Terry Gilliam on the Guardian

Terry Gilliam Reveals Don Quixote Start Date

The tale of Terry Gilliam’s The Man Who Killed Don Quixote is movie lore by now. Not-quite-making-of doc Lost In La Mancha charted the foiling of his first attempt to make it due to a combination of injury, NATO fly-bys and rotten luck. Undeterred, and with a refusal to surrender that would impress even the Spanish hidalgo, Gilliam is having another crack and has concept art to show for it and a new start date lined up.

When Empire caught up with Gilliam to talk The Zero Theorem, he revealed that production onDon Quixote will kick off on September 29 in the Canary Islands. Gilliam now has Spanish producer Adrián Guerra, veteran of Buried, Red Lights and Elijah Wood’s Grand Piano (movies made under similarly restrained circumstances) to run interference for him, help raise capital and shoot down any errant fighter jets.

“He’s really smart, loves movies,” explains the director. “He’s young enough to still love movies. But we’ve still got to cast it and get the money but other than that, that’s the deal.”

So how many Quixote casts has this film had now? “I’m hoping it’s the lucky 11,“ he laughs. "We keep rewriting the script each time, too, so it’s a slightly different film each time. It’s the same film but the details change. Maybe it’s better, it’s certainly slightly smaller to fit into the new clothing we wear,” he said, adding wryly: “Which are cheap clothes these days.”

For Gilliam, it’s become more than just an itch that needs scratching. “It’s obsessive… desperate… pathetic… foolish,” laughs the director of his yen to make the film. “It’s this growth, this tumour that’s become part of my system that has to get out if I’m to survive.”

“I’ve got the opera (the ENO’s Benvenuto Cellini) to get out the way first and we start rehearsals in April. That’s for June, and there’s a week between the opera opening and Python rehearsals. And then we are at the moment starting shooting Quixote in the last week of September. If it’s happening. Or not.”

With a little long-overdue luck, some handy financing and a fair wind, he’ll start shooting later this year. The Zero Theorem, meanwhile, is set for UK release on March 14

Terry Gilliam on Twitter, and The Zero Theorum

DIRECTOR Terry Gilliam is all fired up – about people relying so much on technology it is stopping them from engaging with the real world – and his new film

“TWEETING makes me crazy,” erupts Terry Gilliam. “There’s nothing wrong with communicating quickly, but people are going to events and they’re already commenting before the thing has happened. It’s like: everyone’s a critic, everyone thinks their opinion counts. NO! Your opinion doesn’t count. F*** OFF!”

Sitting in a severe-looking hotel conference room in Glasgow, on a rain-lashed February afternoon, the anarchic filmmaker, animator and soon-to-be-resurrected Python is on playfully irascible form, half barking, half giggling as he rants against all things social media. “I did this webcast, a live stream from Madison Square Garden with Arcade Fire a few years ago,” he continues, warming to his theme “and before the first song was even half-way through, the tweets were coming in: ‘Wonderful’, ‘Terrible,’ ‘Beautiful.’” He makes a neck-throttling motion with his hands. “Shut the f*** up! Listen to the song! Enjoy the moment!”

At 74, Gilliam – leather flying jacket flung over his chair; black kimono-style top giving him the air of ready-to-strike samurai – hasn’t come down with a case of Grumpy Old Man syndrome. He’s fired up because he cares about the way people’s over-reliance on technology is stopping them from properly engaging with the real world. It’s an issue he’s been puzzling over for a while now, so naturally it’s an issue at the heart of his latest film, The Zero Theorem, a low budget sci-fi about a data-cruncher driven mad by his desire to find meaning in his existence while working for a corporation determined to prove existence is meaningless. Thematically, it feels very much like a digital age companion piece to Brazil.

“The Brazilness of it was there [in first time writer Pat Rushin’s script], but also, there was a reference to almost every film I’ve done,” laughs Gilliam. “There were lines where I almost went, oh, that’s from one of my films, so for me it was like the lazy man’s compendium.”

Lazy or not, it’s his most vital film for a while, fizzing with ideas both serious and, as Gilliam puts it, “playful just for the f****** fun of it”. At its centre is Christoph Waltz, bald and baby-like, as Qohen, the film’s questing protagonist, a man whose inability to find answers to the big questions has made him certifiable in a world where everyone is desperate to be virtually connected to everyone else. Gilliam’s biggest fear is that, like Qohen, too many people are retreating into the virtual world because it’s the only way they can exert control over their lives. “That’s the future of a lot people now. I remember when my son was young, and doing all this Tony Hawk skateboarding stuff; he was going out into the world and falling flat on his face. That’s a good thing! You remind yourself that gravity works and the world isn’t easy.”

Gilliam, of course, knows better than most that the world isn’t easy: the calamitous nature of past productions (the studio battles over Brazil, The Man Who Killed Don Quixote’s aborted shoot, the death of Heath Ledger in the midst of making The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus) is now the stuff of film lore. But as a corporate exec (played by Matt Damon) says in The Zero Theorem: “Chaos pays”, and I wonder if Gilliam – having seemingly come through the other side of such catastrophes (the new film went off without a hitch) – now feels the same way. “It’s the ground between chaos and order that’s important. I can’t do what I do if it’s all chaos, so I have to order it very carefully, plan everything reasonably carefully, hope it all works – and of course it doesn’t – and be prepared for chaos to take over.”

Though his approach has frequently been vindicated, his back-catalogue still doesn’t given him much sway with financiers or studios, even when they profess to love his movies. It must be odd, then, to go from a situation where people who obsess over box-office receipts tell him “no”, to the imminent Monty Python reunion, the tickets for which sold out in 43.5 seconds. “Genuinely, I don’t think any of us thought that would happen,” says Gilliam, who makes no secret of the fact that the shows are going ahead to plug “a hole in their finances” after the surviving Pythons lost a court battle over royalties relating to the Spamalot musical. “It intrigues me that Python, whatever it is we did, still seems to work.”

As for the shows, he’s not really sure what they will be. He knows he doesn’t just want to please fans, though.“ You’re doomed if you do that. In fact, I fear that we’re maybe thinking a bit too much like that and it bothers me. I want to shake it up. I want to surprise people or shock them. That’s what we did originally. That may not happen though. It may just be a very reassuring show.” He giggles again.

Post Python, there’s an opera to direct and then, finally, The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, which is scheduled to go into production in September after falling apart so spectacularly 14 years ago (all of it chronicled in Lost in La Mancha). “It’s like I have this terrible growth on my body that I have to excise before I can carry on,” says Gilliam of his need to finish this particular film above all the projects of his that have fallen by the wayside. “But that’s the nature of Quixote himself. If you’re going to take him on you’d better be true to the man. And be as mad as Quixote.”

Time’s almost up, so I ask if he’s thought about doing a comic book movie again after coming so close with Watchmen a few years back. “I wanted to do those kinds of films 20 years ago,” he sighs. “Now everybody else is doing them, I’m perverse and I’m not going to do ‘em. Also I don’t really like most of them. They’re too limited by their budgets. I was really enjoying The Avengers when it came out, until they had to blow up another city. I was like: what are you doing? You had a really fantastic film going there, and then you’ve got to DO THAT? THAT’S JUST

STUPID. STOP IT!”

Terry Gilliam, irascible to the end.

Christoph Waltz Starring In Terry Gilliam’s ‘Zero Theorem;’ Voltage Selling

Christoph Waltz has been set to star in The Zero Theorem, the next film to be directed by Terry Gilliam. Waltz will play Qohen Leth, an eccentric and reclusive computer genius plagued with existential angst who works on a mysterious project aimed at discovering the purpose of existence—or the lack thereof—once and for all.

It will be the next film for Waltz, who, after winning the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for Inglourious Basterds, has been shooting Tarantino’s follow up, Django Unchained.

Scripted by Pat Rushin, The Zero Theorem is set in a world that seems right in Gilliam’s wheelhouse. Living in an Orwellian corporate world where “mancams” serve as the eyes of a shadowy figure known only as Management, Leth (Waltz) works on a solution to the strange theorem while living as a virtual cloistered monk in his home—the shattered interior of a fire-damaged chapel. His isolation and work are interrupted now and then by surprise visits from Bainsley, a flamboyantly lusty love interest who tempts him with “tantric biotelemetric interfacing” (virtual sex) and Bob. Latter is the rebellious whiz-kid teenage son of Management who, with a combination of insult-comedy and an evolving true friendship, spurs on Qohen’s efforts at solving the theorem. But these visits turn out to be intentional diversions orchestrated by Management to keep control of Qohen’s progress. Bob creates a virtual reality “inner-space” suit that will carry Qohen on an inward voyage, a close encounter with the hidden dimensions and truth of his own soul, wherein lie the answers both he and Management are seeking. The suit and supporting computer technology will perform an inventory of Qohen’s soul, either proving or disproving the Zero Theorem.

The has already started pre-production in Romania, and the European production will start shooting at Mediapro Studios on October 22nd. Dean Zanuck (Road to Perdition, Get Low) is producing and Waltz will also co-produce. Dean Zanuck will see to fruition a project that was started by his late father, the iconic Richard Zanuck. Voltage Pictures will handle worldwide sales in Toronto. Waltz is repped by ICM Partners and Gilliam by London-based Jenne Casarotto.