The movie Terry Gilliam will always regret never making: “I got totally disillusioned”
In 1991, Terry Gilliam watched as The Fisher King became by far and away the biggest commercial success of his post-Monty Python directing career. The comedy drama boasted two big stars, Robin Williams and Jeff Bridges, and was the most grounded in reality of any of Gilliam’s films thus far, even if it did still weave in some fantasy elements.
In the wake of the film making $72.4 million at the box office and notching five Oscar nominations, Gilliam was in as powerful a position as he’d ever enjoyed in Hollywood. Therefore, when it was announced in 1992 that his follow-up film would be The Defective Detective, in which a hardboiled New York detective suffers a nervous breakdown and winds up in a child’s fantasy world, everything seemed set for another hit.
To Gilliam’s eternal frustration, though, instead of becoming his seventh film, The Defective Detective fell into decades of development hell. He tried to make it twice in the early ’90s, but it fell through, so he made 1995’s 12 Monkeys instead. That Bruce Willis/Brad Pitt sci-fi thriller became an even bigger critical and commercial hit than The Fisher King, racking up an excellent $168.8 million worldwide, and once again, the world was Gilliam’s oyster. Naturally, he once again turned to The Defective Detective, and this time came as close as he ever would to actually getting a green light.
Seizing the momentum of the moment, Gilliam teamed up with The Fisher King writer Richard LaGravenese on a new, improved version of The Defective Detective, and the project was snapped up by producer Scott Rudin and Paramount Pictures. The movie even had heavyweight names like Nicolas Cage, Nick Nolte, Cameron Diaz, Sean Connery, and Danny DeVito attached to the project, but it didn’t get over the line yet again. In 1997, Paramount seemingly had had enough and put the project in turnaround, and with that, it faded into the ether.
Battling against studios may be par for the course of directing, but it left Gilliam exhausted. “The worst thing about development hell is that nobody says no,” he revealed in Gilliam on Gilliam. “You’re living on hope the whole time. You want to do it, and they string you along. This went on for two or three years.”
This entire process was a test of Gilliam’s mettle because he’d always prided himself on being a fiercely independent soul. He was never one to bow to a studio executive or bean counter’s whims to get a film made, because he always wanted to make his films, his way. This period went on so long, though, that he worried it would be endless if he didn’t compromise even a little bit. Eventually, against his better judgment, he and LaGravenese did make budget-minded changes to the script.
However, when Rudin began throwing his two cents into the writing space, Gilliam decided enough was enough. “I didn’t get on with Scott, who was trying to interfere creatively,” he remembered. “He wanted to feel involved, and I wasn’t interested in that. His job was just to get us the money. End of story.”
After the movie was thrown into the abyss in ’97, Gilliam admitted, “I got totally disillusioned with that project and put it to one side.” When he looked at the script again after 12 Monkeys‘ release, though, he realised that his instincts had been correct, and that he shouldn’t have made any changes to the script, because the alterations made it worse. “We were only a few steps away from a really good script,” he claimed, “but we’d spent months in the wrong place, and it was disturbing to discover how influenced I’d been when I thought I wasn’t influenceable.”
As of today, The Defective Detective still hasn’t seen the light of day, despite Gilliam revealing he and LaGravenese reshaped it as a six-episode miniseries in 2015, in the hopes it could be greenlit as an Amazon Prime Video original. This didn’t come to pass, but in 2025, the 84-year-old director told the BFI he still hadn’t given up hope. “It’s the film I really want to get done before I kick the bucket,” he chuckled morbidly. “It’s been lost these many years in the bowels of one particular studio, very hard to get out. But there’s a change in that studio. We’ll see.”
