In a scene worthy of one of his animated works, Terry Gillam took to a stage covered in crashed paper planes at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival on Sunday to receive its honorary Cristal award and give a masterclass about his animated works.
Gilliam was last in Annecy, where its audience has a tradition of bombarding the stage with paper planes, in 1975 with Miracle of Flight. The anarchic comedy about mankind’s different attempts to fly debuted in the shorts competition but did not win a prize.
“Do you know how long it’s taken me to get this f**king award… They’ve finally let me in… I think they know I might not be around next year,” joked the director as he received the trophy.
The French lakeside animation festival, running from June 9 to 14, is set to welcome close to 16,000 animation professionals this year, many of them on the hunt for their next commission.
Gilliam raised a cheer from the young crowd packed into the 1,000-seat theatre of Annecy’s Bonlieu cultural complex for the masterclass, when he revealed that aside from the honorary award the main reason he was at the festival was to scout talent for his next film.
“I’m looking for a guy or a girl, a man or woman, whichever is the correct word, or adult or ‘adultess’… I met just last night with some very interesting people. I’m trying to do something that is not my style of animation… some of it’s stop motion, some is going to be digital… Annecy’s got some of the greatest animators on the planet, so I’m just here to meet people.”
The movie in question is biblical comedy The Carnival at the End of Days, which Gilliam is aiming to shoot next January with Johnny Depp, Jeff Bridges, Adam Driver and Jason Momoa in the cast, according to fresh details revealed by the director in an interview with French cinema magazine Premiere last week.
Depp – who previously appeared in his Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998) and The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus (2009), is set to play Satan, who in a reversal of roles, finds himself trying to save humanity in the face of a punitive God played by Jeff Bridges.
Quizzed in the masterclass on his next projects, Gilliam reconfirmed the film was in the works.
“Apparently I read in Premiere magazine, which is a French magazine I believe, that I’m doing a film with Johnny Depp, Jeff Bridges and Adam Driver… I’ll come back next year and we’ll see whether I was lying or not,” he said.
Although Gilliam has never made a full-blown animated feature across his 55-year-career, the cut-out animations he created for Monty Python’s Flying Circus, The Life of Brian (1979) and The Meaning of Life (1983) have had a seminal influence on generations of animators.
Conversely, Gilliam’s infamous 1988 production The Adventures of Baron Munchausen was heavily influenced by Czech director Karel Zeman’s 1961 picture The Fabulous Baron Munchausen, which mixed live action and animation.
Revealing a childhood love of animation sparked by Walt Disney movies, Minneapolis-born, L.A.-raised Gilliam recalled his early career in New York under the mentorship of American cartoonist Harvey Kurtzman as assistant editor on his magazine Help!.
“The great thing is, it paid me $2 a week less than I would have gotten on the dole but I was with a man I loved, who I learned so much from, playing with all the various forms of comedy, whether it’s written comedy, comic books, or beautiful drawings,” said Gilliam.
“This was sort of the mecca of all the cartoonists in America, especially college magazine cartoonists… So Bob Crumb, Robert Crumb, became my best friend. Gilbert Shelton, The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, he was rooming with us for a while… we had had no money, but we were having a ball.”
After the magazine folded in 1965, Gilliam set off to hitchhike around Europe and ended up in the UK. Initially making a living as magazine art director and cartoonist, he secured a game-changing commission in 1968 to make an animated segment for We Have Ways of Making You Laugh, poking fun at celebrity DJ Jimmy Young.
“I was on this television show where I would draw cartoons, caricatures of the guests as they came on,” recounted Gilliam. “One of the guys in the show had collected several months’ worth of puns that connected one song to the next by this very famous disc jockey. They wanted to do something with it and they didn’t know what to do.”
“I said, ‘Well, let me make an animated film’. They assumed I knew what I was talking about. Life goes on like that. Assume nothing, my friends, is all I can say… The only thing I could think of was cut-out animation because I only had two weeks and I think there was about 100 pounds to do it. All I did was cut out pictures of this disc jockey, cut his mouth out and got him talking.”
Gilliam said it was not long before work captured the attention of Monty Python co-founders – Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Eric Idle, Terry Jones and Michael Palin.
“This is around the birth of Python There were only three television stations in England at the time, BBC One, BBC Two and ITV. So people were bound to bump into what you do because there were so few choices and nobody had ever seen that kind of cut out animation in England. And literally overnight, I became a famous animator,” said the director.
Gilliam said that Miracle of Flight had been born out of a commission for a show by late UK comedian Marty Feldman. That same year, Gilliam had also cut his directors teeth on Monty Python and the Holy Grail with Terry Jones.
“In those days, I just worked frenetically. I would probably have at least one, if not two, all-nighters every week. A lot of people, especially with the Python stuff, thought I was on drugs. But no, I was on lack of sleep. It’s better than drugs and cheaper,” he said.
Gilliam said he had enjoyed the constant pressure and pushing things through without thinking too much about the process.
“Double thinking is the worst thing because you start doubting your idea. It happens to all of us, and especially if you’re surrounded by other people, like agents and studio executives. They live in a world of complete neurosis… but all I know is that all the mistakes I’ve made have never been as bad as the mistakes the highly paid executives have made.”
Gilliam said he had decided very early on in his career that he only wanted to work on productions where he had complete control and creative freedom.
“It’s a bit arrogant, but it simplified life. So many doors just shut in my face after that. You say, ‘I want total control’, doors shut, and then the big money runs away,” he said.
“These cartoons were relatively cheap to make. Films are obviously more expensive, which means more people being frightened about getting it right. When I look at what I did and what Python did with nobody telling us, ‘You can’t do that’, we produced a pretty incredible bit of work, which is very hard to do these days.”
Gilliam also looked back at his experiences on fantasy adventure The Adventures of Baron Munchausen which went wildly over budget and then bombed at the box office, losing Columbia Pictures $38 million.
“It was completely out of control, even though I had storyboarded the whole film. The bond company was threatening to sue me for fraud and misrepresentation,” he reminisced. “My wife was pregnant with our third child, and they were threatening to take over my house.”
“My memory was very skewed. They just released a new 4K version of it, and I had to supervise. Watching it again, I’m just, ‘F**k me, this is good’”.
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