Faust Things Faust: The Not Entirely Tragic History of Terry Gilliam

By now it should be abundantly clear that Terry Gilliam has never made a deal with the devil. The many obstacles the man has famously encountered during his decades of writing and directing films are unparalleled in magnitude, and his path has been anything but charmed. Ranging from the absurd—the combination of a lead actor’s herniated disc and a flood that decimated the set of The Man Who Killed Don Quixote in 1999—to the heart-breaking—the shocking and untimely death of 28-year-old luminary Heath Ledger during the filming of The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus—his production struggles are the stuff of Hollywood legend. Yet the visionary 69-year-old director has not only endured, but triumphed, having forged a brilliant body of work that pits tragedy against comedy, modernity against antiquity, and vulgarity against virtue, sometimes all in the course of a single scene. He describes himself as “mad” and “obsessed,” but comes across as equal parts good-humored and compassionate, and speaks with a mix 
of baritone confidence and uncalculated humility.

The only American-born founding member of the Monty Python troupe, Gilliam was originally billed as animator but eventually found himself acting in skits and directing such uproarious (or as uproarious as deadpan absurdist British humor gets) full-length Python films like Monty Python and the Holy Grail and The Meaning of Life, as well as the much beloved non-Python feature, Time Bandits.

In 1985, Gilliam released the mesmerizing (if also polarizing) Brazil, a satire of bureaucracy, authoritarianism, industrialism, militarism and technophilia set in a futuristic dystopia that follows a man in pursuit of a woman he knows only in dreams. Gilliam revisits the idea of a man on the run from a vision only he can see in 1991’s The Fisher King, in which Robin Williams’ mad and homeless “Parry” is chased and tormented by a flaming red horseman after Parry’s wife is senselessly gunned down in a Manhattan restaurant. In each of those films—as well as in his viscerally arresting adaptation of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and in his pre- and post-apocalyptic mind-game 12 Monkeys—Gilliam’s men and women are suffocated at the hands of, rather than enabled by modernity; it’s only through flirtations with insanity that any of them get by.

These are tropes that resurface in The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus, wherein Gilliam’s Faustian titular character—who was once immortal but has traded his daughter’s soul in exchange for his own mortality—leads a gypsy-like troupe of traveling players around modern day London, inviting audience members to step onto their rag-tag stage and into a supernatural mirror. The film is a meditation on both morality and mortality, and an astonishing demonstration of Gilliam’s resiliency. Faced with the half-finished movie and the death of Ledger, his leading male and dear friend, Gilliam managed to shoot Ledger’s remaining scenes with performances by Johnny Depp, Jude Law and Colin Farrell, with bizarre and astonishing cohesion.

While promoting the film and strolling about the streets of Rome, Terry Gilliam was kind enough to answer his mobile phone when Filter came calling. He shared his thoughts on what it meant to complete Heath Ledger’s final film, what the Greeks got right about God, and what’s funny about a deal with the devil.

A Conversation with Terry Gilliam

With the two projects—the 40th anniversary of Monty Python and the release of The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus—it’s kind of a banner year for you. Do you feel differently about filmmaking than you did, say, at the beginning of your career?
I’m more resigned to the fact that it’s difficult. Getting money is harder than ever, so this kind of weariness creeps in. But, as far as the work itself, that doesn’t change. I’m probably more relaxed about things and confident, not as mad and as obsessive as I was before…but I’m still pretty mad and obsessive.

When Heath Ledger died and the film was unfinished, you certainly could have been forgiven for shutting down production. Why was it important to you to finish this film?
Well, because it was Heath’s last performance; we’re not going to let that get thrown away. He was far too special a person and actor to abandon it. The fact is, we found a way of making it work, some say brilliantly, as if it was always meant to be that way, but that’s another story.

It was rather seamless. If I hadn’t known the backstory, I would have thought it was by design. How did you arrive at the trio of Depp, Law and  Farrell to play his character’s remaining scenes?
Well, Johnny was one of the first people I called when Heath died, but it was more about commiserating rather than anything else. I didn’t have a plan at that point. I didn’t even know if I wanted to finish it. I was pretty devastated by Heath’s death. And Johnny said, “Well, this is horrible, but whatever you want, I’ll be there.” So, in a sense, it began with Johnny. I hadn’t worked out the solution yet, but we had Johnny there to help, whatever that meant. And once I made the not particularly difficult leap that a person’s face could be different on the other side of the mirror, [it] meant you could have three different actors. So, I just basically started calling friends of Heath’s—that was very important, that they knew him and understood him, because it was a family-related affair. Colin and Jude were able to screw their schedules around to match ours, almost—it was an outrageous dance between their schedules, all three of theirs and ours. It was a very complicated dance, but we certainly got there.

In the film, you confront ideas of morality, fate, good and evil, and it’s all very surreal on one side of the mirror, but all these concepts are personified to the point of almost being real, physical beings. What was the motivation for dealing with those ideas as literal, physical entities?
I’ve always been, I think, mentally a medievalist. And it’s just that demons and physical creatures look like something. I’ve always found that much more interesting than abstract ideas like the id or the superego.

It’s interesting, though, to call yourself a medievalist, because you’re also a master of anachronism, in that you take those old tropes and bring them to a modern setting. What’s behind that method?
That’s the fun part. When we were doing Python or Life of Brian, the ideas were all modern ideas in modern situations, but by throwing them into a period, it puts it into this more abstract form, which makes it easier to have fun and make fun.

So you’re saying it’s more fun?
Yeah [laughs]. And I’m just not particularly interested in doing modern day films. Everybody else is doing that and they are better at it. So, if I can take things into a surreal or hyper-real world—a mythic world—there’s a lot more fun to be had.

In a lot of your films, there’s also this issue of conflicted imagination (The Fisher King and Fear and Loathing) but the idea of battles or journeys that go on inside people’s heads features prominently. Parnassus seems like another, and maybe the most literal distillation of a battle within one’s head or soul. Is that something that concerns you?
Oh, all the time. My wife always says I make the same film, I just change the costumes; maybe I’ve gotten it right this time. We imagine the world and then the world either is or isn’t close to our imagination. What I’m really talking about is trying to get people to think for themselves and not just accept the world as described by the media or films of the moment or the limited views of the world which are insidious in terms of the way we perceive reality.

So you offer a surreal rejoinder to the typical depiction?
Well, it’s not that I’m actually giving answers. But hopefully I’ll encourage people to think for themselves, imagine their version of things. I never really want to give answers, but if I can make a question or two—that’s rather useful, I think.

When I was watching Parnassus, I kept thinking about Faust, Shakespeare’s The Tempest and more specifically, Prospero’s Books, which is a kind of surreal adaptation of that play on film.
Which is a film I know but have never seen [laughs].

So there goes my interpretation…
Well Faust and The Tempest aren’t wrong. I know my Shakespeare a little bit. So, there is The Tempest; there’s King Lear. I was in France the other day and someone said, “Ah, but the ending is Les Miserables.” I hadn’t thought of that, though. The way I tend to work is, basically, I read as much as I can. And then, stuff just sort of stews around in my brain for years. It’s only later when the film’s finished and I start talking to people and people mention different references that I say, “Oh, I wasn’t actually thinking that but clearly it’s in my head somewhere.”

Has there ever been an interpretation or reference that’s struck you as completely far fetched?    
Yeah, 12 Monkeys. I saw a big piece on the web about “JC,” James Cole, the character that Bruce [Willis] plays: JC being Jesus Christ, the 12 Monkeys being the 12 disciples, and that it’s all a huge outrageous religious study. I thought, well that’s kind of interesting…if I’d done that with intention. It was never in my wildest thought to do any of that, but it certainly triggered somebody’s imagination, which is great.

In Parnassus, you don’t deal with Christ at all, but you do have a sort of flawed, even Faustian god in Dr. Parnassus (Christopher Plummer) who makes a deal with the devil, Mr. Nick (Tom Waits), in exchange for immortality. Oddly, that devil possesses a sort of moral compass. Is that an idea that you’re drawn to: flawed gods battling sympathetic devils?
Well, an all-powerful god, or the Judeo-Christian-Islam god, I just don’t buy. I don’t see any proof of that. Yeah, you’ve got two demiurges as opposed to full-blown gods, and the universe is something that has its own rules and marches on. I guess that goes back to Time Bandits, how “The Supreme Being” has a lot of gaps in his power. Certainly at the human level, I can’t see one great god who’s taken any interest in you or me. There’s probably a lot of Parnassuses and Nicks out there.

And they are facing the same struggles we are…
That’s what I liked about the Greeks and their pantheon of gods. They’re much closer to us. They have weaknesses, but they’re not this monotheistic God that most of the world seems to try to worship. The Greeks were smart; they kept their gods at a certain level, so you could still understand them, see their flaws and avoid them. I think Hindus are probably better at this as well.

The reality of being a writer-director is probably similar to being a sort of demi-god—powerful but at the mercy of producers and studios. Do you have any work from, say, the Python days that got scrapped and didn’t get made?
There are several scripts floating around that have never seen the light of day. This script The Defective Detective is just sitting there in my drawer. And there’s Good Omens, which is based on this Terry Pratchett book. There’s Theseus and the Minotaur, a Greek tragedy. There are just pages of notebooks full of ideas that have never coalesced into scripts.

What happens if, years down the road, it looks like some of it will never get made? Will you pass it down to anyone or will it be lost for the ages?
Oh, I don’t know. There’s an archive at Boston University that gets all my stuff, so it’ll be sitting there for others to steal, which will be fine with me.