Terry Gilliam: ‘There are more than enough people conforming out there, and I like rebels’

when it comes to Hollywood awards, Terry Gilliam is probably more akin to Marlon Brando than the luvvies who turn on the waterworks the minute an Oscar is thrust in their hands.

Brando won best actor for his role as Don Corleone in The Godfather, but famously failed to attend the awards ceremony. Instead the actor sent a young woman dressed in Native American costume to refuse the award on his behalf and to draw attention to the plight of Native Americans. It’s the kind of rebellious act that Gilliam, you suspect, would probably approve of. “I don’t know what it is about the film industry that people feel the need to be recognised for what they do. Other people don’t ,so why should they?” he says.

This could sound like sour grapes if it wasn’t for the fact that he’s had more award nominations than you can shake a stick at. In 2009, he was honoured with a Bafta fellowship and on Saturday Gilliam will receive the annual Fellowship Award at this year’s Bradford International Film Festival, which is also screening a number of his films including Brazil (1984), Twelve Monkeys (1995) and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998). “It will give people the chance to watch the films on the big screen as they’re supposed to be seen so I’m really excited about that,” he says.

His journey from young cartoonist to one of the world’s leading figures in fantasy cinema has been a long and interesting one. “The first films I remember watching were Disney animation and then as I got older I became interested in live action films,” he says. Gilliam grew up in Minnesota before his family moved to California in the 50s, by which time he had become interested in film and animation. He created artwork for his college magazine which was noticed by publisher Harvey Kurtzman who had started a magazine called Help! and offered Gilliam the job of assistant editor in New York.

“When I was a cartoonist I would go out with a group of friends at weekends with a roll of 16mm film and shoot anything and everything.” Among those friends was Harry Shearer, of Spinal Tap and The Simpsons fame, who they would film eating spaghetti in a park or something equally surreal. Gilliam then enrolled in a film-making course at night school. “I lasted about a month. It was full of people who were far more ambitious than I was. They knew they wanted to be film-makers and I was just this kid from California,” he says.

Despite this setback he kept up his interest in film-making and photography. In 1963, he covered the freedom march in Washington which culminated in Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech to 200,000 civil rights supporters at the Lincoln Memorial. It was a tumultuous period in American history and one that saw Gilliam become increasingly politicised.

“You had race riots in LA and Buddhist monks immolating themselves in protest against the Vietnam War. To me, the war was crazy and I was angry with the world. I wasn’t unique, if you were young and politically aware then you were angry at what was going on.” But it reached the stage where he felt he had to leave his homeland. “I’d become an activist and the next stage would have been to start throwing bombs – but I’m a better cartoonist than I am a bomb-maker,” he says, with a chuckle.

While working in New York he met John Cleese who was in the US with the Cambridge Footlights Revue. They became friends and when Gilliam moved to England in 1967 Cleese introduced him to Humphrey Berkeley, who at the time was making the TV show Do Not Adjust Your Set, which starred, among others, Michael Palin, Eric Idle and Terry Jones. Gilliam was the final piece in the jigsaw and Monty Python’s Flying Circus was born. It was, he says, a defining moment in his life.

“I was an outsider, I wasn’t English, I spoke with an American accent and I worked with imagery whereas they worked with words. But immediately I felt here was a group of people who shared my absurd view of the world and it felt like I had found the kind of people I’d spent my life looking for.”

Monty Python was first broadcast in 1969 with Gilliam’s animation used as a bridge between the surreal sketches. Their humour was anarchic, childish, original, and, above all, funny – which is why it has found a new generation of fans.

“We laughed at authority figures and the absurdity of people. The world had become very cautious so we seemed very radical. What pleases me is that you get kids of 11 and 12 watching Python today and it means as much to them as it did to us.” But although he enjoyed being a Python, he wanted to be a film director.

“Animation was a detour. It was something I fell into because I could do it, but that was it. Live action intrigued me and after doing animation with Python for several years I was starting to get a bit bored.”

Ironically, he made his feature length directorial debut on Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975) which he co-directed with Terry Jones. “It became a standing joke on set that you had to be called Terry to be a director.”

The film’s success whetted his appetite and he followed it up with Jabberwocky (1977) and Time Bandits (1981) which cemented his growing reputation. But it was art, rather than film, which inspired him.

“I used to go to the National Gallery whenever I ran out of inspiration just to look at the great history of painting on the walls and I think there is a painter’s eye in my work.” He is an ardent fan of Renaissance artists Pieter Bruegel and Hieronymus Bosch. “They would have been film-makers if they were around today because their paintings are epic in scale, they aren’t just based around a single idea,” he says.

“Cinema offers an escape into another world, but it also seems to me to allow you to look at the world in a different way. Most film-makers just look at other films, they’re like walking encyclopedias on cinema history and I try to move away from that because it becomes too self-reflective,” he says. “I like to take images I grew up with and try to be a bit perverse by using them in the opposite way to which they were intended, to take a cliche and play it against itself. There are enough people out there conforming and I like rebels.”

But his outspoken attitude hasn’t always endeared him to Hollywood’s executives with whom he’s had past run ins and he admits it is harder to get films made now.

“It was easier in the beginning. I was fortunate that the Holy Grail was successful because that allowed me to do Jabberwocky and that then allowed me to make Time Bandits, and so on. These days you can make a film for £10m or £100m, but in between it’s really tough and that’s where I am.” Even so he has no shortage of fans among Hollywood’s A-list actors and following Heath Ledger’s untimely death a third of the way through filming The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, Johnny Depp, Jude Law and Colin Farrell all jumped in to help complete the film.

But despite having thrilled cinemagoers for the past five decades he still feels the need for a new challenge. “It’s easy for me to fall back into the comfortable world I know that’s slightly removed from society and I’d like to do something different but I’m not sure what,” he says. “Right now I feel like I’m out in the woods and I’ve got lost somehow.”

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Terry Gilliam is appearing at the 17th Bradford International Film Festival on March 19. For more information call 0844 856 3797, or visit www.mediamuseum.org.uk/biff

Terry Gilliam: The Full Monty

Born in Minnesota in 1940, he was the eldest of three children.

Worked as an assistant editor on Help! magazine in New York in the early 1960s, where he first met John Cleese.

Moved to England in 1967 and teamed up with Cleese, Graham Chapman, Michael Palin, Terry Jones and Eric Idle, to form Monty Python’s Flying Circus.

Co-directed Monty Python and the Holy Grail in 1975 and has since directed a number of films including Brazil (1984), The Fisher King (1991) and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998).

Received a Bafta fellowship in 2009 and this week is being honoured with a Fellowship Award at the Bradford International Film Festival.