Down an alley in Covent Garden, on a building that was once a banana warehouse, there is a blue plaque. “Monty Python, Film Maker, Lived Here, 1976-1
Down an alley in Covent Garden, on a building that was once a banana warehouse, there is a blue plaque. “Monty Python, Film Maker, Lived Here, 1976-1987,” reads the inscription. It’s simple to miss: the plaque is not at eye level as they normally are, but up on the first floor, almost as if the blue plaque committee lost confidence in their uncharacteristic joke. Or perhaps John Cleese put it up.
Terry Gilliam arrives. I like his jacket. It looks like it’s been stitched together from bits of blankets. “Me too,” he says. “I got it 30 years ago in a secondhand store in New York.” We’re going to wander around London, revisiting places that have played significant parts in his career, as he approaches his 85th birthday.
The mother and son who worked the hotdog stall were filthy, totally Dickensian. I was in love with this place
The dates on the plaque are right, he thinks. After the success of 1975’s Monty Python and the Holy Grail, which Gilliam co-directed (with Terry Jones), they had money. So he, Michael Palin and special effects whiz Julian Doyle rented this building. On the ground floor, they recorded the Monty Python albums. Upstairs was a studio where they did some of the effects for Life of Brian, like the spaceship crash. “We went down to the local magic shop, bought exploding cigars, emptied the gunpowder, then broke a lightbulb and put it on the filament.” Boom. Gilliam giggles at the memory. He giggles a lot, a childish, naughty giggle. I was half-expecting a grumpy venerable man. “At home I am,” he admits. “This is a performance.”
Where it began … the blue plaque on the venerable banana warehouse. Photograph: David Levene/The Guardian
The area is much gentrified. He tells me about a mother and son who used to prepare their hotdog stall here, before wheeling it to Leicester Square. “They were filthy, totally Dickensian. I was in love with this place.” And over there was an armourer, “making armour the old way, pounding away on steel”.
Really? It sounds like he’s recalling scenes from his films, but I check later and a New York Times piece from 1978 also mentions the Covent Garden armourer. Now it’s all high-end coffee shops and hair salons. What was once the Python’s warehouse is now Neal’s Yard Remedies, currently being refurbished. A workman notices Gilliam looking up at the plaque and asks who he is. “Terry Gilliam.” The man nods, but not knowingly. Wrong generation.
After arriving on a boat from the US in 1968, Gilliam’s career really took off with the TV comedy sketch show Monty Python’s Flying Circus. I wonder if he felt an outsider? They’d all been to Oxford or Cambridge while he was, in his own words, “a monosyllabic Minnesota farm boy”, albeit one with a talent for animation.
“I was in awe. They were so clever with words, great performers. I was just this guy cutting up pieces of paper and mucking around. But my sense of humour was like theirs, even though mine was more visual. That’s the thing about Python: the chemistry of the six of us. We were different, we fought, but the combination produced an inexplicable chemical magic.” Who could have known the only thing lacking would be a giant stampy foot?
‘I was in awe’ … Gilliam, far right, with the Pythons. Photograph: Python/Sportsphoto/Allstar
Originally credited as animator, Gilliam was soon an integral Python, going on to co-direct Holy Grail, which led to a whole novel chapter of making his own films. This building we’re standing outside is part of that chapter: he cut his 1985 satirical Orwellian fantasy Brazil here and cast Time Bandits, the film that preceded Brazil in his Trilogy of Imagination. We talk and walk. “Luckily I’m not recognisable like Cleese or Palin,” he says. He likes to talk to people though, stopping for a chat with a woman in a key-cutting booth. “Keep cutting those keys,” he tells her.
Gilliam has nominal aphasia, meaning he struggles to remember the names of things. Once he couldn’t remember the name of his wife (it’s Maggie Weston – they met when she was a makeup artist on Monty Python). So much of ageing, he says, is regressive. “I’m actually regressing back to the clay that God uses to make Adam. What does Adam do when he gets going? He has to name everything? I’m doing the opposite. I’m un-naming everything!” The nominal aphasia might have something to do with a recent stroke. Gilliam didn’t know it was a stroke at the time, thought he was going blind, he tells an amusing anecdote about walking into an concealed man.
We are at our next stop: the London Coliseum on St Martin’s Lane. Our route is planned around geography rather than along a timeline, so we’ve jumped to 2011, when Gilliam directed Berlioz’s The Damnation of Faust here. “I know nothing about opera. I’d probably seen one or maybe two maximum in my whole life.” But he was persuaded to do it. He set Faust in Nazi Germany, though had to tone it down when the production moved to Berlin. “They were very nervous about Faust in hell, with Hitler so prominent.”
‘I know nothing about opera’ … where Gilliam directed The Damnation of Faust. Photograph: David Levene/The Guardian
The security guard isn’t keen to let us in. Maybe he doesn’t believe that this guy with a rat-tail haircut in an venerable patchwork jacket once directed an opera here. While phone calls are made, Gilliam says, “I can show you where a good place to piss is,” and disappears down another alley.
Ew. Yes, it stinks. I’m cheerful to report we don’t add to the stench: Gilliam just wants to show me a bit of proper London. It’s quite a contrast to the ornate Edwardian splendour of the Coliseum interior when we’re eventually allowed in. His Faust was a massive success. “I was so proud – and 41% of the audience had never been to an opera before. They were coming in jeans. My happiest moment was on the last day. In the queue for tickets, a fight broke out! I thought, ‘Yes, we’ve made it!’”
On our way to the final stop, Gilliam says he sees his life as a fairytale. “There’s the king and knights doing their thing. There’s the lovely maid who’s virtuous and being abducted all the time, and witches waiting. It’s all there.”
His last film, The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, took 25 years to make because he kept running out of money. “Then my daughter met a lady who, late in life, had come into a lot of money. She had been following my career – or lack of it – and she gave us three and a half million euros, just like that. A Fairy Godmother came into our life. You’re going to the ball, Terry!”
‘He was going to be the finest actor of his generation’ … Heath Ledger in The Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus. Photograph: AP
We arrive not at a ball but at a pub, the Horseshoe in Clerkenwell where, in 2008, Gilliam shot a scene for The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus. The film follows a travelling theatre troupe whose leader, played by Christopher Plummer, is both wise and childlike and has more than a hint of Gilliam about him. Gilliam says he identifies more with Don Quixote. “It’s about a man who sees reality in a more noble beautiful way, constantly failing and smashed down, but you keep getting up. That’s the task.”
Richard the landlord greets Gilliam warmly, and has fond memories of when Doctor Parnassus’s strange travelling theatre came to town. But a sadness hangs over the project. Heath Ledger also starred in the film – the last he ever made. Gilliam wants to show me where they had their last conversation and leads me to the men’s toilet. “So I’m here, having a piss, and Heath comes in and stands over there.” He indicates the other end of the urinal. “I’m happy pissing away and he says, ‘Terry.’ I turned and he had this ridiculous mask and clown makeup on. He says, ‘We’ve got to stop meeting like this.’ What a place to say goodbye.”
Two days later Ledger was dead, having taken an accidental overdose of prescription drugs in his New York apartment. He was 28, although Gilliam says he always seemed much older. “Everybody who knew him said there’s somebody very old inside this young body. There was no question he was going to be the finest actor of his generation. He had it all, and everybody loved him because there was such a warmth about him. And it was his magnetism that worked on so many different levels, he was so smart and just capable of everything you’d ever want of an actor.”
‘I think about my death every day. I’m not worried at all’ … Gilliam in the Horseshoe. Photograph: David Levene/The Guardian
Later, Gilliam was in Vancouver to shoot the sequences featuring the Imaginarium – a mirror through which people could step to explore their own imaginations – when he got the call about Ledger. “I just wanted to die,” Gilliam says. His immediate thought was to abandon the whole project, but he was persuaded to carry on. They ended up using footage they’d already shot of Ledger, but then got three actors who had known him – Johnny Depp, Colin Farrell and Jude Law – to play transformed versions of his character. The film is dedicated to Ledger.
Not that he’s anywhere near it, but does Gilliam ever consider his own demise? “My death is something I’m not worried about at all. I think about it every day of course, but in fun ways. I just don’t want anybody in my family to jump the queue, that’s all. I’m out first, number uno.” He has a plan, it’s in his will. They have a house in Italy, he says, that sits like a nipple on a breast-shaped hill in Puglia. “I want to be buried there with the best view. Put me in the ground in a cardboard coffin, then get an oak sapling and stick it in my chest so I can grow up to be an oak tree. It’s beautiful.”
It is indeed handsome. And perhaps a little inappropriate, appropriately. Maybe a giant foot then stamps down on it …
Film-maker and Monty Python veteran Terry Gilliam will be in interview at a special Guardian event on 29 October to celebrate his extraordinary life and 50 years in film, live at Cadogan Hall in London and online. Book tickets here.
COMMENTS