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Terry Gilliam: Time Bandits
25 Years Later
By Rich Drees
“I guess this is when I apologize for the film you are about to
see,” jokes director Terry Gilliam prior to a recent screening of
his fantasy Time Bandits (1981) at New York City’s Film
Forum. But the audience in the sold out art house auditorium had no
complaints about the film’s quality, especially considering that
Time Bandits is the first film where Gilliam – a member of the
famed Monty Python comedy troupe – began to exhibit his unique
visual flair that has become a hallmark of his work.
Time Bandits
follows the exploits of young boy named Kevin (Craig Warnock) who
joins up with six dwarves who plan on pillaging their way through
history with a map stolen from their boss, the Supreme Being. While
encountering the likes of Greek monarch Agamemnon (Sean Connery) and
another notable bandit by the name of Robin Hood (John Cleese), they
are slowly manipulated into delivering the map into the clutches of
Evil (David Warner) who plans on using it to reorder Creation in his
own twisted view.
Following the
screening, part of a two week long retrospective of the films of
Monty Python and its individual members, Gilliam reappeared to
discuss the film with the audience. Although currently making the
publicity rounds for his latest film Tideland, he seemed more
than happy to reminisce about his earlier work.
Gilliam
explained that Time Bandits actually owes its existence to
the fact that he couldn’t get another film he wanted to make called
Brazil greenlit. Some backstory- In 1979 Gilliam and the
other members of Monty Python joined with former Beatle George
Harrison to form the production company Handmade Films, after EMI
Studios backed out of financing Monty Python- Life Of Brian
at the eleventh hour. Denis O’Brien, Harrison’s and the Python
group’s mutual manager, was named head of the company.
“Denis O’Brien
didn’t understand or wasn’t interested and kept stalling [on the
project],” Gilliam explains. “So out of frustration one weekend I
said ‘I’m going to write something for all the family’ and that’s
what you just saw. I basically wrote the story and then I called
Mike Palin up and said ‘Will you work with me on this?’ The words
are his and between us the characters and everything grew.”
Gilliam states
that the Time Bandits concept grew out of a synthesis of two
different ideas.
“I was worried
that the child would not be able to sustain the whole film and so I
said ‘Well there’s only one way around this problem and that’s to
surround him with a gang the same height,’” he says. “And that’s how
they became time bandits. I think my original idea is that these
people were not satisfied with heaven and life on the run, robbing
and pillaging through history was much more interesting. And then
there was the idea you could commit a crime and then jump to a time
before the crime was committed. It grew like that.”
Although
Gilliam had co-directed Monty Python And The Holy Grail
(1975) with fellow Python Terry Jones as well as solo directing the
fantasy film Jabberwocky (1977), American studios seemed
reluctant to make the movie.
“We went to the
studios with the script and nobody wanted to know about it,” he
states. “So George once again put up the money to make this film.
The finished film we took to the studios and no one wanted to buy
it. So we ended up with a company called Avco/Embassy which was the
smallest of the majors, really a mini-major. They hadn’t had a hit
in ten years. But they had a distribution system. So George and
Dennis guaranteed the prints and advertising and we basically used
the machinery of their distribution. The film opened and I didn’t
think it was going to do much. It ended up being number one for five
or six weeks. It is still the most financially successful film I’ve
done in America. What it did do was give me enough credibility so we
could make Brazil, so it’s a very important film in my life.”
Like all films,
there were struggles waged while getting Time Bandits filmed
and Gilliam recounted them with a jovial tone that only twenty-five
years separation from such events can provide.
“The most
difficult part of Time Bandits was the beginning because I
hadn’t shot a film for a couple of years since Jabberwocky,”
he relates. “We started in Morocco on top of this mountain in 130
degree heat with Sean Connery and a boy who had never been in a
movie before. I had my storyboards ambitious, like 30 shots in one
day. Impossible. It was heading towards disaster on day one. It was
Sean that said, “Shot me, get me out of the thing and then you can
play with the boy.’
“He’d do things
like ‘I’m not going to let you shoot me getting on the horse. I’ll
look like shit. So I’ll just stand in the stirrups and I’ll lower
myself down. You gotta get me on in post. Good bye, kid.’ And it was
so shocking, but he got me through it. I threw everything out and I
got his shots and then concentrated on the boy.”
While nearly
all films are shot out of sequence and then assembled in the editing
room, Gilliam seemed to take this method to the extreme when it came
time to shoot the film’s climactic battle against Evil.
“Where it went
a bit crazy was at the end with the big battle with the tank and the
cowboys and the archers and all of that,” Gilliam explains. “I had
to shoot that completely out of sequence. There was no connecting
tissue for any of it. I just had my storyboards and [would do a
random] shot. And then the tank wouldn’t work, ‘OK forget about the
tank, let’s go and do this’ and we’d shoot that. I just had to rely
totally on the storyboards because I didn’t have the confidence to
just wing it. In that instance it was fantastic to just go shot,
shot, shot, shot and stick the jigsaw together at the end.”
Still, the
sequence did come off quite as Gilliam had initially envisioned it.
“Originally,
that big battle when all those archers appear was Sean Connery’s
re-entrance into the film,” he says. “He was supposed to be leading
that group of archers and he was the one who was supposed to be
crushed by the falling column. But we had run out of time with Sean.
We only had X number of days with Sean, so overnight I rewrote [the
scene]. So we killed Fidget, he was the cute one.”
But while
Connery couldn’t appear in the film’s climax, he would get to appear
in the movie’s coda.
“We got to the
end of the film, we really didn’t have a good ending,” Gilliam
recalls. “Then I remembered my first conversation with Sean and he
said wouldn’t it be great if he played the fireman. He happened to
be in London, he was a tax exile then, he had one day to see his
accountant. I said, ‘Could you stop be the studio?’ So he stopped by
the studio and I put him in a fireman’s outfit and did two shots-
one where he puts the boy down and winks and then he climbs in the
cab, shuts the door, winks. That was it! I didn’t write the scene
until a month later. We shot with doubles the whole end sequence and
it works.”
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Gilliam (left) chats with fans after a screening of
Time Bandits (1981). |
But how did
Gilliam manage to get an internationally known star like Sean
Connery to appear in a film that no major Hollywood studio wished to
finance?
“Mike (Palin)
and I wrote in the scene with the Greek warrior that after the
battle with the minotaur, he takes his helmet off revealing himself
to be none other than Sean Connery or ‘an actor of equal but cheaper
stature,’” explains Gilliam. “That was actually in the script
because we had no idea we could ever get Sean Connery. It was our
little joke. Denis O’Brien was playing golf with Connery and
Connery’s career at that point was really at its nadir. He had done
some wonderful films that weren’t working. For what ever reason he
liked the idea of this and he came on board. I think he was very
important to the success of the film.”
Although
Gilliam was given fairly free reign in making Time Bandits,
he still had to fight to keep certain things in the film.
“The ending is
the only big battle I was having,” he states. “The idea of a
children’s film where the parents blew up was not possible. We had a
screening in Fresno, California. It was one of those NRG screening
where they hand out the cards and you fill in [your reactions]. It
gives the audience a chance to have power over the filmmaker and
they really grasp that moment. Something was wrong with the print
and it went through the wrong sound system so the first at least
third of the film was garbled. People were leaving. On the
questionnaire, there were all these questions. One of the questions
was ‘What was your favorite part of the film?’ and one of the
answers was ‘The end.’ I took the cards home, because it’s very nice
to read them because you see the handwriting. You can see the anger,
you can see the joy of the person writing this stuff. It was clear
that because of this terrible sound system and so many people
leaving that the part they liked best about the film was the end. It
was over is what they meant. But when you looked at the statistics
the next day, the part of the film that was most loved about the
film was the end because of the parents blowing up! So I won and got
the parents blowing up!”
One unexpected bonus for Gilliam in the wake of Time Bandits
success has been the responses he’s received from little people
around the world.
“I’ve been a
lot of places and all the little people would come up to me and say
‘Thank you for treating us like human beings,’” he says. “That’s
part of the thing I wanted to do. I was so tired of seeing these
guys in stupid costumes or tin cans like R2-D2. Here’s a chance to
let them be heroes. Alan Ladd was short and he was a hero so why
couldn’t they?”
As for the six
little people actors who played the temporal thieves, Gilliam has
nothing but praise.
“They were
fantastic,” Gilliam recalls enthusiastically. “All the guys just
rose to the occasion. My biggest fear was that they would overdo
themselves. Tiny Ross is a very old guy. He was on that horse during
the end when the cowboys arrive. He was sitting on the back. I left
the studio for about fifteen minutes and on that we day we had a new
temporary first assistant director and I said, ‘Be really careful
because these guys will push themselves beyond their limits.’ When I
got back fifteen minutes later there was Tiny with a broken arm.
That scene was shot with his arm in a cast hidden behind the
cowboys.”
Following Time
Bandits, Gilliam would go on to co-write and direct Brazil
(1985) and The Adventures Of Baron Munchausen (1988), two
films that also explored the idea of the power of imagination. While
at the time of Munchausen’s release Gilliam stated that the
three movies dealt with dreamers at different stages of their life-
youth (Time Bandits), adulthood (Brazil) and old age (Baron
Munchausen), he now admits that such a thematic trilogy only
came about by accident.
“It was only at
the making of Baron Munchausen that I kind of realized what
was going on here about the child, the man and the old man, so I
took full credit for having done a trilogy,” he admits with a laugh.
“I never think about these things. It’s only later that I’ve
discovered what I’ve done because someone points out the obvious.”
Gilliam also
admits that having revisited Time Bandits for the evening’s
appearance that he noticed a parallel with his new film Tideland.
“It’s funny but
I wasn’t thinking about this when I was making Tideland, but
it’s only having to do this [appearance] that it brought this
connection together- they’re very similar in the sense of what a
child’s imagination can do,” he states. “Interestingly enough [Time
Bandits] ends with the parents disappearing, blowing up and in
Tideland it doesn’t take long to get rid of them.
“It’s 25 years
old now, Time Bandits. I’ve been doing a lot of interviews
today for Tideland, which in a strange way is 25 years on
from this. They both start with a TI and they’re both about
children’s imaginations, but they’re very, very different films. I’m
not sure if the world has changed or it’s me that’s changed in all
of that time.”
Related FilmBuff Reading-
Time Bandits 2 Script
Review
Terry Gilliam: Time Bandits 25 Years Later- The Deleted Scenes |
