Monty Python Speaks Read online

  What were your impressions of the other Pythons, and their roles within the group?

  ADAMS: [Although] I already knew his voice from radio, I’m Sorry, I’ll Read That Again, I can remember the first time I ever saw John on television, which would have been The Frost Report. I just thought, “That’s it, that’s what I want to do, I can do that—I’m as tall as he is.” Well, the job had already been taken!

  No, it’s curious what a powerful effect that whole sort of tightly constrained inner turmoil, the way that resonates with me very, very strongly. John was really an iconic figure for me in all kinds of ways. I’ve gotten to know all the Pythons, [yet] I’ve always found it hardest to relate to John as an actual ordinary human being, because he was always that iconic figure to me. There was something about his performance that I found so mesmeric and extraordinary, that it just made it harder to see the actual human being.

  John and Terry Jones were kind of at opposite ends of the spectrum. It’s not a coincidence that one’s from Weston-Super-Mare and the other is from North Wales, because that’s a border which people famously despise each other over. Terry being all sort of Celtic and volatile and full of romantic ideals and ideas. And John being rather meticulous, methodical, and cerebral; Terry was sort of emotional and not always best at explaining himself clearly and simply at exactly the right moment. That was the most difficult relationship. But they’re like all relationships, [where you would] suddenly become very close.

  The member of the Pythons that I know by far the best is Terry Jones. And I think he always found Graham a bit of a mystery, I’m not sure how much real connection there was between them at all. I mean they got on perfectly well, he worked well with him; Terry tends to get on with most people, he’s a very friendly, warm, giggly person. But I never really got a sense of what the relationship between Terry and Graham had been.

  I first met Terry, actually, when I was on that Python shoot in Exeter. And he and I just sort of idly drifted [together] and grew into really quite good friends.

  All the Pythons have their own love/hate relationship with the group. The story would always go that there were fights between each of the Pythons except for Michael; Mike was always the one that at any given moment all of the others liked.

  I understand you very nearly killed them all?

  ADAMS: When they went off to do the filming for that fourth series, Graham said, “Look, if you want to come on down and see how it’s filmed, then do.” So I got in my mother’s batty old camper-van and drove down to Exeter, where they were doing it, and I went along for the days they were filming. It was very, very extraordinary to be out with the Pythons filming. I think they got me to do a couple of walk-on things; you can probably count the number of frames I actually appeared in on the fingers of two hands, but nevertheless a big thrill.

  One evening we thought we’d all go out to dinner, and since I had this big van we’d all go in the van, so we drove off to this quite nice restaurant, had a very nice dinner, and on the way back it was a bit foggy. The strip road seemed to go on a bit, and after a while Eric said, “Uhm, where are we exactly?” I said, “We’re on the strip road of the motorway.” He said, “I don’t think we are, and the reason I mention this is because if we’re not on the strip road of the motorway then we’re actually on the motorway—and if we’re on the motorway, then I’ve a feeling we’re going the wrong way.” I said, “No, no, we’re on the strip road, we’re not on the motorway.” So a bit of a discussion ensues and after a while the consensus of opinion in the van is that we are going the wrong way on the motorway, and at that moment we get overtaken by a car on the other side of the central divide going the same way we are. It means we’re in the fast lane going the wrong way! So I hurriedly do a U-turn, and just literally a few seconds later a car went past that otherwise would have hit us head-on.

  LIFE OF BRIAN

  Nowadays People Want Something Wittier

  During a promotional tour for Holy Grail, when asked what the group’s next film would be, Idle responded, “Jesus Christ: Lust for Glory.” Apart from the ridiculous juxtaposition of the Son of God with George S. Patton (or, given the general’s ego, perhaps not so ridiculous), the title suggested a brazen new direction for the group, involving a much more controversial subject matter than their previous film.

  Brian tells the story of a young contemporary of Christ’s who through happenstance suddenly finds himself to be an adored holy figure. Though first an initiate into a revolutionary group trying to free Judea from the Roman occupation, Brian stumbles into the role of spiritual leader when he is mistaken for the promised Messiah. Burdened with the celebrity of his new position, and now a target of the ruling elite, Brian tries to rid himself of his followers by professing that they do not need leaders for their faith. Imprisoned and sentenced to crucifixion, Brian watches from the cross as in his coming death he becomes an object of admiration, parental scorn, and inspiration for a parting song.

  The film marked a maturation of the group, for while Brian lacks the breezy innocence that Grail exuded (and is much less self-conscious that it is a movie), it is a complex, thoughtful, and ultimately moving portrait of a character and his period. It is adorned with some surreal passages and filled with wildly eccentric characters: the Virgin Mandy, Brian’s mother, to whom Three Wise Men come mistaking her hovel for the manger next door; Stan, a revolutionary who wants to be known as Loretta; Ben, an ultra-right-wing prisoner who loves his captors with a vengeance; and Pontius Pilate, whose speech defect completely negates his authority among the masses.

  Brian also featured humorous asides to the Gospel, such as the difficulties posed for those standing too far away from Jesus at the Sermon on the Mount (“I think He said, Blessed are the cheesemakers.”). No matter that Christ was an obvious outside figure to the proceedings; many churchgoers took the Pythons to task for what they called a blatantly disrepectful and blasphemous take on the Son of God. The controversy that met with the film’s release in 1979, however, merely confirmed that a central idea in Life of Brian—that religion or spirituality should not be left in the hands of a powerful few—was sharp enough to sting even when wrapped in the guise of a knockabout farce.

  A coy reminder of the film industry’s initial lack of enthusiasm for backing the Pythons was the brief spurt of other religion-themed comedies (Wholly Moses, In God We Trust) inspired by the success of Brian.

  IDLE: After the initial quip in New York at the opening of Grail, Gilliam and I got drunk in Amsterdam and began to make bad-taste carpenter jokes, about J.C. (Jack Christ, not Jesus Cleese), and him being nailed inadequately to a cross by a poor workman, and trying to give the carpenters advice since they were so bad. [And] the cross kept falling over and he went slap face first into the mud—those sort of sophomoric gags which are hilarious when you are in a nice warm bar in Amsterdam with several bottles of Dutch beer inside you.

  When we got back to London people were taking the idea seriously, and what attracted us was the freshness of the subject—nobody had made a biblical comedy film. So we rented a lot of Hollywood biblical films, and watched Charlton Heston’s breasts and the sheer seriousness with which they treated everything, and this gave us a fresh look. Of course it became clear early on that we couldn’t make fun of the Christ since what he says is very fine (and Buddhist), but the people around him were hilarious, and still are!

  So it really is an attack on Churches and pontificators and self-righteous assholes who claim to speak for God, of whom there are too many still on the planet.

  PALIN: I remember Eric coming up with Jesus Christ: Lust for Glory. What a wonderful, wonderful title. How do you put a film to that?

  We knew we needed to work in an area which would stimulate us and which would be different from anything we’d done before, and would be in a sense quite abrasive. And religion was something I think we all had very similar views about: we had all been spoonfed it in large, regular doses when we were young and yet none of us w
ere religious now, so what was going on? What were the mistakes? So the idea of doing a film about religion was really intriguing. But how you do it, how do you make it funny, so it’s not just amazingly dull?

  We realized that the key thing—the way we’d done Holy Grail—was to create the biblical period so convincingly that if you put modern characters and modern attitudes in it, it would still convince as being part of that period. Once we’d come up with that, then in our reading up about Jesus’ life (which we all did), there were certain things which were absolutely so modern and so absolutely spot-on that we wanted to talk about. For instance, the Messiah fever: at that time there were signs and portents that the Messiah would be coming. Suddenly it seemed a terribly clear idea: everybody’s thinking about the Messiah, maybe it’s the man next door who’s the Messiah; no, it’s him! You’ve got Brian there. You’ve also got the Roman occupation, so you’ve got the whole of British imperialism, which was something which we were all brought up on. You can have the modern resistance groups, all with their obscure acronyms which they can never remember (the P.F.L.—no, the P.L.J.) and their conflicting agendas.

  I remember getting to the crucifixion period, thinking, “How on Earth do we do this?” And I said, “Let’s apply the same rule: let’s just look at the historical background.” The historical background is that Jesus’ crucifixion was not a unique event, it was part of a regular entertainment that was put on by the Romans to both impress their power and authority and to entertain people—you know, people would be crucified and there would also be fairs: bread and circuses and crucifixions. Once you accept that it wasn’t a unique event, then you can begin to introduce characters who would have been around then, like the terribly decent man who offers to take the cross and the guy just runs off.

  If we said we’re going to have somebody doing a song on the cross, we started [off thinking], “We just can’t do that, it would offend so many people.” Once we had a reason for doing that, then it suddenly became like the “Undertaker” sketch—it had a truth to it. You can quite easily argue that, at that time, there must have been some people who just dealt with this in a not-reverent way. I mean, the stained-glass windows is what has been imposed later on all these events, it’s all been very selective, and a few people throughout history (or rather, a large number of people) have said, “This is what we must learn from this, this is what we’re going to let you know about it.” And suddenly it all came together.

  So our target, what made the film valid, was not “Jesus didn’t exist” or “Jesus was a fraud” or that “Jesus was wrong,” but that we rely on interpretation, and interpretation is a political thing, and it’s been used by people throughout the ages to condone all sorts of excesses. And yet these are just people who will take this story, the story of this man, and use it in any way they want—usually to extract money from poor, gullible people and all that. That’s exactly something we could say.

  “History is written by the winners.”

  PALIN: Yes. I’ve always been more interested in the more ordinary people—not in the heroes, but in people who get in the way of heroes being heroes.

  Jones on the set in Tunisia.

  And I Should Know, I’ve Followed a Few

  JONES: Terry Gilliam had done Jabberwocky in the meantime, so he’d directed his own film. He hadn’t really enjoyed shared direction, and then I think there was a feeling among some of the group that it would be better to have one director. And I was quite keen to do it, too. It was by default, really!

  I’d always liked history anyway, and the thing I do like about films is creating a world. I’m not particularly interested in films about what’s here and now, a world that you can just see as you go out of your door. I do like fantasy and I like entering into the world of the film. On the other hand, I wasn’t particularly keen on doing a biblical film because I always thought they had such boring costumes! But Hazel Pethig did a really good job on the costumes, it was a relief to find it wasn’t all long robes.

  Why was Terry Jones the ideal director for the group—and why the sole director this time?

  GILLIAM: I think Terry instinctively understands the material, he understands what’s right and wrong, what’s needed and what isn’t in that sense. And he works really hard, and he badgers and he just goes on. After Holy Grail, I said, “The director’s job is a dogsbody job,” because we were running around doing all the work—for them, the other half of the group. It actually started to create a kind of split in the group, because there was Terry and me over here and [they were] there.

  When we did the first dub of Holy Grail, we showed it [to them]. Eric just hated seeing what we had done to ruin the film; he stormed out. I can’t remember if Graham did. It’s like, Jesus! Terry and I were getting the blame for fucking up the film, and that wasn’t a good time. It all got sorted out, but that was a worry. Maybe in a way with just Terry directing, it became so uneven you couldn’t blame just Terry for it—everyone had to be involved in it more. But with Terry and I together it was like this little unit moving around.

  Terry’s got so much energy; he’s got more energy than I do. He wakes up in the morning, claps his hand, “Let’s get to work!” this smile, he can’t wait to get going. And I’m just like, “Oh, fuck, another day,” have to drag myself into it. And again with performances, that sense of “Let’s do it!” is very good, where I am going to take longer setting up a shot, to get the smoke and all the elements right. Because I’m always adding elements to the thing—I’ll be going through six levels of stuff—whereas Terry will deal with two or three levels, and that’s much better for Python, to work at that pace.

  So Terry’s the right director for Python. In a sense I think it was more about me learning that I wasn’t than anything else, because I don’t have the energy to fight the group as a director. For me being the designer [on Brian], what I actually do is try to work for the film, but that may not be the same thing as working with the director. But the way it’s worked out is the right way. And everybody’s happy, because again Terry’s got more patience than I do with them.

  Is Terry’s enthusiasm to direct the group a kind of competition, or test, with the other members of Python, in that he can be seen to be the one to keep them all in line?

  GILLIAM: I don’t think so; I’ve never quite felt that. I’ve always felt there’s more of a competition between Terry and me. It’s just that he’s so passionate, so enthusiastic about it. I don’t know if he feels he’s competing with the others. I mean, he still obviously has that sense of he’s right, but then I have the same thing, John has it, we all have it. Most of us—Mike is more malleable, and Graham didn’t seem to care as much. That’s what’s so extraordinary: you’ve got six egos that are all pretty strong and all yet working together, which astonishes me, it still gets me. And it always came down to that fact that we all thought each of the others was brilliant—you may have hated them, but it was, really.

  Spare a Talent for an Old Ex-Leper

  JOHN GOLDSTONE: It was kind of lucky the way certain things happened. They had gone off to Barbados to write the final draft of Life of Brian in the end of 1977. The script that came back was wonderful, you could just see it was going to work. And word had got through to EMI, which had become a very different kind of company [post-Grail]. It was run by Barry Spikings and Michael Deeley, who were much more into doing “real” movies by then. Barry had heard about it because he was in Barbados at the same time they were writing the screenplay. He called me up and said, “I’ve got to see this, I just want to do this.” So we sent him the script because they were still one of the few financing bodies in England. He read it immediately, [and] said it was the funniest thing he’d ever read, and he had to have this film. That weekend we shook hands on a deal. I’d established in that deal that we would have complete artistic control over every aspect, we would have final cut, and they accepted that—he wanted it so much, he agreed to those terms.

  Despite the fact that we
’d agreed [to] it, that deal didn’t go through. Lord Bernard Delfont (who was the chairman of EMI) had been told by a member of his board, Sir James Carreras (who had made his fortune with the Hammer horror films, but was a Catholic), that this was a blasphemous film and EMI should not put their name to it. So Bernie told Barry Spikings to find a way out.

  We came to a settlement, but it left us without funding. We were already preparing to go out to Tunisia and shoot in April of 1978, and suddenly the money wasn’t there. And there was a cutoff point by which we’d have to start shooting or else it was too hot to shoot in Tunisia. There was no way we were going to get the money together in time, so we said, “Okay, big deep breath, let’s say we’ll do it in September and it’ll give us a bit more time to get it together.” So I went off to America to raise the money.

  I went to Mike Medavoy, who was then head of production at United Artists, who in fact I’d shown Holy Grail to in Los Angeles. He’d sent me off to their New York distribution head (who’d turned Grail down), but he’d seen that they should have picked it up because it had done very well. So he was very keen to give me an American pickup deal for Brian, but it was only for fifty percent of the costs—the budget for this was now four million dollars, quite a leap forward from Grail. So although I had a pledge from him for half the money, it didn’t really give me the confidence that I could come back to Europe and raise the rest here, because in those days the places you could go to raise that sort of money didn’t exist.

  It just so happened at that time that Eric Idle was in Los Angeles and we were looking at options, and he said we should try George Harrison. He’s always been a huge Python fan, he’d never invested in movies, but he’s got a lot of money and he was a good friend of Eric’s. And so we went up to see him at his house. He said, “Oh yes, I want to do this.” He was clearly serious about it but this was, like, too good to be true. And he said, “Talk to my business manager, Denis O’Brien [who was back in Europe] and he’ll sort it all out.” So I accepted that because I didn’t see any real alternative at that point.