Monty Python Speaks Read online

  Like the crucifixion: Roger Christian and I went out to Matmata. Terry is so excited and he’s convinced the crucifixion scene is going to be out here. Rather than waste time we split up, we’ll go in two separate areas. He goes roaring off that way, Roger and I go this way. We find this spot that’s fucking great; it’s got everything you want—not only this beautiful ridge, but there’s a range of mountains behind it, the sun will be at the right angles, and on the front part there’s this huge opening with an Acropolis there—“Golgothic” is what it should be. So you’ve got all that working for you, and the sun and the mountains, everything would be perfect! And so we come back, and Terry I can see has not found what he’s wanted, he’s disappointed, and we decided we’ve got to be really careful how we present this.

  So I go, “Okay, we found something that might work, we’re not sure.” We were walking on eggshells! We go out to this thing and say, “Well, what do you think?”

  Cleese flagrantly flouting some Islamic law or another.

  Terry said, “Hhmmm, yeah…Oh! Look at that over there!” And it’s in the wrong place! So Roger and I go, “Oh, fuck!” And that’s where we shot the fucking thing—we shot the crucifixion in the wrong fucking place.

  He would just not accept (and he didn’t want to) when we said, “The light will do this…” because Terry had to find it. It was this competition. At that time, he had to get it. And he found the place, and it’s fine, the film goes on, all that’s fine, but there’s a better place, it would be such a spectacular end to the film. [laughs]

  That’s why I just can’t get involved directing the group. This stuff is too important to me to just take it easy. And Terry’s more lax in a strange way, it’s less important to him.

  There’s one bit that I did go down and shoot, that was the opening scene with the Wise Men coming into Bethlehem; they come in, then we go to the set inside, and that’s Terry, and then we come outside [and] see the Holy Family, that’s me, and they’re really beautiful shots! [laughs] And it’s just that difference; that’s what I am trying to do, and I know the rest of the group is not interested in working at that level. And for me to do that takes this, that, and the other thing; it takes longer. So it’s better that I just step back from it.

  Gilliam under mud.

  Do the other Pythons appreciate that after the fact? Do they look at the finished film and say, “Yes, it’s better and funnier for having held out for that visual quality”?

  GILLIAM: I don’t know, nobody’s ever said anything! Not that I ever sat down and really talked to John. I mean, Eric understands it, and I think Mike understands it. That’s what’s so funny about us as a group: we’ve never sat down and discussed things like that. We don’t spend a lot of time congratulating each other and patting each other on the back, which is the good thing. I think we’re very critical, so that’s good. I just always felt there was sort of a shared respect, that was the main thing, which was unstated but it was there. And that’s when the group worked best.

  I love Life of Brian, I think it’s great even though it doesn’t have visually as much beauty—not just beauty, but things of interest—in there. That’s one of the reasons, when I was being the jailer and some of these other characters, I cover myself with mud; it was a way of adding texture to the movie!

  But it’s not that vital because ultimately what we were saying, these ideas, was what was important. Such funny ideas, such really intelligent, outrageous and strong and smart ideas.

  I’ve Got Better Things to Do Than Come Down to the Dairy

  GILLIAM: I honestly don’t remember whether it was my idea or not, the idea of the spaceship for getting Brian from the top of the tower to the ground safely. Does anybody else claim credit for that? Because if they don’t, I will! It might have been Graham, for all I know, but the reason I think it might have been me was because I was very much impressed with a lot of what was going on in Star Wars at the time, the scale of that; all I wanted to do was play around with that. So once we decided on the spaceship, then I was on my own and just did my spaceship sequence, invented my little creatures.

  I think it was my desperate bid to escape from being the animator, escape from that role. It was my first chance to play around with model shooting. We’d done some very basic stuff on Holy Grail, like using little cows from train sets thrown in the air, but this is me and my interest in special effects moving forward. I wanted to show we could do a Star Wars sequence for five quid! It was really the first step towards The Crimson Permanent Assurance. I got my own little film group, a good crew, and we did all that in a room about twenty-five feet by twenty-five feet, got Graham to come in and look frightened for a bit, and that was it!

  I need to be just a step away from [the group] to get where I really feel confident enough and comfortable enough to do what I do without feeling I have to explain it, justify it, any of that stuff—I just did it. I think it’s been like that even now when I go to Hollywood; I have to talk about a script that I did very, very hesitantly. “I know what I’m doing, I don’t have to sit and tell you people what I’m trying to do.” “You have to, because we have the money, that’s why you do it.” But I’ve learned in Hollywood that what I do is just make a lot of noise and flap my hands and get really excited: “AND THEN THIS THING COMES IN, AND, AND THEN, WOW!! AND THEN…”

  Biblical alien.

  I’m sure they haven’t a fucking clue what I just said, but it sounds exciting! The medium becomes the message.

  I like how the spaceship’s engine shifts gears.

  GILLIAM: Well, if you’re going to do a chase, it’s like Bullitt with gears changing. What we actually used were motorcycle gear changes. Brrrrmm VVVRRRrrrmmm! That still makes me laugh!

  JONES: The filming of [Life of Brian] was great fun, actually; it was really enjoyable. You just felt you were on a roll, you just knew it was working. But the editing wasn’t very fun. I always felt with the films I’d be left out there, especially by Life of Brian—everybody else would go off and do other things and I was there six, seven months later still toiling away, trying to do the dubbing and this and that.

  I didn’t enjoy the editing, and that was partly because Terry G. and Julian [Doyle] had just set up a company together in Neal’s Yard and they were working very closely. And Julian was editing it, and I felt slightly excluded in the editing which felt like a bit of, “I have to get in.” Terry G. was a bit fed up with me at that point; we’d been on location and I’d said something rather sharp to him and he was feeling a bit put-out about it, so there was some odd thing going on.

  DOYLE: I learned then what had gone wrong with the editing on Holy Grail. In Brian there was a scene of Brian and a salesman haggling over a beard. Now they played that out, rehearsed it, and shot it, then we’d see the rushes. And there was this two-shot at the beginning, the wide shot of the two haggling, and the audience was in stitches it’s so funny, and then there were some closeups of Brian and the beard salesman, and nobody laughs; of course they’re closeups, they’re only half the performance, and you’ve seen the performance in the wide shot. So I had Eric come to me, and he said, “Don’t cut the two-shot, it’s brilliant, the closeups don’t work.” And the same with Graham, he came to me: “Don’t cut the two-shot! The two-shot works brilliantly.”

  This is a thing: comedians will tell you two-shots work, because you get the timing right. Somebody can cut in closeups and ruin somebody’s performance by changing their pauses, and that’s why I think comedians are [keen] about the two-shot—at least nobody’ll ruin it.

  I’d done a rough cut of Brian. When we ran the film back in London, they said, “Oh, it’s working great except the haggling doesn’t work.” And Eric was, of course, “Well, we’ll have to cut out the haggling.” And I said, “Let me have a go at it.”

  What it was, the haggling was too slow in the two-shot. It works fine when you play it on its own, [but] when you put it in the film, where Brian’s being chased by Romans, the performance
s are too slow. I can speed them up if I go to the closeups and put shots of the Romans getting closer; there’s more panic on him. I cut the two-shot with closeups and stuck it in the film. Cleese came around and I ran it: “Well, that seems to work.”

  No One Is to Stone Anyone Until I Blow This Whistle

  JONES: Oh yes, I remember when we were writing it sort of thinking some loony might take potshots at us, something like that. I thought it would be controversial. Having said that, the controversy surrounding it usually came from people who hadn’t seen the film, people who just didn’t like the idea of it. As I say, the film is heretical; it’s not blasphemous!

  Some might not understand the difference; they both sound bad!

  JONES: Well, it’s not blasphemous because it accepts the Christian story; in fact, the film doesn’t make sense unless you take the Christian story, but it’s heretical in terms of [being] very critical of the Church, and I think that’s what the joke of it is, really: to say, here is Christ saying all these wonderful things about people living together in peace and love, and then for the next two thousand years people are putting each other to death in His name because they can’t agree about how He said it, or in what order He said it. The whole thing about “The sandal!” “It’s a shoe!” is like a history of the Church in three minutes.

  CLEESE: Terry always says it’s a heresy, and I’ve never understood this because a heresy is a teaching which is at variance with the Church’s teaching, and I don’t know in what way we’re a heresy. What we are is quite clearly making fun of the way people follow religion but not of religion itself, and the whole purpose of having that lovely scene at the start when the Three Wise Men go into the wrong stable is to say Brian is not Christ, he just gets taken for a Messiah. And that’s a very important point.

  I would defend Life of Brian as being a perfectly religious film.

  Did the controversy divert a potential audience by making them think the film was something it wasn’t, an attack on a revered figure?

  JONES: Might have done. But usually our audience is very intelligent. I mean, we’ve never had a mass audience. Python’s always been [accepted by] sort of an intelligent, articulate minority, so our audiences would soon cop onto what the film was, really. I don’t think it distracted people in terms of appreciating the film.

  PALIN: Yes, I was just totally indignant at the level of the debate. I think I’d expected there to be argument, I’d expected there to be opposition, but the level of it was so depressing. It was just, “They’re comedy writers, therefore nothing they say is to be taken seriously. They have no serious point to make.” I mean, John and I went on television [with] a bishop and a prominent religious writer, and they were pathetic—they were just sort of sneering at us [for] attempting to deal with this subject. And the rest of it was just laughable because people were saying it was Python’s send-up of Jesus.

  “No, he isn’t Jesus, he’s this character.”

  “Oh, we all know what you mean.”

  “We have Jesus in the film and we have Brian in the film; Brian is not Jesus. We make that quite clear.”

  “Oh, yes he is.”

  You can’t deal with people who have that level of resistance, just head-in-sand attitudes. The opposition was of a very, very poor quality, just exactly what you’d expect: knee-jerk. There was no real attempt to argue with us and say, “Well, perhaps you’d got it historically wrong here,” or that sort of thing; it was, “Python, they’re irreverent. They made a Bible story with no respect for Jesus. We all know they hate everybody and they have no respect for anybody. Therefore our case is, we rest our case.”

  So consequently I remember being tremendously rewarded by the attitude of some churchmen I knew and heard about who said, “This is exactly what you should be saying, this is terrific that you’ve done a film like this. I want to show it to my congregation.” Members of a church at St. John’s Wood, the guy said, “We showed it to them, we had a discussion, we raised these points, we loved it, terrific.”

  CLEESE: The offense is what a friend of mine called “public offense.” He said when you really offend people they tend to come up to you privately and express their offense quite gently—you feel uncomfortable afterwards because you really do feel you’ve upset someone. There’s also what they call “institutional offense,” and he had a lot of this running a department of the BBC, which is people complaining because they’re the heads of organizations and they feel that their members will complain to them if they don’t complain.

  One of the themes in the film is, “Do make up your own mind about things and don’t do what people tell you.” And I find it slightly funny that there are now religious organizations saying, “Do not go and see this film that tells you not to do what you are told.”

  I think originally the movie might have gone into 200 movie houses, and once the protests started it was soon decided to put it into 600. So it is wonderful when people embark on a course of action that they can really achieve something so totally counterproductive. One can only think that either they are profoundly stupid—and these people are obviously not—or they have become so enraged that they are incapable of thinking. Because obviously if you don’t want people to see a movie, the thing to do is to just let it quietly die away, get a tiny little review on the movie page, and nobody knows about it. But if you do want to make a success of a movie, get people cross and angry and protesting. It’s extraordinary!

  They have actually made me rich! I feel we should send them a crate of champagne or something.

  IDLE: The film has appealed to many seriously religious people, including the Dalai Lama and some Jesuits. It [also] plays better in Catholic countries—go figure! But it was wonderful—anger is the hallmark of the closed mind, and we certainly flushed out some raving bigots, and that was part of the joy of it.

  PALIN: It was quite bracing at the time; also it had a delightfully Pythonic effect, in that in this country the film was passed by the British Board of Film Censors, but local councils could ban it under a rather obscure law governing hygiene in cinemas! For some reason under this law, they could if they wanted to decide not to show a certain film, and a number of councils decided not to show Life of Brian.

  There were two towns in Surrey without cinemas that banned it anyway!

  PALIN: Really? Well, my favorite story is that Swansea, a large town in Wales, had banned it. And this little cinema, a flea-pit up the coast in Porthcawl just sort of going out of business, put it on, and busloads of people used to come up from Swansea from the university and places like that to see it. So this cinema suddenly enjoyed a complete new lease on life—rejuvenated by Life of Brian!

  NANCY LEWIS: I was coordinating with whoever was doing publicity for Life of Brian at Warners. I know we had originally planned this wonderful launching party for it. The Pythons had come up with the idea of having these cardboard cutouts of famous people around, dotted all over the party. Terry sent over a prototype I have still in our storage container in New Jersey: a life-sized black-and-white photo of Frank Sinatra. Of course the party was cancelled because Warners thought it would just invite controversy.

  They were all very nervous and twitching at it. Strom Thurmond and his wife and all the people who hadn’t seen it came out and said it shouldn’t be seen, it should be banned, but it was not as controversial. Everyone was told to tread carefully, and as a result they did very little publicity for it, they low-keyed it.

  Otto’s crack suicide squad, in a demonstration cut from the final film.

  GOLDSTONE: I suppose we went into it blindly. I mean, you can’t really consider the consequences, otherwise you don’t do your best work. You can almost take the view that if the public can’t take the joke, tough! It’s that thing of hitting a nerve; and the resistance to it was from groups just reacting to the idea that anyone should lampoon a piece of sacred history. And that wasn’t what it was about at all. I think when people saw it and enjoyed it, that kind of took over fro
m all the controversy. And everywhere it was banned ultimately played the film, it was only a matter of time—some decades! Certainly the same thing happened in America; in the Bible Belt it was viewed with a lot of suspicion, but where it did play it played very well.

  CLEESE: Many years later I stood in a queue to see the Marty Scorsese film The Last Temptation of Christ, and I was standing there with all these nice, thoughtful, quiet, well-behaved students who were reading books or talking quietly to each other, and opposite were all the people protesting against the film who were as batty and unpleasant a bunch of ravers as I’ve ever seen! It was something terribly funny about these weirdos protesting at these very normal, quiet, well-behaved people.

  Let’s face it: about twenty percent of the population is quite disturbed, in any country. Some of them only slightly, but by the time you get to the bottom seven or eight percent, I mean really getting quite disturbed. And of course they tend to latch onto religion or things like that for comfort, rather than extrapolating theories as to how the eye works or something.

  PALIN: In the end, we’d been through all the possible dangers of people dismissing it and I think we’d come out with something intellectually defensible, so I quite enjoyed the reaction. Because in many ways it made us exactly what Python is about, really, the reaction from the sort of people who were inspiration for Python: the little petty local officials who close cinemas for hygiene because they don’t like the comedy film about the Bible story.

  In a way, comedy doesn’t want to change the world, and it never does, but occasionally you need to have your own prejudices reinforced! These people still exist, so there’s a reason to be doing Python!