an exclusive Q&A with Terry Gilliam on Friday (21st Feb).

We're inviting your questions below and we'll ask the relevant and interesting ones to him and record his replies on video for you.

Whether it's his Monty Python involvement, his past work on films including The Life of Brian, Twelve Monkeys or Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas or what you can expect from The Zero Theorem, we'll have time with him to get through as many questions as we can.

We also are offering one pair of tickets to the Sold Out screening on Friday evening for the best question and will reward other interesting questions with tickets to the film when it's released in Ireland on March 14.

You can find out more about The Zero Theorem here and follow Terry's visit to Ireland on twitter under #thezerotheoremIRL.

So please post your questions below, on Thursday afternoon (around 3pm) we'll pick what we think is the best one for a pair of ticket's to Friday's première screening (please let us know ahead of time if you can't attend and please check your PM inbox on Thursday evening

ColmFelix

Mr. Gilliam, you are one of the world's finest and most prestigious directors and a personal favourite of mine so thank you ever so much.
My question is do you have a favourite film(s) that really inspired you? Any film that made you realise that you wanted to make films yourself?

P.S.: Any luck with Don Quixote?

Ben Moore

Mr. Gilliam,

if you were a coalminer and your psychiatrist asked you to take his wife (who you were secretly attracted to) to a Terry Gilliam Movie, which one would you choose?

Kind Regards,

Ben Moore

A loyal fan.

jojo3000

-I understood that you hired Mélanie Thierry for The Zero Theorem on the advice of Bertrand Tavernier... Is it true and what are your relationshionship with Tavernier and the french cinema in general (you're good friends with Albert Dupontel, too) ?

-Also, the word "gilliamesque" has now entered the cinephile vocabulary... Is there a film you didn't direct that you would call "gilliamesque" ?
Thanks.

-Another question : You worked with the french artist Fred on a short comic book story back in the sixties when you were working for the french magazine Pilote. Fred sadly passed away last year. Were you familiar with his work ? What could you say about him ?

P.S : Is Robert Duvall still your Quixote ?

johnny_ultimate

You're previous two 'dystopia' films Brazil and 12 Monkeys were inspired by 1984 and La Jette respectively - taking some of their ideas and taking them in very fresh and exciting new directions. What do you think are the benefits of using existing work as a launching point, and were there any texts that inspired your work on The Zero Theorem?

Birneybau

What... is your name?

What... is your quest?

What... is your favourite colour?

What... is the capital of Assyria?

What... is the air-speed velocity of an unladen swallow? Either African or European.

Jijsaw

George Harrison's company 'Handmade Films' financed 'Time Bandits' and of course 'Life of Brian'. Did he have much involvement in the filming process apart from financing it? Did he visit the set during filming? Why did you cease working with 'Handmade Films'?

Curlygmt

Heya Tez
I'm from Dublin.
Giz a ticket.
I'll be your buddy.

kizilbash110

Terry, your films all sharply critique the direction our world has taken in the realms of politics, science, and society. If you could change something about our world, say about education or the economy, or technological 'progress', what would you change? I am a teacher and I think on this question all the time, often spurred by your own cinematic explorations.

aaroncorless

Mr. Gilliam,

the imagination and style in your work is wonderful. In your opinion how can we keep imagination and creativity alive and strong in the world?


(Thank you so much for continuously making incredible films.)
Aaron

Morag

Mr. Gilliam,

The wonderful skewed take on the world which is glouriously displayed in your work,
was there ever a time that you felt pressured to make your vision or art conform to more mundane standards?

You work features both Fantasy, Scifi and even Urban fantasy (before the term was even coined; The Fisher king)
Do you prefer one of these genres over the other?

Morag.

Artful_Badger

Hi Mr Gilliam,

There are a lot of movies that I think are very close to being fantastic but fall short in certain aspects. As a director you must see movies all the time that you think could be so much better with a few little changes.

Is there any movie you consider almost perfect but you wish you had a hand in creating so you could fix the aspects that stop it reaching its potential ?

MilanPan!c

Hi Terry,

Just curious if you're a fan of Adam Curtis...?

Seems like e.g. "Century of the Self" would be right up your alley, so to speak.

Thanks!

MadsL

ColmFelix wrote: »

P.S.: Any luck with Don Quixote?

recent announcement...
http://www.avclub.com/article/terry-gilliam-making-yet-another-attempt-at-filmin-107677

(on future use of CGI in his films) "Nooo! Leave that to George Lucas, he' s really mastered the CGI acting. That scares me! I hate it! Everybody is so pleased and excited by it. Animation is animation. Animation is great. But it's when you're now taking what should be films full of people, living thinking, breathing, flawed creatures and you're controlling every moment of that, it's just death to me. It's death to cinema, I can't watch those Star Wars films, they're dead things."

Mr Gilliam, does CGI still scare you? Do you admire any current CGI film techniques or are they still killing cinema?

4zn76tysfajdxp

Have you ever regretted renouncing your American citizenship and if not, can you ever imagine a scenario when you would regret it?

Terry,

In your movie 'Jabberwocky' who was the one character portrayed that wasn't entirely fictitious and bore a resemblance to someone living or dead?

marienbad

Terry

I saw your production of Berlioz' Damnation of Faust some years back at the ENO and I am already lined up for Benvenuto Cellini later this year. Have you any plans for further opera productions ?

shrapnel222

mr Gilliam,

you've been talking, thinking, filming Don Quixote now for at least 15 years, and weirdly enough, for as long as i can remember, Jean Rochefort has always been in my eyes the one and only Don Quixote (in real life and on screen), so the equation of you, him and cervantes together had me incredibly excited!!

Seeing that that combination will no longer be possible, and that the film MUST happen, even if only just for your own sanity, have you

a)made significant changes to the script to account for a very different actor

or

b)worked on the new actor to "act in the manner of" jean rochefort (have they actually met, and has he seen footage of the original)?

on a directors level though will it be difficult to disassociate the old and the new? Will scenes done last time influence scenes done this time, will one Don Quixote influence the other or is this being treated as a completely blank canvas?

longshanks

Have you ever been to the island in the Bahamas that's full of swimming pigs?

Corkfeen

Mr Gilliam,
Going by Brazil and the earlier Crimson Permanent Assurance short film, it seems that George Orwell influenced your work significantly. Mind discussing your love for his work?

Photo-Sniper

Mr Gilliam,

What was the transition like for you, going from childrens animation straight into adult animation with Monthy Python? You're animation work is up there with the best.

conorhal

Mr. Gilliam,

I see this morning that you are again attempting to ressurect 'The Man Who Killed Don Quixote'. Is there a bit of the Don to your character? Tilting at this particular windmill which has so often knocked you to the ground when most would have given up?

beakerjoe

Dear Mr Gilliam, with The Imaginarium Of Doctor Parnassus having such a fantastical but tragic journey to the screen, Did it feel like hard work trying to complete it without Heath Ledger???

BeakerJoe

Mr. Incognito

What movie are you proudest of

and

What is your greatest professional regret.



For the record Fear and Loathing was a Masterpiece for me, I am a huge Hunter Fan and you did the book justice.

Reg'stoy

Terry, Frank Darabont has secured the film rights to Stephen King's (Richard Bachman) novel, The Long Walk. Considering your predilection for dystopian stories, could you ever see yourself colaborate with him in bringing this story to life on the big screen.

I personally think you and this story would be the perfect mix.

Considering your unsuccessfull attempts to film Watchmen, have you ever met Alan Moore and how would you convince him to allow you to adapt one of his works for the big screen and which one would it be.

conorhal

Reg'stoy wrote: »

Terry, Frank Darabont has secured the film rights to Stephen King's (Richard Bachman) novel, The Long Walk. Considering your predilection for dystopian stories, could you ever see yourself colaborate with him in bringing this story to life on the big screen.

I personally think you and this story would be the perfect mix.

Considering your unsuccessfull attempts to film Watchmen, have you ever met Alan Moore and how would you convince him to allow you to adapt one of his works for the big screen and which one would it be.

If ever there was a novel that had Terry Gilliam written all over it, it has to be the Manual of Detection by Jedediah Berry:

http://www.amazon.com/Manual-Detection-Jedediah-Berry/dp/0143116517

"Set in an unnamed city, Berry's ambitious debut reverberates with echoes of Kafka and Paul Auster. Charles Unwin, a clerk who's toiled for years for the Pinkerton-like Agency, has meticulously catalogued the legendary cases of sleuth Travis Sivart.
When Sivart disappears, Unwin, who's inexplicably promoted to the rank of detective, goes in search of him. While exploring the upper reaches of the Agency's labyrinthine headquarters, the paper pusher stumbles on a corpse. Aided by a narcoleptic assistant, he enters a surreal landscape where all the alarm clocks have been stolen.
In the course of his inquiries, Unwin is shattered to realize that some of Sivart's greatest triumphs were empty ones, that his hero didn't always come up with the correct solution. Even if the intriguing conceit doesn't fully work, this cerebral novel, with its sly winks at traditional whodunits and inspired portrait of the bureaucratic and paranoid Agency, will appeal to mystery readers and nongenre fans alike."

Sombody needs to put this book into his hands!

TlatoSMD

I won't be able to attend the Q&A in person because I'm in Germany here, so I'd be happy with bowing out of the tickets lottery and not block the seat for somebody else. But I've been a lifelong fan of Terry's as my favorite director ever since I came upon his "Munchausen" in a local video rental circa 20 years ago! And that's mainly because of his visual genius in photography and image composition, but also because of his weird, surreal, psychedelic, satirical countercultural views and roots coming through every now and then, as it used to do with all the Pythons way back when (and looking at their individual solo careers, I think Terry has definitely made the most out of it).

(I apologize for my first question being kinda long, as it's what I'm most obsessed about. I leave it to you if and how you think you can condense it in any way.)

Question no. 1: Terry's amazing wide-angle lenses

What's been thrilling me to no end ever since I first got aware of you is your surreal, larger-than-life ultra-wide angle imagery, and it's spoiled me to most other directors ever since. The only parallels in art history I could identify would be certain Mannerist paintings from the Early Baroque period particularly associated with the early spread of a rather self-ironic, philosophical kind of reason, and some psychedelic art styles and caricatures of the 1960s counterculture, whereas the values of the latter I understand to have a certain influence upon you if mostly through Harvey Kurtzman. The overarching theme for these two art movements would be trying to liberate people's minds in a way, a theme which also fits the wide-angle imagery in your movies pretty well, by showing everything in a highly unusual, disorienting field of view, in order to make people reconsider their traditional perceptions and prejudices.

Yet, when looking to the film world, potential influences regarding your particular use of rectilinear wide-angle imagery would be sparse. In fact, the only film that I could name as looking particularly "Gilliamesque" before Python would be Orson Welles's version of Kafka's "The trial".

So my question is: Could you identify any visual influences upon yourself with your use of extremely wide lenses? Your mastery of extreme wide-angle imagery is already there and perfect with your very first feature "Holy Grail", yet the only film theory source I remember you talking about particularly studying before "Holy Grail" was Eisenstein, and he certainly doesn't look like that. You once said that you pretty much "learned the tools of the trade" when working at an ad company back in the 60s, does that have anything to do with it?

Question no. 2: Lenses and early 16mm hobby

I understand you've been toying with 16mm film as a hobby even way before "Holy Grail", were you already prone to using very wide lenses for that back then as well?

Question no. 3: Terry, Francois Schuiten, and The Obscure Cities

Besides being a fan of yours, I'm also a fan of the Belgian steampunk graphic novel series "The Obscure Cities" (aka Les Cites obscure) drawn by Francois Schuiten, which shares with your films aspects of dystopian Kafkaesque satire, a taste for historical settings and (as taken from one of your interviews) old-fashioned mechanical things, and, of course, breathtaking, immensely imaginative and whimsical imagery. So I've been pleasantly surprised when in Schuiten's biography, "The Book of Schuiten", I came upon a photo of you and Francois talking to each other at some conference, taken circa around the time of "Brothers Grimm" and "Tideland".

So I'm wondering, how do you feel about Schuiten's comics if you know them, and would you ever want to collaborate with Schuiten on a future certain masterpiece of a film, maybe even an adaption of an existing Obscure Cities volume or an independent chapter taking place in the Obscure World? Schuiten did work as production designer on a number of international films before, after all.

Question no. 4: Magical Mystery Tour

When your iconic animations first came on the air in the UK with "Do not adjust your set", it was just a few days away from another countercultural premiere on the same airwaves, which was that of The Beatles's telefilm "Magical Mystery Tour", a work which I think many people will agree on would've benefited in many places from better direction and a tighter script by a director who would've been more in tune with their countercultural and psychedelic brainwaves at the time.

With The Beatles, according to your words, having meant a lot in your life and career, would you have liked to have been there, or now go back to 1967 in a time machine, to give the Fabs a hand or two with better photography, direction, and maybe a few script touch-ups, to help shape the "Magical Mystery Tour" film more into what it could've been?

Question no. 5: Homelessness

In a few interviews related to "The Fisher King", you have mentioned in passing that your cinematography and visual language for that film came from having for some time actually gone homeless and living in the street in an American city. Exactly when and where was that, and for how long?

wonderfullife

I read a 2002 interview in which you stated you "hate marmite".

Have you reconsidered your position on this matter yet?

It's great on toast.

Also, do you feel Madeleine Stowes performance in 12 Monkeys is under-rated due to the more flashy performance of Pitt?

jojo3000

@TlatoSMD : I have seen a documentary about "Magical Mystery Tour" (I believe it's also available in the recent dvd re-release) where Terry Gilliam was interviewed and said he came to the set... I don't know how long he staid but he was definitely there (don't remember if he was already friends with George Harrison or if it was something else).

jojo3000

By the way, another question if possible :
There have been reports of you and Neil Gaiman working together... Is there a project you still want to make together ? A Good Omens adaptation ? Sandman ?...

mark13

Have been a lifelong fan, I loved your adaption of the Damnation of Faust.

Have you ever considered adapting an opera for a big-screen release?

JaneOH

Dear Terry,

Your films have always reveled in the absurd, and wonderfully so, so is there anything (absurd or not) that links all your films together?

Thank you.

LeahD

Since you have renounced your American citizenship, you're only able to spend 29 days per year in the USA (according to wikipedia at least).
My question: Do you use those 29 days and if so, what do you do with them?

Terry,

In the 90's you were working on a big screen adaptation of Alan Moore's Watchmen, can you tell us what happened with that?

Have you seen the version which was released in 2009 and if so, how did it differ from your interpretation?

Boards.ie: Niamh

Ok folks, we are extending this til 6pm this evening when the winning question shall be chosen to win the pair of tickets to tomorrow night's premiere!

MRnotlob606

Who was your inspiration as an animator ?

Dav

jojo3000 wrote: »

-I understood that you hired Mélanie Thierry for The Zero Theorem on the advice of Bertrand Tavernier... Is it true and what are your relationshionship with Tavernier and the french cinema in general (you're good friends with Albert Dupontel, too) ?

-Also, the word "gilliamesque" has now entered the cinephile vocabulary... Is there a film you didn't direct that you would call "gilliamesque" ?
Thanks.

-Another question : You worked with the french artist Fred on a short comic book story back in the sixties when you were working for the french magazine Pilote. Fred sadly passed away last year. Were you familiar with his work ? What could you say about him ?

P.S : Is Robert Duvall still your Quixote ?

I've picked jojo's questions as the winner for the screening tickets, but I will be picking 3 more winners for tickets to the general release next month. If there are any more questions you'd like to see asked, post away, we'll be meeting tomorrow around 4pm.

Congrats jojo, I hope you have a good time at the screening tomorrow! I've sent you a PM looking for some details from you.

kumate_champ07

what is your favorite Philip K dick novel ,and screen adaptation?

TlatoSMD

jojo3000 wrote: »

@TlatoSMD : I have seen a documentary about "Magical Mystery Tour" (I believe it's also available in the recent dvd re-release) where Terry Gilliam was interviewed and said he came to the set... I don't know how long he staid but he was definitely there (don't remember if he was already friends with George Harrison or if it was something else).

Yes, I too remember him being interviewed in a documentary about the film because it's the kind of background he comes from also with his own films.

But my question is if he, looking at the result of MMT as a film that left some things to be desired, would like, or would have liked, to put a hand or two to it when they were making it, to see it live up more to the potential it really had. And it'd probably be a difference if it was young Terry helping them, or a Terry with the experience of a few masterpieces from "Holy Grail" onwards already under his belt.

But of course it'd be interesting to hear as well if he did add a thing or two for real.

TlatoSMD

I'd also like to add to my earlier question that if Terry already used wide lenses with his early 16mm hobby, I'd love to pay to see that footage on DVD! Just as I would with an official release of all of The Beatles's home movies from the 60s...

wil

'It's an interesting idea, but...'
any chance of a script and then maybe you know you could get it stamped, and finally we could have a Hitchhiker worth recalling, untouched by American hands?

I'm a little bit freaked out. Brazil just appeared on the ignored TV beside me, is that you or could it be just simple DNA predestination?

TlatoSMD

Just to let you guys know, if this is your video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TlsA01zh8BM it's blocked in Germany because of "lacking music rights".

Artful_Badger

TlatoSMD wrote: »

Just to let you guys know, if this is your video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TlsA01zh8BM it's blocked in Germany because of "lacking music rights".

That looks like a google hangout type thing being streamed by Sony which isnt live yet. I'd imagine boards will record their own Q&A and upload it afterwards.

Artful_Badger

Actually that stream is live now.

smurke

Hello Terry

You're adaptation of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is excellent, really faithful to the book yet still has your stamp firmly on it, even Hunter was pleased, and I imagine he was hard to... I've seen the footage where he gives Alex Cox what for, just one thing, why did Jake Busey's Patrolman ask Raoul for a kiss?

Boards.ie: Niamh

Artful_Badger wrote: »

That looks like a google hangout type thing being streamed by Sony which isnt live yet. I'd imagine boards will record their own Q&A and upload it afterwards.

That is correct, Dav is recording an interview with him this afternoon

Dav

The good news: We met Terry and had fun.

The bad news: our 15 minutes was cut to 6 (including our faffing about with lights to make sure we could see him on the camera!) and so we barely got through any of the questions - I'm really sorry, but his schedule was stacked and everything seems to have run slightly late meaning that at the end of the day when we saw him, we had to make do with a shorter time because he was off to receive a Volta Award immediately after he was done with press.

We're just waiting to get some assets from Sony Pictures Ireland to make the video look pretty, so we should have it Monday at the latest, maybe sooner.

Artful_Badger

Pity.

mewso

Not to worry Tubridy asked all the key questions of him last night anyway.

TlatoSMD

Are you guys gonna upload those 6 minutes you did get of him?

Boards.ie: Niamh

TlatoSMD wrote: »

Are you guys gonna upload those 6 minutes you did get of him?

We shall indeed, as Dav said above as soon as he has received some things from Sony to add to the video, he will upload it. Watch this space as they say