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DOS & DON'TS
ALSO BY NICK GAZIN
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TERRY GILLIAM(Page 5 of 8)Published September, 2009 
Sometimes a person who can confront depression and the grim aspects of life doesn’t like other people. They don’t want to talk to anyone, much less worry about selling an idea to a producer or an agent. You’re probably right. But I actually do like people. I’m not frightened by them and they surprise me. And also, talking to you now or talking to a group of people, I’m slightly different from who I really am. I’m outside of myself, performing. Then I go back home and my wife gets to see the truth. I can relate to that. And when you’re by yourself and deprived of stimulus it’s just you and your thoughts. But actually that’s one thing that I’m fighting for so much now. Because of Facebook and Twitter and all this crap, people don’t have time to be alone and confront themselves and who they really are. It’s the thing that really worries me the most about the modern world. People just seem to be extensions of a social order now. We have a house in Italy with no telephone or television. My son would be there, and he was used to playing his video games and blah, blah, blah, and he’d go there and get bored. My wife would say, “Well, we have to do something to keep him entertained,” and I’d say, “No, let him get bored and you’ll see what happens.” After about two days of boredom and saying “There’s fuck all to do here,” he started inventing things. He was creating a really interesting world, because he was involved in creating it. He wasn’t just having it created for him. I think so much of what we do is now done for us. It’s digested, it’s handed to you. I like video games but I also think they’re dangerous because of how much time and energy they consume. It’s not the same as reading a book. You also read a book at your own pace, while TV and video games keep going even if you stop. [laughs] Exactly. Then you’re filled with this terrible feeling like [sinister voice], “They don’t need you.” Another thing is this: My son had the Tony Hawk video game and he was brilliant at it. Then he started skateboarding and he realized that it actually hurts. And this is what bothers me about so many of these video games. They’ve removed that element of pain. You just sit there and you watch your life force go down, but you’re not experiencing pain. You’re sat there flipping through the air, and then you try to go out and do it in the real world and: “Ouch!” After Jabberwocky, you made Time Bandits, a movie that I loved a lot as a child. It sits in my mind along with Jim Henson’s Labyrinth. I wanted to watch it over and over again. It’s also one of your most positive films even though it has a lot of scary elements. I mean, the main character’s parents die in the end! Part of it is the journey of a kid who has a lot of heroes. He goes through history meeting them, and he realizes that they are not quite what he thought they were—not quite so heroic—and ultimately he earns the right to stand on his own two feet. His parents should be listening to him as opposed to ignoring him. It’s a common theme in comics, too, like in Batman and Superman. Kids secretly want to kill their parents and be free of the restrictions they put on them. Anyway, just thinking about Time Bandits now makes me happy. And George Harrison was involved in the film. He was my favorite Beatle. I don’t want to get off topic here, but can I ask you what George was like? He wasn’t the quiet Beatle, which most people thought he was. He was very funny and outspoken. “Sardonic,” I think, is the word. He was quite wicked and he was a great gardener. He spent the last 20 years of his life tending 37 acres of one of the greatest gardens in the world. He was spiritual but he could joke like the best, and he was the number-one Python fan. Amazing. George was a special guy. You don’t meet many like him because his feet were so firmly on the ground even though his head and his heart were floating high. See all articles by this contributor
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