I see Terry Gilliam is to receive a BAFTA fellowship this Sunday. I just found this on the Telegraph website:
Bafta awards 2009: Terry Gilliam on his Bafta fellowship and the death of Heath Ledger Terry Gilliam talks to The Telegraph about his Bafta fellowship, Monty Python, The Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus and the death of star Heath Ledger.
By Cassandra Jardine
Terry Gilliam's best guess as to why this year, of all years, he has been honoured with a Bafta fellowship is that it is a gesture of "sympathy". Voters must, he assumes, have felt sorry for him because his latest film, The Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus, has been hit by three catastrophes. "There have been many human sacrifices involved," says the director with one of the zany laughs that lard his conversations.
The most recent disaster struck this autumn. Gilliam, who is 68, was standing outside a restaurant in Soho when a car backed into him. "Yes, a man can fly," observed a bystander as he flew past. He broke his back, but seems fine now, despite a cracked vertebra and dislodged disc. "Yeah, I'm a lizard," he says, cackling.
Before that, his producer Bill Vince, died suddenly, so Gilliam's daughter Amy – a 30-year-old fledgling producer – had to take over. "No matter how bad it gets," he says, "we keep the jokes going."
But he cannot maintain his hilarity when talking about the death of Heath Ledger, the star of the film.
"I was in Canada," he says, thinking back a year. "We had finished shooting on Saturday night. Heath went to New York and was due to be joining us in Vancouver on the Friday. But on Tuesday (January 22) my daughter told me to come into the office. She wanted to show me something. 'No, I'm too busy,' I said, but there it was on the BBC website: Heath Ledger was dead. It was horrible. It was as if half the world had collapsed."
Ledger, 28 when he died, was not just an actor to Gilliam, he was the finest actor of his generation. They had worked together on The Brothers Grimm, where he had also been impressed by Ledger's sweetness of character and his skill at chess. "It just isn't possible that he's dead," he says. "There's nothing he can't do, it just flows out of him with ease and grace. He lifted everybody. He wasn't like Marlon Brando or James Dean or any of the more neurotic actors, his was all positive energy. I knew he was tired but that Saturday he had been doing all his own stunts, he was leaping off wagons, indestructible. On no level did his death make sense."
Gilliam's first thought was that the announcement was a publicity stunt for the Batman film The Dark Knight, in which Ledger plays the Joker, and for which he has since received Bafta and Oscar nominations. "That says a lot about the ruthlessness of the studio marketing departments," he says mischievously. Then began the rumours about a drug overdose. "Trying to pin that on him enraged me. It was so banal. I knew he was taking painkillers and Valium, but you have to take buckets of them before they knock you out. The only way I can understand it is that he must have woken up in the middle of the night and, in a groggy way, thought, 'I'm awake because I didn't take my pills,' and taken a lot more."
Once he had accepted the death, Gilliam faced not only a personal loss, but a business problem. Ledger was 45 per cent of the way through filming Parnassus, about a strange travelling theatre in modern London. The money men were ready to scrap the film but Gilliam wasn't. "It's interesting how, in extremis, you think clearly. It took me a week to figure out a solution. I thought about starting again with another actor, but Heath was so extraordinary I didn't want to do that. I then looked at how to do the remaining scenes without Heath, and realised that, since his character goes through a magic mirror three times, we could get three actors to play the role."
But who? He had worked with Johnny Depp on The Man who Killed Don Quixote, another of his disaster-prone films. "I called him. He said, 'I'm in.'" Next he asked Jude Law, who would have played Ledger's role had he not been busy. He too was up for it. He found his third substitute at Ledger's funeral. "I didn't know he was a friend," he thought, seeing Colin Farrell. Farrell also accepted.
Not only did the three actors agree to finish their friend's film, they have donated their fees to Ledger's three-year-old child Matilda, whose mother, the actress Michelle Williams, had been his co-star on Brokeback Mountain. "They behaved heroically. If anything positive has come out of this it is to see good people being decent." The film, due out this autumn, will be another surreal creation in the vein that has been Gilliam's hallmark since he made animations for Monty Python in the late Sixties.
Gilliam was the odd one out of the group, the lone American among the Brits: John Cleese, Michael Palin, Eric Idle, Terry Jones and Graham Chapman; a visual man among wordsmiths. He had met Cleese in New York when working as an animator and strip cartoonist; he moved to Britain in protest against the Vietnam War. Here he dreamt up the giant squelching foot and other surreal effects that helped make Monty Python's Flying Circus the biggest popular culture event in Britain after the Beatles.
"George [Harrison] was always convinced that the spirit of the Beatles went into Python. The year they broke up was the year we came together - 1969. George was our patron. When Bernie Delfont read the script of Life of Brian and pronounced it blasphemous just as we were getting on the plane to film in Tunisia, he rescued it. After that we formed HandMade Films and produced Time Bandits, which is still the most famous film we've done."
Unlike the Beatles, Monty Python didn't end acrimoniously. "We just got bored of each other," he says. By then Gilliam had married Maggie Weston, the make-up artist on Python, and set up home in north London with her and their three children. Two-and-a-half years ago he renounced his American citizenship in "disillusionment" with the Bush years, but he retains a pigtail which makes him look like an ageing hippy.
Surprisingly, since his films are full of trippy effects - such as the heating system gone mad in Brazil - he has never taken drugs. "Ten years ago, when I made Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, I thought I ought to try acid, but I never dared because I knew I would never distinguish between fantasy and reality. It was only 15 years ago that I discovered I couldn't fly. I have such a 'sense memory' of flying around the world at the height of a table that when someone asked me to show them, I really thought I could do it."
He doesn't need drugs to stimulate his imagination. Dali, Ernst and Mad magazine did that for him when he was a teenager; coming to Europe, the paintings of Breughel and Bosch blew him away. But he was always hyper-imaginative. As a child in rural Minnesota, he spent hours fantasising in the three-storey tree-house that his carpenter father built. After the family moved to Los Angeles when he was 11, he was thrilled by Disneyland.
Like Barack Obama, he won a scholarship to Occidental, a Presbyterian college for high-fliers in California. There Gilliam the polymath read physics, then fine arts, and finally political science, and relished the practical jokes played by richer kids. "They took a car to pieces and assembled it in someone's room. They filled a room with paper. Another time they took the hinges off a door, and attached a weight to it, so that, when opened, it flew across the room."
Until the age of 18 he had been set to become a missionary. That ended when he discovered that his humour wasn't appreciated in church. "What kind of God is this who can't take a joke?" he thought. That tension remains deep-seated: his films have been about chaos and order, freedom and control. "I hate authority, but you need structure," he explains. This anarchic spirit has not always endeared him to Hollywood's bean counters - he calls them "hollow, desperate people". JK Rowling, a Python fan, wanted him to direct the Harry Potter films, "but the studio was never going to let me".
People like working with Gilliam because, however dire his situation, he always finds something to laugh about. Somehow, he manages to scrape together a budget and a starry cast to transfer his latest vision to film. The last series of disasters occurred when he was making his Quixote film in the late Nineties - first the lead actor fell ill, then the set was washed away in a flood. "After that, Hollywood loved me again because I was a victim."
With Dr Parnassus losing its star, producer and nearly its director too, he is now once again being lauded by the film establishment. For all his iconoclastic talk, he seems to be enjoying it enormously.
The Orange British Academy Film Awards on Feb 8 begin on BBC Two from 8pm, continuing on BBC One from 9pm. A preview show will be broadcast on BBC Three from 7pm.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/baftas/4437378/Bafta-awards-2009-Terry-Gilliam-on-his-Bafta-fellowship-and-the-death-of-Health-Ledger.html
