Terry Gilliam Quotes (55 Quotes)

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.

I just like the fact I can make a film which might give comfort to some people who think they are the only crazy person in the world and suddenly they see there are two crazy people in the world.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Hyperbole is something I'd better avoid.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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

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.

Of the six-month hiatus from The Brothers Grimm, ... It was a gamble. But it was a great relief to go off to do something else. You get so nonobjective at the end there. When I came back to London, they asked me to finish 'Grimm' the way I wanted to, and in the interim, I'd actually seen a few things we could do to improve it. The film benefited from that gap.

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.

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,

Harry Shearer, Joel Siegel, and I used to be a little group for awhile, trying to do children's television, because it was the one area that nobody was paying attention to in those days...

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

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.

I like taking movie stars and letting them be something very different, ... Actors love it because it's an escape from having to be that character that the public wants them to be. I don't direct them so much as provide extra space to play in. Studios get very nervous about this. They want to hand out the same Big Mac each time, but I want to turn the Big Mac inside out.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

It was lights, camera, inaction.

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.

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 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.

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'

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

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

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.

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