Ever since 1974, with the release of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Terry Gilliam has been primarily a film director. Prior to this, he was just the resident animator/sometime actor for Monty Python's Flying Circus and, when the group decided to make the big leap to the silver screen (as opposed to the small hop which was And Now For Something Completely Different), it was decided that he and Terry Jones should direct it. Now, I will not be discussing Holy Grail at length because, since it was directed by two people, it's hard to figure out who was responsible for the direction of what scene.

There are some shots that typify the Gilliam style however, foremost of these being the scene where Tim the Enchanter is leading King Arthur and his knights towards the Cave of Caer Bannog (and almost certain death). Anyway, there is one beautiful shot which is just a close-up of a skull, side-view, with Arthur and company walking along the horizon in the background. In fact, it almost looks as if they are stepping out of the skull's nose. It shows a marvelous sense of composition and hints at more things to come. In the film, the shot signifies the looming, constant presence of death and even prepares the audience for some extremely brutal scenes of violence. For Gilliam, it signifies that he has a unique visual style which had heretofore been confined to his animations and which was now going to be unleased onto the world of feature films.

After a half-season more of Monty Python (with John Cleese gone, Gilliam was called on to take on more roles and be more involved with the writing), the group decided to go their own ways. Having been bitten by the directed bug, Gilliam decided that he wanted to do a film based loosely on the Lewis Carroll poem "Jabberwocky." This he did and, in 1977, filmgoers were treated to a film which "bears almost no relation to Lewis Carroll but turns out to be instead an uncannily persuasive Breughelesgue portrait of the Middle Ages," according to Alan Brien, in his review of the film (Thompson 6). Apparently, many of the scenes in Holy Grail which featured various characters scrounging around the mud and being generally disgusting were at least partly of Gilliam's devising, as evidenced by the prominence of filth of all kinds in his follow-up film. His vision of the Middle Ages is that of "an astonishingly dirty period, with people much the same as they are today, except that they have to wade through mire, animal ordure, and mountains of frightful garbage" (George Perry, quoted in Thompson 19).

This obsession with showing the dark side (or, if you please, the underside) of the Dark Ages turned many of the critics off, but it provided audiences with an extremely detailed and meticulously uncompromising world-view. On his approach, Gilliam has the following to say: "When you're doing parodies and comedies, the more realistic or truthful or elaborate you are in your depiction of the world you're parodying, the funnier and more effective it is. That really carries over. When you look at Monty Python and the Holy Grail or Jabberwocky, when we were taking the piss out of a certain time and place, we were doing it as beautifully and seriously as Luchino Visconti would in doing The Leopard" (Johnson, "The Real Fantasist" 63). Of course, one could say that he was, in fact, putting the piss back in the Middle Ages...and the shit...and the dirt...and...

Another thing of note about the film is its distinct lack of animations. While Gilliam still relied heavily on animation in Holy Grail, apart from an opening narration sequence which is heard over shots of extremely grotesque medieval paintings and the closing (extremely fake) sunset, there is little animation in Jabberwocky. Instead of having to rely on it to tell his stories and get his ideas across, it was pushed to the side and only used when absolutely necessary (or when he wanted to make a point, as he did with the extremely unrealistic fairy-tale ending).

Gilliam, at one point, said that films "like Jabberwocky were really an attempt to do what I didn't think we had achieved in Holy Grail" (Johnson, "The Real Fantasist 64). Unfortunately, when Jabberwocky came out, it was "promoted in some areas as Monty Python's Jabberwocky and even Jabberwocky and the Holy Grail, which, understandably, made Gilliam furious" (Johnson, First 200 Years 229). It was unfortunate but also a bit understandable as Gilliam had yet to get fully away from doing things "the Python way." As Gilliam said, "I don't think we were bold enough when we wrote the thing; there are certain areas which are very Pythonesque in it, and we didn't completely make the break from Python. It was like a transition film--it went half-way to where I wanted to go" (Wilmut 235). But where did he want to go? In a 1978 interview with Kim "Howard" Johnson, he said, "I really want to continue along the way of Jabberwocky where I write, design, and direct a film, just do everything, like I did with the animations. It's taking something from an original idea and carrying it all the way through to the final result" (Life Before 130).

The next "original idea" which he carried through turned out to be 1981's Time Bandits which, although co-written with Michael Palin, is very much a Gilliam film through and through. "The film is about wonderment, and being a child again, and all those things that go on in your bedroom when you're eleven years old," said Gilliam in an interview with Jim Sulski in Fantastic Films (10). After failing to raise money for the film that would eventually become Brazil, Gilliam set out to make the most commercial film he could and decided that a children's film would fit the bill. Of course, Time Bandits is far from being a typical children's film. Many of the references go way over their heads (I know most of them went over mine when I first saw it), but the real attraction to children is the story, "a juvenile mind being much more capable of assimilating the sudden switches of locale and plot as the adventurers hurtle on their hare-brained flips through the temporal dimension" (Perry 83).

Time Bandits also has a distinct visual style, one which could not be identified with anyone in particular, unless you were going to identify it with Gilliam. There are some moments of absolute splendor, like when the medieval knight on horseback comes crashing out of Kevin's closet and then rides off into the forest. First, we're in Kevin's bedroom. Then, the knight leaps out of the closet, looking for a way out. "Suddenly, with a commanding cry from the KNIGHT, the HORSE leaps right across the kid's bed and charges down a darkened avenue of trees that has replaced one of the walls of the bedroom. KEVIN is stunned. He dives under the covers. The hoofbeats disappear into the distance and, slowly, he peers out from his hiding place. Everything is back to normal" (Gilliam & Palin 5A). It's very quick and very simple, but it adds up to a great sense of "what the hell's going on here?" In answer, Gilliam says that everything in the film, including the ending, is "just an extension of the boy's imagination. The idea is that imagination can be whatever it is, it's just out there--and the ending is a logical extension" (Gerrold 53).

The ending which Gilliam refers to is the point where Kevin's parents find a piece of evil in one of their microwaves and Kevin cries out, "Mum, Dad! Don't touch it. It's evil!" Of course, having heard this, his parents touch it and are blown to pieces, leaving only small piles of smoldering ash. It's a disturbing ending, but only if you take it literally. Of course, personally, I would have preferred it if the parents had been turned into hermit crabs, because, as the Supreme Being said a few minutes earlier in the film, "That's concentrated Evil ... one drop of that could turn you all into hermit crabs" (Gilliam & Palin 123). Still, what is shown in the film is a fitting demise for Kevin's parents, obsessed with technology and devoid of imagination as they both are.

And that's another thing which Time Bandits is about--it is a warning about the dangers of the modern preoccupation with technology. In an interview with Anne Thompson, Gilliam clearly states, "I'm well aware of what I'm doing and having Evil being obsessed with technology is very important to me. It's a very dangerous thing, and it isn't the answer to everything, and that's why we're got the Supreme Being obsessed with wooly-minded thinking and rainbows--really nice things. God is British and Evil is American. There's no question about it" (Thompson 17). This comes across well in the film because it is Kevin who has the "ability to imagine and wonder and be amazed" (Sulski 46) and therefore will be able to cope without parents (he already has, for the most part).

Another thing which Gilliam did with Time Bandits was to get away from the need to be so jokey all the time. Things like the Agamemnon sequence showed that he could do thing which were sympathetic as well. "I'd like to put comedy aside and forget about jokes and things," said Gilliam in an interview with David Gerrold, "just delve deeper in those areas, because I seem to be able to pull them off" (63). He also said, "The parts I really enjoy in the film are the ones where there's very little talking, where the plot is delineated strictly as a visual adventure. And that's a mile-step away from Python fare" (Sulski 46). A mile-step away, indeed. As Kim "Howard" Johnson wrote, "Time Bandits proved to be a huge international success, and Terry Gilliam established a reputation in Hollywood as a director who could bring in an expensive-looking movie on a modest budget" (Life Before 165).

Having simply acted as production designer for Monty Python's Life of Brian instead of co- directing with Terry Jones again, when the group got together again to do what became The Meaning of Life, it was decided that Gilliam would direct again, only this time he would be filming his own segment to appear alongside the main film. This became The Crimson Permanent Assurance. Called "a marvelous, crazy idea" of "grandiose and nonsensical absurdity" by George Perry (84), it is a fantastic achievement in filmmaking and provided an interesting counterpoint to the rest of the film, which wasn't quite as visually interesting. The Crimson Permanent Assurance is quite stunning, and its depiction of an insurance building setting sail and attacking other companies (corporate piracy in its most literal sense) is a bizarre conceit which only Gilliam would have seriously attempted on film.

Interestingly enough, it was originally intended to be a three-minute segment in the middle of the film, but "it grew to occupy over fifteen minutes of screen time, and as much time to shoot as the rest of the film put together" (Johnson, First 200 Years 216). What started out as "an interesting attempt to do more and different special effects than he'd ever done before ... proved much more complicated than he had first thought" (216). As Gilliam said, "Nobody took it seriously until it was too late. Then they realized they had something as complicated as the entire rest of the film" (216). But it got done, as Gilliam's films always do, and was delegated a place as a short preceding the main film wherever The Meaning of Life was shown.

Gilliam says his films are "about the eccentricities, the blind absurdity of the human race" (Thompson 25). This is certainly true of Brazil, his masterpiece, wherein the main character, Sam Lowry, lives so much through his dreams that he is totally blind to the evil and oppressive world around him until he gets inextricably caught up in it. In the same piece in Thompson, which is from an interview dating back to 1978, the following scene is described: "Walking down a street in Copenhagen he saw a very well-dressed conventional couple parading arm in arm, with them was a snowy white poodle with a plaster stuck over its bottom. 'Amazing isn't it--[Gilliam says]--when I draw that people will say, "ah that's not life"'" (25). Well, apparently he decided it would be easier for people to accept if he showed it to them in a film. As the script for Brazil states, "The LADY continues screaming at him, her little Pekinese dog (who incidentally wears a plaster over his bum hole) yaps at his ankles, ripping SAM's new trousers" (Gilliam, Stoppard, McKeown 89). Thus a detail from real life becomes a detail in one of Gilliam's films, making it all the more surrealistic. According to Roger Wilmut, near the end of his book From Fringe to Flying Circus, "the challenge for Gilliam is to make a film (or films) which give his skill in the creation and juxtaposition of images free reign, while avoiding the temptation to use Python mockery ... If Gilliam can sustain an 'inner belief' throughout a film, he can create his own world, be it mediaeval legend or science fiction" (255). For Brazil, more so than for either of his previous films, he would have to create a world which had never been seen before anywhere. As described by Kim "Howard" Johnson, "the world designed by Gilliam ... incorporates elements of the past, present, and future existing simultaneously with Lowry's flights into fantasy" (First 200 Years 230).

As Gilliam says, "It's really about Walter Mitty meeting Franz Kafka" (Perry 84). "We've got another catchphrase which is rather boring--'a post-Orwelliam view of a pre-Orwellian world'--it's really tedious-sounding, and I think Mitty and Kafka are the truth of the matter," he says in another interview. "It's really about someone who doesn't take reality seriously enough, and spends too much time day-dreaming" (Johnson, Life Before 204). He goes on to say, "It's a strange thing, but I think the character Jonathan Pryce plays in Brazil is like the boy in Time Bandits fifteen years later. He has the same problems, he still dreams, but he's a bit older and things have changed. If I were making a trilogy, this would be part of it" (205-6). Of course, Brazil is a much darker film than Time Bandits was, almost like an extension of the disturbing ending to that film. That is not to say that there aren't elements of humor--there are plenty. They are just balanced with equal amounts of unpleasantness. In an interview for Starlog magazine, Ian Holm discussed his character, Mr. Kurtzmann, as being "possibly the last vaguely comic element before the descent into very much hell thereafter" and described the film as being, "a very heavy piece indeed, very 1984 ... It's a pretty ghastly picture that he [Gilliam] has painted, but I think, of necessity, rather a true one" (Pirani 12). As Pauline Kael describes it, "Gilliam presents ... a vision of the future as the decayed past, and this vision is an organic thing on the screen--which is a considerable accomplishment" (Johnson, Life Before 207).

While being "a heavy piece," Brazil also contains many moments of pure ecstacy, like the point where Lowry sabotages the message delivery service at the Ministry of Information Retrieval. The "tubes give a final convulsion and then there appears to be a muffled explosion outside SAM's office door. It shakes the whole building. SAM goes to his door and opens it. Every door in the corridor has been opened by the occupants of the room. All the occupants stick their heads into the corridor, all gazing with SAM at the variously coloured blizzard of paper which had erupted through the whole length of the corridor ceiling" (Gilliam, Stoppard, McKeown 109-110). It is a beautiful moment and one of great relief after the tension which has been building up ever since the beginning of the scene right before it.

In fact, that is one of Brazil's strong points--the fact that there is so much variety and so much going on. Gilliam is alternately bringing you up and then sending you tumbling down on an emotional roller-coaster that doesn't really end when the movie comes to an end. This is mostly due to the fact that the film has, yet again, a rather controversial ending, but one which is essential to the meaning of the film. Gilliam fought a major battle with Universal Pictures to release the film his way (this is amply covered in Jack Matthews's The Battle of Brazil, so I won't go into it here), even after it had been voted Best Picture by the L.A. Film Critics. As co-writer Charles McKeown said, "To have changed Terry's ending to a happier, lighter ending would have really rendered the entire film completely null and void. It would have made nonsense out of it" (Johnson, "True Facts" 48).