Monty Python Speaks Read online

  Denis was this rather smart ex-banker who had initially taken on Peter Sellers to manage his [affairs] and done very well with Peter, had sorted him out, and Sellers recommended him to Harrison because [when] the whole Apple thing collapsed it all got very messy. Denis had already done a lot to sort out George’s affairs [when] I went to see him, and he said, “Yeah, George wants to do this, but we’ve never done films, and I don’t really know very much about film contracts or anything; you’re really going to have to help me through this.” So I presented him with the draft contract EMI had prepared that gave us final cut and artistic control, and he said, “Fine, we’ll use this as the basis of [our] contract.”

  So we entered into an agreement [with] one of Denis’ companies, a limited partnership, which was the origin of Handmade Films, a company just set up to make Life of Brian, of which George was a general partner. Because of that structure, Python kept the copyright in its name, kept final cut, kept artistic control, and Handmade were just licensed to exploit the rights. Interestingly, because they weren’t familiar with the film business, we had a provision where we would have consultation on distribution and advertising, and they were not allowed to cut anything without our knowledge and us doing it. And if they defaulted on these points, the [licensing] rights would revert back to us.

  [As it turns out twenty years later, the company that they then sold the Handmade library on to, Paragon Pictures, ultimately defaulted on those issues, which was why the Paragon court case went in our favor and the rights (to Brian) have been given back to Python.]

  But it was all done in good faith and the relationship with George and Denis was very good; they let us go off and make the film and do it the way we wanted to, and they didn’t really interfere at all.

  What happened with Mike Medavoy was, not long after I’d met with him, he left for Orion; and Orion picked up the rights to Life of Brian for America. And he picked up Erik the Viking for America when he was at Orion, and didn’t interfere, really. He was always very supportive.

  As Much Gold as They Could Eat

  GOLDSTONE: Well, we’ve never, ever had enough to spend, it’s always been having to be quite creative in terms of how it could be done. Holy Grail had been such a difficult one to do because the budget was really limited and it needed an enormous amount of invention; I mean the very thing about not being able to afford horses and having to use coconuts was inspired. The Life of Brian budget—which we maintained—worked because we found this set in Tunisia built for Jesus of Nazareth that was still standing, which we then added on to and elaborated on, and in fact used some of their costumes from a Rome costume house. We were really able to give it a look and a scale without having to spend the kind of money it might have cost. But in those situations, they all rose to the occasion.

  There weren’t any huge difficulties with Life of Brian. Once we’d sorted out the finances, we actually had time to prepare, and I’ve always found that preparation is crucial to making these things work.

  The other important thing is the screenplays don’t really vary that much. A certain amount of work happens in rehearsals, but essentially they keep to what’s on the page; it’s not as if they’re improvising or doing anything unpredictable. It’s all been worked out before, and that does make a big difference, to being able to run a film effectively. There are no enormous surprises. The only things you might run into is weather.

  I’m Brian, and So Is My Wife

  JONES: I think John was quite keen to play Brian, actually, and I think others of us didn’t want him to do it, partly because we thought Graham was such a good straight-man, and partly because there were so many other parts, like the revolutionaries’ leader, that we really wanted John to do—he wouldn’t [have been] able to do them at the same time. The Centurion had to be John, so we felt quite strongly that Graham ought to do [the lead].

  CLEESE: Yes, it was the one exception to the rule about people not fighting about casting. I wanted to do Brian for a very simple reason: We made Brian in 1978, and at that point I had reached the ripe old age of thirty-eight and had never had the experience of playing a role the whole way through a film. And I was fascinated by the idea of doing it. I didn’t know what it would be like, I didn’t know how difficult or easy it would be to do scenes out of order, it was so different from just turning up and being a Centurion. And I really wanted to have this new experience; I wanted to learn, because if I’m learning I’m happy. And the others resisted, and I have to say they were absolutely right, and I was disappointed for about forty-eight hours when they basically said, “Well, Graham has to be Brian.” And they were right because I was funnier in the other roles than Graham would have been, and Graham was very, very good as Brian.

  DAVID SHERLOCK: By the time of Life of Brian, Graham had stopped drinking. Well, he was given less than a year to live if he didn’t; he saw a guy who had also been at St. Bart’s who said, “If you continue as you are, I reckon you could be dead within a year; do you want to live or do you want to die?” Graham said, “Well, I’d rather live.” And he survived for another ten years. But the damage that he’d done to his liver was colossal. From then on he became, not a total health freak, but pretty much. I think the thing that protected him up until then was the fact that we were both very keen amateur cooks and thoroughly enjoyed preparing food—because he ate well, which is very unusual for someone who drinks hard, it wasn’t really until the year before he collapsed and having tried to dry himself out that it was really noticeable that things were going wrong.

  You played some of the more colorful characters in Brian. Can you explain the mix?

  PALIN: Well, Ben was someone who’s got nothing going for him at all; he’s in great pain, great discomfort, but he’s still incredibly aggressive. It’s like the Black Knight with no legs: “Come back, you bastard, I’ll kill you” or whatever he says. Ben was a bit like that, someone you just think, “Shut up, don’t say anything!” But no, he’s going to have a go. He’s always going to have a go. He’s very chirpy: he loves the Romans, the way they deal with all these things. That takes a situation where a character behaves completely the opposite to how you would expect him to behave; I suppose that’s where the comedy is.

  Do you approach the creation of characters from a psychological standpoint?

  Ben, the incorrigible prisoner.

  PALIN: Well, I think they are very instinctive. Certainly it’s the way I write. I just write something which comes into my head, or a situation, and it comes out like that, and then probably at the end you can make a connection: “Ah, yes I can see where this comes from.” But at the time it feels very intuitive.

  Unlike Ben, who was created from nowhere, Pontius Pilate was a legitimate historical character, part of the Bible story, [therefore] he had to be dealt with. How do we deal with this man? I must have felt: ruling class, British ruling class, very often distinguished through some aristocratic inbreeding by vowel difficulties of some kind, or vocal distinctions. I think it might have just come from there.

  Pilate never acknowledges that he has a problem at all. This is the wonderful thing; again I think this must have come in my mind from listening to Violet Bonham Carter or people like that, the English aristocracy. They have vewy stwange ways of tawking, and they doughn’t think eet’s vewy extwawdinawy at awl! And I had an aunt who said parafeen, she always referred to parafin as parafeen. This is something they’re not aware of, so I felt that I had to play Pilate as somebody who, if he was aware of the way he spoke he wouldn’t have chosen the words that he did.

  So one had a character who is exercising power, that’s what Pilate is doing; he is the top man there, he can go up to people and be sort of, “Why, you know, you haven’t got your hair cut! You call that a uniform?” or something like that. It’s going up to someone and saying, “I am more powerful than you, and I’m going to show you what my powers are.” It just so happens that in this case, you have a man of great power in the region [who] has something a
bout him which is impossible to take seriously, namely “Wisable Bwian” and all that sort of stuff. People are aware of this, but as long as he’s got soldiers around then that’s fine—nobody dares laugh. Hence the scene with Biggus Dickus, where he gets very angry at the soldiers just trying desperately not to laugh.

  I suppose it’s the sort of paper-thin division between being powerful or being ridiculous. Ceausescu, for instance, was this amazingly powerful man in palaces; overnight, he’s suddenly just a frightened man who ends up lying on a yard with a bullet through him.

  Well, having power and having authority are slightly different things.

  PALIN: Yes, yes. Well, once we’d got the idea of Pilate, the pronunciation problem, then one had to up the stakes to really exploit it, so it can’t just be a few guards wanting to laugh; what happens when you’ve got a whole crowd of people corpsing somebody? We built the great temple, there’s all this wonderful imperial toga and all that sort of stuff, and he goes out to the people, and that was just an extraordinary scene to play. Because when you find 600 people all rolling over and laughing at you, it’s just as strong as people screaming abuse at you. It has the same effect: you suddenly feel your power is completely negated.

  I suddenly realized, “God, ridicule is such a strong weapon in the hands of a really determined crowd.” I think much more [so] than hatred. You know, hatred sort of breeds hatred; comedy just breeds more comedy! It’s all about people’s fear about comedy. That’s why people in positions of power don’t like comedy, because it’s essentially subversive, and that was a subversive use of laughter in the Pilate scene for all to see. We all know (long before he does) that he’s been made to look a complete idiot; but he carries on, and so does Biggus Dickus.

  The name Biggus Dickus, there’s nothing subtle about it at all, it’s obviously a silly name to have. Again, brilliant, absolute brilliant playing by Graham, looks magnificent, and if Graham had just done one sort of little giggle or looked to one side and been aware of it, it just wouldn’t have worked. It had to be played absolutely superbly, which is always one of the things which gave me the most tremendous pleasure in Python; it all boiled down to how people performed, how clever they were at getting really what the humor was about. You know, sometimes missing a short-term gag for the long-term benefit by playing it straight.

  And so, in people’s minds now, Biggus Dickus is a man of no humor at all, Pontius Pilate is a man of no humor at all—both of whom take part in one of the funniest, most humorous sketches of Python!

  Was it a precursor of the stutterer you played in A Fish Called Wanda?

  PALIN: “Michael Palin. Speciality: speech defects.” I used to spend so much time at school mercilessly dissecting any verbal anomaly in any of the teachers because you heard them all the time talking at you; the great teachers you just don’t hear it, but there are a lot of others who are extremely boring and the fact that they spoke in a certain way just lodged in my mind. I remember that patterns of speech became terribly, terribly important; certainly when I was at school my first attempts at humor were always being able to mimic how people could speak, because I listened to them day in and day out, droning on in Latins, so maybe I have a particular ear for speech patterns. I didn’t actually dislike bad teachers. Sometimes I liked them, I felt very sad for the ones that just couldn’t teach very well, but I liked them as people. So there’s a certain amount of odd affection for Pontius Pilate in a way; you couldn’t hate him!

  My Hovercraft Is Full of Eels

  JONES: Until we actually started, I felt, “Oh my God, what’s this going to be like, so far away, filming on location in Tunisia?” Once we’d started doing it, it was great, but for example we didn’t know how we were going to organize the crowds to do anything, because we couldn’t comunicate directly with them.

  One day we had a crowd of 500 people in the square, and we had to get them all laughing. We hired a Tunisian comedian to tell jokes and we filmed the crowd listening to him, but that didn’t really work very well. And I wanted everybody to lie on their backs and kick their legs in the air. So we got our assistant director (a Tunisian) to tell them what we wanted, and there were a lot of blank stares. Finally I said to him, “I’ll tell you what: tell them the director’s going to show you what he wants you to do.” So I fell on my back and kicked my legs in the air and started laughing hysterically, and then he said, “Now we want you to do that.” And of course they all went down on their backs absolutely hysterical with laughter, it was the most wonderful sight, and the dust rose and these Tunisians were just so abandoned, lying on their backs, kicking their legs in the air. And of course we weren’t turning over [the camera], because we were just telling them what to do! That was heartbreaking. Of course then they had to do it again, they did it quite well, but it was never quite as funny as that first moment when they all went over.

  The other thing was, a crowd had to shout back in English, when Brian is in the window with the Virgin Mandy. We had about 250 there, I think, they were all Tunisians; if any of them spoke a foreign language, they spoke a bit of French. I’d always assumed we’d have to dub it. So we had about eighteen English speakers, we put them all up at the front, and then I just said, “Okay, say these words after me,” and I just shouted out the lines, and they shouted them back. And then I’d shout [more] and they’d shout them again. It was perfect, it was just unbelievable. It sounded pretty good, and in fact that’s what we used in the end.

  Jones demonstrating proper laughing techniques to his extras.

  GILLIAM: In a way, with Brian, we kept trying to do really dramatic things which I don’t know if it ever works with comedy. I mean, Brian is just a more clever version of disguising the fact that they’re a bunch of sketches than the others have been, because at least there’s a tale that flows through the thing. But when we start setting up a thing like the chase and people are running, I don’t think the audience ever gets really caught up and excited. It’s jolly, it’s fun, [and] you’re always slightly back from it; it’s not like being in a real thriller where your guts are in your mouth. And yet I think Terry and I always wanted to be able to do that to an audience. We always had a tendency to turn them into dramatic pieces with tension and suspense. But I don’t think we’ve done it with Python; it’s much better we go off and play with those elements in our own films.

  Where Is the New Leader? I Wish to Hail Him

  GILLIAM: It was Jabberwocky that spoiled me. I got through Holy Grail and then [had] done my own thing, it was just, I don’t want to do it, I don’t want to get into arguments with Terry about “We should be doing it this way, we should be doing it that way.” I thought, “Let me just design the thing.” It was like going back to being at the camera. Because on Holy Grail that’s what I did anyway as well, I mean the whole look of the thing was just stuff I really concentrated on.

  And so I did the same thing with Life of Brian, but unlike Grail, where as a codirector I was in control of where the camera was, as a designer I wasn’t, and so I became the “resigner” at that point! I mean, you can have all this stuff, but if you don’t put the camera there you don’t see it. I don’t mind if you don’t want to put the camera there, but if we built all that stuff and spent all that money, put the camera there! And I got a little bit crazed about it as well. I think working with the group was making me fraught, because it’s one thing to be crazed on your own project where you’ve really got control over it, but the group thing was just for me becoming more and more difficult.

  It’s like the writing on the wall: Romani ite domum. Now all that’s set up to be shot as day-for-night—it was supposed to be night—and to do day-for-night you’ve got to point the camera in one direction as opposed to the other direction so that [it can] be front-lit, so that you can crank everything down; the sky goes dark, and you still have light on the faces. And John didn’t want to do it that way, he wanted to hold his sword in the other hand, and so he couldn’t do it left-to-right, he could only do i
t right-to-left—whichever, it doesn’t matter—and so Terry sticks the camera there. So basically to get the scene looking like night, you’ve got to drop it so down you’re missing a lot of stuff in the eyes; but it doesn’t look like night, either, because they couldn’t bring the sky down enough! I go crazy with things like that, and I’m glad I wasn’t directing, because I would have just exploded at that point; but Terry—“It’ll be fine, put the camera here”—didn’t have the problem that I would have had.

  It’s like the scene where Ben is hanging in his cell. Roger Christian designed this set, it was a really good set; there’s a long wall and then Ben is hanging way up there under a sewage outlet so sewage is dripping on his head the whole time. He’s way up there and Brian’s down there, so it’s not like they’re level. Roger had done this thing, and I said, “This is great.” Then Roger took Terry to the set, and Terry says, “Well, he’s going to be too high.” And so Roger chopped the whole thing down and lowered Ben. So of course when Terry gets in there with the camera and tries to see the angle, he can’t do it, so now he’s got to dig a hole in the ground to get the camera where it belonged!

  There’s a weird, I suppose, competition between Terry and me, and that’s what’s funny. It’s always there, and maybe it shouldn’t be, and I think it is because in a sense we seem to see things in the same way, but how we get there is different. I can’t do a patch on what he can do, [yet] I’m much more technically adept at getting the idea, the image of that idea, on the screen more so than Terry is, and yet I feel he’s still trying to compete at that level rather than just accepting that’s what I do better than he does.