The Gene Hackman movie Terry Gilliam walked out of: “You’re wasting too much of my life”
Few filmmakers have run afoul of studio executives more often than Terry Gilliam, but that bullishness is part of who he is. He knows what he’s getting himself into, and so do the people he’s working with, yet those disagreements continue to rear their heads anyway.
Looking back over Gilliam’s career, it’s a lot more surprising when he successfully completes a production from start to finish without any setbacks. Even during his Monty Python days, the legendary comedy troupe suffered their fair share of issues when they entered the testing world of feature-length production.
The infamous Weinstein siblings were preceded by their reputation for meddling long before they hired Gilliam to helm The Brothers Grimm, and to the shock of absolutely nobody, the interfering studio moguls and the hard-headed auteur were at loggerheads for the duration of the shoot.
There’s also the issues that plagued The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, Gilliam’s belief that 12 Monkeys star Bruce Willis had a mouth that looked like an arsehole, Hunter S Thompson wreaking havoc on the set of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and the legendary trials and tribulations he went through in order to finally drag The Man Who Killed Don Quixote over the finish line after three decades of trying.
When Gilliam sets his mind to a film, he will do everything in his power to make it through to the end, come hell or high water. However, when he’s only an audience member, he’ll quite happily get up and leave if it can’t hold his interest. One such offender boasted the heavyweight pairing of Academy Award-winning legend Gene Hackman and Don’t Look Now director Nicolas Roeg, and he hated it.
“I’ve blocked it from my mind, but I got up and walked out because I was like, ‘You’re wasting too much of my life,'” he told The Playlist. “Oh, a Nic Roeg film with Gene Hackman and Theresa Russell, up in the Klondikes prospecting for gold. What was its name?”
So unimpressed he couldn’t even remember what it was called, Roeg’s 1983 effort Eureka stars Hackman as an Alaskan prospector who becomes rich beyond his wildest dreams, only for his idyllic life on a private Caribbean island to be disrupted by gangsters, occultists, voodoo, orgies, and violence so graphic the film was slapped with an X-rating.
Eureka has assaults by blowtorch, murder trials, clairvoyance, and decapitations, but even that, combined with all of the above, wasn’t enough to keep Gilliam seated until the credits. In his defence, audiences didn’t care either after it earned an embarrassing $123,000 at the box office, but Danny Boyle is of the opposite mind after naming Hackman and Roeg’s psychological mystery as one of his five favourite flicks of all time.
