Terry GilliamHe's a satirist, illustrator, animator and film director. He's an American who became disillusioned with his native land and took British citizenship. He has constantly rattled the establishment, and now, pushing retirement age, he shows no sign of letting up. Cinemas OnLine takes a delve into the strange world of Terry Gilliam.For a man to create the surreal animations for Monty Python's Flying Circus, then write and direct some of the oddest works to be committed to celluloid without that work being the product of some terrible childhood trauma seems surprising, but Terry Gilliam has nothing but fond recollections of his youth. Born in 1940, he was raised in rural Minnesota. As a child he loved the outdoors and compares his childhood experience to that of Tom Sawyer or Huckleberry Finn. In those days, before the ubiquity of television, his mind was free to create fantastic images to accompany the radio plays he would listen to. Gilliam attributes his visual sense to his early years beside the radio - 'really excellent training for a visual artist' he told one interviewer. 
In the early 'fifties the family moved to California. At school Gilliam excelled, he worked hard with dreams of becoming a scientist or engineer. Young Terry was certainly a model pupil, if he had a rebellious streak he kept it well hidden. When he left California's Birmingham High School, it was with a distinction in every subject.
It was at university that Gilliam's talent for illustration bloomed. Whilst he was supposed to be studying physics, a subject he later dropped for politics, he began taking an interest in comics. He read Superman and Captain Marvel and began to ape their style with his own artwork. Mad magazine was hitting its stride at the time, lampooning anything and everything, and Gilliam read this. Later, when Mad creator Harvey Kurtzman left to work on a new underground title, Help!, he made sure he not to miss any issues of this either. 
With his studies complete, Terry Gilliam was left looking for work, and moved to New York. He had begun putting together his own comic, 'Fang', and without much hope he sent copies to his hero Kurtzman, in hope of getting hired to work on Help! . His timing was perfect, one of the magazine's contributors had just left and Gilliam stepped straight into the job, working with the man he called 'The Maestro'. Gilliam's work in Help! was shaped by the era, the cartoons he had published were mostly satirical. His first cartoon focused on the burgeoning black civil rights movement. Later, whilst serving in the National Guard, he was to comment bitingly on America's involvement in Vietnam.
Unhappy with the situation in his own country, Gilliam decided to move to England. In the mid sixties he was a young London-based illustrator with a Beatles haircut. He was receiving regular commissions from magazines, newspapers and comic books. This work led him to be employed to provide caricatures for a television programme. When the programme makers found themselves with some hard to present material, Gilliam suggested making an animated film. With his bosses agreement, he began his animation career. Animating was new to Gilliam then, he had read a book, years before, on the basic process, but had no practical experience. Undaunted, he set about his task with a technique that defines his work to this day. Firstly he would meticulously illustrate the story elements, cut them into pieces, then manipulate the cutouts frame by frame beneath a rostrum camera.  A young man who had posed for one of Gilliam's photo-strips in Help! , John Cleese, was part of a comedy team commissioned by Barry Took to run on BBC television. Terry Gilliam was the natural choice to provide linking animations between the sketches. Monty Python's Flying Circus first aired in 1969, and, for the next few years, he found himself working relentlessly, every day (and often into the night) in a basement, creating bizarre sequences on the BBC's ancient animation equipment. Whilst he was doing this, he also began to take on some writing and acting in the live-action segments of the show. Promoted to cardinal, he was part of the Spanish Inquisition - nobody expected that!
After the television run of Python, the team decided to move into the movies, their first effort, And Now For Something Completely Different, was more of the same, being reworked sketches from the series. Their second outing was altogether more ambitious, a comic take on Arthurian Legends. With no experience, but a great deal of enthusiasm, Terry Gilliam and fellow Python Terry Jones worked together to direct 'Monty Python and the Holy Grail'. Filmed on a tiny budget, the production managed to make a virtue of its financial constraints. With no money for horses, the actors had to bang together coconut shells whist pretending to trot across the countryside. Gilliam even poked fun at himself, when in a moment of stop-motion madness the animator is seen to collapse at his desk, leaving the knights to escape from the animated monster chasing them through a cave! The success of the Holy Grail in 1974 allowed Gilliam to work on a project of his own. Along with Charles Alverson, a colleague from his time at Help!, he wrote the script for Jabberwocky, a film supposedly inspired by the nonsense of Lewis Carroll's poetry. Gilliam directed the film, casting his Python pal Michael Palin in the leading role. Palin plays as a young cooper who sets out on a series of adventures to hunt down a terrible dragon after the death of his father. Although not a huge hit, the film played a part in establishing Gilliam's dark visual style, moving away from the Monty Python house style. Now proven as a solo director, he moved onto his next project, a fantasy film which managed to appeal to both adults and children. Time Bandits was co-written with Michael Palin, the script featuring a boy who was transported through time with a group of dwarfs. The anarchic humour and downbeat ending didn't fit the bill for American movie studios, so, as with Gilliam's previous work, the film was made in the UK on a modest budget. Building on his experience with Jabberwocky, he created a visually intense film, which looked at once stunning and grotesque. The film was a success in the UK, and it was hoped to sell the movie rights to a US distributor. Eventually a deal was struck, but it involved the distributor being paid to carry the film! The American release of Time Bandits was a success, Gilliam's name was on the lips of Hollywood producers as a man who could make cheap films that looked expensive. |
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