Paul Risker continues his Terry Gilliam retrospective….
The Fisher King and Twelve Monkeys represent a hiatus for Gilliam from penning and developing his own scripts. This period in Gilliam’s career is a period of transformation, in which he continued to break his own rules. Despite having already deviated from these on The Fisher King, the sci-fi time travel drama Twelve Monkeys sits as a point of escalation in Gilliam’s oeuvre. Twelve Monkeys was a Universal Pictures film, the very studio Gilliam had waged a war with over Brazil. Whilst Fisher King was set in America, Twelve Monkeys was set in Philadelphia, one of America’s historical cities and where in 1776 American Independence was first declared.
If signing with the Creative Artists Agency (CAA) was the beginning of the end of his virginity, then the Hollywood lawyer Gilliam now had on speed dial, his return to Universal, and his casting of stars Bruce Willis and Brad Pitt must have felt like the end of the end of losing his virginity.
“I began making movies not wanting to have big stars involved because they always bring that team, and they end up controlling it. To me the director has to control the movie and so I always avoided them.”
But Gilliam was pursued by both Bruce Willis and Brad Pitt, and earlier he had worked with Sean Connery on Time Bandits and later Robert De Niro on Brazil, so stars were not a new component of Gilliam’s personality led revolution.
As he admits, “The irony is I’ve ended up working with really big stars. But it’s always been at points in their careers when they were trying to prove something different to what had been happening in their lives. In the case of Sean Connery in Time Bandits, Sean’s career was at its nadir I think at that point. He’d been making some wonderful films after he’d stopped being Bond, but they weren’t making money. We got him at just the right point in his career. That certainly helped.”
If this was a period of transformation for Gilliam, then this opportunity for transformation extended to his stars. Through Twelve Monkeys he afforded Willis and Pitt an opportunity to undermine their star personas, instead portraying themselves as actors. This was an opportunity both men were desperately seeking.
Whilst Gilliam had experience of working with stars in the past, Willis and Pitt best exemplify the opportunity Gilliam afforded his stars to challenge their persona in the cinematic social consciousness.
“With Bruce Willis and Brad Pitt, they were both trying to prove something. Bruce was desperate to show that he was a serious and good actor. So I said “Okay. But if you come onto the film you can’t bring your entourage. I’m interested in Bruce Willis the actor, not Bruce Willis the super star.” And he did. I said, “You have to come here naked.” And he did. Brad was trying to escape from the huge success of Legends of the Fall where he was all blonde and beautiful. He want to show something as well. So he went out of his way to make himself look as unlovely as possible. Both of them had a chance to do something and I responded to that.”
Brad Pitt would go on to receive a “Best Actor in a Supporting Role” nomination, only to lose out – understandably – to Kevin Spacey for The Usual Suspects (but is he Keyser Söze?). The acknowledgement of the Academy affirmed that Gilliam was the type of director who would respond to any artist desiring to re-define their identity. Pitt’s determination when he met him was, according to Gilliam, the reason he gave him the opportunity. After all, Gilliam had through The Fisher King transformed his own approach, and to his benefit, prolonging his career for at least another film.
Twelve Monkeys would be a follow-up success at the box office for Gilliam. On a production budget of $29 million, a low figure for a sci-fi studio produced picture, it would accrue a total worldwide gross of $168,841,459, and its foreign takings would nearly double the domestic total. Again Gilliam proved that his directorial vision would secure a box office performance of note, and in the film business money talks.
Suddenly Gilliam was transforming himself into a successful Hollywood director, something he hinted at in the documentary The Hamster Factory, was quite nauseating. After all for most of his career he had ben rebelling against America. If he was only dipping his feet into the system he deplored on The Fisher King, he was not now far off diving right in.
No matter the success of The Fisher King and Twelve Monkeys Gilliam would struggle to get projects off the ground. He was unable to develop A Tale of Two Cities off the back of Fisher King, and after Twelve Monkeys – despite Willis’ interest in another project Gilliam was looking to develop – the same occurred. Instead he would go on to adapt Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
Despite congratulations from the studios, they equated the success not to the sum of the parts, but rather they put it down to star value – specifically Brad Pitt. For Gilliam the success of the film was owed to a truth the studios still refused to accept: that there was an audience out there for intelligent cinema. For them it remained star value. That was the reason a collaborative project was a success.
Whilst he may have broken his rules, Gilliam at his core was still the same rebellious maverick expatriate. Only now he was functioning within the system, exploiting it to allow him to meet the requirements of his Gilliamesque imagination – something as producer Charles Roven suggested, requires Hollywood money and the broad audience to make his projects financially viable. Twelve Monkeys is closer to an art-house movie than it is a commercial studio picture, so Gilliam’s hiatus from developing his own scripts is a period of exploiting the system to make the kinds of films derived from the imaginations of others who he happened to discover an affection for; creatively combining his directorial eye with their narrative ideas.
Paul Risker is co-editor in chief of Wages of Film, freelance writer and contributor to Flickering Myth and Scream The Horror Magazine.
