Terry Gilliam

Presenter0:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young. Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Island Discs from BBC Radio 4. For rights reasons the music choices are shorter than in the radio broadcast.

Presenter0:10

For more information about the programme, please visit bbc.co.uk slash radio four.

Presenter0:35

My castaway this week is the animator and director Terry Gilliam.

Presenter0:39

It's more than thirty years since he first made a foot-shaped impression on our cultural landscape. Then the enormous animated foot, which squashed everything beneath it, became one of the defining images of Monty Python's Flying Circus. In the years since, his films have included Brazil, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, and Twelve Monkeys. They've given free rein to his extraordinary imagination, and brought him stacks of awards and nominations. But there have been difficulties too, arguments over funding and distribution, of course. And after his leading man, Heath Ledger, died in the middle of filming one of his movies, he was tempted to throw in the towel.

Presenter1:17

As a teenager, a circus sparked his imagination. He wound up helping to run an old fashioned freak show. It triggered his interest in the odd and unusual, and in people who fell outside mainstream society. Now, aged seventy, he says It gets harder as you get older, as you get more normal, or more tired. How close to normal are you right now, Terry

Terry Gilliam1:41

Oh, God I always thought I was normal, and then and then I discovered I wasn't, and now I'm just weary, I think is the word. It's creeping in weariness.

Presenter1:50

Yeah.

Presenter1:52

Is that being ground down by the studios, by the whole machine that makes movies? Is that what it is? Or is it just being seventy?

Terry Gilliam1:59

No, I think it's nature. Yeah, nature's come in and taking its toll, as it always does. And the business, I suppose, is changing all the time like most. It's squeezing out the middle range of filmmaking at the moment, because either you make a film for less than ten million or a hundred million. I'm one of the middle ground people, so I'm actually middle class when it comes to filmmaking. And that's about all I'm middle class in.

Presenter2:25

Yeah, do you like you th I imagine being in the middle doesn't really suit your temperament much.

Terry Gilliam2:29

No, it's it's it's just the opposite. I've always liked the extremes, the edges. I like to know where the cliff is, where the cliff face is, but you only find out by stepping off. Uh it's usually wandering around in the dark, fumbling through forests that you can't uh see the end of, and suddenly you're falling.

Presenter2:46

There's a great line in in one of your great movies, Twelve Monkeys, where one of the characters says, Everything we say or do has already happened. And I'm wondering, in your context, as somebody who imagines, as a film maker, do you worry about running out of sources of originality?

Terry Gilliam3:03

Yeah, I've always felt that the well is very shallow. My wife thinks I keep making the same movie. I just change the costumes and the sets. It's invariably somebody trying to fight against the system, trying to get off the ground, to try to defy gravity, somebody who doesn't want to be limited. And that seems to be the theme in all of them. And I do find myself repeating myself, or I suspect I'm repeating myself, and I don't want to be caught out. So maybe it's good that it's harder for me to raise money and make movies. If I made more, they would discover I only have this one idea.

Presenter3:37

Yeah.

Terry Gilliam3:37

Yeah.

Presenter3:37

Yes, let's have some music, Terry Gilliam. The first of your discs is What, and why have you chosen it?

Terry Gilliam3:42

Ah, it's one of those moments when you're going through life thinking it's all sweet and lovely and you're clean and brushed and suddenly you're dragged down a dark alley. And it was Heartbreak Hotel. I was sitting in a car somewhere in Southern California one night and suddenly the song came on. I thought, uh-oh, the world has just changed. It turned ninety degrees and dragged me with it.

Speaker 34:05

Well since my baby left me, well I find a new place to dwell, well it's down at the end of Lonely Street that heartbreak hotel

Speaker 34:16

I'll be just a lonely baby, but I'm so lonely.

Speaker 34:21

I'll be so lonely, I could die

Speaker 34:25

Oh, but it's always crowded, and you still can find some room for broken-hearted mothers to crowd their blue.

Presenter4:36

That was Elvis Presley and Heartbreak Hotel. So, Terry Gilliam, you were of course the only non-Brit in the Monty Python team then, and you brought to the show these extraordinary images, uh you know, highly original, you know, the great big foots, the mouths that that open these

Presenter4:51

Apparently, very simplistic animations. Were you working as part of the team? Were the team inputting, or were you left to your own devices?

Terry Gilliam5:00

I suppose I had the most freedom of anybody in the group because what I was doing was clearly different from what they did. Early on at the beginning we decided to get rid of punch lines because so often in previous shows you had seen a great sketch, a great character and great ideas, and suddenly it needed a punch line, and the punch line was never as good as the sketch itself.

Terry Gilliam5:19

I mean, we w the way we would work, oftentimes it was just that they would reach the end of a sketch and not know where to go, and they'd say, I would Gilliam takes over here and gets us to the next bit. I was just going to with his visual sense and these images and doing this strange cut-out business that nobody else could do. So my animations gave it, I suppose, another level, a different colouring and a part for the non-verbal people to enjoy.

Presenter5:46

Do you consider yourself a non-verbal person?

Terry Gilliam5:49

Well, compared to the others, yeah, I really was. I mean, I was always the laughing stock. And strange enough, I still feel that we were on about a year ago, we were in New York, it was the 40th or 45th or whatever anniversary of Python. We were on a television show and all of us were there. And I just felt constrained once again because the others were so quick verbally and I couldn't compete. And so I just sat there quietly.

Presenter6:13

Yeah, you should have asked them to draw a picture like you and see what they've managed. Um Michael Palin said that you're one of these people who you exist in opposition to the world. Do y was he right about that?

Terry Gilliam6:15

Yeah.

Terry Gilliam6:23

I think he's right. I think because I've always been reactive. I don't know what I want. I don't know but I do know what's wrong. I do know what makes me angry. And so I respond to that immediately.

Presenter6:34

And you said just a moment ago there, you said you couldn't compete. Was it easy to imagine that it was a rather competitive environment that in those Python days?

Terry Gilliam6:43

I think it was an ideally designed creative environment because everybody respected each other as comedians and as writers, not as individuals and human beings, but we respected each other's talent. And there was always this war going on between, say, the Oxford versus the Cambridge people, the tall versus the normally sized people, the left-brain versus the right brain. And I was the lucky one because I could watch that and then step in when I wanted to and then pull back when I wanted to. Let's have some more music.

Presenter7:14

Disc number two, what is it? What is it?

Terry Gilliam7:17

Uh

Presenter7:17

The

Terry Gilliam7:17

Yeah, what is it? Oh yes, we're going back to the beginning now. This is uh the kid in Minnesota uh going to the movies and seeing Walt Disney and Pinocchio, and it's When You Wish Upon a Star.

Presenter7:17

Yeah, what is it?

Presenter7:20

Okay.

Speaker 37:32

Like a boat out of the blue.

Speaker 37:37

Fate steps in and sees you through

Presenter7:48

About

Presenter7:52

Your dreams come.

Presenter8:02

When You Wish Upon a Star from the original soundtrack of Pinocchio, uh Terry Gilliam such such innocence in that almost uh it is almost the personification of the American dream in a single individual's voice.

Terry Gilliam8:14

I think so. And it's that innocence that I think probably informed me more than anything else, being an American growing up in the country. And I just thought, this is the world, this is fantastic. I mean, when we played the song the first time, I started welling up because I was innocent once. It was like I was in the Garden of Eden.

Presenter8:35

Uh so you were brought up in uh for those first few years at least in Minnesota. Uh you lived it was you lived in rural Minnesota, did you? T t tell me more about it, describe it to me.

Terry Gilliam8:44

Well, it was basically a country cottage that was just for the summer that my dad insulated against the 40-degree below zero winters. We lived about two blocks from a lake. Across the street was a swamp. Behind the house was a forest. A few blocks that direction was cornfields. I mean, this is Tom Sawyer country. This is true.

Speaker 19:06

Yeah.

Presenter9:06

And this is

Presenter9:08

Uh

Terry Gilliam9:08

America

Presenter9:08

And was it a Tom Sawyer life? What what did you get up to?

Terry Gilliam9:11

Everything. We were amongst Swedes, let's put it that way, because Minnesota is the homeland of Swedes. They left Sweden. They came all the way across the world and ended up in a place that looks exactly like Sweden. And so it's a Swedish Protestant kind of world. We didn't have an indoor toilet for the first several years. And I remember the Biffy, as it's referred to, was a two-holer out in the back garden. Now, I have no sense memory of going out there in 40 degrees below zero and sitting on that wooden seat.

Presenter9:42

Probably best not to have a memory of that.

Terry Gilliam9:44

Well, this is it. Maybe this is how you maintain your innocence by forgetting things like that. We had a treehouse which was made out of the Biffy when we got an inside-door toilet. It was great. What did your dad do to earn a living? He was a carpenter, but he went through different stages. He was a Folger's coffee salesman at one point. He helped build the Alaskan Highway as a driving earth mover. He was away a lot because of that. But his carpentering is what I remember him most for because he made things.

Presenter10:13

Right.

Terry Gilliam10:13

And that's always been important to me, to be the ability to make something.

Presenter10:17

Can you do that? Can you make things yourself?

Terry Gilliam10:18

Yeah, I can build things, I can do that.

Presenter10:21

And did your father teach you as a little boy? Were you there as he was at it with his jigsaw and doing all that sort of stuff?

Terry Gilliam10:25

Yeah, just like Jesus and Joseph, Pinocchio and Geppetto. Yeah, that's how it works. My mother was a virgin too, just just so you know.

Presenter10:35

Nice to clear that up. Right, let's have some more music then. What are we going to hear now? By way of a little bit of contrast.

Terry Gilliam10:37

Let's have some more music.

Terry Gilliam10:41

Uh, it's it is contrast, but it's not contrast. It's again America, and it's Tom Waits, who I just think is the great musical poet in America, and it's a song called Alice.

Speaker 110:53

Set me adrift and I'm lost.

Speaker 110:58

Who were there?

Speaker 111:00

And I must be insane.

Speaker 111:05

To go skating on your nap

Speaker 111:08

Da da da da da da da.

Speaker 111:10

And by tracing it twice

Speaker 111:15

I fell through the ice.

Presenter11:23

That was Tom Waits and Alice. So you like him, Terry Gilliam, and he likes you. He says I'm quoting directly here that you are a wizard. You have unlimited imagination and energy and enthusiasm.

Terry Gilliam11:35

He lies, doesn't he? But the great thing with Tom, we all want to talk like Tom. I was gonna do a C D called Talk Like Tom, and it's a way of relaxing. Rather than doing um other yoga things, you just talk like Tom

Presenter11:52

Um you uh you've worked with him, of course, but are are you friends? Are you people who spent time together? Yeah.

Terry Gilliam11:55

His music goes from the darkest to the most heavenly. And I think I'm attracted to to again, it's this extreme thing, those that can use the entire range there that's available.

Presenter12:09

When did the imagination properly kick in then when you were younger? When did you begin to draw and think in images?

Terry Gilliam12:16

I don't know. I just always drew. I just love drawing. I love playing. It's playing is what I get paid to do. Come on, let's be honest. I'm play.

Presenter12:24

Uh when you were growing up then, did you was it a church going family? Did you was religion in

Terry Gilliam12:27

Yeah.

Terry Gilliam12:28

Yeah, I think we were Lutherans then, in those days. And then when we moved to California and became Presbyterians, we were always in church. That was a basic thing. In fact, it's how I got to college, because I went to college on a Presbyterian scholarship. I was going to be a missionary.

Presenter12:30

Images

Presenter12:45

You w really?

Terry Gilliam12:46

I really I was a little zealot in my youth, and I was going to go out and make the world a better place, really, help people.

Presenter12:54

Now, of course it does come out of goodness, Terry, but it kind of comes out, I think also of a degree of superiority. I mean, you were a clever boy. Did you feel slightly superior?

Terry Gilliam13:04

Uh

Presenter13:04

Uh

Terry Gilliam13:04

I never felt superior. I was always surprised that other people found it more difficult than I did. I I don't think I ever felt superior. I mean, I was elected student body president, which completely astonished me, because I had no political ambitions. For whatever reason, they decided that I was the guy to run for president.

Presenter13:06

Yeah.

Presenter13:20

President?

Terry Gilliam13:22

I have no idea. It's as simple as that. I go through life not being aware of who I am. I don't even know what I look like, is the reality. I mean, years ago when we were doing Fisher King, there was a birthday party on the set for Robin Williams, and somebody videoed it, and Robin comes through the door of the set, and ah, happy birthday. And there's a guy walking around in the room, and I don't know who it is, and it was me. So I have no self-awareness in that sense.

Presenter13:51

But you you were also voted most likely to succeed, weren't you? Yeah, you stood out from the crowd.

Terry Gilliam13:54

It is stood up.

Terry Gilliam13:56

Uh

Terry Gilliam13:57

I wasn't aware of it. I mean, I'm not being coy here. I mean, it's absolutely genuine.

Presenter13:59

Yeah, I mean it's

Speaker 114:00

Uh

Terry Gilliam14:03

Just it happened and I didn't understand why it was happening. I was distracted by uh life. I wasn't interested in money. I was interested in just being able to do what I wanted to do, control what I wanted to do and uh and that, and hopefully find an audience for it.

Presenter14:19

When did you give up on the idea of becoming a missionary?

Terry Gilliam14:22

Oh, when uh at church they found my jokes about God or unseemly, I think was the word, they didn't laugh. And I said, What kind of God do you believe in that can't take a joke? My little jokes are going to undermine the whole structure that you believe in? This is nonsense. I'm out of here. And on that note

Presenter14:40

Uh

Terry Gilliam14:41

Let's have some

Presenter14:41

Music then. We are now already. We're already on disc four.

Terry Gilliam14:43

Where are we going?

Terry Gilliam14:46

Disc four. All right. Now when I was making The Brothers Grimm in Prague, I started falling into this other wonderful world, which was Hungarian, Czech, Romanian, gypsy music. And one group I really loved was a group called Parnograst, and this is them.

Presenter15:12

Da da da da da da.

Presenter15:14

Yeah.

Presenter15:27

That was a traditional Hungarian Roma song performed by Parno Grast. Um, I mentioned the freak show. When did you work I mean, you didn't work in the freak show, but when did you work for the freak show?

Terry Gilliam15:36

I think I must have been about 12 or 13, the Clyde Beatty Circus came. All of us kids would go out there to try to get a job helping raise the tents. It was great, because we still raise tents with elephants and things like that. And I got stuck with the freak show tent. At that point, I used to go to the country fairs, and they'd have the great canvas hoardings out front with the lizard man, the alligator woman. And it was, again, the extraordinariness, the amazingness about what life can produce. As a cartoonist, you deal with grotesques, you stretch things, faces, bodies, everything. And suddenly I was there with living cartoons. But what was interesting for me was inside the tent I was watching the, quote, freaks, the pinhead man, the dwarfs, the strangely shaped human beings, all just sitting around playing cards. It wasn't like the lizard man, it was Bob, and it was Ken. And they were just normal people. Extraordinary, but normal. Those are the people that impressed me because they were dealt a pretty odd hand of cards, and yet they've made a life out of it. And I think that's great.

Presenter15:48

Yeah.

Speaker 115:56

Is it

Speaker 116:25

Yeah.

Presenter16:37

Yeah, I think

Presenter16:38

Yes. And what about identifying with outsiders? That's I mean, it's very interesting to hear you describe your school days where you didn't feel that you were, you know, part of the in-group, part of the team. You were you were interested in other things. Do you think you always have identified with the outsider?

Terry Gilliam16:53

I've wanted to be an outsider, let's put it that way. And I felt I was far too normal and everything was right. I used to blame my parents for not being poor and miserable and putting me in closets and locking me in. I thought, this is terrible lack of child abuse. How can I be an artist? How can I be anything if if I'm like that?

Presenter17:09

Anything

Presenter17:11

What about your own kids then? Have you tried to fill their life with uh misery and torment in order to enable them to be creative?

Terry Gilliam17:16

Um I tried and I failed, I think. They're not as creative as they ought to be, frankly.

Terry Gilliam17:23

No, the kids are great. It's a difficult one. I I think in my last year in college I counseled at a summer camp and all the kids came from Beverly Hills. So they were sons and daughters of film directors, actors. They were the famous kids and they were all a mess. They were all a mess. They'd been raised by nannies. They had been privileged beyond belief. And they were all terrible. And I was worried, oh, I don't want my kids to end up like that. So my wife is Maggie has done most of the work of raising them. I think I'm hidden down somewhere in the basement so I don't inf infect them.

Presenter17:25

Uh

Presenter17:58

But you've been married for thirty odd years, nearly forty years. Yeah, that's uh again incredibly conventional and not necessarily what people would expect of the person who makes the sort of films you make.

Terry Gilliam18:00

Yeah.

Terry Gilliam18:08

I think Maggie's stability for me is what she is. She she I mean, I couldn't function without her. I mean she seems to do everything. When when she says a single parent family, I mean basically we've got three kids and me, so she's got four to deal with basically. And you are you difficult to

Presenter18:08

I see.

Presenter18:23

Yeah.

Presenter18:24

Are you are you difficult to are you difficult to live with?

Terry Gilliam18:26

I'm a delight, I'm told. Not by Maggie, but everybody else.

Presenter18:28

But

Presenter18:30

What does Maggie say? I'm interested in what Maggie says.

Terry Gilliam18:32

You have to get her on the program to find out the truth. No. We've been married for so long it's quite extraordinary. But she's, I guess, balances me. W I think we still like each other even after all that time. She makes me laugh.

Presenter18:46

Let's have some more music then, Terry Gillian.

Presenter18:49

Number f

Terry Gilliam18:49

5.

Presenter18:49

Where

Terry Gilliam18:49

Where are we?

Presenter18:49

Yeah.

Terry Gilliam18:50

Ah

Terry Gilliam18:51

This is the Beatles, of course, have to come in because they've been so much an important part of my life, in particular George Harrison, with handmade films. And we wouldn't be here if it wasn't for George. And I always said he wouldn't be where he was if I hadn't been buying all of his albums. So I thought we ought to do Tax Man from George Harrison.

Presenter19:14

Let me tell you how it will be.

Presenter19:21

There's one for you, nineteen for me.

Presenter19:28

Cause I'm the tax man

Presenter19:30

Yeah, I'm the tight side.

Presenter19:36

That was The Beatles and Tax Man. You you mentioned going into that, Terry Gilliam, that that George Harrison and you helped each other out. You bought The Beatles albums, and what was it you did with handmade films?

Terry Gilliam19:46

Well, he gave us the money to make Life of Brian, is what he did, and out of that grew handmade films, which was George and Python together. And it was quite an extraordinary relationship because he always felt that the spirit of the Beatles went into Monty Python, because we started when they quit. And I think there was an element of truth to that. He seemed to be the biggest Python fan in the world. It was always embarrassing being with him because he would throw out Python lines and I didn't know what he was talking about.

Presenter19:49

Yeah.

Terry Gilliam20:19

Why did you never watch the T V show? Well, it's one of those things you do it and then you kind of forget about it. I suppose Python is the most for me the most important thing, is it's it you know, suddenly I was able to do all of the things I really wanted to do, which is direct live action films and not be an animator or a lumberjack.

Presenter20:34

Or a lumberjack. And w and yeah, that that felt too confining, did it? You wanted to play on a bigger stage, literally.

Terry Gilliam20:41

Well, I think for a long time I'd wanted to be a movie director'cause it was the the greater form, basically. I always wanted to do that.

Presenter20:46

Yeah.

Presenter20:48

Um you are currently directing your first it's your first ever opera. You've come this far and not directed an opera. I would think that you were a complete shoo-in to direct operas, you know, in terms of the sort of scale, imagination, and you're not frightened of going off at some distance from the possibility of real life. How come you've never done it before?

Terry Gilliam21:05

Possibly because people were trying to get me to do it. I'm just perverse. People were for years, it's probably twenty years people have been trying to get me to do opera and I just didn't do it because I was determined to keep making films. I was attracted to the ENO because it's not an opera house, it's an old music hall. And they offered me Berliosa's Damnation of Faust. And the reason I took it is it's never been successful, so I can't be judged to be less good than others.

Presenter21:08

I'm just

Presenter21:09

Yeah.

Presenter21:33

But it's also the subject matter that that seems to be, you know, close to your own heart. If you if we look at something like Doctor Parnassus, you know, that idea of do literally in that movie, of course, doing a deal with the devil, you know, the idea that you can uh nothing's for nothing, and if you give up a little bit of your soul for something that seems good, you're going to pay for it in the end.

Terry Gilliam21:51

I think the the the Faustian ta tale has always been the thing I hold up as the thing to watch yourself, watch yourself constantly, because the temptation to sell out to do it the other way, to do it the easy way, the temptation is there always. And I just fight against it. The great advantage of being a Python is that we've got this little pension fund. We own the shows. We own two of the movies. And so money trickles in. It doesn't make a man rich, but it makes a man comfortable enough that he will wait.

Presenter22:21

Do you ever get bored of people saying to you, Talk to me about Python? Tell me what it was like in the old days. You know, you've you've done so much since.

Terry Gilliam22:28

Not really, because I think I do feel I owe everything to Python, because honestly, I mean, that's going to be on my grave probably, ex Python, no matter what you do. All the films I've done came out of that. Once that momentum starts, boom, boom, boom. And so no, Python is gets the credit for everything.

Presenter22:45

More music then. Um Terry Gilliam

Terry Gilliam22:48

Yeah, I think the next is a bit of Richard Strauss, Ein Heldenleben, which translates as a hero's life, I believe. The thing I love about Strauss, again, his orchestrations go from the deepest, darkest to highest, thinnest, most beautiful. And the end of Ein Heldenleben, after all these battles and turmoil throughout the whole piece, suddenly you come to this end and it's this fine, fine violin, which is the last bit of his spirit. He dies.

Speaker 123:35

Okay.

Presenter24:15

That was Einhelden Leben, A Hero's Life by Richard Strauss, played by Daniel Majesewski with the Cleveland Orchestra conducted by Vladimir Ashkenazi.

Presenter24:23

So then, Terry Gillian, your film career, we should remind people we've talked about some of them, so many classics, things like Brazil, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, we talked about The Fisher King, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and your most recent movie of it was 2009, I think, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus. You were midway through filming when the central character, your leading man, Heath Ledger, died. How did you hear about that?

Terry Gilliam24:49

on my daughter, Amy, said you've got to come into my office and there it was on the BBC uh website. And I said, It's just a joke, this is not not possible, because we'd just all been together two days earlier.

Speaker 124:58

None.

Terry Gilliam25:02

I mean, he was so vital, so full of life, so joyous, and suddenly he's dead. It's just like that. Life is over. And I think that's what happened with Heath,'cause um I mean, there's I still don't have any other explanation other than just, you know, you take your your pills, your sleeping pills and things, pop'em in and you die.

Presenter25:16

Yeah.

Presenter25:20

And so you were left not just with with the grief of losing uh a young man that you knew well and were working with, you were left then with this huge hole in the middle of the movie you were shooting. So I mean, where do you where do you begin with that? What how do the conversations go with the people at the studio and the various kinds of

Speaker 125:31

So I mean

Terry Gilliam25:37

No, with me, it's very simple. I gave up. I'm going home. That's it. It's over. Finished. We were halfway through shooting. Heath was a star, and he wasn't there. And I called Johnny Depp, and I called him not to get him to play a part. I called him immediately the day I think Heath died. And he said, Well, whatever happens, I'm there for you, whatever you want. And my daughter, being shrewder than me, told the money people who were in fast retreat at that point because they were closing the shop down. She said, Johnny Depp says he'll do anything. And then later, when I decided what to do to go ahead, I basically just called people who were friends of Heath. There were other people being offered bigger names, bigger stars. But nope, family. I'm not going to give you the names. But I said, it was wrong. This has to be. Tom Cruise at some point.

Presenter26:18

Brilliant.

Presenter26:22

Tom Cruise at some point offered himself a little bit. Did you say that? I did say Tom Cruise.

Terry Gilliam26:23

Did you say that?

Terry Gilliam26:25

I don't know. I've heard rumors to that effect, but I don't know. You might be the person to confirm that rumor. Oh, not over the air.

Presenter26:28

You might be the person.

Terry Gilliam26:33

But it had to be within the family, and that's what it was.

Presenter26:36

And that's

Presenter26:38

Um, you I'm wondering how you're viewed by the studios. You've not always been a nice, quiet, tame director, have you? You've been a director on on one occasion you took out a full page advert. What what was what was the advert about? What did it say?

Terry Gilliam26:49

Well, it was just a little personal note to the head of the studio, because we'd made this little film called Brazil, and the studio decided it would be a much better, more successful film if one changed the ending, made it a happy ending. You would reach a larger audience. Isn't that what you won, Terry? And I said, No, we all agreed at the beginning to tell this particular story, and that's what we tell. And it doesn't have a happy ending. So I took a big full-page hat out in variety, and it was like an Italian death poster, where big empty page outlined in black at the edge, and in the middle of this white space in the middle, it says, Dear Sid Scheinberg, when are you going to release my film Brazil? signed Terry Gilliam. Suddenly, explosions everywhere. I mean, they went crazy.

Presenter27:30

And this was a film that became not just a well-reviewed film, it is a cult film. You know, it's one of those movies that people will put in their top ten for years to come. Did the studio say sorry?

Terry Gilliam27:34

Yeah.

Terry Gilliam27:35

Yeah.

Terry Gilliam27:37

Yeah.

Terry Gilliam27:39

We were wrong. No. What happened was we started clandestine screenings with the LA critics, and the LA critics announced Best Picture Brazil, Best Screenplay Brazil, Best Director Brazil. And this is a film that hadn't been released, and they had to release it. So you were nominated for those awards? Well, the LA critics discovered that the film didn't actually have to be released to qualify. Ha ha ha! And it was in their bylaws somewhere. So we won the three big ones.

Presenter27:58

Well you

Presenter28:10

Given that when you put the ad in variety you didn't know you were going to win, did Maggie say to you this is career suicide and you must be off your head?

Terry Gilliam28:18

No, we've never had a career. We don't use that word in the house.

Terry Gilliam28:22

No, we don't think about things like that. It was it was good fun because I there was I in fact I was very depressed because I assumed we would never get the film out. It became a game of me, the Joker, against the very serious head of a studio.

Presenter28:36

Yeah, well you're very good at getting laughs, though, obviously, and you are a very buoyant character. But it's interesting you say, you know, you were depressed. I mean, this was a huge movie that had taken a huge effort, as you say, you know, the work of many hundreds of people to get this piece of art made. Um the depression, how does that hit you and how do you deal with it? And do you do you go under the covers?

Terry Gilliam28:53

Yeah, fetal was a nice position to sleep in. Were they?

Presenter28:57

Yeah.

Terry Gilliam28:57

Yeah. The point with depression to me is you've got to go all the way down to the bottom before you can come back up. And the bottom is very deep. It's not much fun.

Terry Gilliam29:07

You just have to deal with it. I mean, to me, life is just about

Presenter29:09

Dealing with what's thrown at you. The time that Brazil wasn't being put out and, you know, things were looking quite bleak, you were.

Presenter29:17

Your youngest child would have been quite young, six or seven years old. I mean, what's the effect on your family? Is it just kind of don't go near Dad because Dad's not talking or Dad's not

Terry Gilliam29:26

No, I don't know. I think I think I'm quite good at at covering what I'm feeling. But I'm a miserable sod around the house. I mean this grumbling, dark cloud.

Terry Gilliam29:37

But I hope they hopefully I stay out of their way and Maggie keeps the family out of my way.

Presenter29:44

My way.

Terry Gilliam29:44

Yeah.

Presenter29:44

Let's have um let's have well

Terry Gilliam29:46

Oh, let's brighten things up a little bit here. It's getting miserable in this studio.

Presenter29:48

But I think here it's

Terry Gilliam29:51

How

Presenter29:51

What would you like to hear now about?

Terry Gilliam29:52

I would like. There's somebody I really admire, and his name is Van Dyke Parks. And he's one of the great American musicians. And he made an album called Jump, which, when I was making Brazil, which was a long nine months, I played it every morning on the way to work. And it made me happy. It made me American again. It made me optimistic. And so this is a song from Jump.

Presenter30:15

An opportunity for to

Presenter30:19

It had to be me.

Speaker 130:21

It had to be you. It seemed to be a dream.

Speaker 130:26

It happened to be true.

Speaker 130:30

I find your charity

Speaker 130:33

Uh

Presenter30:33

One

Presenter30:34

A day to make hay!

Presenter30:36

Erase the new

Presenter30:37

Uh

Speaker 130:37

Brood of glue for you

Speaker 130:41

They say you the one.

Presenter30:45

That was Van Dyke Park's and Opportunity for Two. I'm wondering, this you know, this sort of tiny lone man surrounded by the giant buildings fighting against the the oppressors or officialdom in whatever creative form they take. Is there a bit of you that feels that, yourself, even at this uh this uh grand age of seventy nine?

Terry Gilliam31:02

There's a bit of that. I just, when I was younger, I thought I could actually make a difference. I'm not sure anymore. That's what happens with age. It's an American thing. You're raised to be a hero, that you can actually change the world. You can make a difference. Your life is important. Every American gets this. I remember when I went to India some years ago with Mike Palin, we did a trip to India. And I suddenly thought for the first time the hero is a very Western concept. This one guy who's going to change the world. You go to India and it says, no, I can't make much of a difference at all. This place runs itself. It is its own thing. So I think I've become much more Eastern in my thinking. The world just turns again. Sometimes you get crushed by the wheel as it turns. Sometimes you rise to the top. It goes on. The world is an extraordinary place. It's a great ride. But I've only got a few more turns before it's over.

Presenter31:53

How will you be on the island then? I'm going to cast you away.

Terry Gilliam31:57

I know, this is so cruel. I'll be alone. I'll be with me. And I don't like desert islands.

Presenter31:59

Yeah.

Presenter32:01

And I don't

Terry Gilliam32:03

Maybe it's a good thing. Maybe that's the way one should end their lives, just sitting on the mountain and letting the clouds and the the bugs do whatever they do.

Presenter32:13

Our final piece then. What's the final thing we're going to hear today?

Terry Gilliam32:16

I guess we're going to the island. We are. This one is. I love this piece because it's based on a painting by a man named Arnold Berkelin, who painted all sorts of strange classic creatures. And there's a painting of this strange island, this golden rock with a door in it, and there's a boat with a white shrouded figure heading towards it. And it's called the Isle of the Dead. And Rachmaninoff wrote a piece which we were inspired by, or we stole, I can't remember which, for the figure of death in Baron Munchausen. It's extraordinary as the waves of the world just sweep on endlessly.

Presenter32:18

We are.

Presenter33:56

That was part of Rachmaninoff's The Isle of the Dead, performed by the St. Petersburg Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Maris Janssons. So I will give you, Terry Gilliam, the Bible, the complete works of Shakespeare, and you get to take a book along too. What else would you like to take?

Terry Gilliam34:11

Do I actually have to take the Bible?

Presenter34:13

But you don't have to.

Terry Gilliam34:14

It's still a good read. It's got good good action sequences in it. The book. I think it's going to have to be the biggest dictionary I can find.

Presenter34:26

Okay.

Terry Gilliam34:26

And also, if it's big enough, I can probably hollow out a bit of it and uh smuggle along with me a pistol in there that when I get bored with my company I can shoot myself.

Presenter34:37

Yeah, I didn't hear that and I'm not even gonna in any way comment on that plan. Uh you are allowed a luxury.

Presenter34:42

Can I have

Terry Gilliam34:42

Can I have a mirror to see at least who I'm talking to?

Terry Gilliam34:46

Okay, then at least I'll be able to see who I'm talking to. My only companion is me.

Presenter34:51

Okay, you'll recognize yourself in a room then afterwards. I probably won't. And if you had to choose just one of these eight tracks today, which one would you choose?

Terry Gilliam34:53

I probably

Terry Gilliam34:58

Oh, that's yeah, now that's actually hard. Uh

Terry Gilliam35:02

Strangely enough, probably Einhelden Leibniz, because it's such a rich, textured piece, you can sit there and imagine the journey of your own life, and I would be able to be present at my own death, which I'd hate to miss.

Presenter35:16

Okay, Terry Gilliam, thank you very much for letting us hear your Desert Island discs.

Presenter35:24

Yeah.

Terry Gilliam35:24

You've done it. It's over. It was good fun. You're great. Thank you.

Presenter35:24

It's over.

Presenter36:14

You've been listening to a download from the BBC.

Presenter36:17

You'll find more information on the Radio 4 website: bbc.co.uk slash radio 4.