The ‘Monty Python’ scene that destroyed the camera
Even though it’s regularly held up as one of the greatest comedies ever made, the brains behind Monty Python and the Holy Grail have been happy to admit they were resolutely ill-equipped and under-prepared for making a feature film.
Co-directors Terry Gilliam and Terry Jones had never helmed a movie before but decided the best way to embark upon the steepest possible learning curve was to dive right in and pick it up on the fly. That’s reflective of the troupe’s anarchic nature as a whole, and the production was unsurprisingly gripped by several predicaments stemming from their lack of funds and experience.
The thrifty budget of under £200,000 was cobbled together from a myriad of assorted investors, including Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull, and Elton John, among others. Still, the investment didn’t stretch far enough to afford more than one camera, which inevitably suffered from malfunctions on the very first day of shooting.
Descending upon Scotland’s Glencoe region, the ‘Bridge of Death’ sequence was first on the schedule, only for technical problems to arise on the first take on Holy Grail. As Gilliam shared in a making-of documentary, panic immediately set in when the novice crew couldn’t even capture a single frame of footage without incident.
“The first couple of days, we just sort of leaped into it. Immediately, we, first of all, had chosen an impossible location, about a half a mile up Glen Coe, so everything had to be hunked by sherpas up the mountain,” he explained. “We got up there, the very first shot of the film, the big moment, the camera turns and it jams.”
Being the only camera they had at their disposal, the circumstances were far from ideal, especially when the camera wouldn’t sync up with the audio once it was back up and running. To ensure that at least some work was getting done, close-ups that didn’t require any dialogue or external sounds were filmed.
“So we didn’t have a sound camera, and all of our great laid plans were suddenly up in the air,” Gilliam continued. “We panicked, and we just had to try and get a film made suddenly on the spot because we had this incredible location, no camera and no experience; that’s the worst thing.”
That early mishap was made all the more ironic by the ending of Monty Python and the Holy Grail featuring Graham Chapman’s Arthur and Jones’ Bedevere being arrested and breaking a camera. It’s something that would have given the crew flashbacks to their fateful first day of production when they’d embarked on an epic trek to ring in the first day’s shooting on their movie, only for disaster to strike.
