THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Tuesday, January 2, 1996 TAG: 9512300050
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Interview
SOURCE: BY MAL VINCENT, ENTERTAINMENT WRITER
LENGTH: Long : 186 lines
WITH HIS gray-streaked hair hanging to his shoulders and a merry girth around his middle, Terry Gilliam, the Monty Python mischief-maker of yesteryear, looked a bit like a flower child who refuses to fade.
After a four-year absence from film (since the hit ``The Fisher King''), the director returns with ``12 Monkeys,'' a movie that is being released by Universal Pictures, the very studio that once refused to release his cult classic ``Brazil.'' It features big-time commercial stars Brad Pitt and Bruce Willis, along with tough-minded beauty Madeleine Stowe.
Has the avowed maverick sold out to the Hollywood Establishment?
After all, this is the man who once threatened to burn his movie rather than let the heathen moneymakers alter it.
Well, he hasn't softened much.
``I didn't want Bruce and Brad the superstars,'' says the director, at the Essex House Hotel in New York on the day of the premiere. ``I'm NOT interested in them. I wanted Bruce and Brad the actors. That's what I got.''
Gilliam, who would just as soon be reading Proust as making movies, thinks it would be ``nice'' if folks ``get it,'' but he admits that the movie is ``complex.'' To make things more commercially questionable, ``12 Monkeys'' examines his favorite comedic subject - death. It is about a deadly virus that threatens to end the world in the year 1996.
What a jolly New Year's present from Terry! And, though it has comedic touches, it is not a comedy.
``People say this movie is very droll,'' says the director. ``I LIKE making a film that people say is droll.''
Gilliam, 55, fresh from his 17th century home in England (a house Sir Francis Bacon once lived in), was in New York for the premiere and to attend a retrospective of his films at the American Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, N.Y. (His work includes ``Jabberwocky,'' ``Time Bandits,'' ``The Adventures of Baron Munchausen,'' ``Brazil'' and ``The Fisher King.''
The life of Python
One of the original six writer-actor-comics who created the Monty Python group 25 years ago, Gilliam is not, as many people think, British. Born in Minneapolis and raised in California's San Fernando Valley, he was educated at
Occidental College in Los Angeles. He began his career as an illustrator for the magazine Help!, a sister publication to Mad magazine.
In 1967, he moved to London and became the animator for a unique new British TV program, ``Monty Python's Flying Circus.'' The other five called him the ``token American.''
The show became the turning point in youth-culture comedy. It had jokes about death with grim reapers all about, people dying on crosses or of medieval torture or disease, sketches about a dead parrot. It was irreverent and altogether absurd. American youths took to it even more than the British.
Gilliam laughs when he thinks of all the effort outsiders have made to revive Monty Python.
``It's a lot like giving wedding anniversary parties for a wife you left 20 years ago,'' he says.
He recalls with glee the 25th anniversary party in Los Angeles at which a guest shocked the crowd by opening a jar and seemingly scattering the ashes of Graham Chapman (the dead member of the group) over the crowd.
``I love bad-taste jokes,'' Gilliam admits. ``I love to go too far - into the realm that some think are too painful. Comedy is to keep the angel of death away. If you can laugh at it, it keeps the potency of it away.''
The TV show, in reality, lasted only four years. The hit movie ``Monty Python and the Holy Grail'' in 1975 paved the way for the TV show's popularity in America.
When John Cleese left the troupe, in the TV program's second year, the group began to unravel.
``Monty Python's Life of Brian'' in 1979 was the pranksters' most controversial movie, a spoof of Christianity revolving around a peasant mistaken for the Messiah. The Janaf Theater in Norfolk was picketed by fundamentalist protesters when it opened. Still today, Gilliam counters that Brian was a fictional character, a contemporary of Jesus Christ, but surely not a symbol for him.
``Monty Python's The Meaning of Life'' in 1983 was the troupe's swan song.
Hollywood battles
``I've probably gone furthest from comedy than any of the group,'' Gilliam says. ``I like to go for the tragic and the meaningful. `12 Monkeys' is about madness and death and time. It deals with a perception of what the world is or isn't.''
It was preceded by several outright battles with Hollywood. ``Time Bandits,'' his 1981 film, was an oddity. It was apparently made for children but was ultraviolent, with a boy and a band of dwarfs time-warping through history to steal valuable artifacts. Gilliam threatened to burn the only copy if the studio didn't let him release it as he had made it. There was a compro-mise.
More controversial was ``Brazil,'' his dark, wild, Orwellian fantasy set in a bleak future run by totalitarian authority. Universal, which had put up the money for the film, ruled that it was unreleasable. Gilliam, however, sneaked critics into test screenings. Unbelievably, the Los Angeles Film Critics Society named it the best film of the year and Gilliam best director, even though the film had never been released in theaters.
Gilliam took out ads in newspapers, badgering Universal to release the film. Even though it was distributed and became a cult classic, he claimed it was not cut the way he wanted. ``The version you see on television today is not at all my version,'' he says. In any case, it failed at the box office.
Battle No. 3 occurred when ``The Adventures of Baron Munchausen,'' budgeted at some $20 million, escalated in costs to more than $40 million and, in spite of four Oscar nominations for its design, bombed at the box office. Hollywood branded director Gilliam as uncontrollable and irresponsible.
A comeback
His rehabilitation came with ``The Fisher King,'' starring Robin Williams and Jeff Bridges on a medieval quest in modern New York. It was not only arty, a retelling of the Parsifal myth, but it was a hit. Williams got an Oscar nomination and Mercedes Ruehl won the best supporting actress nod.
Suddenly Gilliam was a moneymaker. ``It seems it is impossible to burn your bridges behind you in Hollywood, even if you try,'' he says. ``There is always, it seems, another chance.''
What followed was four years of what he calls ``development hell.'' Studios offered him all kinds of movies but none that he wanted to make. He admits that he took ``12 Monkeys'' because ``there was nothing else remotely acceptable, and I liked the script.''
Bruce Willis plays a convict in the year 2035 who volunteers to make a time trip back to 1996 to try to find out what went wrong. Ninety-nine percent of the world's population has been destroyed by a plague that forces the survivors to live underground.
The movie was filmed on location in Philadelphia and Baltimore on a budget of $29 million; Gilliam finished on time and within budget.
Bruce and ``Monkeys''
Gilliam is famed for making stars drop their star image and follow his orders. For ``The Fisher King,'' he says, ``one of the first things I told Robin was whatever funniness is here is going to be based on pain.'' He did the same thing with Willis.
``What attracted me to Bruce was a scene in `Die Hard' in which he's picking glass out of his bare feet and he's on the phone to his wife and he starts crying. He had all the macho but also the vulnerability. That's what I wanted here.''
Willis, who gets $20 million per movie for other movies, worked for much less in order to work with Terry Gilliam.
``This was my favorite movie experience,'' Willis said at the premiere party. ``Working with Terry is so collaborative. We both agree that the most interesting thing is to find the character. Terry is so prepared. He has the entire film shot in his head when he gets to the set.''
Willis said that he hopes ``12 Monkeys'' will change his image.
``I have the image of this wisecracking motor-mouth, kind of smirky,'' he said. ``This role is a very interior one. It's nice not to have to crack wise.''
Brad Pitt, who has received a Golden Globe nominee as best supporting actor for his performance, is cast as the son of a rich scientist (Christopher Plummer) who is in a mental ward. For the part, he prepared by shaving his head and staying in a mental ward, posing as a patient.
``I don't think he'll be the usual lad that the girls gaze upon on magazine covers in this,'' Gilliam says.
The studio gave him no trouble, Gilliam claims, not even about the, uh, downbeat ending.
``Yes, we can talk about the downbeat ending,'' he says. ``We don't have to tell them how downbeat. That ending was in the contract. I wouldn't make the movie if they tried to change it. The only thing the studio tried to change was to add a bit more of romance between Bruce and Madeleine. I said he had enough. That it needed to be subtle. Eventually they agreed.''
Gilliam's producer, Charles Roben, claims that the man is a born pessimist. ``Some people see the glass half empty, some see it half full. Terry doesn't see the glass.''
Gilliam laughs and says: ``No. No. I'm not all that gloomy. I'd like to do a comedy next so that I could really be silly again, like with Monty Python. But I don't agree that `12 Monkeys' is all that downbeat. I think the ending is ambiguous. You can see it as you will.''
In his own Pythonesque way, he signs and adds, ``I would like to be a pessimist, but I find, continuously, that no matter how hard I try, I can't just give up on the world.'' ILLUSTRATION: [B\W photo]
Terry Gilliam
[Photos]
[Bruce Willis]
[Bruce Willis and Brad Pitt]
PHIL CARUSO / Universal Pictures
Director Terry Gilliam, left, said he didn't want Bruce Willis,
right, and Brad Pitt in his film as superstars but rather as
actors.
PHIL CARUSO / Universal Pictures
Bruce Willis, right, says that working with director Terry Gilliam,
left, ``was my favorite movie experience.''
KEYWORDS: INTERVIEW PROFILE by CNB