NEWSLETTER

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TERRY GILLIAM

INTERVIEW BY NICK GAZIN
PORTRAITS BY ALEX STURROCK



Terry Gilliam got his start being the most beloved guy in his high school and then he went on to do every job that anyone has ever fantasized about and to collaborate with everyone that anyone has ever wanted to meet or be. He worked for Harvey Kurtzman on Harvey’s longest-running post-Mad attempt at magazining. He was in Monty Python and did all those animations and distinctive visuals. Then he went on to make really big, great, depressing movies like Time Bandits, Brazil, 12 Monkeys, The Fisher King, and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Also George Harrison, aka the best Beatle, was his number-one fan. Gilliam is a genius. I think that so many things have come easily to him that he has to make the most difficult-to-film movies possible just to keep from getting bored.

The person who was originally supposed to conduct this interview died or something while working on a story in Detroit, and I was called up at the last minute to fill in. I didn’t have time to do research although I’d spent much of my formative years obsessing over Terry Gilliam. That obsession waned once I started obsessing over how to be Terry Gilliam. So this interview contains some of the stock content that you get when you talk to someone as famous as him, but I also wanted to know about how, for him, depression and hope relate to making creative work. I don’t know if I did a good job or not. I didn’t see his last couple of films. I hope he didn’t hang up the phone and say to himself, “What a jackass.”

Vice: I’d like to start with something that’s near and dear to me. I love Mad magazine and I love Harvey Kurtzman, so I’d like to ask you about growing up reading Mad and your eventual work with Harvey.
Terry Gilliam: Well, Mad was THE magazine when I was a teenager so far as I’m concerned. It was so smart and so funny and so… troublesome.

It was fantastic—the bomb in the mailbox on the letters page.
Yeah, all that stuff was freeing. It was like, “Wow!” You couldn’t wait for the next issue. And the art was brilliant. Jack Davis, Wally Wood, Willie Elder… It wasn’t just destructive anarchy. It was really intelligent. They were brilliant at satirizing whatever was going on in the world, whether it was other comic strips, television, or movies. It was a fantastic, funny mirror held up to the world. So I became a huge fan of it and started learning how to cartoon like those guys. Wally Wood’s women were so sexy that I felt that it was possibly a form of pornography, and I used to hide the magazine from my parents because I felt guilty.

That’s how you know it’s great art. I remember seeing the first six issues. My dad had them. I forget when the first issue came out. ’52? ’51? But it’s still edgy today. The sex and anger are all on the surface.
There was nothing else like it at the time, so there was nothing to compete with it. Every cartoonist I know from my generation was totally affected and influenced by it. Harvey became kind of a god for all of us.

You got to work for Harvey at Help! magazine along with Robert Crumb and some other greats.
It was after Harvey walked out of Mad and his other magazines, Humbug and Trump, came and went. Help! was the one that seem to develop a life of its own. I was in college at the time, and some friends and I took over the school’s art and literary journal and turned it into a humor magazine. Help! was in many ways the model. Our magazine was called Fang.

You went to Occidental College in Los Angeles, right?
Yes. We started doing parodies of things like West Side Story. I sent a copy of our magazine to Harvey and he wrote back a nice letter and that was the end of it for me—I just had to go to New York and meet this guy. I wanted to be part of that world. I wrote him back saying that I was thinking of coming to New York after I graduated and he wrote back again saying, “Forget about it, there’s nothing for you here, we’re self-sufficient.” And I said, “No, no, I’m coming.”

Nice.
It was really funny, that summer I had been reading a book called Act One. It’s the autobiography of Moss Hart. He was an incredibly successful playwright. His story was of a callow youth going to New York to meet his hero and ending up being his partner in writing—and that’s what happened to me. I met with Harvey at the Algonquin Hotel, which at that point was famous for the round table where Robert Benchley and Dorothy Parker and all these brilliant wits hung out in the 40s. I went up and knocked on the door of his suite, and it wasn’t Harvey in there, but Willie Elder and Al Jaffee and Arnold Roth. All of these cartoonists were busy working on the first issue of Little Annie Fanny.

Oh my God.
It was like walking onto Mount Olympus and there were the gods. Eventually Harvey turned up, and this is where luck enters the whole picture. The guy who was the assistant editor was quitting and they were looking for someone else to work for next to nothing. I was the kid standing there, and that’s how it happened.