TIME BANDITS
THE HISTORY BOYS
TERRY GILLIAM REMAINS ONE OF CINEMA’S MOST RENOWNED AUTEURS. FORTY YEARS AGO, TIME BANDITS GRANTED THE AMBITIOUS DIRECTOR HIS FIRST SUCCESS, AND ENABLED AN ESCAPE FROM THE SHADOW OF MONTY PYTHON
WORDS: ANDREW PRICE
PICTURES © HANDMADE FILMS, ALAMY, GETTY
I DON’T LIKE FANTASY!” CHUCKLES a typically mischievous Terry Gilliam. “I always want the audience to feel like they’re witnessing amazing things going on in the real world.” It’s an eyebrow-raising admission from a master of the outlandish. Throughout Gilliam’s much-lionised body of work, a central conflict between imagination and reality constantly echoes. “My wife keeps telling me that I’m always making the same film –I just change the costumes,” quips the now 80-year-old director.
Forty years ago, Gilliam was best known as the reclusive, quiet member of Monty Python, injecting his surrealist sensibilities into its iconic animations. After co-directing Python’s big-screen romp Monty Python And The Holy Grail, and helming 1977’s Michael Palinstarring Jabberwocky solo, he was keen to fly the Python coop.
“George Harrison and his manager Denis O’Brien created HandMade Films to fund The Life of Brian. That was – in theory – then going to give us all the chance to make what we’d always wanted to make,” explains Gilliam. “I’d been writing the first few drafts of Brazil, but then Denis told me he had absolutely no interest in making it.”
This roadblock sent Gilliam down a new avenue. “Over the space of one weekend I came up with the idea of a group of very small helpers of God deciding that life in Heaven was boring and that they should go on a robbing rampage through history. The idea was that a crime could be committed, and these ‘time bandits’ could leap back through history and couldn’t be traced – because the crime hadn’t happened yet.”