“I just want them to stop”: how Terry Gilliam fell out of love with his favourite medium
Terry Gilliam has always been Hollywood’s finest purveyor of a unique vein of absurdist fantasy. When he began his career as Monty Python’s animator, he was responsible for the bizarre cartoons that linked the comedy sketches. As his career evolved, he moved into directing, helming singular movies such as Brazil, 12 Monkeys, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Fascinatingly, though, Gilliam has admitted that if things had worked out differently, he could have seen himself making a very different, much more commercial, kind of film. Unfortunately, he fell out of love with the medium somewhere along the way.
When Gilliam was a teenager attending high school in Los Angeles, his first love wasn’t film. Instead, he was an avid comic book fan, especially the strips which appeared every Sunday in newspapers. In 2015, he told Dazed, “The tradition of comic books in the States goes way back to the ’30s, if not earlier. It had always been there. I never really bothered to dig deep into the whys and wherefores – I just liked it.”
In addition to comics, Gilliam was also a devoted fan of Mad magazine, the satirical publication that featured comic strips and cartoons skewering the political figures of the day. In fact, he was so shaped by Mad’s brand of humour that he once declared, “Mad comics inspired everything we ever did.”
His love of comic strips and humour cartoons encouraged Gilliam to pursue his own artistic ambitions, and he began his professional career as a cartoonist and animator. He loved the immediate feedback that he’d get from readers when they looked at his cartoons, explaining, “If people like what you’ve done, they laugh, and you think, ‘That feels good. I’ll do some more.’ It’s as simple as that.”
Nowadays, though, when most people think of comic books, they picture superheroes. While Gilliam read plenty of superhero comics when he was growing up, he maintains they were only part of the comics landscape back then—they didn’t completely dominate it like today. Fascinatingly, though, he did tell Dazed, “If things had gone differently, those are the films I would have ended up making – comic-book films. But it just didn’t pan out that way.”
As strange as it may be to imagine, given Gilliam’s career as a surrealist maverick, he did attempt to adapt one superhero comic to the big screen. In the ’90s, he worked on a script for an adaptation of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ seminal masterpiece Watchmen, which Gilliam called “the War and Peace of graphic novels.” He and writer Charles McKeown tried to fashion a script honouring a comic that was considered unadaptable due to its density of plot and character. Every time Gilliam tried to finagle it into a workable two-hour script, though, he found “it’s just like straight comic book heroes again, and it doesn’t have a real meaning.”
Of course, Zack Snyder finally adapted Watchmen in 2009. However, many critics accused him of stripping the source material of everything that made it different from standard superhero movies, much as Gilliam had feared doing in the ’90s. By that point, though, the Marvel Cinematic Universe had begun, Sam Raimi had made three hugely successful Spider-Man movies, and Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy was conquering the box office. Superheroes were here to stay – and that really bummed Gilliam out.
In 2014, an exhausted Gilliam told Hey U Guys, “I always wanted to make films based on graphic novels because that’s where I come from. Now they’re here. And they are endless, and they are repetitive, and I just want them to stop.” Gilliam qualified his statement, though, by saying that he didn’t necessarily consider all superhero movies bad. In fact, he felt some were well-made and featured great performances. It was simply the cookie-cutter nature of most of them that rankled him. He mused, “The repetition we’re seeing on the big screen now is boring.”
It was a sad statement for someone who began his career in the world of comics and cartoons to make, but Gilliam certainly had a valid point. In fact, he was nearly a decade ahead of the curve, as complaints about the ubiquity of superhero movies have been gaining significant traction in the last few years. What happened, though? What turned him against the medium he had so much love for?
The Zero Theorem auteur theorised, “By the time I’d got into a position to do bigger-budget films, I wasn’t really interested. I guess I had grown out of it.”
He added, “ My mantra has always been, ‘Do what nobody else is doing'”.
