anderswolleck

Will I date I myself if I use the phrase Were not worthy? There is almost nothing to be said when introducing SuicideGirls to Terry Gilliam, because at this point if you dont know who he is, I wouldnt cry if you killed yourself. But for those who dont have the guts to throw themselves off a bridge, Gilliam is the brilliant film auteur behind such classics as Time Bandits, Brazil, and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. He is also a founding member of the best sketch comedy troupe ever, Monty Pythons Flying Circus. Gilliams latest film is the very heavy Tideland, the story of a young girl whose junkie parents die and leave her alone in an empty house only with her imagination.

I got a chance to interview Gilliam when he was in New York City. When we spoke of a possible Python live tour he seemed to imply that we could be seeing some new sketches.

Check out the official website for Tideland

Daniel Robert Epstein: First of all, I didnt recognize Jeff Bridges at first. I thought that was Lemmy [of Motorhead].

Terry Gilliam: [laughs] Thats the thing, Jeff, like all the actors in my films have no vanity.

DRE: Yeah. [laughs] Well, its interesting that you say that about the vanity because this is a film that doesnt have a lot of vanity.

TG: No.

DRE: Was that a result of the book or the budget?

TG: Its just what it is. The book is what it is. The budget was what we needed and the actors werent afraid. I hate working with actors who are worried about what they look like other than the character that they should be playing. Everybody there just dove in and they were all very fearless and nobody had any qualms and off we went.

DRE: Did you know from the beginning that this film was going to be as difficult as it was?

TG: No, when I read the book I thought, Oh this is fantastic. This will be great. [Tideland co-writer] Tony Grison said, Fantastic, lets do it. Jeremy Thomas the producer said, Terrific, lets go to work. But then we couldnt raise the money [laughs]. It seemed that some people thought it was not quite the jolly little jaunt that we thought it was [laughs].

DRE: When you first got the book, did you know that eventually you wanted to turn it into a movie?

TG: No, [Tideland author] Mitch Cullin is the one that actually sent it to me. It was sitting on a stack of books and scripts that I never look at. One day I was just frustrated or bored, I cant remember, and I picked it up off the top of the pile and I go, Whats this? Started reading and said, Hello? This is really great. A few pages in, I was hooked. All Mitch was trying to do was get a blurb for the cover of the book. He didnt expect to make a movie out of it [laughs]. But I said, No, Id love to have a go at this thing and off we went. It was very interesting because when we were raising the money, thats when we began to realize that it was dealing with subject matter that a lot of people found difficult. Somebody said, Well, its men that control the money and men find this more disturbing than women. I said, What we need is a woman with a lot of money. Ultimately thats what happened.

DRE: In Canada.

TG: In Canada, yeah, they finally turned up.

DRE: Ive interviewed David Cronenberg a number of times over the years. I always thought that you guys had some thematic crossover.

TG: Yeah.

DRE: I asked him if he ever puts things in his films just to tweak the audience. He said, If I was to do any tweaking then I would be doing it to me. But it sounds like you may feel a little differently about that.

TG: Yeah, I was intrigued and excited by everything in there but at the same time Im not a fool. I know a lot of people are going to go Whoa. Heres a little scene where the girl is preparing heroin for her father. Somebodys going to go. Heres a scene where the girls beginning to kiss a retarded 20 year old, somethings going to happen there. So I know full well whats going to happen but all those scenes were absolutely fantastic. Thats what I liked about the book. I think they were honest. I think they were something I hadnt seen before and I thought Here is a child that is being treated like a child and not some romanticized, sentimentalized version of an adults version of childhood. Thats what I liked about it. I was getting really tired of hearing non-stop tales of child victimization until it wasnt even victimization after a while. There are all sorts of difficult things in life but this was just a way of selling newspapers and doing television shows. I was really getting angry. I said, Heres a chance to show a really tough, strong, child. What children really are. Theyre designed to survive and shes put through some very difficult situations and she comes out alive and well.

DRE: Smelling like a rose.

TG: Exactly. I didnt say it you did [laughs].

DRE: Just because its you making films, youre never sure how much is going to be reality versus fantasy. But with Tideland there seems to be a strong delineation between reality and fantasy.

TG: Oh yeah, I think its clear. To me this is real and the moments when she goes into full fantasy, theres no question that it is fantasy. But somebody the other day was saying, So, at the end is that her imagination? Is that really happening? Is the whole film really a flashback? I said, No, its exactly what it is. Its telling the story and when we go into fantasy its very clear its a fantasy thing. I cant see a single moment where you dont know that its real as opposed to fantasy. Shes distorting the world. When Dell turns up I shoot it from Jeliza-Roses point of view so Dell is a giant. But then Dell is a real person. So Jeliza-Rose is trying to make things more interesting than they really are.

DRE: Otherwise shed be bored.

Did you have to resist putting more fantasy?

TG: No, I was just doing the book. This is Mitch Cullins world and Im just trying to translate his world honestly and thats exactly what I did. But there are a couple of things. When she goes up the stairs and starts crawling through the trunks and all the clothes that were in there. I dont think in the book it was an endlessly long trunk of clothes so that was me. I thought we should make this idea of this little girl amongst all of her grannys clothes endless. Thats me expanding the book. Im the Jeliza-Rose thats taking Mitch dull, banal mundane world and turning it into something magical [laughs].

DRE: Brendan Fletcher who played the retarded person was just fantastic.

TG: Extraordinary performance. Absolutely wonderful. That was the first time Ive ever cast an actor without meeting him in the flesh. He sent this tape in that he and his girlfriend put together. I said, Fuck, this kids amazing! Hes got the job. But it is very funny because in the flesh he looks like Sting.

DRE: Yeah, Ive seen him in other films.

TG: Hes a great actor and he is also very funny and sweet. A lot of the other actors who were auditioning for the role, could bring out the humor but it wasnt believable, it wasnt real. I was at a film festival in Germany a few weeks ago and the guy in the front row said, Whered you find that kid? I said, Hes a wonderful actor. He said, Youre kidding because I work with retarded kids all the time and hes spot on. There wasnt one moment of falseness in that performance. I said Ill be glad to tell Brendan that because hell be very proud and pleased.

DRE: Was there anything that you asked him to do?

TG: No, I dont direct actors like that. I sort of work with them. I encourage them to go wherever they want to go with these things. I think the one thing I did was the thing he does with his tongue. I thought that would be interesting because the audience would squirm. So that will have an affect and its very good because the audience is behaving exactly right. But he moves his tongue like he has a goldfish in his mouth and that scenes stunning. Theres another moment that I did when they swim through the grass. She reaches for his hand and I said, Lets do that because there has got to be moments when the audience might think youre a potential danger to her. Its not that youre trying to do that, but it just gets so dark and I dont rush away from that because it will make the audience feel, Where is this going? Is this girl in jeopardy? So in that sense Im playing with the audience but there are very slight moments. Im not pushing it. Im not trying to make it a horror film or anything like that but in almost every one of those moments its only a beat, thats it, nothing more.

DRE: Theres always festival screenings or press screenings where if someone doesnt like the film they might walk out.

TG: Or in many cases, a lot of people dont like the film and they walk out [laughs].

DRE: This is the first time Ive seen this many people walk out of one of your films.

TG: I know.

DRE: Im like, Why dont you sit through the whole thing and see what happens at the end?

TG: Do you remember where they walked out? Did they all walk out at specific points?

DRE: One person walked out about a half hour into the film and then once Brendan and Jodelle started kissing more people walked out.

TG: It was getting too much for them.

DRE: Do the walkouts surprise you?

TG: No, I expected people to walk out. I said that if they didnt Ive failed. I dont mind people walking out. What I mind is when reviewers walk out and then write about it.

DRE: Oh, thats horrible.

TG: Ive seen too much of that going on. Dont touch it if you didnt see the whole film, dont write about it. But you dont have to like it. But dont sit there and write a piece about it and Ive read a few unfortunately. I dont mind people walking out. Id say its the closest to Brazil of any film Ive done in that sense and Brazil used to have huge walkouts but for very different reasons. In Tideland its obvious Im getting to people and they dont like what theyre seeing and they dont want to confront it. They dont want to deal with it. They just want to get out of there. Thats fair enough. I was hoping this film would actually create a lot of dialogue between people, those who dont like it or have questions about it or are disturbed and those that love it. What I find so interesting is that those who dont like it cant see how anybody could like it.

DRE: Oh, I know a lot of people who have said that.

TG: And those who like it or love it cant understand why people have a problem with it.

DRE: I can see that too. There are a lot of people that say you love it or you hate it. Its hard for me to say that I love this film. I think the feelings I have for it are on the level of love.

TG: Good, thats fine.

DRE: But I cant say I love it.

TG: No, I know. But there are some, and they tend to be women, come out just beaming saying, Yeah! Those are the people who really love it. Theres more ambivalence than that for most people. I know Im touching things, Im getting to them. They cant quite explain what it is or why they like it. There was one girl at a screening the other night that said, The film, like so many of your films at the end I feel nauseous. But I loved it. It was a positive nauseousness. Im in a place that I havent been before. We had a thing when we were cutting it. Normally every couple weeks I get groups of people together to show the film because Im just trying to find out, Am I communicating what I want to communicate? Is it boring them at points? Can I tighten it? I just dont want to bore people too much, but they didnt know what to say at the end of a lot of them. I said, Heres what, Ill give you my email. When youre ready to talk about it email me. Then some people would take a week before they had got their thoughts in order. I thought, Well, thats great. Its shifted their parameters, the way they think, we jumbled up the boxes and maybe something interesting would come out of that. People are saying, I really reconsidered the way I look at the world. Its made me do this. Its made me think like that. I thought Fuck, thats great. Im happy.

DRE: Every film of yours is so packed with detail within the frame. Tideland is detailed in a different kind of way.

TG: Everything you see in there has been considered. On a simplistic level it was really about two worlds. One was the open space out there and the freedom of nature. It was big skies and grass and then the other was inside this house, which is decaying and rotting like the corpse itself. So there is that contrast and by juxtaposing those two things people come out and say How did you shoot those exteriors? Theyre so beautiful. Theyre not any different than any other exterior. They just happened to be contrasting whats going on inside. We found the house. I added the porch on the front of it, that wonderful but weird porch, but the house was there.

DRE: Wow, I totally thought you built that house.

TG: I know. That porch was on another house about a mile away. I said, I like that porch, lets stick it on that place. We did build the inside but they related to the outside. Andrew Wyeths paintings were very much a part of it from the beginning. When I read the book, I said, Thats fucking Christinas World. Then I called Mitch Cullin and said, Did you have a picture in mind when you made it? He said, Well, I had Andrew Wyeths Christinas World in mind. So I knew we were in good company and we looked at a lot of Wyeths paintings. Also my editor, Lesley Walker, is a woman. [production designer] Jasna Stefanovic is Canadian and a woman. There are a lot of women working on this film because thats important to me when youre doing this kind of story with a little girl. I wanted womens takes on these things. Jasna got the job because she spent the night before we met putting all these scraps of images and photographs together. When I looked at that I said, Youve got it, you understand this child. You understand the world. Thats how I work. Its a totally collaborative little world of probably about eight or nine really critical people in the design and then we go from there.

DRE: I remember an American Cinematographer article on Twelve Monkeys where you said youre not as super detail-oriented as you were with Time Bandits or Brazil just because youre finding people who you collaborate with so you leapfrog over each other creatively.

TG: Its totally like that, yes.

DRE: Has it advanced more?

TG: No, its just that you work with different people so you leapfrog in different ways [laughs]. But you try to find people who have the right sensibility for the project. I worked with so many new people on this one because I had to work with a Canadian crew and we just found the right people. They understood it.

DRE: Last night you introduced a screening of Time Bandits at Film Forums Pythonalot festival. What made you choose that film?

TG: Well, its 25 years since I made it.

DRE: Oh my God, now even I feel old.

TG: Yeah, I know, and Im older. Tideland is another story about a child and their imagination, 25 years gone. Have I changed? Has the world changed? [laughs]

DRE: How does what went down The Brothers Grimm change your view of what films youre going to do?

TG: Its the same view I had before I started that project, not to work with the Weinsteins. I had always said I wouldnt work with them. They came in at the point where MGM pulled out. We were in preproduction so it was out of the frying pan and into the fire. Its not that the Weinsteins are the worst people on the planet. They are who they are and I am who I am and I know it was always going to be a bad marriage. Were going to head butt. At the end it got interesting because we got to the point where I thought the film was done but they kept going with it. Then Jeremy Thomas managed to raise the money for Tideland so I said, Ive another film to make so why dont you go away and do whatever you want with Grimm? That was instead of fighting, which is my normal mode of operation. I realized that those guys love a fight. Theyre bigger, more brutal fighters than I am so I ran away. Tideland was a great escape from all of that. Free at last. Then what was interesting, was that when I was editing Tideland, I got a call from the Weinsteins to finish Grimm my way. So I was editing both films at the same time. Id won by not fighting and it was really interesting doing both films because when youre editing youre watching the film constantly and you learn to hate it at a certain point. You cant make it better, you get frustrated. So wed run down the corridor and start working on Grimm until we reach that state and then we go back and do Tideland. It was fantastic [laughs].

DRE: If there is a Monty Python tour, would you want to do short films or animations for it?

TG: There may come a point where Im just tired of all the difficulties of getting money and making movies. When I do animation its just me and the computer now. About five or six years ago, there was a 35th Python reunion for the BBC. It was a crap show because we all like each other too much now. But I did one little bit of animation on my computer because now I can do everything I did before, easier. The computer has caught up with my really crude technology. I can do the same cutouts because they are easy to move around on the computer. So thats always that fallback position if I get in trouble.

DRE: What sketches would you want to do on the tour?

TG: Ah. [laughs] You mean existing ones.

I think we ought to get the dead mother in the bag at the crematorium scene. You could burn her or you could eat her. That was one of the worst; most tasteless sketches ever written and that would be number one on my list of things to do [laughs].

by Daniel Robert Epstein

SG Username: AndersWolleck