Brazil (1985)

Give me a random quote that will lead into an informative Q and A

"Mr. Helpmann, I'm keen to get into Information Retrieval.

Mr Helpmann, I'm dying to get at this woman... no, no, no."

Sam Lowry

In 1967, Terry Gilliam, a maverick American cartoonist met up with a group of comedians to form Monty Python's Flying Circus.

To everyone's surprise - not least his - It became one of the most acclaimed TV comedy series in history.

Gilliam went on to make a series of feature films such as Time Bandits, Brazil, The Fisher King, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and what became the most expensive flop in history - The Adventures of Baron Munchausen.

Gilliam's career is hardly what you could call 'planned'.

From his days as animator on the hit series, he was given carte blanche to do what he liked.

"The nice thing about Python is that we didn't actually know what we were doing," he revealed in a recent interview.

"We were just pleasing ourselves and that I think is something to be remembered in life because we weren't pretending to be knowledgeable about what the public wanted and we didn't seem to be concerned with becoming overly successful."

"In really grandiose terms, we just wanted to make something that made ourselves laugh and that's what we set out to do. The six of us were the judges."

Often working alone with just a camera and his sketches, Gilliam created some stunning, often surreal cartoons that gave Python a unique look.

"What was odd was that people hadn't seen that style of cartoons before. The public were familiar with the Disney style or the Hanna Barbera cheap Saturday morning things.

"Because I was able to use images and classic images from Durer or Bruegel so my cartoons had a veneer of class."

Directing people, however, was a different matter all together.

"When we came to do The Holy Grail it was an interesting situation because we were given the money with no strings Terry Jones and I wanted to be film-makers.

"So we said: 'Anyone called Terry can be a film director', and luckily there were two of us. So we set off and tried to direct a film and it was wonderful because we'd never done it before.

"We made a lot of mistakes but somehow we got through it."

"It was difficult for me because I had been in my little room with my little pieces of paper so they wouldn't talk back and they'd do exactly what I wanted them to do. Then I had to confront people that were very independently minded and I seemingly had no facility to communicate with them.

Luckily, the problems with directing actors were soon short lived as Gilliam went off to make films on his own. When I came to do Jabberwocky, there was this wonderful revelation that actors believe in directors, they respect them and they do all the things the Pythons don't do. It was wonderful."
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