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This great Hollywood director has achieved cult status for the offbeat films he takes on.

He's directed the absurdist comedy Monty Python and the Holy Grail, the bizarre tale of the Fisher King with Robin Williams and Jeff Bridges, the time-traveling psycho thriller Twelve Monkeys with Bruce Willis and Brad Pitt, the hallucinatory acid romp Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas with Johnny Depp, and his most challenging project, The Imaginarium of Dr.

Parnassus with Heath Ledger, who had to be replaced by Colin Farrell, Jude Law and Johnny Depp after his sudden death during filming.

But most would agree that the Oscar-nominated futuristic film Brazil is truly his masterpiece.

Hello, I'm Terry Gilliam.

Welcome to Hollywood's Best Film Directors.

I won't be in the program.

Although most of my life I've been an American, most of my life I've lived in London.

I live in Highgate.

I seem to be half Hollywood and half European filmmaker.

Welcome to the series.

I was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, long ago in a far, far distant universe.

My first memories were really when we moved to the countryside.

So we lived in a house that had been a summer cottage that my father had converted to all-year living accommodations.

And we were on a dirt road, and there was a lake a couple blocks away, and there was a cornfield over there, a swamp across the street, and there was a forest behind the house.

So it was Tom Sawyer-like childhood.

My father was a carpenter.

My mother, I've always said, was a virgin.

And we know where this leads.

But it was a great childhood because I lived outside most of the time.

We didn't have much money.

But the fact that my father was a carpenter was interesting because I learned to work with my hands.

I learned to make things.

Making things was always very important.

I also loved magic as a kid.

And my father built me a cabinet that I could put on shows with the other kids.

I was particularly bad at magic.

And so comedy seemed to be the way to salvage these terrible magic shows.

When I was 12, we moved out to Los Angeles to San Fernando Valley, a place called Panorama City.

And we literally got a wagon, put it on behind the car and headed west.

And I thought we were going to arrive at a place with cowboys and Indians and all the things I'd seen on television.

Of course, it was a tract home.

It had just been built.

I'd always been a huge fan of comic books growing up, ever since I was a kid.

And the one that I probably liked most was Mad Comics that Harvey Kurtzman was doing, which was the first time I really understood about satire and pastiche.

And he would do these wonderful pastiches of Superman or whatever the popular comics were, or whatever the television shows were, and they were really brilliant.

And so when I was in college, I took over the literary magazine and turned it into a humor magazine.

And with a group of others, we started producing issues.

And I was sending them off to New York to Harvey, who was now editing a magazine called Help at that time.

And I graduated with no idea where I was going to go.

I wrote to Harvey saying, "Maybe I'd like to come to New York."

And this callow youth from California gets to New York.

We managed to wangle an appointment out of Harvey, and we agreed to meet at the Algonquin Hotel.

And the Algonquin Hotel, for me, was a famous place.

The Round Table used to be there, where Dorothy Parker and Ben Schley, and all these great comedians used to hang out.

I walked in and a guy named Charles Alverson was the assistant editor, and he was quitting, and I walked into his job.

And for the next three years, I was in New York.

John had been offered, because of his success in other things, to do a show for the BBC.

And he basically said, "I want to work with these guys."

And so John and Graham teamed up with the four of us.

And that was it.

Python began.

Monty Python's Flying Circus became obviously quite successful on television, which attracted people with money to say, "Why don't you do a movie?"

I don't know how we eventually decided on doing Holy Grail, but the idea seemed to be you've got a collection of knights and a round table and you can go on various adventures, so that seemed perfect for the group of us.

And that's what we did.

We wanted to put it in the Holy Grail.

And Terry Jones and I, well, the shows were going on, always were chafing at the bit.

We wanted to be film directors.

Charlie, you come to this mark there.

And so one meeting we said everybody named Terry gets to be the director.

Does everybody agree?

Everybody agreed.

So Terry and I became the director.

And we set off to do it in Scotland.

In fact, what was interesting, a few weeks before we were about to shoot, we had chosen all these beautiful locations, castles, wonderful places, and we were planning to start shooting in a couple of weeks, and suddenly we were told by the National Trust that we couldn't use them, because they said we may, as comedians, not respect the dignity of the fabric of the buildings.

So suddenly, we had no sets, and we started having to improvise.

It was an interesting thing, finally becoming a film director, to be half a film director.

Terry Jobes and I had always been eye to eye on everything until we started to shoot.

And it became very apparent that we had slightly diverging views, which is a very odd way to work to direct a film.

The crew didn't know who they were supposed to be listening to.

And ultimately we split the work.

So he dealt with the others in the group.

And I, with less social skills, stayed with the camera and the look of the thing.

So we kind of worked that way.

They're pretty good.

You get through this thing, at every stage something went disastrously wrong.

And one of the advantages of making a comedy film, we could break the rules all the time.

And so we were rewriting as we went along every day.

The fact that we survived and did it in, was it four weeks for no money at all, is extraordinary.

And then when it came to editing, we had the same problems, that Terry and I had diverging views.

It's a strange film school to go to.

I wouldn't recommend it for too many people.

- Film night with Idol, end board.

- Action.

- Got it.

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- Brazil was the film I really wanted to make after Time Bandits, 'cause Time Bandits was a big success in America, and it actually propelled me into Hollywood, I would say, because we were number one for weeks, and I wanted to make this thing called Brazil that nobody was really interested in.

However, I was this guy who made this money-making film from nowhere.

And so they all took my meetings.

And nevertheless, we couldn't get anybody interested.

We had a budget of $12 million.

Failing in America, we went to the Cannes Film Festival, raised the budget to $15 million.

And something was working in Cannes.

There was a kind of buzz in the air, booze in the air as well.

And we managed to get two studios to co-finance at Universal and 20th Century Fox.

It was... the whole experience was very strange because I'd been writing the film for a long time, collecting all of my frustrations and anger at the world, what was going on with the terrorists were doing this, governments were behaving very, very repressively, people in South America were being tortured and having to pay for their torture.

Everything was going on and I was just collating what I thought was documentary material.

And I got to a point on the script where it was about 96 pages long.

Somebody suggested, "Why don't I work with Tom Stolpard?"

Which we did.

And Tom and I reworked this stuff.

He organized it better than I did.

He made wonderful leaps on it because I was so close to the material.

And eventually, with the inclusion of Charles McKeown later, we had a script.

But I think the real reason we got the money was that one of the studios wanted me to do what was then their new A picture.

And I think they'd gone through Spielberg and Lucas and all the other top directors and finally got down to me.

And rather than saying, "Okay, we've got an A picture with a B director," they elevate the B director to the A-bis.

So now I'm an A-bis director.

But I say, "I don't want to do that film.

I want to do this film called Brazil."

Which then I suppose, I'm thinking, "Well, A-list director, why does he want to do Brazil?

It must be an A-list film."

And somehow this whole thing worked its way up into the air to the point that the studios gave us the money to start work.

Look a bit closer to camera.

Into the lens, even.

Try it.

Twelve Monkeys was a script that was sent to me by Chuck Roven.

And when I read it, I was just amazed by it, because I said, there's no way this is going to get through the Hollywood system.

So let's do it.

That's the way I work.

I never want to see the scripts that everybody else is reading, because they're going to get made by other people.

I just want to do the ones that are less likely.

And this script, I thought, was extraordinary.

I wanted originally Jeff Bridges in the cast, because we had just finished Fisher King and that had been a big success.

And for various reasons, the studio had no interest in Jeff.

So other names kept coming forward.

I won't name them, because none of them I felt were right.

And I walked away from the project.

And then one day my agent called and said Bruce Willis was interested.

And I'd met Bruce when we were making Fisher King.

He'd just come by the set and I liked him.

Terry's in the flight truck, you're gonna open up.

So I was talking to Bruce about this scene he had done in Die Hard, which I thought was really interesting, because he's got his feet full of shards of glass, and he's in the building, you know, with terrorists, and he's on the phone to his wife, and he's weeping.

And I thought, that's extraordinary, the big action film with a tough guy, and he's weeping.

And he said that was his idea.

And so I thought, this guy's got a lot more going on than we were seeing.

And so when his name came up, I said, yeah, let's get together.

He met in New York, and he was at a phase where he was determined to show that he was really a wonderful actor, not just a big superstar.

And and we agreed to do it.

And I said, if you come on, you've got to come on just as Bruce Willis actor.

You know, can we make it basically no entourage, nothing.

And he agreed.

And so we were off and running.

And then as we were still preparing it, it wasn't definitely green yet, I got a call, Brad Pitt wanted to meet me.

And at that point, Brad hadn't made Legends of the Fall, he was still in his earlier phase.

And he came to London and I thought, he was wonderful, he was great, he was so determined to do it.

And what intrigued me was he was wanting to play the part that he played, which is a motor mouth and up to that point nobody had ever seen Brad speak quickly.

Like this, like this, like this, and they need to know, and they need to know something, you gotta tell them, you gotta wake them up, you gotta go one, two, three.

But I love the fact that somebody wanted to do something beyond what they were being categorized as.

And so I said yes, and off we went.

And we made the film.

And what was funny, on the first day of shooting, I think Legends of the Fall came out and Brad became a superstar overnight.

So suddenly, we've got two superstars with all the security that that entails.

And so our little movie is surrounded by cordons of security.

You're not talking about the stuff we did the other day.

No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

I'm talking about that little bit.

Pre-production is probably one of the best parts of making a movie, because you can dream still.

You can still imagine what you're going to do.

You can fantasize what a great film it's going to be with all these things.

And so, you know, I start, let's assume we've written the script at this point.

You start.

You've got to get actors.

You've got to get locations.

And for me, finding the actor is really the critical thing, getting the cast.

Because if you get the right people, the film is going to work.

I don't see myself as a director who's, you know, they're telling the actor how to do the job.

I want to make sure the actor has got the right attitude, understands the character, and we're talking about the same kind of film.

And once you've got that halfway there, then I used to storyboard a lot.

I don't do it because I suppose over the years I'm more confident.

So I don't do it unless there's a special effects sequence.

And so we start with that.

We start looking for locations.

And for me, what I love about it is that whether I've written the script or not, I've got control of it.

So I can rewrite the script all the time.

And so if I find a location that's different than what was suggested in the script, let's go that way.

And so you're forming it all the time because of what you can or cannot do or what you can find.

But to me, the exciting thing is always finding new ideas as you're going through.

The thing is now becoming more and more alive.

The crew is the same thing.

You've got to get the right people.

Because my attitude is always, we're going to be climbing Mount Everest.

And you've got to trust each other.

You've got to support each other.

You've got... I mean, I've always said that if I'm in the way of this film, just push me out of the way.

You keep carrying on that day.

Because it's always to me a real collaborative group effort.

If you've got a good grouping of actors and technical people, then I'm happy.

And then, that's kind of it.

There's no order to it normally.

It's just trying to find the film.

Always, the whole business of filmmaking to me is trying to find it.

It's one thing with all the images in my head and all the ideas and all the things.

Because you're always bumping up against reality.

And you keep pushing until reality fits your fantasies, or do you start a dialogue between the two things, or do you just submit to reality?

It's one or the other.

It's always shifting.

Wonderful.

Thank you.

I think the key to my directing is that I don't direct.

I really don't know what I do.

I talk to people and we have dinners in advance.

We try to just amongst us work out what it is we're doing, why that actor wants to do it that way.

Is I to me, by the time we start shooting, I've been thinking about the film too long.

So I want new input.

I want new things coming in to keep it alive every day.

When we were doing Fisher King, Robin Williams, an old friend, the thing that worried me about Robin was his energy, his need to vamp and be extemporaneous and come up with new ideas all the time.

His mind is so fast, he has to keep fueling himself with new ideas.

And I'm like that as well.

And the two of us could just fly off into the stratosphere just giggling and topping each other and trying to be funny about something and so the way I directed Robin in Fisher King was to get Jeff Bridges on because Jeff is such a solid his feet on the ground kind of actor he's so boom it's just there he can dance he can joke you know but he never fakes it he doesn't cheat and and I knew Jeff would be the anchor to both Robin and myself because I have to direct myself as well who I'm directing and it's uh and it worked that way and and you just watch it and with in the case of Robin he really got into it he was you know working with Jeff all the time and he realized okay I'll stay down there but invariably there would be days when he just got to do some more I got some more ideas and we would do maybe okay after a few takes that okay go do it and well there was that one bit keep that in back to the script and and it works and it's uh but I don't want to ever restrict an actor the point is to give them room to do what they're good at and I think my theory is my job is to make sure the the defense around the playpen is secure that Within that we can take chances.

We can fall on our faces.

We can make mistakes and Then I'll protect them in the editing room.

I won't show those bits I'm that I find is what makes the film start coming really alive to me because things are happening that nobody expected and if we're a good crew, let's go with that direction for a bit.

I will leave the straight narrow path all the time.

I mean, it feels to me when we start shooting is like, okay, I've got a script, which basically the map to get to the town on the other side of the very dark and confused forest.

And we go and we start losing our way sometimes.

Or it's more interesting if you go off there for a bit because you can always pull it back in the editing room is my theory and and that's just how how we work I I was watching Clint Eastwood direct on the last film he did hereafter and I just loved it because he doesn't say action or any of that he's just talking to the actors and he's yeah when we wrote Brazil I thought this is saying something very important about the world we live in.

And then at the end of the day even though the film had already been released in the rest of the world by 20th Century Fox, our good friends at Universal Pictures who had it for North America decided it was unreleasable.

They hated it.

The producer Arnold Milson says we're going to get lawyers, we're going to fight this thing.

I said there's no way we can fight a studio.

They have all the lawyers and they have all the time.

They don't need to release the film.

We've got to approach this thing in a different way.

Sid Scheinberg was the boss, that's all I know.

And I liked Sid, but he said, you know, why can't you just change the ending of this film and make it with a happy ending?

And he says, it's a really good film and more people would come to see it.

And don't you want more people to see your film?

I said, I want everybody to see my film, but I'm not going to change the story just for that.

And he couldn't understand that.

And he thought, how can you harm your own film?

I said, I'm not harming it.

I'm trying to save my own film.

So we reached a stalemate.

And I decided the only way was to try to bring this into the open.

I took out a full page ad in variety.

And rather than filling up the page like most pages of variety, which is how many millions of films made in the last 30 seconds, it was this very blank page with just in the middle, a little note, "Dear Sid Sheinberg, when are you going to release my film Brazil?"

signed Terry Gilliam.

And nobody had done anything as foolish as that before Hollywood, apparently.

So we did it.

And of course, the press got interested.

This is a great story for Sid.

I think it was a losing battle because it's David versus Goliath.

It was the artist versus the system.

And it went on and it got more.

I mean, it got interest everywhere in New York, everywhere, even to the point of ABC television.

Maria Shriver had her own show.

And she what happened was De Niro never did interviews on television.

He just didn't.

But again, he supported us.

We went on the show.

And she was interviewing him and Bobby had three things to say, not much.

So eventually she had to turn to me.

So Terry, I understand you have a problem with the studio.

I said, I don't have a problem in the studio.

But I do have a problem with one man.

His name is Sid Sheinberg.

And he looks like this.

And I went to the cameras and the night by 10 glossy of Sid.

I mean, this you just do not do these things.

But I decided I was gonna be a berserker.

I had nothing to lose.

And maybe something would come of it.

And the Los Angeles critics started having clandestine screenings in their homes and things.

And they discovered at the end of the year that the bylaws never said anything about a film having to be released to qualify for the competition of best film and all.

We're all in New York.

It was the opening of Out of Africa, the big film of the year.

And they're all in black tie Merrill was there and Redford.

And suddenly this thing is handed to them.

The Los Angeles critics have just awarded best film Brazil best director.

Gilliam best screenplay.

Stop it.

Kill him.

McEwen.

They didn't know what to do.

And they had to release the film.

And that was it.

It went out.

Got it.

Cut!

When I have to think about my own films, I don't watch them, basically.

I'm waiting for the day I can actually watch them like a normal guy going in and buying a ticket and seeing the film for the first time because they're all kind of too close.

When I look at my things, all I see are mistakes and now I don't see the good parts.

I mean Brazil will always be there as the one that would... because I think it was so cathartic.

There was so much I was trying to get out of my system and it was like finally I just spewed it out on the screen.

And the fact that it holds up is I think what impresses me about the film.

People now when they talk about Brazil they think I was how prescient I was.

I wasn't prescient.

I was just aware of what was going on then in the 80s.

Always since the last film I make is my favorite.

It's as simple as that.

I think I loved what happened on Fisher King because it was the first time working with just actors and discovering that I was a good director for actors.

I mean before that everybody said, "Oh, you can do great visuals," but they never gave me credit for working with actors.

And I think Fisher King, "Ah, they can work with actors."

I think Parnassus still sticks with me because it was such an extraordinary experience.

And to actually have the film community work the way you've always dreamed it would work, i.e.

other actors respecting a dead actor coming to the rescue just out of love and taking no money for the thing, that's what's special about Parnassus.

It's an act of love from a lot of people.

There's a side of me that chose not to be part of the Hollywood system, and the price I paid for that is a bigger gap between each film, so I've done less films.

On the other hand, I suppose I've ended up making films that probably are slightly more interesting or less predictable because they're not products of the system, as it were.

I think what I like about them, I mean, they're all my babies.

I actually can feel I take credit for them.

My fingerprints are all over them.

It's not like I went to work one morning doing a job and that stuff came out.

It's the strength and the weaknesses of our mind.

Because I've always wanted to make my mistakes and not other people's mistakes.

I thought land work probably could be more interesting.

And that's kind of it.

I like the fact that when the films really work and they inspire people and they inspire other directors who are going down a different path, straight and narrow, to carry on.

I think that's great.

I think I used to think what I really was doing was making films for me when I was a teenager.

The things that suddenly opened my eyes to a different world and inspired me.

If I could keep making for that kid, then maybe it's good.

And I think I like that, because even as an elder statesman in this business, I find the audience that every film I do, there's still teenagers coming in.

And they're fans.

And they're not my age.

And this is, this is, I'm proud of it.