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Wednesday, 10.20.04: Terry Gilliam
Terry Gilliam is one of those genius oddballs -- capable of anything, not always successful, but ready to experiment. I was never a fan of Monty Python's Flying Circus, not that I ever gave it a fair try. Gilliam was "the American Python." His career got started because he could draw. Then he volunteered to put visuals to some kind of funny audio production and his animation career was born. Somehow he got involved with the Pythons and figured out he could write. Then, when the Pythons started doing movies, a director was born. I didn't know who he was till I saw the movie Lost in La Mancha. It's a documentary about his attempt make a film about Don Quixote. The project was a complete disaster. In the middle of production it had to be abandoned -- always instructive to see how geniuses can fail. Anyway, the film contains some of his animation, which got me intrigued by his style and methods. I'm reading a book called Dark Knights & Holy Fools: The Art and Films of Terry Gilliam by Bob McCabe. I marked a page where he talks about how he produced 2-1/2 minutes per week of animated film for Monty Python: No computers, all manually done out of his London apartment, with cut-outs of his own drawings and copies of things from art books, colored with felt tip pens and an airbrush. Then he'd bring it all down to the BBC and shoot it on film. He says about those days:
I'm not sure why I'm so impressed by these words. Maybe it says something about where creativity and surprise come from. Don't overthink the thing. Don't plan for perfection. Just keep the spigots open and keep pouring out the product -- something interesting is bound to happen.
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NOTES Lost in La Mancha (2002) Terry Gilliam: full filmography Animations: his history as an animator |
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