190. Terry Gilliam (filmmaker) - The impossible dream
The film becomes the story of the making of the film. From his Monty Python days to now, Don Quixote is a metaphor for Terry Gilliam’s whole career, and for his 30 year project of making a film about a film about the knight of the woeful countenance. We talk about Muppets, time, and basically everything else two humans can talk about.
April 13, 2019
51 min
Full
191 of 237
April 13, 2019
190. Terry Gilliam (filmmaker) - The impossible dream
0:00 / 51:18
Excerpt playback isn’t available for this episode — use the full-episode link.
Search the Record
Moment search isn’t open for this episode yet
When it opens, you’ll be able to type any phrase and jump straight to the second it was said.
Big Think Episodes Around April 13, 2019
Episode 191 of 237 — walk the feed in the order it was published.
190. Terry Gilliam (filmmaker) - The impossible dream
Summary
Faith in anything is its own special form of madness.
It’s a challenge to entropy, and entropy takes no challenge lightly. If there’s any better metaphor for this struggle than trying to make a big budget movie with even a shred of integrity, I haven’t found it.
On the one hand, you’ve got this impossible dream. This faith in the beautiful thing that’s supposed to emerge at at the end of the process. On the other hand, the process is a hellish sausage-making machine of studio bosses, financing, and acts of god like four days of flash flooding in the middle of your big shoot. You might as well be Don Quixote, doing battle with a windmill.
What kind of masochist would put themselves through that?
My guest today, Terry Gilliam, is that very masochist. And we should be grateful, because his stomach for the fight has given us movies like THE FISHER KING, BRAZIL, 12 MONKEYS and MONTY PYTHON’s THE LIFE OF BRIAN. And now, almost 30 years after his first, biblically disastrous attempt to make it, THE MAN WHO KILLED DON QUIXOTE. Starring Adam Driver and Jonathan Pryce, the movie is as funny, thrilling, and unpretentiously deep as the best of Gilliam’s work. It’s also kind of like one of those Russian matryoshka dolls: a film inside a film inside a film, all of them metaphors for the holy folly of believing in anything at all.
The Man Who Killed Don Quixote is out April 19th in select theaters and on demand video.
Surprise conversation starters in this episode:
Michelle Thaller on whether time is real or an illusion
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Episode details and artwork are published by the show’s own feed. Sentinel plays short cited excerpts and links every episode back to its publisher.