Monty Python Speaks! Revised and Updated Edition. David Morgan
What was the actual process like for you?
GILLIAM: Sometimes I had an assistant working on Python; Terry’s sister-in-law Katie Hepburn assisted me for a while. Basically it was me on my own, with books.
I’d always start: there were the scripts, they go from there to there, and I just sort of had an idea, an image to start with. A lot of times I had a lot of ideas, a lot of things I wanted to get into the shows; I just had to stick them in between and find connecting tissues to get from there to there. So I would use these little storyboard sketches, then I would start looking for the artwork; whether it was stuff I had drawn myself or pictures that I got from books, I’d start getting the elements together.
And in the end the room is all these flats full of artwork. It became like a scenic dock for a studio: I’d have the ground, and I’d have different skies, and I could build a background very quickly after a certain point, and then I just started, totally a magpie approach, things that I liked I use and chop up. If it was photos I needed, I’d send the books in to the photographic place and blow them up to the sizes I want and start cutting them out; usually they wouldn’t be complete so I’d have to draw or airbrush part of it.
Conrad Poohs and His Dancing Teeth.
So I’d have all this artwork and I’d go to the BBC’s rostrum camera, set it up, and just start pushing the stuff around. You’d find at three or four in the morning the papers arranging themselves after a while! The stuff kind of made itself. You pile all these things there and they start forming patterns, a thing lands on top of that; ooh, that’s an idea. It was really free, because even though I had storyboarded and set out with a very specific look or an idea I was after, if I couldn’t find it I’d grab something that was just as good or it would be a little bit different than I expected but I could make it work, and it would flow in that direction.
And I would always shoot long; a lot of the work was done in the editing room afterwards, because I never knew quite [how long] somebody would talk. I would just wiggle the mouth up and down – leave it open for twelve frames, close it for ten – and then later I would chop frames out to try and get it vaguely to [match] whatever was being said. And then for voices I either do them myself, or I’d run and get the guys in the corridor, or in rehearsal. I just stand there with a tape recorder and say, ‘John, say this, say that; okay, good, thank you. Terry, say that …’ And the BBC had a great sound effects library which is all on discs, [but] a lot of times I’d just sit at home, a blanket over my head, with a tape recorder, making noises with kitchen utensils, and just record this shit. And then I’d get down to the editing room and we’d start sticking it all together. I was working seven days a week, it was just crazed. There’d be at least one all-nighter in there.
Cannibalism, Gilliam-style.
All the underground press were convinced I was an acidhead, they thought all of us were on drugs but me in particular, and we weren’t – it’s all natural stuff!
And it’s not like a Disney cartoon where everything’s planned and drawn; it’s using things around me, and just incorporating and letting it grow organically.
I was producing this stuff in two weeks [for each show]. Some of the [location] filming I wouldn’t get to because I was desperately trying to get ahead. I’d have to keep up with the shows, so by the end of the series it was always a mad rush. It was weird.
When you sail in a race, you just go out on the ocean, and you come around a buoy and all the boats are there, and before you get to the next marker everybody disperses and goes a different way; suddenly you’re alone. And then you come to the next marker buoy and Oh! Everybody converges. And it was kind of like that in doing the shows; we’d have the meetings, I’d be there as part of the group, then I’d go off into my world, and we’d only get together the days the shows were being recorded. So they were always together, they were always at rehearsals. My problem was there was one side of me that wanted to be a performer as well, but I really didn’t think I was in their class, so I’d just turn up on the days we were recording and take that little part there, put on a costume, do something silly there, just to keep myself both from being bored and feeling more a part of the thing. Because they were having all the fun, and I felt I was doing all the work!
In story meetings, would you ever bring a fully devised sketch to be animated, such as ‘The House Hunters’ [in which two hunters armed with ‘condemned’ posters track a wild building]?
GILLIAM: I wouldn’t have brought it in as a sketch – I would bring it as an idea. ‘I want to do this whole thing about house hunters, it’s a literal thing.’ And again they didn’t know quite where to put those things because they couldn’t imagine them; that was part of the problem. If I wanted to do that little story, in a sense it was up to me to find the right spot to slide that in. I’m trying to remember whether I would actually say, ‘I’ve got a thing that’s probably going to run about three minutes.’ I honestly can’t remember whether I was ever that specific. Because we’d try to work out a thirty-minute show, so I’m sure I must have been saying ‘a big chunk’. ‘I’ve got a big thing to do here,’ something specific!
A typical magpie approach.
Terry always loved what I was doing, and Mike. It’s so weird because Terry and Mike are much more visually oriented than the others, but it may just have been my inability to explain things. John I think was constantly bemused by my stuff, he was so – ‘intimidated’ is probably too strong a word, but he didn’t know how to criticize it, so he never criticized it except for this one thing where he could actually go, ‘Well, that’s blasphemous,’ or ‘That’s offensive.’ [See page 146.]
That was the bad side of it: I felt at times I wasn’t getting any of the benefit of the criticisms of the group. We all had to be self-criticizing, saying, ‘That doesn’t work,’ ‘That’s not good enough for the shows.’ But a lot of times I never got a sense that they knew whether [what I did] was good or bad, whether it worked or didn’t work, because it was another language that they don’t understand. John didn’t understand the language.
In the English language there’s no word for ‘visual illiteracy’. You have ‘illiterate’, but visual? There’s no term for it; it’s the idea that visual things are not a language. There is a visual language, and yet people who invent words don’t invent that word. I want to use ‘ivvisualites’, people who are visually illiterate.
It’s a thing that intrigues me, the information you get from images; they’re saying things and they’re telling these stories and they don’t necessarily have to be words. Being down with these kids at the Royal College’s Animation Department, some of the stuff they’re doing is just wonderful, but if you sit down and go, ‘Tell me the story,’ they can’t do it. A splotch of stuff here, a funny little noise happens there, what’s that? And yet it’s fantastic – at least it is for me. I look at some of their stuff and I’m not sure that John Cleese would find it funny, I don’t think he would know what to say about it. Sounds like I’m picking on John, but he was the most visually illiterate; I think it’s that. But I wish the others would have been able to come up and say, ‘Terry, that’s pretty weird.’ They didn’t!
Was any animation ever rejected out of hand?
GILLIAM: There was this thing that Ian MacNaughton just completely fucked up because he didn’t understand it, and Terry