Gilliamesque

Terry Gilliam

Description

Now is probably as good a time as any to make a full confession. . . Telling his story for the first time, the director of Time Bandits, Brazil, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, The Fisher King, 12 Monkeys and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas - not to mention co-founder of Monty Python's Flying Circus - recalls his extraordinary life so far. Featuring a cast of amazing supporting characters, including George Harrison, Robin Williams, Jeff Bridges, Robert De Niro, Brad Pitt, Uma Thurman, Johnny Depp, Heath Ledger and all of the fellow Pythons, Gilliamesque is a rollercoaster ride through late twentieth century popular culture. Packed with never-before-seen artwork, photographs and commentary.

Informations

• Publié par: Canongate Books
• Date de parution: 01 octobre 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781782111078
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 18 Mo

Extrait

First published in Great Britain in 2015 by Canongate Books Ltd,
14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE
www.canongate.tv
This digital edition first published in 2015 by Canongate Books
Copyright © 2015 Terry Gilliam
The moral right of the author has been asserted
p. 8, Terry Gilliam and Johnny Depp, The Man Who Killed Don Quixote © 2000 Francois Duhamel; p. 10, Ernie Kovacs © Fred Hermansky/NBCUniversal/Getty Images; Sid Caesar © NBC/MBCU Photo Bank via Getty Images; p. 25, MAD magazine covers © DC Comics; p. 60, Algonquin Hotel lobby © Barry Winiker via Getty Images; p. 72, sketchbook report © Robert Crumb; p. 102, El Cordobes © Hulton Archive via Getty Images; p. 173, Nude on a Sofa by Francois Boucher, photo © bpk/Bayerische Staatsgemaldesämmlungen; p. 184, Time Bandits © Criterion Collection; p. 196, Terry Gilliam as Little Bo Peep in The Meaning of Life © 1983 Universal Studios. All Rights Reserved. Courtesy of Universal Studios; p. 218, John Neville and Sarah Polley, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen © 1989 Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Courtesy of Columbia Pictures; p. 223, three The Adventures of Baron Munchausen images © Sergio Strizzi, courtesy of Contrasto Agency; p. 228, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen cast © 1989 Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Courtesy of Columbia Pictures; p. 248, Terry Gilliam and Johnny Depp, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas © Peter Mountain; p. 248, Benicio Del Toro © Peter Mountain; p. 251, Johnny Depp, The Man Who Killed Don Quixote © 2000 Francois Duhamel; pp. 257–9, six The Man Who Killed Don Quixote images © 2000 Francois Duhamel; pp. 260–1, Terry Gilliam, The Man Who Killed Don Quixote © 2005 HanWay Films/Photos by Francois Duhamel; pp. 265–7, five The Brothers Grimm images © 2005 Dimension Films/Photos by Francois Duhamel; pp. 268–9, three Tideland images © 2005 RPC/Photos by Francois Duhamel; p. 272, two Faust images © Tristram Kenton; p. 273, two Cellini images © ENO/Richard Hubert Smith; p. 273, Cellini poster © ENO, illustration by James Straffon; p. 274, Terry Gilliam, The Brothers Grimm © 2005 Dimension Films/Photos by Francois Duhamel; p. 276, Christopher Plummer and Lily Cole, The Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus © 2008 Liam Daniels; p. 277, Terry Gilliam and Amy Gilliam © Dave Hogan via Getty Images; pp. 280–1, three Zero Theorem images courtesy of Voltage Pictures; p. 282, Monty Python Live (Mostly) entrance © Ralph Larmann; p. 283, Monty Python Live (Mostly) ‘Spanish Inquisition’ © Dave J. Hogan via Getty Images; p. 284, Monty Python stamp © Royal Mail Group Ltd, 2015; p. 288, Gilliam family © David M. Bennett via Getty Images.
Except where explicitly stated, all images of the members of Monty Python are courtesy of Python (Monty) Pictures Ltd.
The photographs in this book are produced from a variety of sources. As well as images by some of the world’s finest photographers there is artwork recovered from such ephemera as long-lost prints, record covers, magazines and posters. We have done our best to restore them and include them here for historic interest.
All reasonable effort has been made to identify and contact the copyright holders of the images and artwork printed in this publication. Any omissions are inadvertent and any party who believes their copyright has been infringed is invited to contact the publisher, who will be pleased to make any necessary arrangements at the earliest opportunity.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available on
request from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 78211 106 1 eISBN 978 1 78211 107 8
Curation & Project Management: HDG Projects Ltd
Design: gray318
Art direction: Rafaela Romaya
This is not the book that my daughter, Holly, and I intended. The plan was to produce a large, expensive, high-class coffee-table book of my artwork for the Cognoscenti of Fine Art. It would include a choice selection of historical tidbits for those who could read. Unfortunately, once the tape recorder started rolling I couldn’t stop babbling, and we have ended up with 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. As a result, I have had to insert handwritten or typed notes to adjust the story, apologise for the egocentric nature of the reminiscences, name the ignored, fill in the glaring gaps, or just try to get control of my story-telling self. The Cognoscenti will have to buy something else for their coffee tables.
Unlike my good friend Michael Palin – who knew where the real pot of gold was buried from the very beginning – I have never bothered to keep a diary and, as my wife Maggie never tires of reminding me, such memory as I do have left is dangerously – if not actionably – selective. On top of this, as the years have passed, more and more of those I’ve relied upon to be custodians of our shared but forgotten experiences – wonderful warm slabs of my life – have been sadly laid out on cold slabs of their own.
It’s in looking back on the lavish gifts of love and creative collaboration which other people – in harness with providence – have continued to recklessly foist on me that I come as close as I am ever likely to get to true humility. And since I haven’t tested the accuracy or otherwise of my alleged memories by cross-checking them with any of my small – and ever-dwindling – number of living friends and relatives, you’ll just have to take my word for it that the account that follows is 100% undisputed objective fact.
ANOTHER WARNING! If you are the type of reader who is looking for cuddly tales of domestic and family bliss, be prepared for disappointment. Those are mine to keep.
CONTENTS
1 Going to California
2 Rock ’n’ Roll High School
3 Camelot
4 Help!
5 Army Dreamer
6 There’s a Riot Going On
7 London is the Place For Me
8 Interstellar Overdrive (Take 6)
9 Performance
10 Always Look on the Bright Side of Life
11 Brazil
12 Jump into the Fire
13 Old Man
14 Desolation Row
15 All Things Must Pass
End Credits
Index
was always frightened to take acid – even in Los Angeles in 1966–7, when everyone seemed to be doing it. You could see the way it was fucking people’s minds up right from the start, and being lucky enough to have occasionally accessed the realm of the imagination LSD was meant to take you to without chemical assistance, I wanted to make sure the itinerary for those visits stayed strictly under my own control.
At that time I was living in a glass house on stilts in Laurel Canyon, and my main concern was that I didn’t really know where the ground was. I’d long had an absolute conviction that I could fly – not soaring high through the clouds like I’d later get a scale model of Jonathan Pryce to do in Brazil , but skimming along happily just a few feet off the ground. The sense-memory I had of flying at that height was so intense that it was hard to believe it only came from dreams, and I suspected that one tab of acid was all it would take to get me demonstrating my supposed aerial prowess from an upper window with potentially fatal consequences.
People have sometimes accused me of not being able to distinguish dreams from reality, and it’s true that when it came to my recurring night-flights of fancy I had been mercifully spared the process of (literally!) disillusionment where you wake up thinking ‘That really happened,’ but then the vision gradually leaves you. I suppose if the mind really is more powerful than the body, then my brain could have convinced all those little muscles that this momentous event had earned its place in their individual memories – which is pretty much how it works for phantom limbs, but in that case you’re dealing with a nervous system trained over a long period of time to assume that certain things are going on down below.
Maybe all dreams of flying are just your subconscious response to the fact that your dad threw you up in the air a lot as a little kid. I know Freud would offer another, earthier interpretation, but I was never a big fan of his, being more of a Jungian myself. A Neil Jungian, that is. I’ve always really loved Neil’s music – Buffalo Springfield, Crazy Horse, all of it – as well as identifying strongly with his no-bullshit approach to the human psyche. So fuck you, Sigmund, I’m sticking with the ‘dad throwing you up in the air a lot’ theorem.
The first chance my dad got to throw me up in the air was in November 1940. I was born a month after John Lennon and half a year before my fellow Minnesotan Bob Dylan (who took a while to realise that was what his name should be). In American terms I was a pre-war baby, because the land of my birth decided to sit out the first few dances of the Second World War, until the Japs marked our card at Pearl Harbor.
My dad, James (‘Gill’) Gilliam – who’d been in the last operational cavalry unit of the US army for a while before the war – tried to re-enlist, but they told him he was too old and his horse-riding skills would be no use against the Nazi blitzkrieg . In any case, his primary duty was to throw me up in the air a lot, so I’d have an excuse for all those flying dreams in later life. As a consequence of this enlightened intervention on the part of the US military (which would not be the last benevolent decision it would make on behalf of the male Gilliams, but more of that later), the war had no impact on my early life at all.
There was none of that formative trauma which is normally so vital to the evolution of the artistic mind (although that absence would in itself become traumatic in later life, proving a serious obstacle to any attempt to pass myself off as a Renaissance man). I arrived two years before my sister Sherry and eight-and-a-bit before my brother Scott, so I’d made sure my feet were firmly under the table before any competition arrived. I was smart, happy an