Terry Gilliam Quotations

They make Spy Kids, they make Scream, they make A Scary Movie. This doesn't do that, so it could be a very bad marriage. I'm trying to keep this potential nightmare quiet because we're just finishing editing.

I got my head bashed in at a demonstration against the Vietnam War. Police were losing control because they were up against a world they really didn't understand.

Actually, I began to think that maybe there is a god, after all. Or maybe it's a different one. The old one got fired.

It's been interesting how kids have had hardly any problems watching it, but adults have more trouble. This happened way back even with Jabberwocky and Time Bandits.

I was born in 1940 in Minnesota and grew up in the country... dirt roads, swamps, lakes, woods.

I was doing political cartoons and getting angry to the point where I felt I was going to have to start making and throwing bombs. I thought I was probably a better cartoonist than a bomb maker.

We did Holy Grail, and I got my name up there as one of the directors. After that, I started moving more and more down the line I wanted to, which was making movies.

It's 85 million dollars and they got to be really careful because they are going to need me.

You get trapped by stories. Though I've got this reputation for being out of control, it's not true, it just happens to be a more interesting story than the truth.

People used to think we just faked all that stuff... it was all written, rehearsed. The fact that it looks as cobbled together as it does is just that we weren't very good.

There are moments when television systems are young and haven't formed properly, and there's room for lots of original stuff. Then things become more and more top-heavy with executives who are trying to guarantee the success of things.

Literally overnight, I became an animator... and one that was well-known.

There was a perverse side of me, with things like Van Helsing coming out. I didn't want to go down that route.

John Cleese was with a group called Cambridge Circus, who had come to New York, and we became friends. Years later that produced a certain team effort.

In advertising, I was frustrated by having to deal with the client. It was the only time I really worked in a proper office, and I didn't like it-simple as that.

I keep referring to them in the plural but all I'm dealing with is Bob. I don't know where Harvey fits in the equation. He was very present at the beginning, winding his brother up. I don't know where he is now.

I was getting frustrated with America. It's interesting how as simple a thing as, like, letting your hair grow longer changed in the world in those days.

At the first screening, there were a lot of areas that we went around and around about. Then we had our second screening. It played better. It's almost a reasonable length film now!

We took up the offer with the BBC, and that was Monty Python's Flying Circus. I didn't have to submit my ideas to the group. I used to turn up on the days we recorded with a can of film under my arm, and in it went.

Usually I have my big fight at the end of a film,

The only time you get to see something interesting occasionally is music videos but even they've become boring, they seem more and more the same.

Mud has been my middle name, ... Of course, people in Hollywood would say that about my career.

Only to my wife, ... Everyone else thinks I'm jolly good fun to work with.

I don't have a problem (with the bad reviews).

I hate being dragged into genres. I like movies that are full of a lot of conflicting and interesting things,

Frankly, it's better than we could do at the time. The text? Obviously inferior! The actors? Better than we were,

Hello, good evening and welcome to the middle of the film.

I actually think we made it better without succumbing to other people's idea about what would make it better. Everybody's happy now. We're a big happy family.

He didn't do anything to become president!, ... Well, thank God for Karl and Dick.

He just had a different view of the film.

I think a once in a lifetime experience is what we call these things,

I was always keen to shock people and shake them up; Eric was a little bit more traditionally motivated in really being just funny all the time.

I was the perfect guy to do Harry Potter. I remember leaving the meeting, getting in my car, and driving for about two hours along Mulholland Drive just so angry. I mean, Chris Columbus' versions are terrible. Just dull. Pedestrian.

I was beginning to wonder if I was ever going to make a movie again,

Whether I like it or not, or whether anybody else does, when I start a film I have a few ideas. And as you're getting into it, you think, 'Ooh, there's another idea,' and you're shooting some more and, 'Oh, here's another thing. Let's do that.' I'm always changing and adding. That's just the way my mind works.

We did a lot of work because the original script, ... The premise was really interesting but the script needed magic. It needed real fairytale, it needed a real sense of the wonder of that world, and working with Lance and people was, we worked our way towards this thing. It was quite organic really, we built this film.

We didn't have TV when I was a kid, ... I grew up reading these stories. For better or worse, they formed my world view.

We cut out the most expensive scene in the film!

Everything in this business conspires to make you bitter and twisted and tough, ... I've always tried to keep a toughness on one side and complete vulnerability on the other. To me, if you get a thick skin, you might as well give up directing.

At the time I was frustrated, but it was the right decision, ... We wouldn't have been able to achieve what we did if we'd stayed on location. The forest was both realistic and believable, and also magical. People can't believe that we actually built all that, but we did.

of numbers, of calculations, where there's very little time for myths and dreaming.

The musical, Hair, was at the time very smart because it got to that basic element of this dividing line in society... which was hair.

There I was back in American television with all of the restrictions. I managed to finish my contracted animation, but it was radio animation.

It wasn't like sitting down and saying, 'Let's see if we can design a film that will capture the book, but maybe work for a mass audience,' ... There was none of that. It was 'Can we translate this book into a film?'

It was a very strange time, ... After having had four projects all collapse on me, by the time 'Grimm' came along, I was jelly.

It often happens with films. You get to the end of production and you find that the film I was making is not necessarily the film that the financiers thought they were getting. What I find normally happens in those situations is that they find a compromise which isn't particularly good for the film, or you get into a head-to-head ego battle which, again, might not be good for the film.

It was like a nightmare working with these guys. Here's how I get through this film: the Weinsteins don't exist. I didn't speak to them.

I'm not going to talk about it, ... I won't! It overwhelms any dialogue about the actual movie. Besides, I'm actually contractually obligated not to go into it.

I know when I watch trailers, that I'm seeing the same ones I've seen the last 15 years,

I like the fact that my films have always encouraged bad and good reviews. The most depressing thing would be a review that was just mediocre. That would kill me,

I'm just being perverse, ... The idea that after such a long gap two films come out in the same year, it makes me smile.

If you're going to be one of the sheep, that our clever marketing technique lures into the theater, you're going to be in trouble. I want people to love it or hate it. I don't want people to say, 'Oh, that was OK, not so bad.' We want to get responses from people, see if they are alive.

In New York, we used to go outside film studios and get reels of blank film, and we used to draw on them, do flipper books, that sort of thing.

I just e-mailed him the other day saying I'm lying to the world that he's still in it, ... We did a deal when 'Quixote' collapsed and we both said we were going to go off and do commercial films so that we could get 'Quixote' back on the road. Well, he did his part of the deal and I'm hoping that 'Grimm' may be my part.

I read the reviews, my career is over. I'm a broken man. Crushed. Smashed.

Heath is not a public kind of guy and this has been rough for him to be in this non-stop now.

Heath is not a public kind of guy and this has been rough for him. He has had to go on Oprah Winfrey and Jay Leno. This is just agony for him.

The character Heath plays is the dreamer, the scholar, the one who's dragged along reluctantly and who then finds this truly enchanted world.

And Now For Something Completely Different was supposed to be our entree into America. It failed in America but was a big success in England.

I like being a patron of things, I like patronizing things. And if it's not going to be people, I'll patronize a festival.

I wasn't creative or theatrical. I was just doing everything. I was head cheerleader, valedictorian - it was ridiculous!

The English are such a frightened, nervous, insecure group of people - they no longer rule the world!

I thought, how do you confuse violent Russian mobsters? Well, by being silly!

I think it's worse for actors, though, because people have to choose you. As a director, I get to choose the actors, but most of the time, actors have to be chosen in order to work.

Now, anybody can make a movie, and I don't see that many great movies, because I think there's only a limited amount of talent out there.

I never define depression, clinical or otherwise. It's the basis of most life, it seems to me, in the modern world. We're all depressed.

Talent is less important in filmmaking than patience.

I have always got medicine I want to give to people.

Invariably, what I'm trying to do is more ambitious than the budget, but we manage to do it somehow.

All films are learning processes. I am still trying to work out how you make a movie. I didn't study at film school or any of those things. I didn't bother with film theory.

The more money you have to work with, the more people you have to deal with that you probably don't want to be spending time dealing with.

Once the voices are in your head, it's either make a movie or kill a lot of people.

Writers do the self-censoring before they even get to the studio executive, because they know the film will not run that gauntlet. They, because they want to get their films made, they censor it.

It's the shock of the world if you allow yourself to disconnect from the world and forget it's out there, how noisy it is, how busy it is, how invasive it is.

I got tired of my taxes paying for exciting little wars around the world. Then I discovered that when I died, my wife would probably have to sell our house to pay for the taxes in America.

What I want to do is make films that astonish people, that astound people, and I hope you want to do that too. It's easy to make money. It's easy to make films like everybody else. But to make films that explode like grenades in people's heads and leave shrapnel for the rest of their lives is a very important thing. That's what the great filmmakers did for me. I've got images from Fellini, from Bergman, from Kurowsawa, from Bunuel, all stuck in my brain.

Port Talbot is a steel town, where everything is covered with gray iron ore dust. Even the beach is completely littered with dust, it's just black. The sun was setting, and it was quite beautiful. The contrast was extraordinary, I had this image of a guy sitting there on this dingy beach with a portable radio, tuning in these strange Latin escapist songs like 'Brazil.' The music transported him somehow and made his world less gray.

You know the hardest thing to do in Hollywood is burn bridges. There is usually some sucker who still likes me. There is usually some sucker who will still work with me.

People in Hollywood are not showmen, they're maintenance men, pandering to what they think their audiences want.

Nobody went to see Tideland! I was hoping people would get angry about it but those that saw it didn't want to talk about it. This is the world we're living in, people don't want to discuss things that are actually worth discussing.

I think there's a side of me that's trying to compete with Lucas and Spielberg - I don't usually admit this publicly - because I tend to think that they only go so far, and their view of the world is rather simplistic. What I want to do is take whatever cinema is considered normal or successful at a particular time and play around with it - to use it as a way of luring audiences in.

Actually, I began to think that maybe there is a god, after all. Or maybe its a different one. The old one got fired.

I'm a cartoonist, it's what I am at heart, so cartoons take reality and deform it and make it grotesque, you make it funny, but you alter it. If it works, it's based on reality. That's what I try to do.

The success of the Hollywood marketing machine is to limit what we see. Not just to limit what we can see, but also to limit our expectations - to limit what we want to see.

I do want to say things in these films. I want audiences to come out with shards stuck in them. I don't care if people love my films or walk out, as long as they have a strong response.

Gorillaz virtually changed my wife...sorry, I mean, life...no, actually, it was my wife.

I think that's the problem with kids now. Everything is manufactured. And then they're sitting there watching the television, where all the work is done for them. Radio made me use my imagination.

When it came to slaughtering sacred cows with such crude yet perfect musical precision, there was no one better than Frank. I wonder what songs he's teaching the angels right now? Good luck God! You've got your hands full this time.

Nooo! Leave that to George Lucas, he' s really mastered the CGI acting. That scares me! I hate it! Everybody is so pleased and excited by it. Animation is animation. Animation is great. But it's when you're now taking what should be films full of people, living thinking, breathing, flawed creatures and you're controlling every moment of that, it's just death to me. It's death to cinema, I can't watch those Star Wars films, they're dead things.

I'm more prone to anarchy than I am to control - even though I'm a film director.

My problem is I'm like a junkie. I want a good movie fix, and I never get that fix.

I've always sworn that not having enough money has saved me from mediocrity.

They all sort of get mixed up in my head, to be quite honest. They're all dealing with similar things. It's about how you deal with reality, by ignoring it sometimes, reinventing it other times, and that's how you get through it.

The Brothers Grimm came along and I was so desperate for work ... Actually I've got to say that I like the movie, I won't apologize for it.

Everybody gets excited about technology, but it doesn't interest me in the least. I'm only interested in it if it makes my job easier or cheaper. They're tools.

I hate losing laughs; they're rare things.

Every few years when it's been another five years that have passed and I haven't made a film and the depression starts taking over totally, I allow myself to do a commercial. And then I feel really dirty and get to work promptly.

The whole point of animation to me is to tell a story, make a joke, express an idea. The technique itself doesn't really matter. Whatever works is the thing to use.

They pay money to watch the same film. Now, you could argue, that's because it makes them feel comfortable. When they go to a movie now, it's almost like hearing a pop song. You know the rhythms, you know when the downbeat is going to come, you know when the explosion is going to come… And so as life becomes more complex, as the economy is in trouble, people cling to what makes them comfortable, so they go again and again to see the same movie.

Whatever I do might be good, it might be bad, it might be all sorts of things, but it's not mediocre.