The cursed movie rescued from disaster by Sean Connery: “He literally saved my ass”
Unlike many of his contemporaries, Sean Connery never showed much interest in diversifying his output beyond his day job of being a globally recognised and enduringly popular movie star.
Whereas countless on-camera performers have dabbled in writing, producing, and directing to significant extents during their careers, the original James Bond wasn’t one of them. He was never credited on a screenplay, and the closest he came was when his pitch for an oddball 007 outing never came to fruition.
The only thing he ever directed was the one-hour TV documentary The Bowler in the Bunnet, which aired in 1967. Outside of a handful of executive-producing credits stretching across decades, the only films he was credited on as a producer were Entrapment and Finding Forrester, which were released in 1999 and 2000, respectively.
However, he wasn’t completely against the idea of rolling up his sleeves and wading into the choppy waters of productions, as Terry Gilliam was glad to discover when they worked together on 1981’s cult favourite fantasy Time Bandits. In fact, Connery’s involvement was largely predicated on fandom and favour, even if he became more invested than he would have imagined at the start.
The star was cast after producer Denis O’Brien went out of his way to track the Scotsman down on a golf course, and he was swayed by his love of Gilliam’s Monty Python days. Not only that, but he refused to take a salary upfront for his performance as Agamemnon, instead negotiating a deal that would see him earn a percentage of the profits should Time Bandits win big at the box office.
As is regularly the case with any Gilliam-directed effort, though, problems were afoot. Securing financing was an issue, with George Harrison having to remortgage his office so that his HandMade Films could back the project. Money was tight from then on, and matters weren’t helped by a tight shooting schedule, malfunctioning props, and the filmmaker’s ambition getting the better of him.
“He literally saved my ass,” Gilliam confessed to The Hollywood Reporter after revealing how Connery had taken a look at the script and shot list before informing the director the easiest way to ensure Time Bandits went off with as few hitches as possible was to streamline the entire thing and get rid of anything that didn’t need to be captured on camera.
“Sean looked at my storyboards and says, ‘Forget about that, you’re not going to get this done, kid,'” Gilliam shared. “So I started throwing pages out. Anything he said, it was, ‘Yes, sir’. I suddenly felt like I was in the hands of an incredible actor with great experience.” He even admitted that the reason he managed to get through Time Bandits at all was “thanks to his pragmatism and not my ambition.”
Fortunately for Gilliam, Harrison’s office, and Connery’s pay packet, Time Bandits recouped its budget more than eight times over from cinemas and ensured a movie that flirted perilously close to disaster became a success for all involved.
