Terry Gilliam

Born on November 22, 1940 in Medicine Lake, Minnesota, Terence Vance Gilliam is the eldest of the three children of a military man turned carpenter. Because one of Terry’s sisters suffered from asthma, Terry’s father decided to move the family to sunny California, where the climate was better for Terry’s health.

Since his childhood, Terry begins to make very personal drawings, especially of strange alien figures. He studies political science at UCLA, where he edits “Fang,” a student publication. At that time he collaborates as a cartoonist in the famous magazine “Mad”.

After spending a summer working in an architect’s studio, he lands a job at a New York advertising agency, and collaborates with the satirical magazine Help!, where he produces a photo-romp style comic story about a guy who falls in love with a Barbie doll. He is modeled for the snapshots by a young British man, John Cleese , then an aspiring actor, who befriends Gilliam.

Bored with the New York scene, where he feels ignored for its hippie aesthetic, Gilliam follows Cleese to London, where he gets a job as an animator for the series Do Not Adjust Your Set , starring Eric Idle , Michael Palin and Terry Jones . The three join Graham Chapman and the aforementioned Cleese, who were preparing a comedy show for the BBC. One of the five suggests incorporating Terry Gilliam into the group. No one remembers who came up with the idea, but Gilliam’s crazy animations, based on collages and drawings, were instrumental in defining the crazy and surreal tone of the show, which ended up being titled Monty Python’s Flying Circus .. Broadcast from 1969 to 1974, it gained enormous acceptance and became the cult comedy show par excellence.

“I met Gilliam in a bar,” stated Eric Idle . “I remember thinking where would we fit drawings of an American. There he was, looking like a showbiz character, in a floor-length fur coat and a glamorous blonde next to him. ‘Hell, just we were missing this. It’s not going to work,’ I thought. But it did: it worked wonders.”

Initially, Gilliam limited himself to developing animations that were as timeless as they were surreal, combining impossible figures with clippings from old photographs on landscape backgrounds. Little by little he was encouraged to appear in a sketch, but he was more interested in writing, directing and continuing with his animations, so he was the member of the group that appeared the least on screen. He was in some memorable sketch, for example he played Mao Tse-Tung who together with Che Guevara and Karl Marx were questioned about his soccer knowledge.

The group tried to make it big in the United States with The Fat One , where they repeated several of their best-known skits in film format, but they were a resounding failure. Following the animated shorts Storytime and The Miracle of Flight , Gilliam co-directed with Terry Jones the Pythons’ second feature, the hilarious Knights of the Square Table , in which the American played the squire who imitated the noise of horses with two coconut halves. .

Although the comedy group ended up breaking up, for various reasons ( Graham Chapman had a drinking problem, John Cleese left the TV show early to star in his own series, etc.), its members would get back together to shoot the irreverent and controversial The Life of Brian , in 1979. Earlier, in 1977, Gilliam had started his career as a solo director with The Beast of the Kingdom , where a peasant chases a medieval monster that devastates the towns it passes through. He kept Michael Palin, as the lead, and Terry Jones, so the film became a curious hybrid. Gilliam’s unmistakable ornate visual style was already present, but he tried to maintain the surreal humor of the Python hallmark.

Much more personal and well-rounded was the unclassifiable Los héroes del tiempo , where a boy with an overflowing imagination discovers that some dwarfs come out of his closet and travel through time to steal great treasures. He featured his fellow Of Him John Cleese and Michael Palin , within a large cast that also included Sean Connery and Shelley Duvall .

For those who sign these lines, the best thing that Gilliam has shot is undoubtedly the short The Crimson Permanent Assurance , where some office workers, fed up with their quiet life, converted their building into a kind of pirate ship. It was included as the opening of the Pythons’ latest feature film: The Meaning of Life .

Already defining his own style, Gilliam shoots the Orwellian Brazil , visually rich and fascinating, questioned by many for its excesses, and considered a cult film by others. In a dystopian future, a quiet bureaucrat ( Jonathan Pryce ) is arrested after being mistaken for a guerilla fighter ( Robert De Niro ). The producers tried to get Gilliam to make a more commercial cut, with a less dark ending, but he refused and it failed at the box office. At least the filmmaker earned an Oscar nomination (the only one in his long career) for best screenplay, alongside Tom Stoppard and Charles McKeown .

Nor did The Adventures of Baron Munchausen , a spectacular film version of the feats supposedly experienced by a real German aristocrat, including traveling to the moon, and which were converted into books by Bürger and Raspe, receive a very good response .

Gilliam’s greatest directing success was with The Fisher King , with Jeff Bridges as a jaded radio host turned drifter who, along with an estranged history professor ( Robin Williams ), sets out on a quest for the Holy Grail. The director did not renounce the constants of his work (praise of the imagination as an escape route, visual delusions, etc.) but he presented them in a more conventional way, since all the surreal elements remain as possible delusions of the protagonists . He earned the Silver Lion at Venice and the only Golden Globe nomination of his career, as a director.

Nor did he do badly with Twelve Monkeys , with Bruce Willis and Brad Pitt , where he repeats elements of his own work (the time travels of The Heroes of Time , the dystopian future of Brazil ) while borrowing the plot of the cult medium-length film La Jetée , by Chris Marker. The action takes place in 2035, when a guy volunteers to travel back in time and get a sample of the virus that has killed millions of people.

Gilliam brought to the screen Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas , Hunter S. Thompson’s autobiographical and psychedelic novel, full of surreal images and characters, about a journalist and his lawyer who, while consuming inhuman amounts of drugs, travel to Las Vegas to report about a motorcycle race.

In his personal life, Gilliam is doing well. Married to makeup artist Maggie Weston, who has collaborated on some of his films, the couple have three children. But in terms of cinema, the director is a real jinx, as demonstrated in the documentary Lost in La Mancha , about his unsuccessful attempt to shoot The Man Who Killed Don Quixote , in 2000. Thunderous F16s of the Spanish Army, a series of apocalyptic storms and the illness of the main actor, Jean Rochefort, put an end to the project. Because of everything that happened, Phil Patterson, his assistant director, gave Gilliam the nickname “Captain Chaos.”

Although he flopped with the unclassifiable Tideland , the filmmaker had some success with The Secret of the Brothers Grimm , a fantastical tale starring the celebrated folktale collectors, with Matt Damon and Heath Ledger . But he was followed by bad luck again when the latter died suddenly from an accidental overdose of prescription drugs, while starring at his command The Imaginary of Doctor Parnassus . He was replaced in different sequences by Johnny Depp , Jude Law and Colin Farrell , so his character transforms as he travels through an unreal world.

In recent times, Gilliam has tried to revive the Don Quixote project. He has also shot the shorts The Legend of Hallowdega and The Wholly Family .