What makes a film director bankable? Quixotic filmmaker Terry Gilliam talks movie, money and mania

Director Terry Gilliam was in Bucharest in December to present his last film, The Zero Theorem, a sci-fi movie shot in Romania, at the opening of the Bucharest International Experimental Film Festival (BIEFF) 2013.

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His many local fans, who value both his work as part of the Monty Python group and his solo work as the director of cult movies such as Brazil (1985), Twelve Monkeys (1995) and The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus (2009), had the opportunity to meet and talk to him at a master-class at Studio Cinema.

A man of overwhelming generosity, Gilliam shared with the audience a lifetime’s experience of filmmaking.

Anca Ionita selected some of the major topics discussed, including her brief enquiry about what went wrong with Gilliam’s favorite film project Don Quixote?

How do you feel about failing with Don Quixote, just like Orson Wells?

You get in a trap, this is the danger! Tomorrow I get back to London, and the next day I go to Spain to start Don Quixote again. This is maybe the seventh time! He has inhabited me, he is like a tumor that I have to get out of my system or I’ll die. And it’s also just foolish, because everybody tells me to move on.

That’s the reasonable thing to do, and I’ve never been reasonable! The sad thing is, because it has been around so long and with so much publicity, I will disappoint a lot of people! It won’t that good a film. I just want to get it out of my system. I don’t know if we will pull it off this year…

What is the problem with the film?

It’s nothing more than money; it’s always just the money! My life is about the money! So right now it’s the casting – is that guy bankable? I used to be able to do it for EUR 20 million but now I’m down to EUR 14 million. With the film The Zero Theorem, five years ago, when we talked about it, the budget was USD 20 million.

We made it here for USD 8.5 million. It’s a big difference! And the only way we made it was by coming to Romania, getting friends like Matt Damon to work for nothing, basically! It’s always good to have friends. Everything about it is a product of being in Bucharest as well.

What is the story of The Zero Theorem and when can the public see it?

I’m hearing talk from the distributors that they are not going to put it out in cinemas but only do it on DVD! The Zero Theorem is the first one-size-fits-all, full-gate, semi-viral motion picture, the first one ever made! Do you want to know what this means? We shot in 16/9 proportion which is what you see on your modern television sets, on your iPad, on your iPhone, and so on whatever medium you are going to watch the film, you are going to see exactly the same image! No more, no less. Full-gate: when you shoot a film the gate of the camera, through which the light comes in, has rounded corners, and normally, in modern film, you use a safe area so any of the dirt that the camera catches when you are shooting is invisible.

We have shown the full gate, no safety net, so it has rounded corners. We shot on film, which is analog, as opposed to digital, which is viral. So half is on film, but there are 250 digital effects in the movie, which makes it semi-viral.

How did you come to shoot it in Bucharest?

Again, the default position for me, you know, like in computers, is the Don Quixote film project. Stupidly! We were working on Don Quixote a year ago (2012), but the money didn’t come through[D1] . So in July I didn’t have a job and I was very determined I was going to make a film out here.

The Zero Theorem was a script that was floating around four or five years before and I never got involved in it properly. The producer was still interested in doing it. We ended up doing it for a third of the initial budget, and that’s why we had to come to Bucharest, because it’s lovely and cheap. I am really grateful to have had the chance to come to Bucharest. I have fallen in love with this place.

The script was odd. It was full of good ideas, existential ideas. I just jumped into it. By the third week of July I got Christoph Waltz to agree to be in it, and by October 5 we were shooting the film. For anybody who has been involved in filmmaking it’s impossible to go from that point to shooting in such a short time!

I just got a lot of friends to come and be part of the process: Matt Damon, Tilda Swinton, David Thewlis, Ben Whishaw. It was a very frenetic experience. We had very little time to prepare. We had to build this incredible chapel at the MediaPro studios, we had to get permission to shoot in the streets of Bucharest, by the bank of Marmorosch (n.r. today’s National Bank – BNR) and on Calea Victoriei.

It was an interesting experience because in the editing, in many ways, we kind of re-wrote the movie. It always happens in the editing, but this was more interesting because we had a lot of material that was interesting in itself that needed to be restructured to make the film work. In the end I think we ended up doing a really good film and the performances are quite wonderful! It was an interesting experience to work that way.

I didn’t do storyboards like I normally do; it was just working on instinct. We brought in only four or five people from outside Romania. Everybody else was from here, in Bucharest. It is a great experience to see how hard people work here, how skilled they are and how good the ‘mici’ is here!

Why do you make films?

The only reason to make films, as far as I am concerned, is to open windows and doors to other ways of looking at the world. You can either agree with me or not, or it might get you inspired to do your own film. But films, hopefully, are the beginning of other people’s adventures or creative attempts. Just to entertain doesn’t interest me, and action films are wonderful but I don’t know how to make them. So I do what I can.

I also like the idea of making films that are difficult to make because I want to keep proving to the distributors and studios that there are many audiences out there and there are lots of intelligent people and if you give them really intelligent films they will come, they will respond!

The studios tend to think we are all stupid, and we just want to see Fast and Furious 29 and Pirates of the Caribbean 110. All those films are fine, but the idea is that we just have to keep eating the same ideas. It gets very depressing for me.

For a long time audiences have been dumbed down, given the same kind of juvenile films, and we keep seeing the same thing again and again and again. I watch trailers, but they are all the same movies – the costumes look different, with different actors, but they are telling the same kind of stories. I’m not saying they are bad movies, because some of them are very good: good performances, good writing, technically they are brilliant.

But somehow I think if you keep giving people a limited selection of food they get used to that rather than asking for the whole range. All I can do is compare to what it was like in the ‘60s and ‘70s. What you could see in the cinema was incredible – you could see an Italian, or a French film, or a Spanish film, or a Yugoslavian one, it didn’t matter! It was alive and everybody was excited.