“That old battle”: when Terry Gilliam accused his critics of cinematic illiteracy
Never one to back down from an argument, Terry Gilliam decided very early on in his filmmaking career that he wouldn’t sugarcoat his opinions regardless of who he was giving them to, an approach that’s won him just as many admirers as enemies.
If Gilliam has a bad time making a movie, then everybody will not only find out about it but also discover the exact reasons directly from the horse’s mouth. At times, he can be his own worst enemy when he’s battling back against studio politics, but there’s plenty to be said from an auteur who refuses to bow to the whim of every executive who tries to impose their will on his work.
What can’t be argued is that Gilliam has become synonymous with a troubled production, even if the reasons for such on-set agony aren’t always within his control. From his Monty Python days to the likes of The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, The Brothers Grimm, Brazil, and the notorious 30-year odyssey towards The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, is it even a Gilliam film if there aren’t issues of some kind?
Based on history, the answer is ‘no, not really’. Beyond that, though, the writer and director does enjoy a fractured timeline and some narrative misdirection, which has become another hallmark of his work. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t, but one thing he’ll never stand for is having his movies repeatedly singled out for their narrative problems, especially if people are making those accusations he doesn’t think are qualified to pass judgment.
“That old battle,” he sighed to Film Scouts when yet again addressing the elephant in the room. “I think my films never had a narrative problem. People disagree, but then they’re possibly visually illiterate, certainly cinematically illiterate. Yes, I leap around in time and space. Yes, I like to confuse things. But I don’t actually go out of my way to do so.”
Several of those aforementioned titles, not to mention further Gilliam flights of fancy, including The Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus, Tideland, The Zero Theorem, and even Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas to a certain extent, would disagree. And yet, he still refused to accept that he’s ever fallen victim to overcomplicating his stories when he didn’t need to.
“Perhaps because the visuals are so complex or disturbing or bizarre, people get distracted by them and can’t see that, in fact, the story is fairly straightforward throughout the piece,” he explained. “On the other hand, since I am usually drawn to complex stories, within that context, I think I tell the story reasonably clearly.”
That doesn’t really clear things up, either, so like most of the feuds between Gilliam, his critics, and studio bigwigs, he’s backing himself to the hilt and not giving much of a fuck as to what everybody else has to say.
