Dreams: The Face Interview
This interview taken from The Face, February 1989.
The Big Picture by Ian Penman
Munchausen, the dictionary warns, is not just a man but a generic, opening onto a realm of exaggeration, towering tales and the people who tell them, who are responsible for them. For director Terry Gilliam, responsibility is an outsize thing, for he’s one of cinema’s high rollers; big money goes on big hunches, and the only thing powering the wheel is Gilliam’s trust in his own untrammelled eye. Neither visions nor budgets come much bigger than those which combine to produce his latest, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen. This ‘project’ began with Gilliam wrapping up Brazil, having nothing better to do basically, and ending up costing the far side of $43million, having exhausted the filmmaking talent of three continents.
Gilliam has become synonymous with the bigger picture, with some of the big pictures Britain - if we can shoulder this expatriate Yank with our tag - has produced. His irrational viewfinder mind is very un-American - America has never even had a Middle Ages - even if his towering disregard for dollar signs is not. His films fuse the normally separate terrains of adult and child, confounding the distinction that takes the kids to Spielberg and puts us to Streep. If Munchausen is a child’s film, it’s not the fast-food candy of Back To The Future or Roger Rabbit. Recent American film fantasy of the Lucas school is inherently rational, Manichean, black and white. Gilliam too contrasts cute and cruel, but in a far more extended play on their difference.
Time Bandits was a child’s fantasy FX clambering frame which also housed adult British comedy. There’s a lot of dark urbanity nestling here and his next film, Brazil, took this darker side into a blockbuster fairy tale of flirty paranoia which also doubles as the real film of Orwell’s 1984.
Like Orson Welles and Stanley Kubrick before him, Gilliam seems less specifically an American filmmaker - not just in the sense of the months, money and murder it takes - than a comfortably global maverick. Gilliam has been based on British soil for a while now (he has a castle that takes up half the hill of Highgate), but his atopical worlds fit into no obvious national fabric - there is nothing characteristic of them save their maker’s obvious manic delight at the absurd astronomical universe of cinema’s possibilities.
Gilliam’s name burst into life through the interruptive/cohesive animation bites he provided for Monty Python. Python often did its best to turn the company themselves into cartoon, and this persists in Gilliam'’ films, where the director routinely regards his actors as objects to be bent out of shape, to be puttied and catapulted, folded and flung at will. But if the Pythons echoed a clear British tradition of logical whimsy, Gilliam’s deregulated world is more demonic.
If we have any idea what a trilogy is, the Time Bandits, Brazil and Baron Munchausen might loosely comprise such a thing. It’s one long wonderful life: child (Time Bandits); man (Jonathan Pryce in Brazil); and wise, wizened uber-OAP in Munchausen. Child and the old man have open eyes and minds and their dreams come true. The poor sod at the dystopic centre of Brazil, on the other hand, is flung down a plughole of paranoiac irreality: he dreams of flight, but the dream isn’t strong enough to dislodge the mad build-up of the day. The ultimate nightmare image of Brazil consists of apparatus which keeps the eyelids apart; thus is dreaming’s digestion and relief done away with.
It’s as if Gilliam were saying you get the world your dreams deserve. One might say the same thing about directors - those creatures of habitual whinge always claim it’s the "medium’s fault" that they’ve been disbarred from Art and had to settle instead for the terrifying privation of Beverly Hills luxury, poor lambs. There are directors who expose such hackspeak for the failure of nerve it is; who drag the massive lumber of some dream always just beyond the next budget: Kubrick’s unmade Napoleon, Cimino’s unrealisable Heaven, Coppola’s whole career… and Gilliam’s Munchausen.
Gilliam’s work in Brazil and Munchausen is haunted by a feeling of potential endlessness, the centre always being lost in the frenzy of invention, rippling away into infinitesimal change and addition, their director like some mad burgermeister fashioning spires of dream architecture from 19 different schools of thought. This isn’t always necessarily a pleasurable experience to sit through.
Gilliam is a big man: big features, hair the fisticuffs of three different cuts, clothes a palette of colours that look thrown on. When he laughs, the animator is really animated - his sentences modulate into big goofy rising laughs ;like some billowing black cloud taking on an ancient face and about to blow your hat off. It’s an infectious big cave-echo cartoon caveman guffaw - haw haw haw! - which breaks like bottles on some quiet afternoon.
So, to begin the big picture: how pleased is he? How neatly does the end match the original conception?
"It’s quite a bit smaller than the original script. That’s what I find extraordinary - to find all this shit up there and it’s still only about three quarters what we began with. In retrospect, I’m not sure we could ever have gotten the other stuff up on screen. My only fear at the moment is that I may have cut it too tight. There’s a constant pressure to shorten, the theory being it will reach more people more easily. This is my nightmare - I don’t know whether I’ve improved it or hurt it, whether I’ve cut too much, sped it up too much. I just keep thinking of this little bit, these ten minutes I pulled out, an expression or a pause…"
If he has a prime fault it’s that he cannot let anything be - but this is also his singularity. Gilliam has got perception like deserts have skies; he plants and scatters tiny details on a Tower of Babel scale - a million chattering images, stitches in a vast fabric. In Gilliam’s big picture, every scene is a Christmas stocking, a jack-in-the-box, a potted history. A dwarf flies sideways past the window. Turrets turn into termites. Gilliam’s aesthetic is based on ceaselessly adding on, but everything manages to look tightly integral as well.
"I work it out very carefully. I convince myself that it’s absolutely logical and makes sense. Then things go wring. Money, time and just sheer mistakes take over, so things are changing all the time. This one was different though - more of a slow build."
You can just picture Gilliam the screenwriter putting in a pencilled insert: falls though into 12th Century. But where do the whirlwinds wing from? These things that end up on screen splitting apart, grasping and falling and reproducing wildly?
"I don’t seem to dream as much as I used to. They really take place when I’m awake. I get frightened sometimes because I don’t know the difference between dream and awake: it comes and goes, everything’s always shifting. I haven’t had any good dreams for a long time; I usually get ’em when things are going really bad. Then I dive into the dreams, I escape that way…"
Are entire films just an excuse for the glory of one stubborn image?
"It tends to be like that. The image I wanted most of all for this film was the Baron when his horse is cut in half by a portcullis and he’s just riding on the front half of his horse - that was what I wanted to do more than anything. But we lost that before we even started shooting."
Gilliam constantly refers to Munchausen as "this one" like it was something he did every other week, a Sunday afternoon kickaround with jumpers for goalposts. He lulls you into forgetting the budget, the sheer enormity of scale and sweat and organisation. (Maybe this is how he gets the money off people in the first place.)
At some point the idea of making such and such a film - "This film is really for my daughters. We basically invented a narrative to try and hold all these stories together!" - becomes the core of life for a while: stitching a hundred galactic sails together, turning actors into archetypes, spending someone else’s dough. At some point, it becomes an obsession. Gilliam says he can understand how Welles could toil for years on his Quixote and then just leave it to rot in an anonymous bank vault halfway round the globe.
"I actually understand that. When you finally finish it, if it isn’t as good as you wanted it to be you just walk away from it as though it had never existed. It’s like too much of your life wasted somehow, you don’t want to even acknowledge it."
The previews only remind you how assembly line the whole thing is. Reality - moviehouse darkness, crackle and pop - intrudes. You wish you could keep it at home like a painting and judge it a little longer, forget it for a while, come back to it fresh - maybe turn it to the wall and sulk, or just chuck it away. Instead you go around the world with it.
In Berlin you settle down in a lovely cinema and feel good about it. But then it opens - and that beginning is lit really dark, it took three days to get it all balanced like that, like a late Rembrandt or something, ancient underwater browns of plague and war, but the projection in this goddamn Kraut cinema is like a 30 watt bulb on its last legs, you can barely see the fucking sky up there, and as for the sound - the sound is imply lo-fibre shit sucked through a sieve. The world seems to be full of giant moths nibbling up your perfect vision.
"It’s something that’s made for a huge screen and great sound and I do find it extraordinary, here you spend all this money and you design the thing for something very specific and then you’re shown it in the most awful circumstances."
Cinema’s poetry is, to a great extent, attendant on scale anyway - it’s a flickering architecture. Certain films do have to be seen on a big screen or run the risk of being reduced to plot, to ‘issues’, to purely spoken connotation. (How come our age’s innovations - video, walkman, CD - are uniformly micro?)
"I wanted Munchausen to be big. When I was getting it off the ground it seemed everybody was talking about doing ‘small films’: Puttnam had gone to LA and everybody was talking ‘small films’, little films… and part of the reason to do Munchausen was, ‘Let’s do something just the opposite of all that! Let’s just do the biggest, most extravagant thing we can think of!’ And then you see it being constantly reduced down to something just like mere mortal size.
"I hate all that shit, it’s practical for everybody, it’s easy to do, everything is reasonable…" Gilliam spits out these small words like he’s found a centipede in his jumbo burger. "Because nobody wants to go for the big things and the whole point is to do the big thing and be extravagant and lift people out of their normal existence; for better or worse just get them out of that occasionally. Otherwise I think it all just shrivels up and the biggest thing anyone thinks about is their BMW, they aspire to the BMW saloon and that’s it.
"We’ve become too reasonable. When you start dealing with mythic things the English in particular want to reduce everything to the smallest common denominator. I think may be I would have like the Middle Ages. There was a very rich tradition, the Church passed on these great images and great stories. Those things were a much more important part of people’s lives and now I think people have forgotten all of that stuff."
You can look back on the text of an education and feel angered at all the gaps: the world of the visual, the worlds of mythology. The paradox being that children are especially open to these things - witness their delight in even dodgy movies that exploit these areas.
"You suddenly realise, ‘Wait, all this stuff has never been taught me, what’s going on here?’ I think that’s why I’ve grabbed onto it. I had a very string religious upbringing which deals with that stuff in a similar way except that it tacks on a lot of other bullshit. But at east you’re used to mythic things. Jesus and his gang, they’re not a bad crowd of people and they’re doing Big Things. But the problem with Christianity is that it’s got such a limited view, it’s such a small view of what really goes on.
" I think people are confused about what they want to make comments about because there’s no Big Picture anymore. They tend to deal with mundane little relationships - does he love her, does she love him? The world is reduced to that now and the Gods have all gone away somewhere.
"The old myths, the Greek myths, are so complicated and wonderful - and incredibly human, that’s what’s nice about them, And nobody deals with them, nobody knows them. A few hundred years ago people understood all the references: you talked about the labours of Hercules and other great stories, and people knew what you were talking about. I don’t know what the stories are that people know about now…"
Nightmare on Elm St, probably.
The visual loop, the loop of Time Bandits, is without any obvious precedent. Film, like characters, seemed to have fallen through a hole in the firmament.
"I hear people talking about Munchausen now, saying it’s epoch-making or something, and they mean the special effects. I mean, of course people and little cherubs dance in the sky! Those things exist in paintings - they’ve always been there and I don’t understand why people are so amazed. There’s a strange leap happens when something goes up on screen and it seems different than when they see it on a painting or in a book or read about it. I was looking at these Medieval paintings the other day and everybody’s floating in the air and there are those marvellous angels and these strange banners that twirl up and round with the dialogue written on them! If you put anything like that in film it’s a very very pale imitation. I’m always disappointed it’s not as good as the painting. Yet people seem to be surprised by it!"
Gilliam gathers himself up and flaps some: you half expect helter skelters to pop out of the temples, distorting mirrors to glaze over the eyes.
"What bothers me is that audiences aren’t educated any more into seeing these things. They become visually illiterate and when you put things up there they ooh! And aah! Far more that they ought to. You’re trying to make beautiful images, but they’re not supposed to dominate the thing, they’re just supposed to be the vocabulary within which the story is told. It seems to be accepted in animation. I think we’ve all gotten caught in this world of naturalism being the truth and naturalism isn’t any more truthful that the stuff I do or the stuff Tex Avery does. I mean it’s all artifice."
Peter Greenaway said that British cinema carries on as if the entire history of Western art had been forgotten, overlooked. As if no landscape, no light had ever been taken in.
"British cinema used to be visually amazing. Carol Reed, David Lean, Powell and Pressburger - these are really strong visual artists! And then it disappeared, got lost somewhere and we (note the transatlantic "we"!) went theatrical; but the side of theatre that isn’t really theatre, it’s the Angry Young Man-type of theatre."
Gilliam’s visual splendour is halfway between the swooning art of Greenaway/Jarman and the flash of the US Brit pack. Both camps are capable of producing films which are literally stunning: the image overwhelms, has no life of its own.
"But at least it’s visual! Ridley (Scott) and that mob are basically commercially oriented. I find the shots so beautiful and yet… maybe they’re just too close to commercials and they have no real substance other than their own beauty. Greenaway’s stuff I wish I could sit through because every time I see clips, stills - I love ‘em. Then I watch the film and I lose interest in the thing - because I don’t think he likes people, and he’s got a real problem there because ultimately they’re rather important!
"When I’m running short I just run down to the National Gallery and there’s this incredible tradition of painting and ideas. There’s a whole history out there we should be part of, and I don’t know how many people appreciate all that. I think it’s a very small number. We actually live in a world of peasants: they just don’t know they’re peasants, they don’t till the fields any more. We pretend democracy changed the world and everybody’s more educated and equal - I don’t know if they are."
Forgetting: TV is our shrine of forgetfulness. One thing Freud didn’t bargain for was a childhood weaned on tiny boxed images. The primal image of love is now found in adverts, which means Love as Money: the family unit has been replaced by the phallic car and coffee jar. TV can reduce not just our images of the world, but our world itself - reduce the world to the square of light right in front of you, which doesn’t leave much room for interpretation.
"Television gives you the impression you’re getting information and education and learning something. You look at a commercial and in 30 seconds the number of images that come up is incredible! Except they’re all the same thing: beautiful girl - car - glassy building. OK, visually they’re incredible, but they’re clichés in the worst possible sense. There’s just no content in them: cave paintings are more clever than this stuff! Except it’s done so beautifully you think you’re seeing something. And pop videos too; it’s all flash and filigree.
"It’s one of the reasons I left the States. I’d reached a point where watching television, seeing those images - the beach at sunset, the gulls, the sea and the beautiful girl walking with me because I use the right deodorant or whatever and we’re in love. And being in California I would find myself on a beautiful beach at sunset with the girl and I couldn’t tell whether it was wonderful or whether it was wonderful because it was wonderful and it drove me crazy. The line had become very confused."
We became used to more ‘complex’ - if compressed - visuals, without knowing how the grammar works, how a particular shot works (on) us.
"I don’t know if that’s important or not. That’s like the magic to me, ultimately we’re still just doing a magic trick, and there’s a lot of ways of doing that trick. In Brazil there’s a pull back at the end and I just know it works - and it’s not important whether it’s a tracking shot or whatever. Ultimately, that’s what it’s got to be about: how it works emotionally.
"I really do want to make the leap away from the world everybody has around them. We start at that premise, we say: all right, this isn’t the world you live in; it doesn’t look or behave necessarily the same way. I don’t like the idea of making naturalistic cinema because television does that very well - people wandering around looking just like everybody else does, having everyday experiences just like everybody else…"
Even TV comedy is very set-oriented, the wide open spaces of Python forgotten.
"I’d just use a Durer engraving and the next day we’d be thinking about that for a set. It’s only in retrospect you look at it and realise how extraordinary some of the things we were doing were."
There’s still at times a very explicit Pythonism in his big picture.
" I keep trying to get away from it and in the end always slide back into cheap jokes. Haw haw haw! I think there’s always going to be a battle between the two things. I keep thinking, I just wanted to get rid of it once and for all and finally do a non-funny film, period. But if it isn’t funny, it’ll be very black, it’ll be really dark and that frightens me…"