How Terry Gilliam reacted to the news of his own death: “It was a bad year”
Aside from Werner Herzog, it’s hard to think of a filmmaker who has put themselves in harm’s way for the sake of their own lofty artistic ambitions more frequently than Terry Gilliam.
And if you’re including severe mental anguish and financial stress in the definition of harm’s way, Gilliam undoubtedly takes the cake. The former Monty Python animator turned his talents to directing in 1975 with Monty Python and the Holy Grail, a film which is an indisputable classic that nearly cost the group their sanity.
Things on set have only gotten more chaotic for Gilliam. Perhaps he is a magnet for bad luck, or he’s just too stubborn to throw in the towel when all signs point him in that direction, but whatever the reason, he’s wrestled with quite a lot over the years, from the death of one of his lead actors to weather disasters of Biblical proportions to accusations of unsafe working environments. Python co-star Eric Idle once said that agreeing to be in a Gilliam film was “fucking madness”, and advised that people just watch them instead.
All of this has given Gilliam plenty of scope to fall deathly ill from stress or be killed in some kind of on-set disaster. The latter seems like the most likely scenario. It’s a miracle, therefore, that he’s made it well into his eighties, and one publication seemed so surprised by this fact that they pre-emptively killed him off. In 2015, Variety published news of his death under the heading, “Monty Python’s Terry Gilliam dies at XXX.”
The director was asked about this colossal fuckup nine years later in a Guardian interview, and he responded with characteristic levity. “I couldn’t believe I died in a Vin Diesel movie!” he said, referring to the 2002 film xXx in which Mr Diesel plays an extreme sports athlete recruited by the government to infiltrate a Russian gang. “I thought it was very funny.”
Of course, the article did have real-world consequences. His family had to undergo the panic of seeing the headline and believing that it might have been true, and Gilliam himself had to come to terms with the fact that the content of the announcement was a bit underwhelming. “It’s one thing to read your own obituary,” he allegedly wrote to the publication, “But it was as bad as your reviews of my films.”
He contacted his agent and his lawyer to see what they could get out of it. Unfortunately, they were prepared to handle the situation like professionals, which wasn’t the type of thing that Gilliam had in mind.
In the end, he demanded that Variety send him a case of Chateau Margeaux, one bottle of which can set you back a cool $1,000. They humoured him, but unfortunately for Gilliam, the case he received “was a bad year.”
They might not be able to fix that faux pas, but hopefully they’ve at least rewritten his obituary by now. It’s the least they could do, especially after staying true to form by calling his only movie of the past decade “a loud, belligerent, barely coherent mess.”
