Terry Gilliam Quotations

They make Spy Kids, they make Scream, they make A Scary Movie. This doesn't do that, so it could be a very bad marriage. I'm trying to keep this potential nightmare quiet because we're just finishing editing.

I got my head bashed in at a demonstration against the Vietnam War. Police were losing control because they were up against a world they really didn't understand.

Actually, I began to think that maybe there is a god, after all. Or maybe it's a different one. The old one got fired.

It's been interesting how kids have had hardly any problems watching it, but adults have more trouble. This happened way back even with Jabberwocky and Time Bandits.

I was born in 1940 in Minnesota and grew up in the country... dirt roads, swamps, lakes, woods.

I was doing political cartoons and getting angry to the point where I felt I was going to have to start making and throwing bombs. I thought I was probably a better cartoonist than a bomb maker.

We did Holy Grail, and I got my name up there as one of the directors. After that, I started moving more and more down the line I wanted to, which was making movies.

It's 85 million dollars and they got to be really careful because they are going to need me.

You get trapped by stories. Though I've got this reputation for being out of control, it's not true, it just happens to be a more interesting story than the truth.

People used to think we just faked all that stuff... it was all written, rehearsed. The fact that it looks as cobbled together as it does is just that we weren't very good.

There are moments when television systems are young and haven't formed properly, and there's room for lots of original stuff. Then things become more and more top-heavy with executives who are trying to guarantee the success of things.

Literally overnight, I became an animator... and one that was well-known.

There was a perverse side of me, with things like Van Helsing coming out. I didn't want to go down that route.

John Cleese was with a group called Cambridge Circus, who had come to New York, and we became friends. Years later that produced a certain team effort.

In advertising, I was frustrated by having to deal with the client. It was the only time I really worked in a proper office, and I didn't like it-simple as that.

I keep referring to them in the plural but all I'm dealing with is Bob. I don't know where Harvey fits in the equation. He was very present at the beginning, winding his brother up. I don't know where he is now.

I was getting frustrated with America. It's interesting how as simple a thing as, like, letting your hair grow longer changed in the world in those days.

At the first screening, there were a lot of areas that we went around and around about. Then we had our second screening. It played better. It's almost a reasonable length film now!

We took up the offer with the BBC, and that was Monty Python's Flying Circus. I didn't have to submit my ideas to the group. I used to turn up on the days we recorded with a can of film under my arm, and in it went.

Only to my wife, ... Everyone else thinks I'm jolly good fun to work with.

I don't have a problem (with the bad reviews).

Mud has been my middle name, ... Of course, people in Hollywood would say that about my career.

He just had a different view of the film.

Frankly, it's better than we could do at the time. The text? Obviously inferior! The actors? Better than we were,

I hate being dragged into genres. I like movies that are full of a lot of conflicting and interesting things,

I actually think we made it better without succumbing to other people's idea about what would make it better. Everybody's happy now. We're a big happy family.

He didn't do anything to become president!, ... Well, thank God for Karl and Dick.

Hello, good evening and welcome to the middle of the film.

I was always keen to shock people and shake them up; Eric was a little bit more traditionally motivated in really being just funny all the time.

I think a once in a lifetime experience is what we call these things,

I was the perfect guy to do Harry Potter. I remember leaving the meeting, getting in my car, and driving for about two hours along Mulholland Drive just so angry. I mean, Chris Columbus' versions are terrible. Just dull. Pedestrian.

I was beginning to wonder if I was ever going to make a movie again,

The only time you get to see something interesting occasionally is music videos but even they've become boring, they seem more and more the same.

Whether I like it or not, or whether anybody else does, when I start a film I have a few ideas. And as you're getting into it, you think, 'Ooh, there's another idea,' and you're shooting some more and, 'Oh, here's another thing. Let's do that.' I'm always changing and adding. That's just the way my mind works.

Usually I have my big fight at the end of a film,

At the time I was frustrated, but it was the right decision, ... We wouldn't have been able to achieve what we did if we'd stayed on location. The forest was both realistic and believable, and also magical. People can't believe that we actually built all that, but we did.

We cut out the most expensive scene in the film!

Everything in this business conspires to make you bitter and twisted and tough, ... I've always tried to keep a toughness on one side and complete vulnerability on the other. To me, if you get a thick skin, you might as well give up directing.

We didn't have TV when I was a kid, ... I grew up reading these stories. For better or worse, they formed my world view.

We did a lot of work because the original script, ... The premise was really interesting but the script needed magic. It needed real fairytale, it needed a real sense of the wonder of that world, and working with Lance and people was, we worked our way towards this thing. It was quite organic really, we built this film.

of numbers, of calculations, where there's very little time for myths and dreaming.

I know when I watch trailers, that I'm seeing the same ones I've seen the last 15 years,

I like the fact that my films have always encouraged bad and good reviews. The most depressing thing would be a review that was just mediocre. That would kill me,

I'm just being perverse, ... The idea that after such a long gap two films come out in the same year, it makes me smile.

If you're going to be one of the sheep, that our clever marketing technique lures into the theater, you're going to be in trouble. I want people to love it or hate it. I don't want people to say, 'Oh, that was OK, not so bad.' We want to get responses from people, see if they are alive.

I'm not going to talk about it, ... I won't! It overwhelms any dialogue about the actual movie. Besides, I'm actually contractually obligated not to go into it.

It often happens with films. You get to the end of production and you find that the film I was making is not necessarily the film that the financiers thought they were getting. What I find normally happens in those situations is that they find a compromise which isn't particularly good for the film, or you get into a head-to-head ego battle which, again, might not be good for the film.

I just e-mailed him the other day saying I'm lying to the world that he's still in it, ... We did a deal when 'Quixote' collapsed and we both said we were going to go off and do commercial films so that we could get 'Quixote' back on the road. Well, he did his part of the deal and I'm hoping that 'Grimm' may be my part.

In New York, we used to go outside film studios and get reels of blank film, and we used to draw on them, do flipper books, that sort of thing.

I read the reviews, my career is over. I'm a broken man. Crushed. Smashed.

It was like a nightmare working with these guys. Here's how I get through this film: the Weinsteins don't exist. I didn't speak to them.

The musical, Hair, was at the time very smart because it got to that basic element of this dividing line in society... which was hair.

The character Heath plays is the dreamer, the scholar, the one who's dragged along reluctantly and who then finds this truly enchanted world.

And Now For Something Completely Different was supposed to be our entree into America. It failed in America but was a big success in England.

It wasn't like sitting down and saying, 'Let's see if we can design a film that will capture the book, but maybe work for a mass audience,' ... There was none of that. It was 'Can we translate this book into a film?'

It was a very strange time, ... After having had four projects all collapse on me, by the time 'Grimm' came along, I was jelly.

There I was back in American television with all of the restrictions. I managed to finish my contracted animation, but it was radio animation.

Heath is not a public kind of guy and this has been rough for him. He has had to go on Oprah Winfrey and Jay Leno. This is just agony for him.

Heath is not a public kind of guy and this has been rough for him to be in this non-stop now.

I've given up asking questions. l merely float on a tsunami of acceptance of anything life throws at me ... and marvel stupidly.

I just like the fact I can make a film which might give comfort to some people who think they are the only crazy person in the world and suddenly they see there are two crazy people in the world.

Well, I really want to encourage a kind of fantasy, a kind of magic. I love the term magic realism, whoever invented it – I do actually like it because it says certain things. It's about expanding how you see the world. I think we live in an age where we're just hammered, hammered to think this is what the world is. Television's saying, everything's saying 'That's the world.' And it's not the world. The world is a million possible things.

I'm overwhelmed by writers. Most people aren't impressed by writers, but if you can draw a cartoon or a picture, they think you're magic.

Reality and fantasy, we need both of those to survive. If we don't have fantasy, dreams and all of those things, what's the point of carrying on? And you need to watch out for reality because buses come.

I can feel my dreams but I can't remember them.

If you really want your films to say something that you hope is unique, then patience and stamina, thick skin and a kind of stupidity, a mule-like stupidity, is what you really need.

I was an incredible Anglophile. I found people who shared the same sense of humor and attitude toward the world.

I'm trying to escape by forming my own kind of world. Basically, I'm trying to encourage others to do the same.

Because I dislike being quoted I lie almost constantly when talking about my work.

There's something about living in the country that I think makes you inventive, because nature is full of miracles and wonder and surprises, and if you don't have much money, you have to make things if you want things.

Fantasy isn't just a jolly escape: It's an escape, but into something far more extreme than reality, or normality. It's where things are more beautiful and more wondrous and more terrifying. You move into a world of conflicting extremes.

I don't think you ever learn just one thing. At some point you start unlearning things. I have been working hard to unlearn everything I know.

It's hard for me to worry about the studios losing money. I'm not very sympathetic to their money problems, because they certainly haven't been sympathetic to mine.

The forces that run the world always try to keep things under control. The population might be having a wonderful time, buying iPods and going to nice restaurants, but I still feel they're all kind of under control.

[Steven Spielberg's films] are comforting, they always give you answers and I don't think they're very clever answers. ... The success of most Hollywood films these days is down to fact that they're comforting. They tie things up in nice little bows and give you answers, even if the answers are stupid, you go home and you don't have to think about it. ... The great filmmakers make you go home and think about it.

Hyperbole is something Id better avoid.

Whatever I do might be good, it might be bad, it might be all sorts of things, but it's not mediocre.

They pay money to watch the same film. Now, you could argue, that's because it makes them feel comfortable. When they go to a movie now, it's almost like hearing a pop song. You know the rhythms, you know when the downbeat is going to come, you know when the explosion is going to come… And so as life becomes more complex, as the economy is in trouble, people cling to what makes them comfortable, so they go again and again to see the same movie.

The whole point of animation to me is to tell a story, make a joke, express an idea. The technique itself doesn't really matter. Whatever works is the thing to use.

Every few years when it's been another five years that have passed and I haven't made a film and the depression starts taking over totally, I allow myself to do a commercial. And then I feel really dirty and get to work promptly.

I hate losing laughs; they're rare things.

Everybody gets excited about technology, but it doesn't interest me in the least. I'm only interested in it if it makes my job easier or cheaper. They're tools.

The Brothers Grimm came along and I was so desperate for work ... Actually I've got to say that I like the movie, I won't apologize for it.

They all sort of get mixed up in my head, to be quite honest. They're all dealing with similar things. It's about how you deal with reality, by ignoring it sometimes, reinventing it other times, and that's how you get through it.

I've always sworn that not having enough money has saved me from mediocrity.

My problem is I'm like a junkie. I want a good movie fix, and I never get that fix.

I'm more prone to anarchy than I am to control - even though I'm a film director.

Nooo! Leave that to George Lucas, he' s really mastered the CGI acting. That scares me! I hate it! Everybody is so pleased and excited by it. Animation is animation. Animation is great. But it's when you're now taking what should be films full of people, living thinking, breathing, flawed creatures and you're controlling every moment of that, it's just death to me. It's death to cinema, I can't watch those Star Wars films, they're dead things.

When it came to slaughtering sacred cows with such crude yet perfect musical precision, there was no one better than Frank. I wonder what songs he's teaching the angels right now? Good luck God! You've got your hands full this time.

I think that's the problem with kids now. Everything is manufactured. And then they're sitting there watching the television, where all the work is done for them. Radio made me use my imagination.

Gorillaz virtually changed my wife...sorry, I mean, life...no, actually, it was my wife.

I do want to say things in these films. I want audiences to come out with shards stuck in them. I don't care if people love my films or walk out, as long as they have a strong response.

The success of the Hollywood marketing machine is to limit what we see. Not just to limit what we can see, but also to limit our expectations - to limit what we want to see.

I'm a cartoonist, it's what I am at heart, so cartoons take reality and deform it and make it grotesque, you make it funny, but you alter it. If it works, it's based on reality. That's what I try to do.

Actually, I began to think that maybe there is a god, after all. Or maybe its a different one. The old one got fired.

I think there's a side of me that's trying to compete with Lucas and Spielberg - I don't usually admit this publicly - because I tend to think that they only go so far, and their view of the world is rather simplistic. What I want to do is take whatever cinema is considered normal or successful at a particular time and play around with it - to use it as a way of luring audiences in.

Nobody went to see Tideland! I was hoping people would get angry about it but those that saw it didn't want to talk about it. This is the world we're living in, people don't want to discuss things that are actually worth discussing.

People in Hollywood are not showmen, they're maintenance men, pandering to what they think their audiences want.

You know the hardest thing to do in Hollywood is burn bridges. There is usually some sucker who still likes me. There is usually some sucker who will still work with me.

Port Talbot is a steel town, where everything is covered with gray iron ore dust. Even the beach is completely littered with dust, it's just black. The sun was setting, and it was quite beautiful. The contrast was extraordinary, I had this image of a guy sitting there on this dingy beach with a portable radio, tuning in these strange Latin escapist songs like 'Brazil.' The music transported him somehow and made his world less gray.