Terry Gilliam names the movies that changed his life
Though Terry Gilliam first came to the public’s attention as the only American member of the British comedy troupe Monty Python, he eventually spread his creative wings into fields outside the realms of humour, delivering some brilliant works of cinema in the process.
For instance, the realm of science fiction has profited greatly as a result of Gilliam’s prowess as a director, including his efforts Brazil and 12 Monkeys, while one of the most brilliant comedy movies of the 1990s, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, also arrived due to Gilliam’s talent.
Still, just like any director worth their salt, Gilliam saw a handful of movies when he was younger that undoubtedly changed his life. It’s often the movies that have the biggest impact on us in our childhood or adolescence that drive us towards becoming involved in the industry, as Gilliam found well.
Discussing the first in an interview with The Playlist, Gilliam noted, “Not quite an epiphany, but there was Paths of Glory,” referring, of course to the 1957 anti-war film directed by Stanley Kurbick, based on the novel of the same name by Humphrey Cobb. The film saw Kirk Douglas play a commanding officer of a group of French soldiers who refuse to take part in a suicidal offence, leading Colonel Dax to defend them from charges of cowardice.
Describing the time he first saw Paths of Glory during a Saturday matinee showing somewhere in the San Fernando Valley, Gilliam explained, “Parents would dump their kids at the cinema, and I was probably 14, something like that, and there it was, this film that was about injustice.”
“It was two things,” he added. “First here was technology that I’d never been aware of, the tracking shots through the trenches which of course I copied in Brazil, but I’d never been aware of the camera before that film.” The technical side of Paths of Glory was certainly something that woke Gilliam up to the possibilities of film, and who better to show him that the legendary Stanley Kubrick?
However, beyond the film’s technical prowess, there was also something in Paths of Glory that showed Gilliam the true power of cinematic storytelling and its ability to provoke thought. He noted, “The second thing was that you talk about injustice in the film, you could talk about big themes, ideas.”
Indeed, as with many of Kubrick’s best movies, Paths of Glory looked at an important idea like injustice and explored it through a cinematic lens. Kubrick was not the only iconic director who left a deep impression on Gilliam, though, as he also spoke of the important impact of Japanese film legend Akira Kurosawa.
“That, and Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai because that was just thrilling stuff,” Gilliam said in reference to Kurosawa’s stunning 1954 epic samurai action movie, which tells of a group of villagers that hires a band of masterless samurai in order to protect their hard-earned crops from rampant local bandits.
Seven Samurai is widely considered one of the greatest movies ever made, so it’s easy to see why it left such a mark on Gilliam, who noted,
“You suddenly saw the way he used the camera, slow motion, the fights suddenly going into slow motion. He was playing with so many of the techniques that afterwards everyone copied.”
