“Fuck that script”: the movie Terry Gilliam hated so much he rewrote it from scratch
If being an auteur means sticking with near-maniacal dedication to a singular, unadulterated vision no matter the cost, Terry Gilliam is the gold standard. He has shown zero compunction about spending three decades trying to adapt an unfilmable novel, tossed out countless projects when no one would finance them in a way that allowed him to complete his precise vision, and probably lost years of life stressing over budgets, practical effects, and script rewrites.
At that time, however, he managed to cobble together a singular filmography—one that may be uneven but that is undeniably marching to the beat of its own drum. Starting his career as the animator and occasional cast member of Monty Python, he branched out into directing when the group made Monty Python and the Holy Grail, an all-time classic that was rife with on-set struggles.
In the 1990s, Gilliam flitted as close to the mainstream as he was capable of with a string of commercially viable movies featuring A-list celebrities. 1991’s The Fisher King starred Robin Williams and Jeff Bridges, 1995’s 12 Monkeys starred Bruce Willis and Brad Pitt, and 1998’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas starred Johnny Depp and Benicio Del Toro.
Based on Hunter S. Thompson’s “true story” novel about a weekend of drug-addled hallucinations in Las Vegas, the surreal premise of the 1998 film was right up Gilliam’s street. But in a 2019 interview with HeyUGuys, the director revealed that the production had not been smooth sailing. By the time he was brought in, the producers had been trying to make the film for more than two decades. Martin Scorsese and Oliver Stone, among others, had been in talks to direct, and it was Alex Cox (director of Repo Man and the Sex Pistols biopic Sid and Nancy) who was finally hired.
The producers brought in Cox out of sheer panic. The clock was ticking on their rights to adapt the book, and they believed he could get the film done and dusted quickly and within budget. Unfortunately, not only was Thompson playing hardball with the deadline, but he was also feeling picky about the script. Unhappy with the version Cox wrote with Thompson scholar Tod Davies, the author advocated for Gilliam to be brought in, and the 12 Monkeys director was equally unimpressed with the state of things.
“We threw that first script out,” he said. “Fuck that script! Take it away.” He wanted to approach the story in an allegorical way, as if the duo at the centre of the film were mimicking the trajectory of Dante’s Inferno, in which the Christian Dante is guided through hell by the Pagan poet Virgil.
Another issue was that he didn’t want the film to be pure excess. “You can’t just have two guys rampaging about Vegas with no shame,” Gilliam explained. Despite his efforts, however, the producers were clearly hoping that that would, in fact, be the crux of the story. “The trailer came along and presented: ‘two wild guys having a wacky drug weekend,’ the director said. “I thought; ‘you fucking fuckers!’”
Gillian completely rewrote the script with Tony Grisoni, but when the film was finally set to be released, the Writer’s Guild refused to remove Cox and Davies from the credits. Even worse, they wouldn’t allow Gilliam and Grisoni to be credited at all, explaining that they had to prove they’d come up with 60% of the script. Given that the script was largely based on a novel, there was no way to prove 60% originality.
Gilliam threatened to insert a short scene before the film that informed audiences that, no matter what the credits said, no writers had been involved in the film, but the Guild finally relented and allowed him and Grisoni to appear with Cox and Davies in the credits. The director would later refer to the process of making Fear and Loathing as “a tedious nightmare.”
