Tetrogramaton.

This is.

The house of Braco Fortebraco, who was in my days are always bad, let's say, 14th century. He was king of his kingdom. His kingdom went all the way to the Adriatic. It was big. He was very powerful. I like all powerful people, they suffer from hubris. I think he took on the Pope once too often. Bingo. This is his house, and it's his town. It's an important town because it's between Perugia and Cittaddi-D'Castello, and it changes its allegiances over the centuries back and forth.

How did you end up coming to this town?

There's an English connection, and I was told about any excuse to come to Italy, especially by then I had my house. I bought a ruin in 90, was it '91, something like that? I was invited to the festival, and all I knew is that the previous year, Donald Sutherland had been there. I thought, Okay, it's a class festival. It was great. It was wonderful, and got to know the people, in particular, Marisa Berna, who was central to the thing. When I bought this house, there was the ride TV. I decided ours was the perfect place for a repeatatory because ours, we've got a bit of a ruin of a castle. I mean, it's the a castle with no upkeep. It should fall down. But it dominated the valley and controlled the valley.

There's a film festival here. How long has this been going on? Well, it's.

Been now, it's probably 20, it's 27 years now here in Montony. Wow! It's just beautiful because there's the piazza down there with the great bell tower that goes up and there's the clock on it. That's where we used to project. We've now moved up to the flat area by the church on San Francesco, which is technically and probably better for watching movies, but it's not quite as interesting because the square would be packed because there were two taverna bars there competing for business because everybody came. They would sit around, we'd be eating, the children would be playing. I remember it with Munchhausen, when we projected it there, it was on the side of the building across the square from one of the bars. The people in the bar, of course, great film lovers were busy drinking and talking and not watching the film, but their silhouettes were on the wall amongst the film. They were in the film. This is fucking wonderful. It just was great. Amazing. It's a beautiful town and to be part of it because it's now... Look, it's 25 years since I was given the keys of the city. Then I think, is it 12 years?

I became the first and only honorary citizen of this little town, which is one of the great proud moments in my life.

Absolutely. How much time do you get spent here?

Not much. The only thing I don't like about the festival, it's in July. It's a time I don't normally want to come to Italy. Spring, autumn, I'm in heaven. But it's here, and it's been great. I suppose this English connection is good because also Colin Firth got the keys of the city, Ray Fine has the keys. It's been wonderful to see this collective, Peter Mulard. It's been great to see them all coming, the people. What happens in the festival, actually, is the week of the festivals, you suddenly discover all the Strangerie that's living in the hills here: English, German, Dutch. You never see them because I only see the local people. Suddenly, for the festival, they descend. Suddenly, you've got this world of accents and language.

It's fantastic. I'm so happy you're here. This is just such a beautiful experience to come to such a great place. It's a.

Beautiful… I mean, it'salmost, I keep saying it's almost too. It's so beautiful. Everything is done beautifully. Great care is taken. That's the pride of the citizens. It's wonderful.

When you're working on a project, do you see it as a series of interesting moments, or does there have to be an overall theme or story?

No, that's not Italy. Come on. Italy is very morbido, fluid, and soft.

No, but I'm asking you in general, though. No. In general.

You think.

Anything could do anything.

Yeah, pretty much. That's it. What I love about it is there are the ceremonies here in this town. We have a sacraspina here, one of thorns, of the crown of thorns that was pressed to Jesus' head. I just found out yesterday reading a book about the city. I thought I'd learn a bit more, is that apparently it's supposed to be miraculous. Every year, somewhere around Easter, the thorn turns green and the blood liquefies. It's a bit like San Gineiro in Naples. I didn't know that. I know the procession, which is very serious. They come down, there's a reliquary where it could be a nail. I'm not sure. But there it is. They come down in renaissance costumes, medieval renaissance, doesn't matter. It's serious and it's wonderful. That's what I like. Yet the same time, they're incredibly playful. It's a serious that's taken with a sense of humor. That's the combination I love.

Did you grow up with a religious background?

I was going to be a missionary. Really? Okay, we were in Minnesota where I was born. We were surrounded by Sweden. It's very interesting because the Sweden, when they made this huge exit from Sweden when times were rough, they ended up in a place, Minnesota, which looks exactly Sweden, but on the other side of the world almost. It was all these Scandinavians around us. At that point, we were Lutherans. Then when I was 12, we moved to California and became a Presbyterian. That just happened to be the local church, and that was it. I went through college on a Presbyterian scholarship that got me through. I was very much involved in the church until, as we were getting around the college time when my jokes weren't found to be funny anymore. I thought, What God can you believe in? A ubiquitous, all-powerful God that can't take a joke? Come on, give me a break, folks. That was my separation from serious religion.

Is there any too far in humor? Can humor go too far? Can you make a joke about anything?

You should, and especially the most sacred things. You test them to find out just how important they are. To me, there is no limit on humor. Unfortunately, we're living at a time where the limitations are getting more and more rigid. People are frightened of humor. They're frightened of interesting or odd or not normal thoughts, especially in universities. It's really frightening in Britain. I don't know what it's like in the States. It was just recently, it was probably a couple of months ago, in some university, a lecturer came, and this lecturer had ideas that shocked the students. The students went into their safe room, held hands for 45 minutes.

To calm them down.

Now, that's one thing. What what bothered me was the administration of the college said, We want our students in college to feel comfortable. That's the death of universities. Universities are not about comfort. It's about expanding your mind, your knowledge, learning all the other ways of perceiving the world. The universities are saying, No, we want our students to be comfortable. This is a bad time.

Well, haven't every new idea has always been met with throughout history? They've always been shut down. The people have been murdered. The person who said that the Earth wasn't the center of the universe was, I think, hanged.

Good old Galileo, don't teach him. It was actually Copernicus who got the idea, but Galileo took the blame. He just took on the Church, the Italian Church. Remember, the Catholic Church, the Roman Catholic Church, was the first great multinational organization. They were everywhere. There. It's extraordinary. There's a book I was reading, a story that takes place in Hong Kong in the 19th century, and somebody gets cholera there, and they needed quinine to cure the cholera. Quinine only existed in South America somewhere, and they went to the local bishop, and he got the church to work. The church had a huge fleet of boats, were very fast. They zipped down to South America, got the quinine, came back, saved the guy. That's power. I mean, the arms of the church stretched everywhere. I loved how the Portuguese got to Japan. They were in India four years before Columbus left Spain for India the wrong way. They were there and they moved through the east. They weren't like the Spanish, they weren't conquistadores. They were businessmen. They were in the trade business of trading. They were actually trying to put Venice out of business is what they were doing.

They got first to India four years before Columbus left Europe, and then they made their way up to Japan through China, everything. The effect was extraordinary, just doing business and not being threatening. Of course, they defended their businesses when the local people, blah, blah, blah. But things like in Japan, Nagasaki was created by the Portuguese. It's originally a Portuguese town. Arigato, which is obligado, is Portuguese. They taught that word. Also, tempura cooking, Portuguese, taught the Japanese. This is what's interesting about history, how different groups... I mean, Portuguese doesn't get much credit for anything, but because they became in the 20th century, Versailles became a dictator, and the Portuguese became the poor man of Europe with one of the last dictators of Europe. It was like, Nice place for holidays, but boy, you don't want to. In fact, particularly during the time of Louis XIV, the French, as he's building Versailles, they were building bigger things and richer things in Portugal. Portugal was the richest nation in Europe, but it's been forgotten.

What era is that?

Well, this is all we're talking... They got going in the African slave trade in the 15th century, so now we're talking the 16th century and 17th centuries where we are. 1492, Columbus sailed the Ocean Blue, and he got to the wrong place where 1492. So, Marely 1488, the Portuguese made the real India. They started like, Here's a note. I'm reading another book called Born in Blackness. It's about slavery from Africa. We're talking African, not Roman slavery or Greek slavery, or all the slavery that's gone on through ever since mankind has been wandering the earth. It's a beautiful book. It's written by a guy whose name I can't remember. He comes from... Now, the modern term would be a mixed-race family. What I love is the old term, Mulato. It's a beautiful word. That's who he is. He sees both sides of the black and white battle, if there is a battle going on. The book is brilliant about how interestingly enough in we're talking when the Dutch, because their empire had grown very quickly, and they had started doing business on transporting Indian cotton. Now, the African sheeps, the nobles, the rich loved it because it was so much lighter and more comfortable than raffia or whatever, or animal skins that they were making.

This became the new thing. The rich and powerful, and they were buying their nice Indian cotton with slaves that people they had enslaved. I wish people would take history serious or at least take it with a sense of humor, because the more I read, the more bizarre, wonders, amazing, and horrible it becomes, all of.

Those things. Yeah, none of it necessarily makes sense. If you try to make sense of it, it only confuses the issue. Yeah.

I mean, when I hear people saying you're going to be on the wrong side of history, how the fuck do you know what side of history is going to be in 2038?

And it keeps changing. Of course. It keeps changing.

I mean, again, it's like when I get caught in some... I'm very much, again, so much of quote, I call the modern not thinking. Like the great unwakening, is it? Reappropriate the inappropriate. Because I'm finding so much of the current thinking that is getting news. I refer to it as neo-Calvinism, very narrow. It's not about discussing. It's not about arguing. It's about, I am right, you are wrong.

Ideology.

Ideology. Exactly. Closed-minded ideologues, and they're making so much noise. The press love it because there's the back and forth goes on. But I just find it absurd because when they talk about cultural appropriation, we've been doing everybody's that. That's what makes the world wonderful. They'll go on, they'll say, Okay, the Rolling Stones, people like that. They took black music. Who is the happiest people? The black music is that nobody knew because now their music is and they're alive and famous again and working. It's what we do. We learn from each other. We steal from each other.

If you're doing something that someone else does, it's not because you want to take advantage of them. It's because you love it. You want to celebrate it always.

But that's the word that isn't used, celebration. That's what life should be. It's about learning, being surprised, finding the joy, the human. But that's why I say our most important sense is not our sense of touch, hearing, it's our sense of humor. It's how do you get through this absurd world that has been a constant reality of humanity? How do you get through it without humor? I guess the alternative is to get a sword or a gun and start killing all the people that you don't agree with. Yeah.

Is comedy always a reaction to the arrogance of the ruling class?

I wouldn't limit it just to the working, I mean, to the ruling class. We go from all. There are no bars for... I mean, I don't like this term about punching down. We don't do it to be cruel. We do it to point the absurdities, the oddness. It's like me being a caricatureist. I've seen things a couple of years ago when Venus, and Serena, and Williamson playing tennis. A guy did this very funny cartoon, and he was vilified because he made her darker than she... He made her lips bigger than they... It's what cartoon... What we do, we take- It's a caricature. -a caricature. We take things and we extend them. They've got to be believable. Otherwise, we've failed on our job. But the grotesque has always been fascinating for me because it is about not treating things in a literal naturalistic way. It's taking them, and that's probably what God did, if there is a God, remolding. Oh, I don't like that shape. Let's make another one. It's basically what nature has done from the beginning.

When you were doing animation, would you collect images that you liked and then figure out the story? Or would you have an idea of a concept and then find images to tell that story?

It's actually both because mostly it's an idea first, and how do I portray the idea? What do I do? What can I get cheaply and quickly? It's always time and money. That's how it starts. But on the way, things will just hit you and go, Wow! Then it's not, I suppose, not trying to make sense of it. It's trying to find a way of say what I experienced when a thing hit me, an image. I have never analyzed how I do what I do. I've avoided that. I'm not Woody Allen. I don't want to know. It's a miracle, is all I know.

It is magic. Either way, it's magic. Whether you analyze it or not, it's still magic. Yeah.

The people who analyze are very good because they use their analysis as a way of finding the humor, the interest, the surprise. I don't want to know how I do it. I'm just happy to be walking along.

Doing it. Do you ever consider what the audience reaction will be when you make something, or are you only making it for your own entertainment?

No, I'm always thinking of the audience. I just want to be admired. We all do. I think it's very fun how we grow up.

The takeaway today is that you've been unsuccessful at what you've been thinking.

There's plenty of time where people take it the wrong way, where I failed misery. That? It all happened. But I'm always aware of an audience. I want to reach people. I'm not going to limit the audience to if I'm working for the studio, they think, Okay, there's that group of people. That's the audience. Then fuck off. That's not. It could be all this. This happened with Time Bandits. The studio all turned down the script. They turned down the finished film because it didn't fit into one little box. Mike Penn and I came up, I think it was Mike that came up with this. We wanted to make a film that was intelligent enough for children and exciting enough for adults. We did it. The studios were completely dumbfounded because they had passed on the script, they had passed on the finished film, and we ended up, only thanks to what you need in your life is a beetle. We had one, George Harrison. George had saved Monty Python's life of Bryan when the studio pulled out. He came in, he mortgaged his house. Then we made- Wow. Yeah, I know. That's what's- That's commitment. -george is an incredible human being.

He never gets the credit for being as funny as he is. He's always say, Oh, he's the religious one, the spiritual one. No, George was really funny and great, and he gave us the money. And great. He gave us the money. And then as a result of life of Bryan, the success, which it wasn't supposed to be a success, but it was, and it was supposed to be a tax knowledge. I'm not really into this. But I think some of our investors thought so because Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, Elton John, Island Records, on a crazy list of records, all were making vast sums of money as pop stars. At that point in UK, taxes had reached as high as 90%. They needed some tax relief. We didn't help them in the way they had hoped, but they were all delighted to be part of the fun. As a result of that connection of George and Python, we created handmade films, and that's how Time Bandits got made. Actually, it's the first original film in handmade films. We also bought a film that had been made long Good Friday with Bob Haas, the brilliant film. But that wasn't handmade or homemade.

Time Bandace was. It was because the studios turned out and George just kept backing it. Then they found a small distributor called Avco Embassy, which hadn't had a hit in 10 years. Avco, at least, had the machinery to distribute a film. Time Bandards went out and it went to number one and stayed there for five weeks. Then I suddenly became a holy band to the studios, a guy who can make money out of nothing. It's nonsense, but it happened. Again, it's thanks to George Harrison. I said, It's because I spent so much money buying Beatle Records that finally it paid off.

When did you first meet George?

Actually, it was when we were promoting Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Eric, Ida, and I were out in L.

A. Holy Grail was a big hit, wasn't it? Yes. You think based on that big hit, you get to make another one.

Funny. Wouldn't you think? You think that way. What do you think? Rational thinking.

These guys know something we don't know. They made a hit.

But I was only one of the guys. Once you pull them apart. I see. It's like George Harrison. What is All Things Must Pass? That's the biggest selling Beatle album ever. It was not a Beatle album. It was a George Harrison album. The world is wonderful how it keeps turning on itself upside down, backwards and forwards, and either take the ride or don't enjoy the ride. But anyway, Eric and I were out in L. A. Promoting the film. It was great. I remember getting in a queue. It was at Westwood at the Bruen, I think is the cinema. We just got joined the queue. It was a very huge, long queue outside as just a couple of nobody's. It was very funny and started growing. But anyway, Eric was having dinner with George that night and said, Come on. That was it. In a sense, we started with Holy Grail and just carried on. It was a great dinner. It was George, Olivia, his wife, Jim Keltner. Now, what was wonderful about Jim Keltner, he went to high school with Carol Cleveland from Monty Python. Isn't that a weird- What.

Are the odds?

That's one of the things I discovered at that dinner. It was just wonderful. You liked it, and that'sThat thing, that connection or those connections are the surprising things in life.

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How did you end up in England?

I had to get out of America.

Why?

What was happening? I became totally disillusioned with the country. The war, the Vietnam War.

So it's 1968, 1969, what year?

I think it was '67, it was. I had actually served my time in the National Guard, and I had been in New York. There's a name, Harvey Kurtzman mean anything? Not here. Okay. Mad Magazine or Mad comics does. Yes. Harvey was the creator of Mad comics. He was to my generation of cartoonists, Robert Kron, Gilbert Shellton, he was God. I graduated... Well, actually, when I was in college, me and another group, we took over the arts magazine of the college and turned it into a human magazine, lowered everything. Harvey was doing at that point, a magazine called Help. And they used to do Fumeti, which is Italian for puffs of smoke. Actually, like in comic, people talking in a little bubble there. But rather than drawings, they were photographs. So it was basically movies without movement. I became Harvey's assistant editor after college. And so we would do these things, and a story would be written, and Harvey would then storyboard it. Then I would go out hiring actors who would work for $15 a day. Yeah, big money and locations. It was like learning to make movies. It's also where I met John Cleves because he was in New York with a group called the Cambridge Circuses.

It was the humor group from Cambridge Circus. They were there on the coattails of Beyond the Fringe. Do you remember Beyond the Fringe? Peter Cooke, Dudley Moore, Jonathan Miller. That had been a big success in New York. They, after university, ended up coming to New York. I found them in this little place down in the village, and they weren't doing very well. But John, as always, stands out from any crowd.

He's short, tall, one. He's 6'5?

No, I don't think he's that tall. He only pretends to be that tall. He's probably 6'2, 6'3. But he consumes a lot of his space, is what John does. I got him to be in one of these Fumeti. It turned out to be another press... I have a life full of Fumeti moments. This was one. It's a story about a man who has an affair with his daughter, who's Barbie doll. He falls in love. Yes, it works as a film. He couldn't make a film of it. The prescient part is he's then been married four times. All of his wives looked like an American Barbidol. They were American for the first three, all blonde. These are the weird things. That's why I find life so utterly fascinating, because I couldn't have planned any of it. I never had thought of a career. I just do what interests me, and I've been very lucky to just survive and make a living doing it. That was John. The magazine was actually in trouble. It was failing. I hitchhiked around Europe. I took off for Europe. I hitchhiked around for five months, I think it was. I was down in Morocco.

I got to Turkey. I just loved Europe, I thought. America has just... I love Disneyland, but this is real here in Europe. Each country spoke a different language. They had different culture. They had different food. I was blown away by the richness of Europe. I came back to the States because I basically had run out of money. I had run out of money in Turkey, and I got back to Paris. I don't know if Pilot Magazine means anything to you. It was a very popular human magazine in Paris, and in it was Asterix and Obelix. Okay. Comic strip that Renny Gossidy wrote, and he was the editor of the magazine. I got to Paris and I had met Renny when he was in New York with Harvey. It's all about connections somewhere along the line. I was broke. I said, Renny, I don't have any mind to get back to America. Can you help me out? He said, Here's two pages. Do funny things about Snow Men, anything you want. I'm sitting in this freezing little left bank hotel, Garrett and drawing Snowman while I'm freezing to death, and gave me enough money to get back to America, which then the only place I really had to stay was Harvey's Attic.

I lived in his attic for a bit and eventually then went back to L. A. And via a friend, Joel Segel. Do you remember Joel Segel? He used to be a good morning America? He was the critic, the film critic.

Oh, yeah.

Well, Joel was an old friend, again, coming from college. Hes in the consumer magazine because he was doing that for UCLA, and I was doing mine for Occidental and these weird connections. He was at that point working in advertising, and he got me a job, being a writer-A copywriter? What was the job being a writer and- Copywriter?

What was.

The job in advertising? I was a copywriter and a designer. I did the whole thing.

For print ads?

Yeah, well, for all sorts of guys, print primarily.

Do you remember any of the ads you did?

There was one for a soup, and I can't... What was the name of the soup? Something soup.

Were they funny or were they serious?

They're all funny. Whatever the soup was, what they were selling was soup that you didn't have to add water to, like Heinz and all this. That was a thing. I wrote this very silly thing about water addicts who couldn't stop. They wanted to put water in the soup. A guy was sneaking down at night when his wife was asleep, adding water to the soup. His wife found him. All of this nonsense I was doing.

Can you make fun of the product that you're actually selling?

Are you going to do this tap dance because you've got to make it humorous without denigrating the product. On the other side, the other thing I was supposed to be doing was coming up with ads for Universal Pictures, for films. I had absolute contempt for the stuff they were doing and the films. That's where I lost my job because I was... It was like, what was it? Madigan. There was a film called Madigan. My big line was, once he was happy, but now he's mad again. Exactly.

Did they use that app?

No, of course not. They fired me effectively. But it was just ridiculous. I hated it. At one point it was funny, but once you're thrust into a situation where you're having to fool people into buying this crap product, I couldn't do that. Even when I was younger, when I was working my way through college, I was selling encyclopedias at one point, and I think it was the Britannica. How it worked, they had got some company to come up with a pitch that then all the salesmen would use this pitch. I'm here, I'm in your neighborhood tonight. I'm looking on doing some research on social, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and to get in the door. It was all this stuff. Some were making real big money and what they would do, the group I was with were all college students. They put you the car, you take you out and drop you around different territories. Then you were left there for an hour, hour and a half, two hours to do your work. I was impossible because I couldn't. I'd knock on somebody's door and I'd look there and there's the family sitting around the table having their dinner.

The guy had been working his ass off for 8, 10 hours and he was home with his family. I was interrupting it. I couldn't do this. It was only one house did I actually get past the door and it was two old people who had nothing else in their life. Here's a perky young kid at the door. Come on in. I got to the point where I had convinced them to buy this huge raft of encyclopedias, and I didn't know how to do the paperwork. And I then had to talk my way out of their house, and I failed to sell a single book. I think that's, again, it's what you do when you're younger, what it leads to later in some strange... It doesn't mean you will go upwards, but you learn all the things you don't want to do. As I got older, I just do, Well, that door is closed. I've closed those doors. I'm not going... It narrowed my focus, let's say. Again, working my way through college, I was on the assembly line of the Chevrolet plant in Van Oys, California, on the night shift. Unbearable. Also because I wasn't allowed to use anything involved with color recognition, it turns out the test, where you get a circle with dots in it and you can see a number?

I can't see the number. Yet my whole life has been working with color.

Yes, amazing.

After a month and a bit on the night shift, horrible. I finally quit, and I said, That's it. I've had a lot of terrible jobs, which limits my choice because as a kid, I just wanted everything. I wanted to do everything. You waste your life wanting it all. The more you can narrow down to all the things, at least get all the things you don't want to do, now you're left with a choice of two, three maybe, if you're lucky, and only one of those doors is going to open maybe, and that's it.

Did you ever want to make a full animated feature?

No, I backed into animation on the Python stuff. It wasn't my intention.

Do you think of yourself as a comedian first?

No, not.

Even that. A comedy writer?

No, I think- Creative person. I can draw some comic images. I don't actually think of myself. I don't know what I do. I understand. I keep learning to make films. I'm still a student. Yes.

That's why they're good.

You're kinder similar.

Same thing.

There's nothing you really do that you could.

Say, I do this. Absolutely not. Yes, I have no idea. And that's what.

It's about. And yet you have a vision of the world or an idea of what the world or you react to things. Maybe your past has developed your sense of the world- For sure. -which is unique. For sure. That's what I think it's about. We're not so wonderful. We're just a bit unique because nobody did the road that we've traveled.

That's true for everybody, by the way, if they chose to do it.

But.

They don't.

I understand. It was like I graduated from college with no fucking idea of what I wanted to do. Yes. My friends were all getting jobs and advertising doctors. They planned their lives out, and off they went. They were making money. When I got the job at Help magazine, I was being paid two dollars less a week than I would have got on the dole. But I was-.

But you were working. I wasI know exactly.

With great people learning. That was what was… All these friends who graduated were making big bucks for years. As I got older and more successful, they got older and more bored with the trap they had found themselves in. That's it.

How do you gage which ideas are worth pursuing? I don't know. I'm guessing you have a lot of ideas.

Less and less with each year as I get older, as it's closing in. No, I pursue the ones that obsess me. I become the victim. I am actually the victim of these ideas, and I am completely in their throll, and I can't get out. I've got a script at the moment. It'll never get made.

Because- Why do you say that?

It's a satire of the world we're living in now, and it'll push all the buttons of all the people. I've actually subtitled it. It's called Carnival at the End of days. Anyway. It's fun for all those who enjoy taking offense. That's what I've done. That's why I don't know where I'm getting... The studios won't touch it. The studios are tiptoeing. Everybody's tiptoeing around the activists, which are a very small group of people, but they're just very good at what they do. I've just gone for it. I teamed up with a young playwright, 33-year-old guy because I thought I want to work with somebody younger rather than my generation just because I know what my attitude to the world is. I want to know his. We've done it. It's very funny. Everybody who I respect, who I've said to me, I want to see this film. At the same time, I think deep down, I'm not going to get the money. If I could do it for five quid, it would be different, but it costs. That's the thing with films, they're expensive things. It's not like writing a book.

Does it have to be with today's technology? There's no way to hand-make that film.

I keep trying to see if it's possible. I think maybe I've been lucky for too long working with the real stuff. But it may come to that. I may have to get down my little claymation. I might have to. I don't know. But that's it. The last, okay, the Don Quixote film, it only took me 30 years to make. I think that's worn me out. That's the point of that perseverance takes its toll.

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Have there been any others over the years that you've started that have never reached fruition?

There's a wonderful one called The Defective Detective, and I wrote it with Richard Lagravinase, who wrote Fisher King. We did it after the film was a success. It's actually stuck in the bowels of Paramount Pictures. They're sitting on it, and they're not going to do anything with it. But the way studios work is they don't want a script that they own to go out and be made by somebody else and possibly be successful. It's just languishing there. It's making me crazy because I think it's a brilliant script, and not just because we were involved. It is a good tale. I think at least I can tell what a good story is.

Let's use that script as an example. If you were able to make it, how different would the finished film be than the script?

It becomes a living thing is what happens. The script is a seed. You stick it in the ground and you start... I can say every film I've made is, in a sense, it's told the tale that I wanted to tell, but the tale was told in a different way. We get to the the magical city at the end of it. But getting.

There is where- And you're surprised along the way.

Well, that's what makes it interesting, because films are hard work, and if I spent a lot of time writing it, cowrite, because I don't write on my own cowrite. I'm just an extension of somebody else's world. But if I spend a lot of time, I'm almost trapped in that vision. The minute you start bringing designers in, actors in, it starts shifting because I want their input. I'm not the director that says, This is mine. You do what I want. I'm completely opposite of that. It's the collaboration that makes it exciting. You start getting lost on cases. You're going through the forest of ideas. But I know where I'm heading in the long term. I'll take little detours. So it is a different film than it would have been if I just stayed the course and doing what I want.

But we're alive. When you cast someone, does that automatically change everything?

Here's the question. Would Brazil be different if it was Tom Cruise rather than.

Jonathan Price? Different movie.

Correct. And that's what happened. Different movie. Yeah, and that's always that. It's the actors are so crucial. I don't think I direct actors. I think I hire the one that's most interesting. It was like Adam driver was not my first choice for the Don Quixhodi movie. I met him and I thought, Everything we talked about, he intrigued me. He didn't look like a movie star, which was really important to me. He looked interestingly. And he had, when 9/11 occurred, he had gone and joined the Marines to fight for his country. That is completely quixotic. And I thought, This guy is interesting. He thinks differently. He behaves differently. Let's see what happens. We had lunch at a pub somewhere in London by the end of the day. I said, There's nobody else who could do this film as far as I'm concerned. And it wasn't originally Jonathan Price. It was Mike Payland, who was.

The director. That'd be a whole entirely different movie.

Completely. But Mike eventually, because I was involved in this producer who didn't produce the film, and Mike got tired of waiting, pissing around. And Jonathan, who has been a very close friends since Brazil, he was pestering me constantly to play Keodi. And I said, You're not old. I was always ducking, Jonathan. And finally.

Mike- He's incredible in it.

Of course he is. He's incredible. But I couldn't see it. That was what it was about. And when he turned 70, I said, Okay, now he's the right age. I don't have to spend money on bushy eyebrows. I've saved money. Jonathan is absolutely breathtaking. There's no question about it.

Unbelievable.

I don't know. It's that weird thing. It was partly because we'd become too close. I knew too much about Jonathan, and that's always the day you don't want to know everything about an actor. They have to have secrets.

The mysterious. Yeah.

Because once he got it, he just went wild. He was so excited.

And every moment- You could see it. You could see his enthusiasm. It totally jumps off the screen.

Here's what's funny, because basically, Adam drivers is supposed to be the main character in the piece. He creates the situation. But we started shooting, and the order of shooting was not the order of the script. Because of location, though, it ended up with Jonathan's scenes were first before Adam's big scenes. Jonathan was so spectacular. I looked at Adam, I said, I looked at his face and he said, What the fuck? This is supposed to be my film, and this guy's walking away with the whole thing. In the end, the balance was brilliant.

Absolutely brilliant. It's a funny duo because they don't look like they belong together. They look like they're from two different worlds.

I suppose, ones in America, they are. It's really funny you say that because to me, and they work so... Well, I think that's what intrigues me. What you've just said intrigues me because what you've seen is different than.

What I saw. What I saw is Price seems like he's in one movie and Driver seems like he's in a more modern movie. Oh, yeah. And it's just different. But that juxtaposition makes it feel like I've not seen a movie like this before, which is great. I love that feeling.

It's also the idea that Adam is the one that created this monster. Is this Frankenstein? Monsters who he's got there. Because the point of the film for me, one of the key points was the dangers of filmmaking, what they do to people, actresses. And here's a little local cobbler who gets dragged into play Don Quixote, and he becomes Don Quixote. And there was more stuff that is in the film about him traveling around to local fairs, always acting the role of... So that wagon that you see where it's in is always introduction for him then turning up at a fair, being Don Quixote. There's a man in this town, his name is Walter. He's quite wonderfully, eccentric, passionate guy. He, in all the processions, all the key ceremonies. He plays Brachio Forte Brachio, the man who created this town. He is it. He lives every moment as this character. That was a strange, I think, that may have been part of the thinking in my head to see a real person in this real world. He's really living in another century.

Yes.

And that's it. Yes. Fascinating.

Had you not seen him, maybe that character wouldn't be that character.

But again, that's it. It's the things you bump into along the way and it's like, Oh, I could use that, or That's an interesting… Or triggers. That's why I don't want to know how it's done. I don't want to know how the trigger occurs. I just want to be surprised when it happens.

I bet it happens sometimes, and we don't even know what the trigger is. Something that we saw 30 years ago is in our subconscious, and that impacts the choice we make. We don't know why. We never know why.

It's only just in this new script. There was something that I solved a problem. I've got our main character and a Guatemala family trying to get across the US border. They arranged The Great Wall, and that's what it was in the script. Then a friend of mine who's very brilliant writer and successful, he had some problems with certain things, and a character that was a result of Trump's 2016 campaign. Trump used to always refer the Mexicans. Well, they're criminals, they're drug dealers, they're rapists, rapists. I've created a guy who is taking credit for being the rapist. Anyway, my friend, the writer, was bothered by this. I went back and tried to find not a preamble, but at least getting Trump speaking so that we could use this his thing about rapists, Mexican rapists. The scene was the Great Wall, but somewhere around the wall were police waiting just on the spot, the south of the border folk. I've now put them behind a bit of the wall, but the bit of the wall is only 100 feet long. The rest was never built. This is in the middle of the desert. This is huge fucking wall, only 100 feet wide with cop car hiding behind it.

They're watching on their television in their cop car, they're watching Trump's greatest moments. We get the whole speech, Trumpy and the speech. But what is so funny about this piece of wall just isolated on its own.

Is funny. They could just walk around anywhere.

You could. Again, this writer friend who I've solved his problem about the rapist business, he was just blown away by it. Here's why it's that way, because years ago there was a lady here, introduced, I think she's still here. She runs a charity in Israel and the West Bank and Palestine, and it's bringing Israeli teenagers and Palestinian teenagers together to realize they are not enemies. They are very common, and so much of their lives are common. It's called Windows for peace. I think, Fuck, this is good. This woman doing something, not talking about how you're doing it. I was in Israel. I was doing a theater show outside of in Jaffa. Her name is Rudy. Is she said, You want to come into Palestine with me? Want to take a ride on the West Bank? I said, You got it. First thing is we're in Jerusalem, and there's the East Jerusalem, and there's the Wall. It comes up a road. There's a road that's crossing this way. Up goes the Wall, all its monumental horror. Then it stops because there is now a lovely villa here with a wonderful garden. It stops. But then here is a cross street going there.

The wall is there. The next bit is a nunnery, big garden. This one isolated bit of wall and what was intriguing was this the low wall around the villa where all these Palestinian women coming to shop, shopping in Jerusalem, and they have to tightrope this wall to get past the wall. I dragged once the the Israeli teenagers and said, Come on, we're going to the West Bank, kids.

And you climb the wall.

We were tightroped across. I showed them, This is what it's like over here, folks. The great growth industries were Palestinian taxis because they were bringing all the ladies. There was almost a traffic jam of taxis because the taxis are the only ones that can go on the beautiful roads on the West Bank. It's the settlers and the taxi drivers. That was a growth industry on the West Bank. The other one was donkeys and carts because we were in a taxi going along and coming to a big bend and oncoming Palestinian taxis were flashing their lights, signal of something, which means at that moment, there's an army checkpoint around the corner. Our taxi driver just goes, right turn, boom, up a dirt road through an olive grove over this little Palestinian village and down the other side around the checkpoint. That's why the other growth industry is donkeys and carts for the dirt roads.

Unbelievable. I'm so excited to have been there to see it. I ended up in a town called Tulcar, which was originally a refugee camp, which is now a city. It was just a refugee camp, but it's grown over the years. The big posters on the walls, the big billboards are these young kids. They were suicide bombers, pop stars, like pop stars up there. They're the martyrs, the kids. That's the future for the young kids in Tulcar be a martyr. Not a good thing. We end up eventually with the the Palestinian side of the charity with the guy who runs it. We're sitting on a nice concrete floor. His old mother, we were just having tea, and all he talked about was despair, that's all. We went through it, and really, these are good people. Next, after our tea on the concrete floor in this shabby little place, I was driven 45 minutes back to Israel to the British Ambassador's house, where I dined with him and his wife and the servants, bring all the food. I said, Listen, this is what I just seen and been through. What are you doing to ameliorate this situation?

And he said, Well, basically he said, It's not our job. What is the fuck your job, man? Bring these people together. It's just crazy. So that was it.

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You told the story of coming up with the rape joke, which your cowriter had a problem with, and then you revised it to give it context to make it work for him. Through that collaboration, do you feel like it got better?

Yeah, it's much better.

It's one of the things that's so interesting in working with other people. If you're not stuck on, This is my way, and you're open to those conversations, what is it that is rubbing you the wrong way? You can actually make it better.

But that's the trick. I think it's always been like doing the animation. When I got this job on a TV show, what it originally was because I never studied animation other than a couple of books and a little thing, and I was on this TV show and I was-.

This is pre-Python.

Yeah, this is pre-Python. This is where I became first an animator on television before Five Pies.

This is in London as well?

Yeah. It was called… We have ways to make you laugh, I think it was called something. I was there as a character, Churis, and I would do a little drawing of the guests that came on. It was a talk show, but there was a lot of comedy involved, sketches and things. I would do these little drawings and they'd, Oh, camera, go in. We'd go on to it. One of the writers and performers of the show had spent several months collecting off the radio. There was a guy named Jimmy Young who was a DJ, who's, I suppose what was unique about him in between the songs. He would do these terrible connections and they're full of puns and all terrible stuff. But he was connecting that with that. And this guy from the show, he had collected a couple of months worth of this stuff and nobody knew what to do with it. I said, Can I make an animated film of this stuff? And they said, Go ahead. I had two wakes and 400 pounds, and the only way I could do it is cutting out other people's artwork, moving it around. That was suddenly me, an animator on television, now well-known, and that led to Python.

That's unbelievable. Also the idea that it's the first comedy group, I suppose, that's a multimedia group.

Because there were great... There was the David Frost show. There was the week it was, all comedy shows, but they never had a guy doing these animated sequences. And that-.

Not as part of the group. It was like you were in the band.

Yeah. No, that was it. We were a boy band without a manager. It was great. Nobody was in charge. We were completely democratic organization, and it was wonderful.

Were you there from the inception of the group? Yeah.

Because what had actually happened from this show that I'd been on with the animation team, I then did a couple of bits for a show that Mike, Payland, Terry Jones, and Eric Idle were doing with a couple of other actors. It was a kid's show. Definitely. Then I became part of that. It was Eric, Mike, Terry, and me. Then John, Clease, and Graham, John was offering BBC do a show. And so he chose to work. I think Mikes Palin has always been the connecting tissue in the group. He's the nice one. We all love working with Mike. John, I think, wanted to work with Mike.

And he's great.

He's fantastic. That's what happened. The four of us and the two of them became, and we just had complete freedom. It was at a time when there were only three television channels, BBC One, Two, and ITV. Now that's a special time. It doesn't exist anymore. Us being on the BBC, even when Louis came out late at night, we gathered an audience, and it grew very quickly. That could never happen now. I think the idea of are you considered an influencer? You're beyond an influencer. Come on, you do real things. No, but it's the idea that there's so many people out there that are just because of the choice of clothes or whatever, become an influencer. But I don't... Well, fashion has never been important in my life, so that doesn't count for me. But you make music sound, and that's music to me is God's voice. Absolutely. It's the making of things. It's always to be important. I don't care about it. I only want to make things.

It doesn't matter what it is. Just a vehicle for the idea.

Yes, and that's what we do. But I still... You keep claiming you don't pay enough, you don't do anything. Come on, you must.

No, I'm a fan. I like it. I can see the way the pieces come together, and I can feel where they don't go together as well as they could. And can verbalize it clearly until we get to that place.

How long did it take you to get to that place?

Very quickly, because it's just intuitive. It's like I.

Feel it. Yeah, but how did they let you- Nobody let me. -how your opinion got in the way of.

Their work? Nobody let me. I just started. What did you say? I just started. I was in school. I just started making things. No, but luckily, they were successful. Had they not been.

Successful, it's different. Of course, we wouldn't be talking. We're the same thing. We're on the verge of being unsuccessful with both of us.

Yeah, because I didn't even know it could be a job. It just turned into a job.

How is it? You just knew a band, some guys, and your opinion, they respected.

The first thing was I was in a punk rock band, so I recorded my punk rock band. That was the first thing. I was not successful. Would you play an instrument? Barely. Punkrock rudimentary guitar. Very barely. Punk rock was more about the energy and the idea behind it than it was about the virtual-uacity.

Yeah, exactly.

Then hip hop started, and I was watching this scene come up, and they were already starting to be these 12-inch vinyl records, early days of hip hop that you would have never heard. They were just like local things. But those records didn't sound like what hip hop sounded like if you went to the hip hop club. So more like a documentarian. I started making things just as a fan of hip hop. The records that were coming out didn't reflect hip hop. They reflected the old values of the way people made music, and they were just having somebody rap on top of the old way.

Bing Crosby is the old way. Bing Crosby is the old way.

Exactly. That's what they did. My feeling was it's not that. It's punk rock.

It's essentially punk rock.

I started making the punk rock version of rap records and people liked them, and then.

It went from there. That's exactly the same with me doing some animation. Somebody liked it and they gave me another thing. People liked that, you get another one. No training, no.

Apparent skills. Every step of the way when I would do something different than what I did before, because you don't do the same thing over and over again, I was told, That's insane. You can't do it. Terrible idea. Are you crazy? You're the rap guy. How could you make a heavy metal record and then you have a successful heavy metal record? You're the rap and metal guy. How could you ever record with country artists? Every step of the way is just these barriers of small thinking.

But this is like me going to the studios after Time Banners and Brazil, all that. You go in there and they're, Wow, I'd love. As a kid, I had Time Banners. It's changed my life. It's insane. I've got the new idea. Yes, but this new thing you're talking about, and it's been like I've got 20 years of that. It doesn't change. Those people stay the same. We keep shifting.

Yes. I think both of us like things that are at least edgy, if not offensive. That also plays a role in the resistance.

My problem is I don't know what the boundaries of humor are, so I keep going to the edge of the cliff.

I don't think they are. -over the edge of the cliff. I don't know that there are.

We're living at a time where people take offense before anything else. They are waiting to take offense. They really are at a time like that. It's not actually the people that are being protected from the offenders. It's the activists who are in between, because I know too many people who just are quietly getting on with their own life being who they want to be. No problem. I think some of these activists, they're beating a drum for them, their sake. It started years ago with film, there was the first showing of it, and these actors came up there and they announced themselves first as an activist, not an actor. What the fuck are you talking about? It's just a virtual signaling is all it is. I'm on the right side doing the right thing. I cannot stand when you... What is happening now. It's like now if you're not on their side, you're phobic. I say I'm a phob-phob. It's what it is.

It's a cheap laugh, as good as a clever laugh.

Not really. But it doesn't mean one doesn't go with the cheap laughs. I mean, we're a desperate people. People try to make people laugh, whichever it is. It's wonderful when you actually get a sublime laugh. Something is truly wonderful. My favorite moment is in the life of Brian, when the whole crowd, when Brian says, You're all individuals. This whole crowd shouts out. We're all individuals. And one voice speaks up, I'm not. That is sublime.

That's so fun. How involved are you in the writing of the projects you do?

Well, with Python, I didn't really write. I did animation. No, in the movies. No, the movies, yeah. I'm always involved. I always work with somebody who is much better at character and dialog than I am, because I'm the big ideas, the shapes, this, that, this scene, that is what I do. Then I'm lucky enough to work with more talented people who can put the words in the character's mouth. I sometimes put words, but I just know in the case of time-based, Mike Payland, he's better than I am. Why should I even be trying to compete? I will write something and he'll rewrite it, making it better.

That's all. Often do the actors write something better. Is that a typical thing?

Sometimes, yes. I mean, so many actors are really smart. They're not given credit for being as smart as they are. They're funny when they're given a chance. Yes, they'll come up with a better line that's more true to the character, even. I mean, when we did Fisher King, Robin Williams, of course, how do you stop Robin? He just went for it all the time because he actually had that feeling people are watching this movie because they're fans and they want to see what Robin Williams does. I had cast Jeff Bridges, not only was a brilliant actor, but he was the anchor that kept Robin and me on the ground. And so any day in a scene, Rob and would say, Let me do something. I'd say, Okay, rather than fighting, there was no point in fighting because that's just putting a cap on the pressure that's going to explode. Go for it, Rob. Out of his ad libbing, there would... There would be moments, a couple of moments really good. I'd say, Keep those in. Now, keep those, but get back to the script. That's how it worked, so that's what I do.

How did the Python TV shows get put together?

Well, we worked in different combinations. John Cleves, Graham Chapman worked together, Mike Penn, and Terry Jones worked together, Eric Heidal and I worked on our own. I didn't do what the others did. They were much better at words. They're much better performers. In many ways, I had the most freedom of anybody because everything was very democratic. When all the material would come in after everybody had been separated and doing their work, then we'd come in and we'd vote on which stays in the show and what doesn't. They never knew what I was doing. They couldn't really explain anything. I couldn't explain what I was doing. It was only on the day of the show that I would turn up with the film of what I had done, and it worked. That's what I think has always been to me, the miracle. This monolithic-syllabic Minnesota farm boy turns up in England with all these Cambridge and Oxford educated Brits. And somehow we shared the same sense of humor. It just came out in different ways, mine visually and theirs verbally.

Did they ever write material based on them all being English, where you didn't understand the joke? If you didn't grow up there, you wouldn't have understood it.

No, I always did. From a very early age, I became an Anglophile somehow. There was The Goon and things that were turning up on disk in America, and I just loved the humor. It was like even with Beatles lyrics. I didn't know what Penny Lane was. It didn't matter. I sensed what it was about. I loved the fact that eventually I could find out what these things were in their lives. But I wasn't really interested. It was poetry to me. That's what the rest of the Pythons were doing.

How were the order? Let's say there were a dozen skits in an episode, would you be the one to put them in order? How would it get assembled and how would the animations connect them?

Well, very early on we decided not to do punchlines because we'd seen so many TV comedy shows and there'd be this wonderful material, great characterizations, and then they'd have to end with a zinger. The zinger were never as good as what we'd experienced before. We said, No punchlines. What would happen, as the sketches were written and as they became assembled, as we worked them out. It would just basically say, And Gillian takes over from here before the punchline and gets us to there. That's all it was. I was the freest of all. I just did it. I could never explain what I was actually doing. Sometimes I had, or I could say, It's going to be like this. Most of the times I would just sit at home late at night because when we were doing the shows, I would probably have two all-nighters a week. My brain was just free, floating around, and the pieces of paper on my desk would start informing me of what we were doing and things. That's how it was. That's why when I looked back at some of the shows, I can't believe I was the guy doing that because it seems how did I ever come up with that ridiculous idea or brilliant idea, whatever it was.

It worked because this one foreign element in the group became very much the signature of the part of the signature.

Absolutely. Absolutely. Absolutely. Again, it made it modern. It was different than any other thing we'd seen before because the animation, it wasn't just the intro and the outro. It was the connective tissue of the whole episode.

The connective tissue really came from one animation I did for this children's show that Mike, Terry, and Eric were involved. It was just a stream of consciousness. Terry Jones loved that. He says, That's how we've got to do the show. It's this weird stream of consciousness, things unrelated things somehow are connected in some way, and we flow through it. I was the connecting tissue.

Let's talk through each of the stages of making a film quickly. First is the idea. Do you have lots of ideas? How do you know which is the one to pursue?

I don't know. I really don't know the process how one thing becomes the thing I'm trying to say. The current thing I'm working on, I was here in Umbria on my own for the first time in many years. My wife not here, my children not here. I was sitting in my house and I suddenly gained confidence. There was nobody to say what an idiot I was, what a complete waste of time I was. It was the weirdest thing. Suddenly, my brain just started dancing. I would say, Okay, let's destroy humanity. It's a good start. Then work out why and how you avoid ultimately doing it is what happened.

Is it helpful to have someone to say, Stop thinking about that. You're an idiot? Is that a good...

Well, obviously not, because my wife does that all.

The time. No, but having that barrier could also... You'll dig in when you dig in, and you won't dig in when it's less important. It could also be like a filter.

Well, that's very important. Usually it's the budget that is the filter. The time and cost becomes a thing. But that's why I like working with a cowriter, somebody else who will question why that's a good idea, then I've got to either defend it or not.

Describe the writing process. From the first day you show up, you have an idea of what you want to do.

What happens. Well, I've written a story first. This is the story I'm trying to tell.

Is it like three pages?

Could be. In the case of Brazil, it was 94. Ninety-four. Okay. And most of it was thrown out. But you start.

There's something. You come in with something.

There is something. Now what do you think? Well, that's really stupid. Why that? The question is, why are you doing that? How could you justify having that horrible idea? You put things in context and how the script is about when you send the script to the studio, they'll always say, Oh, this doesn't work. That doesn't work. They're always wrong because what isn't working is something that takes place in the script 15 minutes before. You have to set the scene for that thing down there. That's how it works. Studios don't understand this simple thing. In music, because it must be Latin music, if you set a chord or in the mix, you could be doing something and plant suddenly a major chord in the middle of minors, and that hangs in the air, and then you develop it later on. I don't know if.

It works that way. No, we always make either a demo in advance or we don't show it to anyone until it's the finished version. But it's working on a much smaller scale. It's a couple of people. It's not 100 people on a set.

That's the difference. Problem with films, you've got to put it in a written form. But the film is not about the written form, whether that says the words, but it's the imagery. What the imagery is expanding from the words. Somebody saying that these words, whatever he's saying, in one location, you put them in a different location, and it means something completely different possibly. And until the film has been shot. The film, you shoot and you're making mistakes every day, and then you're trying to fix them, and time and budget are the determiners, ultimately, of what you've made. I rail against, I don't have enough time to do that. But then it makes me angry, which gets the adrenaline going. The adrenaline comes up with clever ideas just to fuck them, basically. It really is. That happened on Munchhausen. We had a schedule of 21 weeks. In the.

Sixth week- That's a long time.

-this is what often they are. Brazil was nine months from beginning to end of shooting. I know you have to be young to do that. But so Munchhausen, we had to think. At all the budget, all the money was gone in the sixth week of a 21-week shoot. Then the bond company, the insurance company, said, Well, you can't do this. You can't do this. They all said, The baron cannot go to the moon. Because what was in the script? The baron and his friends go to the moon, and on the moon is a king and queen, and there's 2,000 people. All who, during the lunar eclipse, their heads detached from their bodies and may or may not get back to the right body, and the King of the Moon of these 2,000 people is Sean Connery. Now, they said, You can't go to the moon. I said, Hold on, the baron will go to the moon. My first idea was the film would be going along and we reached the point when he arrived at the moon. Basically, we walk into the office with me and my cowriter, and we just are reading the script.

Yeah, we're going to the moon. Fuck you. It was my first reaction. Then it was Eric Idle who suggested maybe Robin Williams could play the King of the Moon. I thought, Whoa, now we're in a different world here. We didn't have the money for 2,000 people, and it was down basically to two people on the moon. I removed three zeroes. Sean Connery said, There's not much point of me being king of two people. He was gone. That's how Sean went before Robin appeared. Then Robin appeared, and we did it with two people on the moon. Much of the moon sequence was Robin ad libbing. There's a lot of stuff there that was scripted. He was in great form, and we had a wonderful time.

If five different great directors had one of the scripts that you start from, how different would those five movies be?

They'd probably be better.

Between the five of them?

I don't know. No, because it's always intrigued me. What you're asking is something I've always wanted to know. Here's a script handed to five different well-known directors. Go for it. And they would be five different films. I mean, my noise have twisted ending. Spielberg doesn't do that. Spielberg is the Norman Rockwell of Cinema. He makes warm, cuddly films. I don't. I'm trying to shock people into looking things in new ways, surprise them. Somebody like Michael Bay, it would be all action, big technological things. We all have different skills.

Who do you think of as peers?

Cohen Brothers. Great. I love the Coens. Great. I think they're the only ones really out there still expanding the boundaries of what you can get away with. Getting away with is the key to everything. How many times can you get away with murder?

How do you think we parse surreal material? Is it intellectual or is it something else?

I don't think in that sense. I just react. It's really weird. I can't explain what surrealism is, but all I know is it makes me see the world in ways I haven't imagined. It's like the brain is all about trying to make sense of things as what the brain. You put two completely conflicting ideas in front of the brain, and it starts working overtime trying to make sense, and you may never make sense of it, but it gets your brain active and struggling. That to me is wonderful.

Yeah. That juxtaposition can create a feeling in the viewer where they don't know why, but I.

Feel this. It's almost impossible to explain why I'm feeling this or exactly even what the feeling is. It's just getting neurons buzzing around. It's a cheap drug, surrealism.

How important is it for the audience to understand what they're seeing?

To me, I'm trying to communicate to an audience. I want to tell a story. I want to bring them along with me, and I want to play with them while we're going there. It is important. At the end of the film, I don't care if what you saw was a different film than the one I thought I made. I don't care. But you saw a film, and it made sense to you. When we finished 12 Monkeys, there was some woman who suddenly got my e-mail and she had worked out a whole cosmic religious film there. The 12 monkeys, the 12 Disciples, James Cole, Bruce Willis's character, JC, Jesus Christ. It was elaborate and it was totally convincing that this is what we had done. It is not at all what we did, but it's what she made out of what we had done. I thought it's interesting.

Yeah, we can never know how someone else receives something. Have you ever come back to something and had an insight about it that you didn't know for years?

With Time Band, I'd say recently I've heard a lot of people who said when they were kids, they were frightened. They thought it was a horror film. Why are they talking about it? It wasn't meant as a horror film. It was just a good adventure. I don't know if they really felt that then or they have now changed because as the world has changed, we've become much more delicate that something as challenging. For me, Time Bandards was interesting. It was a kid's film and it was an adult. It was for all ages. What happened at the end, because there was a big fight with me and Dennis O'Brien, the producer, about the ending, the parents being blown up because they're not listening to their son. I said, This is what the film is about. Parents listen to your children. They're often wiser. And what happened at the end, the boys came out of the film saying, Yeah, no problem. Kevin's on his own without his parents. We can handle it. The girls came out like mothers. They were so worried about what happened. So right from the very beginning, there was this distinction between the young boys and the young girls.

The boys were full of testosterone, Wow, we could do it. Parents, fuck that. The girls were very concerned about the boy. I thought that's fantastic. That made sense to me, those very different views.

You described the initial factions, I'll say, within Python. Did those factions remain the same throughout the duration?

No, it was weird because we were all learning from each other. We were changing in different ways. I was picking up things from them. They were picking up. It was such a good time because we had to keep producing these shows, films. We were just clicking. We didn't have time to intellectualize what we were doing. We were just doing it because it came out and we made each other laugh. That was it. And the fact that it reached a larger audience was a delight. But we all became... I was writing things that were more like something Eric was doing, and he was picking up things from John and Mike. It was a wonderful experience, just working like that, mixing, matching.

Why did it only last the four seasons?

It was enough. I think the sense was we weren't being original anymore. We wanted to be original, and we were becoming repetitive and very successful. Thank you very much. But that was not the purpose of what we were trying to do.

Have you ever had a job on a movie besides directing the movie?

Oh, yeah. I began very early on when I was in New York working for two dollars less than the doll, and I got a job working for Free in a little stop motion action studio. The guy named Ted Demet, aided dancing cigarette packs, it all for commercials. His wife was a director, and she was directing her version of Finnegan's Wake. I was on there as just nobody to help out. I remember one day setting up a shot in this bar at closing time and the circular table had upturned chairs, so it looked like a crown. They were trying to do this shot with the camera and all. That's just wrong. What they're doing is never going to achieve what they're trying to do. I said to the director, Wait, that's not going to work. Because then in particular, I had a really good spatial sense about things, how they really didn't work. I said, That ain't going to work. What you need to do is... And they paid no attention to me. I said, Good night. That was the end. I walked off the set and it was the end. I may be the lowest of the low, but ideas I have.

If you can't be bothered to listen, and that has been my way on sets ever since because I listen to people. I don't care who they are. I try to make sure that everybody can speak to me. I try to break down the hierarchy. When we were doing Munchaus, it was very funny. In Italy, Catholic country, the Pepino Rotunno, the cinematographer, brilliant, brilliant man. Now, his English was not great. I had an assistant who was translating, he didn't like because he had done a Bob Fossey movie and thought his English was great. It wasn't. I said, Pepino, you're not the problem. My English isn't very good. It's the problem. I said, And it wouldn't stop, and it became more and more difficult. I said, You're a Catholic. I'm a Protestant. As a Catholic, you have God, the Pope, and then you. I'm a Protestant. Anybody can speak directly to God. I am God. I don't want a Pope. Which, Pepidou, you are. I want them all to speak to me, not to come through you to speak to me. That was my big fight.

Do you remember the Broadway show? Which one? The Monty.

Python- Oh.

Yeah, whatever that was. -on Broadway. No, with the original cast, I saw it when I was, I don't know, I was probably 12 years old, 15 years old. I still remember mind-blowing. One of the things I remember the most was the giant hand that came down onto the stage just because it was such a visual unexpected in a more straight performance situation.

I don't have really any great memory of it all. It was just fun being on stage and being applauded. And my biggest memory is one of the nights we finished the show with a lumberjack song, and George Harrison was there and Harry Nielsen was there, and we all take the bow. And as the curtain is coming down, Harry steps forward, up stage to the edge of the stage over the orchestra pit, and some fan reaches up to shake his hand and pulls him into the orchestra pit. Last we saw was Harry's feet in the air as he disappeared. And that's my memory of the shows.

Are you superstitious?

Not really. I try to be because it's more interesting, but I'm not very good at convincing myself. But I look for signs. I'm always looking for signs. And at certain point, certain things are happening, and that's forming my view of what is going on. If I've fallen down that day, I crashed my car the next day, my dog was sick that I think something the... The reverberations are not good. The energy is not good. Something is wrong. I don't believe that, but I don't understand any more than that.

What did you believe when you were young that you don't believe anymore?

God is omnipotent, and it's worth begging down and bowing to Him. If you pray, you will get the returns you're hoping for. I think nature is what it is. It's extraordinary. It's brutal. It's wonderful. But it doesn't respond. Except I do actually believe there's energy out there. If you somehow can feel it and sense of the world, you might be more in tune and have better luck than if you're fighting that. That's all it's about. I don't know. God will just have to get on his own without me praying for.

Have you ever made a creative choice because you imagine the audience would prefer it instead of what you prefer?

I've never actually done that. That's a weird one. If there's enough of them, and enough in the audience that are really smart, people I admire or respect, and they say I'm wrong, I listen. But as a general thing, my assumption is the audience is unknowable, and it's much larger than Studio Executives thinks it is. So if the current thinking is all of this, I will go and feed the other bit of thinking and see just how big it is. Almost everything I do is trying to find out the edge of civilizationyou can say.

Did you watch TV as a kid?

Not much. I grew up on radio because we didn't have TV until I was 13. Radio was wonderful because you have to do all the work. You have to do the costumes. Everything is set. It's like reading a book. Same thing. You do the work. I'm convinced it was books and radio that developed my visual sense, simple as that, because those muscles need exercise.

Tell me about the place you grew up in.

It was Medicine Lake outside of Minneapolis, Minnesota, and we were on a little hill, dirt road out there, a house that had been a summer cottage. My dad, he was a carpenter. My mother was a virgin also. We know where this goes. Anyway, my dad was a carpenter, and he restored this little summer shack into a house that we grew up in. For the first 10 years of my life, the toilet was at the end of the garden in a biffy, it was called the biffy. We call it outdoor loo. This is my memories are the snow in the winter, 40 degrees below zero. It was just beautiful and freezing and having to go out and spend an hour in the biffy. You'd go out in your shoes at a bathroom, that's all. I have no memory of how freezing cold that must have been because it was normal. The things that weren't normal in my life was the radio. Let's pretend it was a show. There was the fat man and there was the shadow, Lamont Krasd, Only the shadow knows. And so you have these wonderful voices, the timbre of the voice, the sound, and the footsteps, the sound effects, and your brain is inventing all the visuals.

There was also Johnny Lu Jack. Johnny Lu Jack was a quarterback for Notre Dame University, a Catholic quarterback. This is fast. There were the hardy boys as well who were boy detectives. These were the things I used to listen to.

That's it. How would you describe your taste?

My taste? I don't have any taste. I'm happy when I get a hot pepper. I'm happy when I get particularly sweet things. I want the whole range of possibilities. I'm bombarding my pallette. On the other hand, I'll just drink Coca-Cola.

And artistically the same?

Yeah. I don't want to define it. I'm greedy. That's what I am. I'm basically very greedy. I want it all.

Quentin tells a story of you mentoring him at Sundance before his first movie. Do you have any memory of that? I do. Tell me about that.

No, because what they did at Sundance, they would bring in a group of, quote, professionals, and they're the young, aspiring ones there. My group was Stanley Donnan. Oh, sorry. Yeah. And so Stanley Donnan, me, and Volker Slodov, who had directed The Tin Drum, great German director, and we had all these young hopefuls in there. And this script turned up, and it was Reservoir Dogs. I read it. I was utterly blown away by just the outrageousness of it, the boldness, the complete commitment that Quentin was like. Neither Stanley or Volker, they didn't understand this script. This is great. You got to understand this. I met Quentin. Now, the previous group of professionals, because he overlapped by one week, the previous group has chat all over him. They were just completely unresponsive, unhelpful. I said, Quentin, this is great. He had actually shot a scene. Well, he was there at Sundance with Tim Roth, a scene that ultimately Harvey- Harvey Beakey. - did the scene, and he's talking to himself in the mirror. Kevin had 10 different angles on his seat. He said, You don't need all that, kid. Just do it simply and directly. I said, But your work is great.

Apparently, that's all it took. It gave him a little bowl of confidence. I get a credit on Resvar-Tog.

He speaks really highly of it. He talks about it as like a pivotal moment.

Well, because he had been shut upon. Confidence is such a delicate thing. It's so easy to make somebody unconfident, which they had. I just said, This is a fucking wonderful goal for it. I said, Listen, don't try to do everything. Surround yourself with good, talented people that you respect. Listen to them. That's it.

Did you stop doing animation when we stopped seeing it from you? Or have you done any animation since?

When I stopped, I stopped. I think enough of you decided you had had enough of me. I got to do what I'd always wanted to do, direct movies, and that was Holy Grail, and off we went.

How would you describe each of the Python members John.

Is the tallest, the most strange, in some ways the most intellectual, but he doesn't understand humanity. His complication, I think, is that he generally feels he needs to be in control of the world around him. He surrounds himself with a lot of professionals, but he's never yet to control it. That's his great sense, his brilliance and Faulty Towers is a perfect example of it. A man trying to control this world and failing. John is at his best when he's like that. He doesn't understand me because I'm very instinctive. I don't intellectualize. We're at the opposite ends of the place. In between, Mike Palin is not just the nicest person to the group. I think he's the best actor. I think he's brilliant. His sense of comedy, his sense of character is so honest and brilliantly funny. The great writer, and he teamed with Terry Jones. It's interesting because Terry was a bit like me, a bit monomaniacal. We believe we're right. But Terry was wealth, which makes him feel even more that he's right because he's oppressed by the English-I know. But he's terry was passionate, wildly passionate, and excited because of that. Eric is the cleverest in many ways because he can dance.

He's the tap dancer. He can dance with words, music. Hen some sense, he knitted much of the group together because what he did was taking what another member of the group did and found his way to knit it in in there. He, unfortunately, is the successful, famous Python in Hollywood. He bears the brunt and both the fame and the pain of being a well-known comedian. Graham Chapman was from another planet. Graham was just strange. He was a wonderful balance to John, who is so precise, intellectual, argumentative. I can never word which is the right brain and the left brain. Is the right brain more open? One of the half the brains is the rigorous one, the language, mathematics. John is that. I'm the opposite, and Terry Jones was the opposite as well. But Graham was from another planet. He was also the only gay Python that was his his great claim to fame. When a lot of the gay rights began, he became very active and very funny and outraged. And, Graham, I never knew who he was, but he was there with us all the time coming up with an odd word, an idea that just popped out of some other cosmos and it became a connecting bit that would work.

The chemical combination of the six of us, I think, was totally unique. Individually, whatever we are, but chemically together we were just... Can I say the word brilliant? I think we were.

I think you can. Were there ego clashes?

Always. Yeah.

How would that get resolved?

It's because... Okay, there are six egos at work there, six talented people with different skills, and there would be huge battles, but somehow democracy won. The basis of all the differences was a deep respect for each of us, for each other. That was it. We completely disagreed with the other guy, but I respected him and his talent, so you couldn't dismiss anybody. It just worked. Big battles occurred. Now it's sad because we've all gone our separate ways. Everybody's done reasonably well. But it's not the joy, the thrill that it was when we were a multicellular creature.

When you speak to any of them, is the vibe good?

We're fighting over all sorts of very pathetic things. But when you're old and out of work, what can you do?

Did you design the album covers, the matching tie and handkerchief?

Yeah, that was fun. Also the three-sided record was my idea.

Oh, that's so cool.

It is.

I was so happy with that. I think it's the only time I've ever experienced that.

I mean, because we- Of course, how did you get the idea? I don't know why. I was watching how it worked. I mean, spirals. I've always loved spirals. Well, you have two spirals, one just inside the other, they go around together. Where the needle drops, you don't know what spiral you're going to be on. We did it, and it worked. I love the fact that nobody knew we had done it. At the beginning, people said, Oh, you got to hear this. This wonderful sketch, and it wouldn't come up another sketch. That was wonderful.

So cool. Yeah, random. What you got was random.

It was so much fun being Python back then because there was such a fan base and there was enough money to do what we wanted to do. That was a good thing.

Was it huge, out of the box? People referred to Python as the Beatles of comedy. But the Beatles, the explosion was immediate. Was that the case with Python, too?

It was because, again, it was this period where there were only three channels in Britain: BBC One, BBC Two, and ITV. We were BBC One. When the show and we were given the free hand, the organization was a very, I wouldn't say, Lais-s-vaire organization, but it allowed the people in charge to make choices without having to... It wasn't committee work. John Clears was wanted by the BBC to do a program, and so he brought in his five friends and they said, Okay, you got, I think it was seven shows we were given. Go make seven shows. We'll see how it works out. I think I remember is after the fourth show, because when it started, the BBC thought, Monty Python is a flying circus. Oh, it's a circus. Of course, it wasn't a circus in the way they thought of circus. There's a couple of shows where nobody knew what the fuck this was. It was just, What is this? But it caught on very quickly. It was that because you only had three choices on a Sunday night, and we were the one the most interesting choice available. They stumbled off, and very quickly we became hot.

But the funny thing is, as we were rising very quickly on the fourth show, we were taken off and replaced by the Horse of the Year show, which is an annual event where people riding their beautiful horses over this, that, and the other thing. The funny thing about it, we were taken off, and yet during one of the exercises of the horse did, they played. The John Suez of March that we had effort. There was no way of stopping Python. We were just spewing. And then Nancy Lewis was this woman who is a PR lady for Buddha Records in America, and she got wind of Python. She is responsible for bringing Python to America. She's not credited anywhere, which is a crime against Nancy. But she got a guy named Ron DeVille from Texas. He was working one of the TV channels there. It turned out that the TV channel he was working for, the boss band, was Owen Wilson's father. They had to gather together 11 pay-per-view channels, whatever they were, and they got it. Ron got it, and off we went. We hit it right from the beginning. Boom. I think it was after the first couple of shows, I think in Des Moines, Iowa or somewhere in the Midwest, they pulled the show off.

A couple of thousand people were demonstrating out of the street to get the show back on.

Was it pulled off because of it was being censored or banned?

I have no idea. I suppose the big prank was when we were on national-public, NPRs, that's where we were. I just love the idea.

Or PBS in the US.

Yeah, it was PBS, what it was called. The fact there were no commercials, the show went out as we made it. Then we were preparing to do the Python New York show, and ABC TV had gotten very excited about the show, and a guy whose name I've forgotten had decided ABC would take it. All we had to do was change, edit the show. They did their modularized version of the show. We were very late in waking up to the fact that the show was going to go out with all these ridiculous cuts in it. We took them to court. The court case was in New York, the big federal building there where the previous attorney general, John, who was under Nixon, had been held in court. We were there, ABC versus Python. Mike, Pagan and I were witnesses for Python.

This is a huge building, 40-foot high ceilings, all of panels. There's the John John is high thing. Mike and I had individual turns in the witness box. It was quite wonderful. Now, the stupid things about the ABC lawyer, they were saying it was all a publicity stunt for the upcoming New York show, which it wasn't. No. And the fact we had been so long after it come out, it was only purely a publicity stunt. It wasn't. We just were very slow at thinking about legal. We just didn't think about this. So we're up there. Now, the moment when they, ABC laws was very simple. We sit in the jury box, the judge and Mike and I on either side of him and the ABC lawyers. They showed our uncut versions first, and everybody laughed. Wonderful. Then they showed the boundarized version. Nobody laughed because old material, it wasn't as funny. That's how stupid the ABC lawyer was. He didn't understand comedy. Amazing. We blocked it going out. We didn't win originally, took more appeals, but it stopped ABC because ABC didn't understand because they loved the show and they were just trying to make it available for more people.

We'd be loved by more people. We didn't care about more people. We just wanted to go out the way we made it and we would suffer if it didn't. In the end, the appeals went back and forth. Eventually, the BBC, who had been central to selling it off to ABC, lost. We owned the shows.

Wow. Incredible.

Happy ending. It is a happy ending.

Happy ending. At what point in the success did you realize this is really having impact? It's not regular success because it's something different.

I think it was the New York shows that really a live audience was there, and they were trying to leave at the end. They were banging at the gates. It was like that frenzy, which was The Beatles, a smaller version of it. But for us, it was gigantic.

This was already after the show was done, the TV show was finished.

We knew we had succeeded. We knew it was working, but it wasn't a first-hand experience. When you actually get mobbed, then you're at a different level.

What was the ratio of the skits filmed to the ones that made it into the show?

I don't know. Let's say three quarters got in. The quality of writing was really good. It was the business of trying to organize which sketches would go in that show and how we could relate them if any way. Some good things were just lost because there wasn't a way of fitting them in as far as we were concerned.

Any inspirations from when you were young?

I tried to be a magician. My dad built me a beautiful stall to work from behind, and I would try to do my magic trips to impress the local kids, and I always fucked them up. I became known as Terry the Clown because my failures made them laugh. I was a failed magician, but a pretty decent clown. It's what anybody involved in comedy or even, I'm sure, in music is we're the guys that were maybe less popular at school. How do you get the girls to look at you? How do you get people to notice you're interesting? Comedy is the best thing, and especially if you have to be smaller than the other guys who would like to beat the shit out of you. You better get it out of it. You're going to run it quickly. That's how you survive. It's survival techniques is what brings comedians alive, I think.

Do you remember how And Now For Something Completely Different came about?

No, I don't. That's what's wonderful. As you get older, holes in your memory appear. You're the Swiss cheese of memory is what I got up to. Certain things stick and other things don't. What normally sticks are the bad things because they're the most shocking, the most, I suppose you'd say, traumatic, but they don't kill you. I think, Nietzsche is right. Failed humor makes you stronger. He didn't say it quite like that. It is the knocks that are important. The knocks are because you've got to keep picking you. Listen, that's one reason. Kihodi is such an important character to me. It's about failure. He gets knocked down because his view of the world is noble and beautiful. The real world kicks him in the ass every time he's down on the ground, he's flat, but he gets up again and goes off trying to live in this world of nobility, which doesn't really exist. That is inspiring. Failure is his ability to constantly get up again is to me, a great inspiration. I wish poor people appreciated that.

Is making things now as fun for you and interesting as it's always been?

Just more difficult. I want it to be fun, yes, because I know when I get into it, whether writing something or trying to make it or what I really do, my real job is making birthday cards for my family.

Beautiful.

Each birthday comes along. It's a specific age, and I've got to come up with an idea that is about whatever is going on in their life at that age. It's really hard work. I spend a lot of time thinking, and then suddenly the idea is when the idea, I got it. Now I've got to do it. I realized I haven't been spending what I should have been doing in all the time up to that practicing my drawing skills, and suddenly I can't draw properly anymore. Each thing is a battle, but at the end of it, I've done something. I've got all these birthday cards, Valentine's cards from my wife, even our anniversary cards. That's what I do. That's my art.

These days. I imagine cracking the code of the card is every bit as exciting as putting together a Python episode. It's like you get to make something and you get to have that. A-ha, look, there it is.

But that's it. Is a-ha. Is that Archimedes, Eureka? It's Eureka moment. Whatever. And an idea, when a good idea hits you, and it feels so brilliant because I don't even know where it came from. Somewhere in the psyche, deep down in some of the bowels, maybe. I don't know. It comes out of my ass, as far as I know.

Well, thank you so much for talking to me. It's been a pleasure, and I feel like we will be lifelong friends.

Yeah, we are. We met another guy who talks out of his ass.

Thank you, sir.

Great. It's been a joy. Thank you. It's the same.