Preposterous good luck and calamity plague the pages of GILLIAMESQUE, a pre-posthumous memoir by Terry Gilliam, Monty Python’s Pythagorean animator and pithy picture maker in his own write.
What apparently started out as a high class coffee table book of his artwork has evolved into something closer to a Grand Theft Auto-biography: “a high speed car chase through my life with lots of skids and crashes, many of the best moments whizzing by in a blur.”
Unlike his Python pal, Palin, Gilliam didn’t do diary, so the narrative is fractious, fractured, and one hundred per-cent objective fact.
Taking cue from Dylan Thomas, Rodgers and Hammerstein, and The Bible, the septuagenarian starts at the very beginning, back in 1940 Minnesota, a cold climate incubator far removed from the Hollywood hot water he’d eventually end up in.
A happy childhood, with a diet of Disney and comedian Ernie Kovacs, fueled Gilliam’s imagination. At age eleven, his family relocated to California, where his father stubbornly refused to find work in the motion picture industry. However, Gilliam discovered the most important single cultural influence of his teenage years; MAD comics.
From MAD to Madison Avenue, as Uni grad Terry joins the advertising business, making ads for cheesy exploitation flicks, perfect training for the budding auteur.
What made him run away from America and join the Monty Python Flying Circus makes intriguing reading, and of course, the post Python era of his picture making is the piece de resistance for film buffs.
From Jabberwocky through to The Zero Theorem, Gilliam gives us gorgeous titbit about the making and marketing of these productions, and his collaborations with stars such as Sean Connery, Robert De Niro, Christopher Waltz, Brad Pitt and Johnny Depp.
“I think good actors will be willing to completely expose themselves so long as they’re confident they are in safe hands and are feeling protected…my experience is that once they trust me they will go beyond their career ‘health and safety limits’. They aren’t called ‘players’ for nothing and my job is to create a playground in which it’s safe for them to risk falling flat on their faces.”
Interesting insights into the power plays of producers and performers too, with an eye-opening account of the courting of Marlon Brando to appear in The Adventures of Baron Munchausen.
GILLIAMESQUE is a careening kaleidoscope of a book brim full of anecdote, rant, and musings, accompanied by illustrations and photographs. There’s hardly a page in the three hundred strong that is not adorned with pictorial ravishing.
Too clever for our own good, thank you, Terry Gilliam, for being too clever for own good, for stirring our imagination, gratifying our funny bone, and producing this fabulous book.
GILLIAMESQUE by Terry Gilliam is published by Canongate in just the right fit for Santa’s sack.