David Morgan on location with The Fisher King
NEW YORK — “This little idea came up: I was watching rush hour traffic in Grand Central, and I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if all these people suddenly started waltzing?’ I really said it as a joke, and everybody thought it was wonderful. They said, ‘No, no, we gotta do it!”
Director Terry Gilliam must have been contemplating the seriousness of his humor as he stood over the lobby of Grand Central Station at four in the morning, regarding the one thousand extras who had been amassed for a brief scene in his latest film, THE FISHER KING. As an AD counted off to the accompaniment of “The Blue Danube,” the commuters, college students, sailors, policemen, nuns and Hasidic Jews paired up and gracefully sailed over the floor, circling the information booth in the center, atop of which had been placed a mirrored globe.
Through this sea of fervent dancers, a disheveled homeless man played by Robin Williams walks single-mindedly through the crowd, following his true love, a wallflower also seemingly in her own world, played by Amanda Plummer. As is revealed, the waltzing New Yorkers are merely part of the homeless man’s distinctly magical vision of New York, as a place where medieval influences and dangers may lurk unnoticed by Manhattan’s other residents.
What is perhaps most intriguing in the case of this “little idea” is that the focus in this outlandish scene is not upon the teeming, swirling hordes, but on the two souls wandering in their midst. The conceit is very human, a quality for which Gilliam’s films have been attacked for ignoring. It’s a sign of how he has adapted to working for the first time as a director-for-hire, taking someone else’s original script and opening it up through his unique vision.
It’s also a sign of the expectations that producers, actors, crew and studio executives must have when working for the first time with this director, whose past films have been praised and criticized for their bold excess. “I keep trying to make it more mundane and drag it down,” admits Gilliam, somewhat facetiously, “and everybody says ‘No, no, you gotta go this way.’ It’s very strange. I keep saying this isn’t MUNCHAUSEN, this isn’t BRAZIL, but nobody believes me. I spend the whole time trying to ground this film, trying to keep it from turning into a Gilliam film. Well, it turned out everyone wanted to do a Gilliam film except me.
“I don’t know — I think they’re getting a Gilliam film.”
To those in the middle of production, the making of FISHER KING thankfully has not been nearly as gargantuan a task as that of Gilliam’s last film, THE ADVENTURES OF BARON MUNCHAUSEN, which became an enterprise larger than some of history’s wars. Now there is better communication among the cast and crew (it helps that English is a common language), and the script is more dependent upon the work of actors than on unwieldy or time-consuming special effects.
After MUNCHAUSEN, Gilliam spoke often of the desire to set his energies toward filming a smaller, more intimate story. [“Put a couple of people in a room, that’s it. Or do Beckett, which would be even more spare.”] When his agent sent a copy of Richard LaGravenese’s THE FISHER KING, having described it as ‘a really interesting bit of writing,’ Gilliam was hooked. “It looked really simple,” he recalled. “I understood the characters immediately, and thought this is really good; all I’ve got to do is get a good cast together and bingo! it’s done. Easy.
“And then, the Demon spoke; he told me, ‘Go Out and Make This!”‘
The Demon of which Gilliam speaks materialized in the form of producers Lynda Obst and Debra Hill. Hill admits that, while searching for a director, “Every time we said, ‘How about Terry Gilliam?’ we’d get this twinkle in our eyes. It was very sort of devilish of us. The studio thought we were crazy! But we thought if we could get somebody like him interested in the material, it automatically would be elevated. It was the fact that Terry Gilliam is directing the picture that brought the kind of talent we were able to assemble, both in front of and behind the camera.”
“And Terry has more to prove than anyone,” adds Obst, “that MUNCHAUSEN was not about the way he made movies. So we actually got him at a really good time.”
In the tightly-woven story, Jeff Bridges plays Jack Lucas, a loud-mouthed, brash radio DJ who suffers a debilitating personal shock in the very beginning of the film, and whose life proceeds to spiral downwards. When his path crosses with that of Parry — a homeless man appearing in the guise of a warrior/avenger — Jack learns that Parry similarly suffered a personal tragedy, one which shattered his sanity, leaving him on the streets with a new identity and seeing the world not for what it is. In addition to taking commands from “little people” and encountering demonic spirits, Parry enlists Jack’s aid in his quest for the Holy Grail (which he believes is kept in an Upper East Side townhouse).
While still unable to see New York through Parry’s eyes, Jack convinces himself that by helping this pathetic creature, he can lift the oppressive curse that has kept him down. He sees his chance by arranging for Parry to meet his unrequited love, Lydia, whose lack of coordination the lovesick Parry chooses to define as “a random grace.”
There are many elements in LaGravenese’s script which parallel themes or characters in Gilliam’s earlier films: the mad visionary who tries to convince others of his own view of the world; a romance in which the reality is more grounded and painful than the fantasy; the recurring image of the Red Knight, a demonic figure who terrorizes Parry; and the idea of a man closed off from society accepting responsibility by committing a selfless act. These parallels were coincidental, however. And while the material does seem perfectly suited to Gilliam’s sensibility, at one time during its development the script was promised to James Cameron. Also once mentioned as a co-star for Williams: Billy Crystal. “It would have been perceived as two comedians, like cute bums or something,” reflects Hill.
Gilliam’s insistence in casting was to prevent the film from becoming a tale of two “cute bums.” “I first met Robin just talking about who would play Jack,” recalls Gilliam. “And I said it’s got to be an actor who doesn’t work on the same level as you do; he can’t be a funny man, he can’t be clever.
“Why I like the idea of Jeff doing this is that he can be a real asshole at the start of the thing and you still care about him. People like Jeff; you like him no matter how awful he is, there’s something about him that’ll drag you along. And Parry is such a fractured character; he’s a really good bum, but we’re trying to make it so that when he does have his hallucinations they’re really ugly; he’s disturbing.”
LaGravenese, whose first original screenplay this is, has access to the production that’s uncommon with the experiences of other screenwriters; he is as much a presence on the set as the director — attending rehearsals, shoots, observing and listening on the monitor, and working in close collaboration with the actors. It’s a relationship nurtured by Obst’s sense of being her writer’s protector: “For the period of time before the piece had a captain I had to make sure that the piece was never violated. There’s something silly about that, because Richard’s his own protector.”
“Actually I feel that I’m trying to be terribly responsible and loyal to the script,” says the director. “But this is weird for me; it’s something I’ve never experienced. I don’t like feeling that I could make a mess of somebody else’s idea, and the first couple of weeks I was feeling maybe that’s what I was doing. But we’re getting on somehow.”
The first thing Gilliam did, recalls LaGravenese, “was make me put back everything that my first development process had made me take out, which was great — a lot of the odd, weird stuff. He’s adding an edge to it that is so important because the script to me could have been so sentimental that it makes your teeth hurt.”
The sound of the extras’ heels clunking on the wood-and-plaster sidewalk extension, built to match the size of walkways on Fifth Avenue, is a reminder that the elegant, medieval mansion owned by billionaire Langdon Carmichael — home to the Grail for Parry — is not what it seems. To make the imposing brick building at 94th and Madison owned by Hunter College appear inhabited, production designer Mel Bourne supervised the construction of stained glass windows and a gothic entranceway and staircase, which were then shipped East from California on a flatbed truck. Residents expressed disappointment that the addition would not be permanent.
The first three weeks of location shooting in New York, with disruptions by bad weather, police sirens and bottle-hurling residents and with no cover sets, have passed with few incidents. One resident on the Upper West Side, either annoyed or confused by the smoke used to light a street scene, called 911, sending fire engines racing through the set. And the Sanitation Department, after permission had been granted to shoot down by the waterfront, proceeded to clear out all the wrecked cars stored there which the filmmakers had planned to use.
Because of Parry’s affinity towards the medieval world, many archaic elements in Manhattan’s architecture — its gargoyles, towers and Gothic cathedrals — are coloring this film. For example, the base of the Manhattan Bridge, in Gilliam’s eyes, reflects something between Piranesi and Goya.
“Terry felt it was very important to shoot the exteriors first,” says Hill. “It’s where the size and scope is. It’s where he could get his ideas, rather than being sequestered in a little set.” Originally that was not to be the case, but when Williams’ commitment to AWAKENINGS was extended as that production went over schedule, interior shooting was switched to commence in late June, on the Columbia-Culver City backlot, once the New York scenes have wrapped.
Perhaps the most important reason for shooting the more elaborate, exterior work at the beginning is so that the studio executives’ first look at this film would be the story’s most elaborate, stand-out scenes; these involve not only the Red Knight and Grand Central Station sequences but also a tender monologue performed by Williams in Central Park that is the emotional key to Parry’s [and indeed, all the characters’] motivations. It may therefore negate their fears that Gilliam was not the right director for this project, and yet remove any doubt left in their minds that they are indeed getting a Gilliam film.
At nightfall on the Lower East Side, Gilliam has set up under the FDR Drive within view of the Manhattan Bridge. A full moon is giving way to pouring rain and lightning, as water streaming from underneath the bridge roadway looks like stalactites in the beam of a powerful spotlight across the river. None of this background is of much concern to Gilliam, however, as he arranges Bridges and two yuppie thugs who are set to attack him: “I’m just looking at the foreground, these characters, and I don’t want to lose them in that sort of deep photography. I’m just tired of looking back there any more. When I see rushes, I see our wide master shots and they’re really extraordinary, and then I see a closeup and I know that that’s where I’ve got to be; get to the close-up quicker, and stay with the characters.”
If Gilliam had aimed toward doing a simple, workmanlike job on this film, then he definitely failed, for he seems to be paying even more attention, worrying more, and studying the actors more closely. He is conferring more with his cast, going over their performances and re-enacting lines or moves he’d liked shaped differently. Fellow Python Eric Idle had once suggested that Gilliam gets great performances in his films almost by default, so consumed is he by a shot’s physical demands; here he seems to be earning those performances. In the process of which, Gilliam may be rediscovering his purpose as a director, a function that was lost during the nightmare of MUNCHAUSEN: that of being the conductor rather than the entire orchestra.
But a more apparent change in Gilliam’s manner from the frenzied days of MUNCHAUSEN is the steady, quiet attitude he brings, with the piercing eyes and dryly bemused air that reminds one of James Mason. As his infectious giggle suggests, he actually seems to be enjoying himself, witnessing his own emotional ties to the material come alive through the performances, and watching the story become more than it was on the page.
And he clearly wants his attitude to spread. “He’s made me feel that it’s very easy to share ideas,” says Bridges. “Not necessarily that he’ll use them but he encourages me to participate, whereas some directors make you feel like you’re intruding. He’s very friendly, and yet lets you know when you do something that’s not as he saw it.”
“Yeah, he frees me in many ways,” admits Williams, “because I’m not afraid to try stuff; and then the greatest thing is that I’m not afraid to do nothing, to just stop for a moment, and in that I find this incredible power, it’s quite strange — not pathetic but very moving. I don’t think anybody expected it to be changing the way it does, how things are turning out. I knew this stuff was good, there were bits that were very surreal, but it’s getting a depth to it, and a pain in some ways. Sometimes horrifying, sometimes moving. I never envisioned it that way.”
Much of Parry’s painful transition from one personality to another is seen by way of the terror he exhibits in an otherwise complacent New York. In one scene, dressed by Jack in a handsome but oversized white Versace suit, Parry runs screaming up Amsterdam Avenue. “This white linen suit, straight from the dry cleaners, was very symbolical,” says costume designer Beatrix Pasztor. “Like he’s a saint; it’s very clean and pure. But we thought he’s crazy anyway so if we put him in this suit it’ll look like a hospital outfit. He’s can’t run, looking vulnerable as well as comical.”
Pedestrians part in front of Parry, seeing a patient in a strait jacket having escaped the asylum. As funny as the image may look, it actually leads into the most heart-breaking sequence of the film, another example of the delicate balancing act this script calls for. “It’s all about how much weight it will bear,” remarks Williams. “How surreal? How violent? You keep walking that line.”
Says Bridges: “I always feel that pieces that are bold like this, which contain both comedic and tragic aspects of life, are more real. It’s gaining a life of its own. It’s to the point where you no longer have to push — it’s pulling you.”
As Robin prepares for his marathon run, Gilliam realizes that “This is the car chase sequence. At last we got it in here. We’ve got the squeal of leather on pavement!”
Galloping down Fifth Avenue among a sea of unaware joggers and women pushing baby carriages, the Red Knight, mounted atop a mammoth red horse and wearing ghoulish body armour, spews forth streams of fire as it disappears into a bank of fog. Filmed in slow motion through clouds of smoke, the vision is of a Manhattan aflame, as if Hell had opened up and no one but Parry were witness to that.
The design and construction of the Red Knight’s outfit, and for the armour adorning the 2500-pound Percheron he rides, combines elements of Dante, Albrecht Durer, Hieronymous Bosch and the diminutive demonic creatures from BRAZIL. It was executed by Pasztor, armour designers Keith Greco and Vincent Jefferds, and special effects consultant Bob McCarthy.
“The concept was of a 500-year-old incarnation of evil that’s disintegrating,” says Jefferds, “burning out, letting off steam, the horse snorting like a locomotive. A Red Knightmare. Our idea was of an illuminated manuscript, of a knight with all the flourishing heraldic fabric. So from the fron the looks like he’s swimming in burnt fabric, like a Portuguese man-of-war. It’s really a pretty wiggy job.”
“When it started there was about 15 yards of Chinese silk on there,” says Greco, “and then the Gilliam School of Burning Away Corruption has reduced it to about five yards. The Rot, as he calls it.”
The spectacle of the colored horse arouses a certain curiosity among New Yorkers, who applaud the pyrotechnics accompanying its appearance. “I don’t know if the Red Knight is going to be the weirdest thing in this film,” admits Gilliam. “I’m beginning to think maybe the rest of it is as fantastical as the Red Knight. I’m having this feeling that the Red Knight is going to be soundless. Because everything else in New York is so noisy, the thing to make it frightening is if there’s no sound to it. Seen but not heard, like children should be.”
Irony is something in which Gilliam revels; it is one of the major thematic elements in his work. It’s evident in the fact that Gilliam is again working for a studio — Columbia/Tri-Star — whose former management he feels abandoned his last film. It is most telling in the ways the filming and release of his pictures seem to parallel the conflicts and struggles of their storylines, with the director himself living the experiences of his characters. Just as the fight to finish MUNCHAUSEN mimicked the hero’s attempts to brave other universes, and the struggle to release BRAZIL in a certain form paralleled Sam Lowry’s rebellion against an undaunted bureaucracy, Gilliam again feels a personal stake analogous to the thematic struggle of THE FISHER KING — to regain a clarity of vision after having wandered from the path which one believed would lead to a state of grace.
“It’s the Parsifal myth; as a boy he sees the Grail, but when he gets to the Grail castle, he doesn’t do the right thing. And Jack is a bit like that; the path he chose was the wrong one.
“I know both those characters, Parry and Jack, and I’m both of them; normally I’m just one character in the film. In this one I’m both, and it really throws me, and in some scenes I’d started shooting it from a sort of neutral position because I couldn’t decide which side I was on. And what’s been good is, Jeff is so grounded in his character, he’s pulling me in a direction that is right. Like the scene we’re doing now, is really from Jack’s point of view, and because I liked what Parry was doing so much, I was featuring Parry more directly. Jeff said, ‘There’s a great shot from down here where I’m lying’; and it suddenly hit me — I’ve got the wrong point of view on this scene.
“You make a lot of decisions early on and set a lot of things in motion, but then other things start affecting those things you started out with. Your original plan is maybe not corrupted but confused by reality.”
If such ironic parallels between fiction and filmmaking are indeed repeated here, then the reason why Gilliam is not truly worried must lie in the fact that — unlike much of his previous work — THE FISHER KING has a happy, life-affirming ending, so in his mind the completion of this film can only be happy and life-affirming.
“I think what’s going to be interesting in this film is whether all the elements, which each in its own right is very rich and good, whether they all fit together and don’t compete; that’ll be the fun of it. Editing at the end, just balancing all these things so that the sort of spectacular way that I’m shooting it and these strange angles and all don’t affect the performances and the characters because that’s what it’s about: the characters. I’m just trying to put them in a world that is more spectacular than most.”
Originally published in the Los Angeles Times “Calendar,” June 1990.
“This is more like ‘Alice in Wonderland’ than anything else I’ve done.” Coming from director Terry Gilliam, referring to his latest film THE FISHER KING, that statement portends a great deal.
Gilliam’s previous films, being exclusively his own untamable fantasies and Pythonesque adventures (including TIME BANDITS and BRAZIL), have earned him a notoriety for being without restraint, both in his imagery and in the lengths to which he will go to protect his work (and, in the case of his last film, THE ADVENTURES OF BARON MUNCHAUSEN, in the lengths to which he would go to outdo that reputation). The sensational designs and crafty stagings of his films have often overshadowed their human content, dealing with social responsibility, the misuse of political power, the force of myth and legends, and the mutability of love.
It’s a unique sensibility, colored by the art of past eras, and one that is also evident in THE FISHER KING, a comedy-drama starring Jeff Bridges as Jack, a radio deejay on the skids, and Robin Williams as Parry, a schizophrenic homeless man, through whose hallucinations New York City appears as a magical landscape filled with medieval flourishes and hellish visions of danger.
When this original script by Richard LaGravenese landed on his doorstep, the temptation to work as a director-for-hire on a major Hollywood film proved extremely powerful for Gilliam. For the producers, Debra Hill and Lynda Obst, it was an opportunity to work with an auteur and still maintain the discipline necessary for a $23 million production. Location shooting commenced in New York City this past summer (with all interior work to be completed at Columbia’s Culver City backlot).
By all accounts Gilliam’s involvement has elevated the material from becoming what could have been perceived as a zany comedy into a darker, more human story of redemption; the troubled Parry, for example, experiences a pain and horror only hinted at in the screenplay’s earlier development phase. With cinematographer Roger Pratt (with whom he shot BRAZIL), Gilliam has also made New York City appear more magical and hallucinatory than it already is.
An intense, focused worker, Gilliam is nonetheless given to punctuate his speech with facetious jokes and giggles, which does much to raise the spirits of those trapped on a Downtown Manhattan location during a torrential rainstorm at 3 in the morning. Weather has been a major hindrance to the film (it poured three days during the first week of exterior shooting, and often enough later on), but the logistics have been more or less smooth, with the main obstacle being bothersome residents who don’t appreciate their neighborhoods being filled with smoke.
David Morgan: When we last spoke near the completion of shooting BARON MUNCHAUSEN, I asked what you had to look forward to. After contemplating suicide, you said you wanted to do something small, perhaps a film with a couple of people in a room, and that’s it. And now you seem to have gotten your wish — although you haven’t gotten to the room just yet.
Terry Gilliam: The room’s always still in the future, yes. I really ran out of steam after MUNCHAUSEN. I think I had reached the point where I was ready to pack in filmmaking, I just was terrified of the whole process.
Then my agent had sent THE FISHER KING along. He said, ‘It’s a really interesting bit of writing.’ And after the first couple of pages I thought, Jesus this is terrific. It looked really simple. With all the attitudes, the characters, I just simply understood [the piece]. Like this medieval element, which is a strange thing because I think it could have been done totally mundane.
But you’ve opened up whatever subtext the writer himself may have been unaware of, but which seems totally truthful.
At some point, I said that I thought that Richard didn’t really appreciate or understand the totality of what he had written, of all his themes. But he did, on an instinctive, subconscious level. But I sort of pushed it. I’ve just pushed everything further.
Do you feel more secure in pushing it because it’s not your own material? Like you’re testing to see how far you can stretch it?
No, actually I feel that I’m trying to be terribly responsible and loyal to the script. I said to Richard, `You know, all I can do now is fuck it up for you.’ I don’t want to do anything [he] wouldn’t have wanted. And it’s that kind of responsibility that is something I’ve never experienced. It’s really weird; I don’t like feeling that I could make a mess of somebody else’s idea, and the first couple of weeks I was feeling maybe that’s what I was doing. But we’re getting on somehow.
How is the film meeting your expectations?
My expectations were really just to have an easy time. And I failed at it. I really just wanted to do something very simple and I find that I can’t. No matter how hard I try, to simplify it and do it direct, I elaborate it somewhere, and put the camera in a funny position, make it more of this or more of that.
Yet your elaborations are not taking the story away from what it really is?
I hope not; I mean we’ll find that out when I stick it all together.
Is it progressing in terms of the story that, as Jack becomes totally drawn into Parry’s world, effectively becoming Parry, the film gets more and more skewed towards that point of view, where it doesn’t show New York for what it is but as Parry himself sees it?
That’s what I’ve been trying from the beginning; the minute Jack steps out of the protective confines of his girlfriend’s video store, it goes pretty weird very quickly. It’s like in the Parsifal myth: as a boy he sees the grail, but when he gets to the grail castle, he doesn’t do the right thing. There’s a clarity of vision when you’re young and then you lose it as you go on, and then you find it at the end hopefully; that’s what making the film is like. It was really clear in my mind early on, and now that I’m into it I’ve lost it, so I’m stumbling through the forest blind at the moment. I’m doing a lot of it by instinct. It’s true, that actually is what happens. I’m on auto-pilot right now.
And where are your instincts taking you?
I don’t know. We’ll find out. I mean, what you do is you make a lot of decisions early on, and set a lot of things in motion, but what happens is then other things start affecting those things you started out with; your original plan is maybe not corrupted but confused by reality. And that’s where we’re at now. I go stumbling on blindly, and everybody says it’s terrific, so I trust that it seems to be working.
You’ve worked before with a couple of members of the crew, but most are not experienced to working with you — a situation similar to that of MUNCHAUSEN. How are they (and you) getting used to it? And are you getting back into the drive of being able to shoot and work very quickly?
Not yet. Not the first couple of weeks. It’s going rather slowly. The team is coming together. It’s a strange situation; to save money they ended up splitting the show between New York and L.A., which ends up that all of the team doesn’t play all of the way through the film. I haven’t seen what the results of that are going to be yet. And I don’t like it because I’ve never done that before; I mean, you get a team and you go. The key people stay with it, but some of the lesser characters don’t, and I’m worried to see about that; I don’t know what’s going to happen.
What I wanted to do was fight my fantastical side, and I wanted people who were really well-grounded in New York. Like Mel Bourne, the designer: he’s done Woody Allen films, he knows the nuts and bolts of New York, and that’s why I wanted to work with someone who grounded the thing.
You’re bringing out a lot of the medieval elements in New York: locations, the design of costumes, the character of the Red Knight, the castle serving as the millionaire’s townhouse. Are you finding other elements of New York to put in?
Not enough. I mean, they’re there but we’re not getting them on film. One of the most frustrating parts about this is that all my ideas of gargoyles and bits and pieces — it’s all around, it’s really easy [to find] in New York, there’s “tons” of it — we lose it; we can’t go to enough places and shoot enough things quickly.
Can a second unit do that while you’re in L.A.?
Uh, I’d want to do it myself. We’ll see what happens. I mean the film’s not over until it’s over. I might be back with a tiny group and get a few goodies.
We shot under the Manhattan Bridge, at the base of that bridge, and it’s — well, it’s actually not medieval-looking but it’s sort of somewhere between Piranesi and Goya. So it certainly doesn’t look like New York as we [usually] see it. At an entrance to the side of the bridge there’s a great arch, which we use as Jack’s passage into Parry’s underworld. “Abandon all hope ye who enter here” is what it should have over it.
We were getting very worried that some of the stuff that we were doing is a bit zany. And we keep trying to insert ugliness in it, and a certain brutality. At times the thing is like “Alice in Wonderland” and Dante and Virgil, it’s all these things. There’s a statue of Dante right outside my hotel. I can see him when I look out my window, in a little square right opposite Lincoln Center — there stands Dante.
Is that an omen of some kind?
Of course!
Are you buffered from the studio by the producers?
Yeah, they seem to be very supportive. I can’t complain at all. I wish I could. But I can’t. The important thing is that what they’re seeing has impressed them and they like it, and that’s the proof really. I mean, they were very nice at the beginning; I think they were very wary because of the MUNCHAUSEN debacle.
What did you learn from that?
What, MUNCHAUSEN? Not to make BARON MUNCHAUSEN again. I learned not to work with a particular producer again. No specific things, there’s no grand wisdom that’s acquired by that. You’ve just got to be more careful. But on the other hand, if we had been more careful we wouldn’t even have started the process, and there’s a film there at the end of it, which is important. So you can’t really say [the experience] was bad because if we had been more reasonable and careful and intelligent we wouldn’t have gotten the thing off the ground.
[On this picture] we’ve had certain problems in the first couple of weeks, it’s just been really rough here; New York is impossible to work here, and we’ve, uh, slipped a bit. I began to think, ‘Oh it’s MUNCHAUSEN all over again.’
But you also have a much tighter budget this time, whereas MUNCHAUSEN started off with a blank check.
No, it didn’t. Starting off it was very carefully budgeted except totally unrealistically. The figures didn’t match the reality of what we were doing.
Is this budget realistic even though it is tight?
Gilliam: It better be. I don’t know. I am slightly at a disadvantage having never worked here, I don’t know what the money buys, but we’ve gone through it and it seems to be right. To be fair they, meaning Debra and Lynda, have not produced a film as ambitious as mine normally are. And I think it’s hard for people; they don’t seem to understand what it means when I say ‘I want something like this. Even I don’t; that’s one of the reasons I ask for it. But a certain naivete makes you think you can do it and if you think you can do it, you have a go.
The last couple of days were very silly where we’re doing a close-up of Jeff in front of Carmichael’s townhouse, against those stairs which were built in California, with all of Madison Avenue behind us, with buses. The noise is unbearable, it’s ruining sound takes, and I’m shooting stuff like that. And I used to laugh at people who did things like that, it’s ridiculous; you could do that close-up in L.A. — just bring the wall back. But we end up doing it because everybody’s fired up, you’ve got to do it. Yesterday we did [close-ups] with the Knight on Fifth Avenue, and what you see on film, I’m not sure if you know it’s Fifth Avenue, which is very, very bad. But it’s to do with the fact that you get away with it, is why you do it.
[The Manhattan Bridge location] again is a silly thing. We just stood here and said, ‘Oh wouldn’t that look nice as a background?’ Well what is involved in making it a background is crazy, and for somebody to say ‘You can’t do that’ would have saved us a lot of trouble; you could have done this scene just on a corner somewhere, but nobody said ‘no,’ so here we are.
This little idea came up, I was watching rush hour traffic in Grand Central. There’s a scene that took place at rush hour, and I thought, `Wouldn’t it be great if all these people suddenly started waltzing?’
And people took you seriously.
[shrugs] Nobody said no.
Are you expecting that one day somebody will come in and say ‘No’? Because on MUNCHAUSEN, nobody told you ‘No’ until it was too late to do anything about it.
Way out of control, yeah. The problem is the ideas seem to capture people, and everybody — not just me but everybody else — falls victim to these things. It’s weird; ideas do this.
Then you discover, it isn’t just the waltzing; the pictures have got to look right. Then I want the lights in a certain way. It’s all the details. That is the difference in shooting it with bad lighting and shooting it with good lighting; good lighting costs more money. What’s interesting, when you work with good people, it doesn’t really come out cheaper because their demands are greater. Really good people are full of ideas and they work to a higher standard. And you pay for it; it costs money. It doesn’t come really cheap.
How is your working relationship with the department heads you’ve not worked with before? “
The interesting thing with films is that the pattern is very quickly established. And because everybody knows that I’m involved in the design of everything on my films, when they walk in they know they’re going to be involved with me. I stick my nose in much more than a lot of other directors might.
So you’re not frightening them away?
No, I don’t think so. Good people, at least most of the ones I can think of, really like input. My problem is that I just have pretty clear ideas about a lot of things. And until I sort of get them I don’t let up. But there’s no way that I can credit myself for all this stuff.
Like with the costumes for Jeff’s character: I wanted Versace clothes because I wanted the most expensive, sleekest stuff at the beginning. Jack’s a guy who’s really a product of America’s materialism, all style and fashion — the best, slick, cool. But everything is monochromatic with him; there’s blacks and greys, no color. And I like the idea of trashing his Versace clothes when he becomes a bum, which is really silly when you’re paying two thousand dollars for a suit and you’re trashing it.
Jack’s lost his job, he’s lost his home, but he doesn’t want to give up his clothes so he wears them into the ground.
Uh-hmm. I also like the idea of seeing these very expensive clothes look like shit.
It’s been slightly harder on costumes for me because they’re contemporary things and I don’t have any great feeling [for them], and so Beatrix Pasztor and I would just spend a lot of time together, and Jeff is very full of ideas. Everyone’s got ideas, that’s what’s nice about it, and I just become the guy who sort of guides it through and says ‘I like that’ and ‘I don’t like that.’ Basically Jeff’s costumes are Jeff, Beatrix and I sitting in a room for hours on end, all shifting around.
Robin, the same thing: Parry had to have this medieval aspect, and what’s nice is that it’s all real modern stuff. With that cape and that poncho and hat, he really comes out of a Bruegel painting. And underneath it he’s got this bit of gold lame, looks like some golden fleece or a bit of chain mail. And all that’s been good fun, to try and assemble what is believable and yet has this total medieval quality to it.
It’s nice working like that. You know, I think a lot of directors just don’t do any of that stuff. They just hire the costume people, the costume people say, ‘Bum bum bum, this is how we’re gonna do it,’ the financing’s all right and that’s the end of it. I just think that takes the fun out of it.
It’s always like doing a painting. You just want to have all the parts the way you’d like them in a painting. I mean, on this one, I’m paying much less attention to background than I normally do because it doesn’t seem to be what this film is about.
This isn’t a case where there’s always something going on very deep in the frame?
No, I’m not doing that on this one, I’m just tired of looking back there any more. I don’t want to lose the characters in that sort of deep photography; I want to keep them in the center. I hope I pull it off.
Are you finding that here, among the crew, you can be the team player you’ve been before, as opposed to being thrust into the position of “Director-God” as you were by the Italian crew of MUNCHAUSEN?
Yeah, I’m very much a team player, but because people don’t know me they don’t say ‘No’ early enough; they don’t say ‘Wait, hold on a minute, are you serious about that?’ or ‘Have you considered maybe there’s another way of doing it?’ One of the problems here is that they seem to respect me too much. The people I’m working with like the films I’ve done, and they think I know what I’m doing.
In England people are much better about saying, ‘Well, why do you want that? Do you really need that? Hold on a minute, wait wait wait, let’s talk this through.’
There are no Devil’s Advocates in America?
Not as many as there are in England. I think that’s why I was lucky to have ended up in England, because they’re less impressed. Here people really are excited about films. And they do love this thing about Terry wants something! so then everybody runs to make it happen. And they don’t always think, ‘Is that an intelligent thing he was asking for?’ And that’s the problem of getting older and making more films, too — ‘The guy clearly knows what he’s doing; we’ve seen these films, and are impressed with them.’ The fact is, he doesn’t know as clearly as they think he knows what he’s doing.
I think I’ve got to go back and do one in England where people know me better; because people learn as they go along but it’s all too late, they’ve got involved with it.
So many people are trying so hard to get themselves nervous on this film. I keep trying to convince myself that it’s still a little film. This isn’t a difficult film really, but because they’ve seen BRAZIL and MUNCHAUSEN they want to work on something like that. And when I say, ‘No, we really just need that little thing,’ they don’t really believe it.
Are the people on this film trying to make this like BRAZIL and MUNCHAUSEN when it’s not?
Well at times it feels like that; I mean, I keep telling people it’s . . . I don’t know. I’ve given up trying to understand anything!
Previously published in Millimeter Magazine, March 1991.
For many more articles by David Morgan, visit The Terry Gilliam Files
