Terry Gilliam
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Terence Vance Gilliam (born November 22 1940) is an American film director and former member of the Monty Python comedy group.
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Early life
Gilliam was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He graduated from Occidental College in Los Angeles, where he was a member of the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity.
Animation
Terry Gilliam started off as an animator and strip cartoonist; one of his early photographic strips for Harvey Kurtzman's Help! magazine featured John Cleese. Moving to England, he animated features for Do Not Adjust Your Set and then joined Monty Python's Flying Circus when it was created. He was the only non-British member. He was the principal artist-animator of the surreal cartoons which frequently linked the show's sketches together, and defined the group's visual language in other mediums. He also appeared in several sketches and played side parts in the films.
Gilliam's Monty Python animations have a distinctive style. He mixed his own art, characterized by soft gradients and odd bulbous shapes, with backgrounds and moving cutouts from antique photographs, mostly from the Victorian era. The style has been mimicked repeatedly throughout the years: in the children's television cartoon Angela Anaconda, a series of television commercials for Guinness Beer, the Jibjab cartoons on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, and the television history series Terry Jones' Medieval Lives.
Directing
Terry Gilliam went on to become a film director. Gilliam's Brazil is known among cineastes as a fine example of the archetypal risk-averse, noncreative movie studio corporation attempting lamely to widen the appeal of a movie, at the cost of ruining the artistic integrity of the film. Gilliam's battles with Universal Studios over the movie are notorious and well documented.
His films are usually highly imaginative and fantastical. Most of his movies include plotlines that seem to occur in the characters' imagination, raising questions of the definition of sanity. He often shows his opposition to bureaucracy and authoritarian regimes. He also distinguishes higher and lower layers of society with a disturbing and ironic style. His movies usually feature a fight or struggle against a great power which may be an emotional situation, a human-made idol, or even the person him/her-self, and the situations do not always end happily. There is usually a paranoid and dark atmosphere and unusual characters who once were normal members of society. His scripts feature a dark sense of humour and often end with a dark twist.
His films have a distinctive look, often recognizable from just a short clip. There is often a baroqueness about the movies, with, for instance, computer monitors in one film equipped with magnifying lenses, and in another a red knight covered with flapping bits of cloth. He also is given to incongruous juxtapositions, say of beauty and ugliness, or antique and modern.
Gilliam has acquired the reputation of making extremely expensive movies beset with production problems. After the lengthy quarreling with Universal Studios over Brazil, Gilliam's next picture, The Adventures of Baron Munchhausen, cost around US$46 million, and then earned only about US$8 million in US ticket sales. A decade later, Gilliam attempted to film The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, allegedly set as the highest-budgeted film to only use European financing; but on the first day of shooting, the actor playing Don Quixote suffered a herniated disc and the entire film was cancelled, resulting in a US$15 million insurance claim. Gilliam's reputation in this regard has been sufficient for the humor newspaper The Onion to run a news article entitled "Terry Gilliam Barbecue Plagued By Production Delays".
Films directed
- Monty Python and the Holy Grail (co-directed with Terry Jones) (1975)
- Jabberwocky (1977)
- Time Bandits (1981)
- The Crimson Permanent Assurance (1983) - A short supporting feature that accompanied Monty Python's The Meaning of Life
- Brazil (1985)
- The Adventures of Baron Munchhausen (1988)
- The Fisher King (1991)
- Twelve Monkeys (1995) - Inspired by Chris Marker's La Jetée.
- Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998)
- The Brothers Grimm (2005)
- Tideland (2006)
He has several projects in various states of development, including an adaptation of Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett's comic fantasy novel Good Omens.
Gilliam's unsuccessful efforts in 1999 and 2000 to film The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, based on Miguel Cervantes' Don Quixote, were the subject of the 2002 documentary Lost In La Mancha. His two efforts to film the Watchmen comics, in 1989 and 1996, were also unsuccessful.
Bibliography
- Gilliam, Terry and Christie, Ian (Ed.) (1999). Gilliam On Gilliam. Faber & Faber. ISBN 0571191908
External links
- Dreams: The Terry Gilliam Fanzine (http://www.smart.co.uk/dreams/)
- The Terry Gilliam Files (http://members.aol.com/morgands1/closeup/indices/gillindx.htm)
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- Terry Gilliam article by Rumsey Taylor (http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/directors/03/gilliam.html)
| Monty Python | Missing image MontyPythonFootLeftSmall.jpg foot | |
|---|---|---|
| Members | Graham Chapman • John Cleese • Terry Gilliam • Eric Idle • Terry Jones • Michael Palin | |
| Other Contributors | Carol Cleveland • Neil Innes • Connie Booth | |
| Films & TV Series | Monty Python's Flying Circus • And Now For Something Completely Different • Monty Python and the Holy Grail • Monty Python's Life of Brian • Monty Python Live at the Hollywood Bowl • The Meaning of Life | |
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