CMU School of Drama


Tuesday, September 23, 2014

Terry Gilliam: Hollywood is just “gray, frightened people” holding on for dear life

Salon.com: If you want to illustrate the old adage about a prophet who is without honor in his own country, look to Terry Gilliam. Mind you, I guess America isn’t even Gilliam’s country anymore, and neither is Hollywood. The onetime Monty Python member and director of “Time Bandits,” “Brazil” and “12 Monkeys,” although he was born in Minneapolis and spent his teen years in Los Angeles, has lived as an expatriate for many years and renounced his United States citizenship in 2006.

1 comment:

Alex Fasciolo said...

I love Monty Python and just about every work of Terry Gilliam that I have seen. Time Bandits in particular is one of the movies that resonates with me as much as it did throughout my childhood (and the movie has a lot to say about childhood). I think Mr. Gilliam makes a good point about not doing everything that you can do all at once. Limitations area a good thing, and if you impose them upon yourself in the right way then it can really help you shape something significant. This can completely be applied to theatrical contexts as well, where we are more than ever already limited by what is physically possible, without the benefit of CGI. Why do we all do this anyway? Why do we constrain ourselves to live performance where off the bat there is so much inherent limitation. Part of the answer I think is that overcoming the challenges presented by those limitations are what helps us become creative. Being forced to choose to present something in a way you may not originally thought of gives us the opportunity to stumble upon very cool ideas.