Terry Jones and Terry Gilliam

Still: Monty Python and the Holy Grail

Terry Jones and Terry Gilliam were interviewed at the National Film Theatre by Phil Jupitus on 6 March 2002. In this interview they discuss cutting their teeth as directors while filming Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

Interview © BFI 2002

Doom Castle

Phil Jupitus: Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Terry Jones and Terry Gilliam.

[Applause]

This film you made, Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Did you really think that you would be accounting for the thing 25 years later? Still defending it?

Terry Jones: I think 25 years ago we were wondering if we were ever going to get it on the screen, basically. It was terrible making it.

Phil Jupitus: I've watched the making of it on DVD and you do spend an inordinate amount of time whining about the making of it ...

[Laughter]

Bearing in mind how much it is revered, I mean, people must still come up to you in the streets and go "Ni! Ni!" and you go "well, it was terrible, it was cold. I had to share a room with Cleese ..."

[Laughter]

Terry Gilliam: I was just hoping we would have a younger audience here tonight. These are people that saw it the first time around.

[Laughter]

Phil Jupitus: Yeah. I was around twelve or thirteen when I saw it. I laughed my crabs off. I didn't even crabs then. Why was it so difficult? Was it physically difficult?

TG: I just think we were amateurs. We were bad at our job. That's the real problem. We were learning on the job. We'd never really made a feature film before.

TJ: We were also doing it on a very small budget. But it didn't help with things like the fact that on inside in Scotland, it was actually the Bridge of Death location. We had the Gorge of Eternal Peril. And it was fine, you could just see it from the road but it took you half an hour to walk there. You had to go across this stream, climb up this mountainside to get there. What we didn't know is that you can't really get a film crew to walk for half an hour. They are carrying equipment - cables, lights, all that kind of stuff, a tea urn. We then get up there, standing by the Gorge of Eternal Peril, and we start doing the very first scene. The camera makes this strange sort of noise. Actually, you can probably do it, can't you Terry?

[Terry Gilliam makes a strange noise]

The very first day of filming Terry and I had chosen this location, which was up a mountain.

[Laughter]

The cameraman looks a bit taken aback so he opens the camera and all these gears and things fall out. The entire camera had imploded. That was our only sink camera and that was beginning.

PJ: The beauty of that is, not only are you making a film, but you all presumably got your bronze Duke of Edinburgh awards.

[Terry Jones laughs]

TG: Before we actually got to that first day of shooting, Terry and I had spent months scouring England, Wales and Scotland for castles.

TJ: It was a bonding experience. Terry and I had kind of bonded.

TG: We had chosen several in Scotland and two weeks before we started the, it wasn't the National Trust, it was...

TJ: The Department of the Environment for Scotland.

TG: Thank you. They deemed that, as comedians, we would not respect the dignity and fabric of the buildings so they kicked us out of all the castles. We had no locations, basically. That was another problem. God, we keep whingeing.

TJ: We suddenly got this letter two weeks before filming started saying we couldn't use any of these castles. These castles had been built for torturing people and suppressing Scotsmen...

TG: Dignified torture, though, very dignified.

[Laughter]

TJ: I suppose if we had been doing that we would have been alright.

TG: That's why Camelot is a cutout. It was 15 foot high, made out of plywood and painted. It stands on the hill and that's it.

TJ: We did have one castle, the only private enterprise castle in Scotland, Doom Castle. I found my socialist convictions shaken when I realised that, if it wasn't for a privately-owned castle, we wouldn't have been able to make the film.

PJ: How did you find Doom Castle then?

TG: Just at the end of the road

[Laughter]

Cold and wet, it was.

TJ: The funny thing is that when we went back it was so small, such a tiny castle.

TG: The other one we used was Castle Stalker, which we used at the end of the film as the Grail castle. The only way we were able to get that was by searching for a private castle. I was owned by someone in Kent, wasn't it?

TJ: Yes. A stockbroker in Kent.

TG: He was on holiday and he had the keys on him.

[Laughter]

So his son flew up to open the castle. It's on the documentary on the DVD. He turned up in the morning with the key. We had the full crew there, trying to make use of this place that we'd only discovered a few days earlier. And that's where the end scene of the film was shot. That was supposed to be done weeks later, with a huge army of 500 people. But they were all waiting in Stirling. They were university students. They were waiting in their costumes. We were out on the west coast of Scotland with this castle and no army. So for the shot where you see the police car roaring in at the end - which is the only shot that connects Arthur, Bedevere, the castle, the army and the police - there are only about 13 people in the foreground. We had everyone in the crew, their children, waving flags and banners. That's the army.

[Laughter]

TJ: I just remember Terry, who was directing that bit, with a little girl of about nine. He put this helmet on her and sticks her there and said, "Look at the camera and hold your spear up, which will give the impression of a huge army".

The Third Director

PJ: How did the joint-directing aspect go?

TJ: We started off doing it alternately. I did one day and Terry did the next. But then it became a bit more ad lib.

TG: Even though Terry and I felt that we had the exact same picture in our minds but the words came out slightly different. So the crew were rather confused. There was, in fact, a period where we had a third director directing it. The third director, who is not called Terry, is actually here tonight. His name is Gerry Harrison, our first agent.

TJ: Yes. He was our location manager and assistant director. Gerry Harrison.

[Applause]

TG: My theory was that there would be this single voice and it would be better if Terry and I could talk to Gerry. But I think that Gerry was making a third film so that didn't last too long.

[Laughter]

PJ: How difficult was it dealing it with the other four? Did they toe the line?

TJ: I have never seen Michael Palin so angry in my life at one point. We were shooting the plague village, the bit with, "Bring out your dead, bring out your dead". We had this bit where Mike had to crawl across the street. So he's crawling across the street and he had a spot he had to get too. So we had chocolate placed there.

[Laughter]

We took about twenty shots of this and it got muddier and muddier. The chocolate got mixed up with mud.

[Laughter]

It was awful. And then eventually he realised that he wasn't on screen.

[Laughter]

TG: I think that was about the same time that we told him that it was a pig farm and that he was crawling through pig shit.

[Laughter]

And it really was.

PJ: So you made Palin eat pig shit. But you were all the writers, weren't you?

TJ: Yes

PJ: How do you hammer six different threads into one script?

TJ: We just used to go off, write and come back together to read out stuff. We then just went with what was funny.

PJ: Were there a lot of last-minute changes?

TJ: No.

PJ: Because on the DVD Cleese says that there were.

TJ: Well he's lying. Or he has a poor memory.

[Laughter]

Usually we stuck to the script. In a way that was why we started doing Python in the first place. We had been writing for other people like David Frost and Marty Feldman, people like that. They would all laugh at the script meetings and we would think "Great. We've sold a script." But then you would see the thing a week later on television and they would have totally changed it. We got really pissed off so we thought we'd do our own thing.

Elton's Tax Write-off

PJ: What were the conditions like while you were filming?

TJ: Wet. My feet were just so wet. The chainmail was knitted wool, which soaked up the wet from the ground. We had cardboard soles on our feet that would just fall off. It was horrible. Graham actually had real chainmail because he was king. Everything was improvised. The whole thing was done on such a small budget. Eric had green and white squares on his coat and if you looked carefully, you could see that they had all been done by a magic marker.

[Laughter]

Pretty tacky if you think about it.

PJ: Where did you get your cash to make it?

TG: Well that was in the days when, if you made enough money in this country you could be taxed 90%.

TJ: 94%, I think.

TG: Was that it? Wow, those were the days. People like Elton John, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, Chrysalis Records and Island Records had all been making too much money and were therefore trying to get rid of it in order to save some tax. They dumped it on us. I think we buggered up their tax scheme, unfortunately, because the film made money.

[Laughter]

I don't think that was the plan. It was like The Producers.

[Laughter]

We were like this great big bunch of losers who they could dump their money on in order to solve their tax problem.

[Laughter]

PJ: How much did Elton give you?

TJ: Well, the whole thing cost £150,000 so he can't have given us that much money.

TG: A thousand pounds for each of us to write the thing but Terry and I got £1,000 extra to direct.

PJ: I was wondering if you were paid pro-rata according to how many characters you played because you played Bedevere and the prince ...

TJ: ... in the tower. I didn't do many, actually. Oh, and the old woman.

PJ: So, three and directing.

TJ: Yes.

Bouncing out of a muckheap

PJ: Did it fill you with trepidation when the film people came to you and said they would like to put a DVD out, this idea of rehashing old stuff?

TJ: Well, the great thing was that they put up a budget to shoot some new stuff. So the DVD has lots of extra things on it. For example, we are going to show you the Holy Grail in Lego. It's great. There is also the documentary of the search for locations. And the best thing is that we have subtitles in French, German and for people who don't like the film. Those are subtitles from Shakespeare's Henry IV Part Two.

[Laughter]

My sister Jessie spent two months trawling through the play trying to find bits that worked for the scenes. With the extra money, we realised that we could re-dub the film in stereo. I spent a week last year sitting a dubbing room, putting it into stereo. I was sat there making all the same decisions I made all those years ago.

PJ: Did all of you decide to make the film? Did you want autonomous control outside of the BBC system?

TJ: We did And Now For Something Completely Different but we didn't really like it. For a start, it was all the old sketches we'd done on the TV.

[Laughter]

We'd been told that it was for the States so we thought, "OK, we'll do it." And we didn't really do them as well. We really wanted to do this film. Terry and I always wanted to make films.

TG: The thing is that, with the TV show, we could never really spend time on money on costume, set and the mood of the piece. It was always brightly lit because that was how you did comedy. The idea of doing a medieval film where you could really smell it and feel it was really exciting. It seems to me that the comedy works much better when it bounces out of the muckheap, rather than a lot of people wearing silly clothes in a clean and tidy studio.

TJ: The lighting cameraman, Terry Bedford, has to be the best at his job in the world. Except that he's only done two films in his life, this film and Jabberwocky. When Stanley Kubrick was making Barry Lyndon he showed Holy Grail to his lighting man and said, "I want the lighting to look like this."

TG: I don't think people had done this kind of comedy before, steeped in a kind of reality. You kind of believe in that world and the jokes spring out of it.

TJ: I think Keaton did it The General, actually. He really went for an authentic look for a historical recreation. In his day, it worked against him because people said that there were too many deaths in it and it was too serious-looking. It wasn't successful when it came out.

PJ: Are you always going to moan about making it? When are you going to admit that it was a real laugh?

TG: That only happened with me when we looked at the new version of it. I actually laughed, really laughed, as observer not a director.

PJ: It came out on laser disc a few years ago. Did you reshoot the 'King Brian the Wild' scene?

TJ: This was a scene that we had written, but it got cut. It was called 'King Brian the Wild.' It starts with people singing about nymphs but they get shot by arrows. It then cuts to King Brian the Wild [laughs demonically]. Then a very anxious looking chancellor comes up and says, "Sire, sire. There are no more close-harmony groups in the land." It was a long scene but we couldn't afford to shoot it. But in the CD Rom game the prize is that you get to see an animated version of this scene. But I don't know what it's like because I've never got through the game to watch it.

[Laughter]

PJ: Do you feel that anything didn't work?

TG: The three-headed knight costume. Terrible. It never really worked. It didn't work, no matter how hard people tried. It worked well in rehearsal but in the end no-one could move their heads up there.

TJ: Costumes can sometimes kill a scene. For example, 'The Knights that say Ni.' I am surprised that people find it funny. When Mike used to read it in the script conference we laughed so much. Mike was great. But when we were actually shooting it, we were in a total panic. We were looking for ten minutes of cut film, when normally you are looking for three. I noticed that the make-up woman was putting a beard and moustache on Mike and thought, "That's going to cover him up a bit." Then she suddenly put a helmet on him so that all you could see were his eyes. Then we stuck him up a ladder. Poor Mike is at the top of this ladder and you can't see his face. He was acting his socks off but I thought, "No-one's going to find this funny."

Shrubbery

PJ: Do people still shout Holy Grail things at you in the street?

TJ: No. People don't really recognise Terry and I. They don't really recognise Terry a lot.

[Terry G looks offended]

[Laughter]

Well, film people of course. But I am the kind of person who people recognise in the street and go, "Is that Eric Idle?"

[Laughter]

TG: In Luxembourg, The Knights of Ni is one of the favourite scenes. "A shrubbery" is often shouted across the street. I was at this film festival and they all started shouting, "A shrubbery!"

[Laughter]

I didn't know what they were talking about.

TJ: Well, a shrubbery is a form of currency in Luxembourg.

TG: One of the strangest things that I remember was when the film opened in New York in 1975. The Vietnam War was still banging away. The audience was basically a fairly left-wing anti-war liberal audience. And the film came to the Black Knight scene. They were laughing all the way through it but suddenly an arm came off and it was like, "Gasp." Then another arm came off and there was no laughter, just sheer horror because of this violence. Everything they despised was up there on the screen. They were shocked because their heroes had betrayed them. I think it took maybe the third, or perhaps second, leg coming off before the titters started. And they eventually they found it funny. But it was an interesting case where people couldn't get their heads around the idea of violence. But it's not really about violence, is it? It's about an attitude.

PJ: How big was the TV show when the film was released in the States?

TJ: There had been about a year of the TV show going out so there was a fanbase there. So the film made money in the States.

TG: For the screening in New York we got a call saying, "You've got to get down here." And there was a queue all the way around the block. They had been there for half the night. I remember John Belushi and Gilder Radner, who hadn't been discovered yet, coming out of the queue and waiting to see this stuff. I don't think any of us expected it to be as successful as it was there.

PJ: The Lego bit on the DVD is fantastic. What do you think of it, Terry? Don't you wish you had shot it all in Lego?

TG: It's perfect. They've got a whole career based on this because what happened is someone sent me the address of a website in Japan that does Lego versions of films. But they are still pictures, they don't have sound and music. I passed it on to John Goldstone, who produced this, and then discovered that there are professionals that go out and spend their lives on stuff like that.

PJ: Did you ever imagine that the film would enter popular culture so completely?

TJ: No, definitely not. In hindsight, maybe it's different, but it was such a nightmare to make. We never thought we'd get it finished.

[Laughter]

We didn't have any money to do titles. We just didn't know that anyone was going to laugh at it.

PJ: Of all the images in Holy Grail, surely the most enduring is the beginning scene with the coconuts, the smoke, the clearing, the wheel, the clucking and the final, "Whoah there." It's just a great opening scene.

TG: That was all filmed on East Heath Road in Hampstead. That opening scene is twenty feet off the road. The final shot, where John is arrested, was also shot there. It was almost the last thing we shot, wasn't it?

TJ: Yeah. Then you had the bits with the book being turned over which were filmed in your front room, weren't they?

TG: Julian Doyle's front room.

TJ: That's right. Our associate producer's living room. We just had a book on the floor, didn't we? The gorilla's hands were, I think, Terry's wife's hands.

[Laughter]

TG: No. The beautiful feminine hands were my wife's hands.

TJ: Really?

TG: Yes, I was wearing the rubber gorilla hands.

TJ: Do you know, I've always thought the gorilla hands were Maggie's.

TG: No. It was actually shot in my bedroom, to be honest. The gorilla hands. Always been a favourite of ours.

[Laughter]

Seeing as we are revealing all the secrets, there's also a shot where you see the knights heading towards the forest of Ewing. It's a shot of a forest and the camera's pushing in. It's actually a photograph from a calendar that we cut out and stuck on the wall. We put a couple of candles between that and the camera, to give a bit of heat haze, and zoomed in.

[Laughter]

Every bit of this is true. We had no money. And I think Terry and I really would have liked to have done it with real horses.

TJ: I think we would have, yes. But we were rescued from our own mediocrity by not having enough funds to do that.

PJ: At one point did someone say, "We haven't got enough money for horses"? Who suggested coconuts?

TJ: We already had the coconuts. We already had them in the opening scene. I think we thought we'd move onto horses later. Then one of the producers said, "I don't think we can afford horses." And we said, "Don't be stupid. We've got to have horses." But then we thought, "Maybe we don't need them."

TG: One of my favourite bits is when the knights mount or dismount. It's wonderful, with the leg over the horse.

[Laughter]

It would have been a really mediocre film without that.

TJ: I don't really notice that they're not on horses.

[Laughter]

I'm just taken in by it.

Cut the 'Muzak'

PJ: I am now going to open the floor to questions.

Q: How much of a learning curve was Monty Python and the Holy Grail for you both, given how far your film careers have since developed?

TJ: Well, Terry and I got very involved in locations for the TV show. We were constantly on our director Ian McNaughton's back. We got involved in the editing too. So we were learning a lot then about cutting and so on. But there's nothing like being out there on location, being responsible for it, to start learning fast.

PJ: Do you feel you learnt more on location or in the edit?

TJ: Well, both really. The edit was a nightmare.

[Laughter]

Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd and all these people were there the first time we showed it. It started with the plague village then. For the first five minutes everyone was laughing but then they all just stopped laughing. It was the most awful thing. The entire film played to silence and we couldn't think what had gone wrong. The only thing that I could think was that for the film And Now For Something Completely Different we had done the dirty fork in the restaurant sketch. We'd done it on the TV and everyone had laughed but when we showed it in the cinema no-one laughed. The only thing I could think of was that Ian had put some muzak over it. So we took the muzak off and everyone laughed. So we thought, "Maybe the same thing is happening here. Maybe we've got too much sound." We then went through the film and took all the sound effects off - all the wind, grass rustling, clothing movements. We then went to people and said, "We're terribly worried about this film. Come and have a look at it. What do you think?" People would come in, twenty or so, and would say, "Yes I can see why you're worried." And no-one laughed until we had a paid audience. Then we suddenly realised that we had a funny film.

PJ: I've just had a thought. Are there two director's cuts? Did you ever go in and edit when he wasn't there?

TG: There was a bit of toing-and-froing. I used to come in and think that Terry had fiddled it. And he used to come in and think that I'd fiddled it. There was a little bit of that but we were basically pretty much in agreement.

Q: If you'd had a more established director, do you think you would have got more money?

TJ: Absolutely. It was because Terry and I were going to direct it that we really couldn't get the money together. None of the established film people, EMI or Rank, would put up the money. They said, "We might if Ian, your TV director, directs it. But not if you two direct it."

TG: We actually had a bit of a thing with an established director, Blake Edwards, on Life of Brian. He came in at one point, when EMI pulled out and we had no money before George Harrison came to rescue us. We had a meeting with Blake Edwards, who was going to be our executive producer and guide things. But the moment he started talking it was clear that he had ideas on how it really should be done so that as that the end of that.

TJ: Julie Andrews was there, wasn't she? She was terribly sexy. Not wearing very much.

TG: She floated in beautifully at the Dorchester Hotel.

Q: What did Eric think of being on location?

TG: Well if we were moaning a lot, they were moaning even more, weren't they?

TJ: I think so.

TG: It was a really whingeing crowd. My worst day was when we were trying to get the cow thrown over the battlements. I was trying to make sure that everybody's heads were below the battlements so we could do a map later and put the cow in. The cow was actually from a railway set. It was tiny.

[Laughter]

It was a matter of getting the camera, them and the battlements in line. They had to go down on their knees and they were in deep pain. But that wasn't good enough, we then had to dig a hole for the camera to go deeper. And John was just awful, awful. I had no social skills in those days and I just blew. Thank God there were two of us. I just went, "For fuck's sake. It's your fucking scene. We're trying to make it work here. You're not paying any attention." So I went off in a huff and Terry took over. It was horrible because none of them had been involved with something with all these technicalities. And I didn't know the technical words to make them do these things.

TJ: John, Graham and Eric thought in those days that the only things that mattered was funny words. If you had funny words and funny ideas, then that was it. They weren't really interested in making it look good. So we were having a fight to make it look good. John moans on the documentary about there being smoke everywhere. It is really annoying and I can see that it gets them down a bit. But it does make the film look nice.

Rockingbeans

Q: Do you have a favourite bit in the film?

TJ: My favourite bit is the scene with the guards, when Mike is saying, "All you have to do is guard him." It's one take and we didn't know if we'd get away with it. We did try close-ups but in the end we just went with one long take. It's the moment that gives me the most pleasure in the film.

TG: I really like that whole sequence that starts with Eric and John riding and then Terry as the Prince. Terry had to climb out the window and there was a gale howling, it was terribly windy. The curtains were going everywhere. It was a very long drop from that window and we just had a little platform out there. And Terry kept climbing out the window and ...

TJ: ... Disappearing.

TG: Yes, and ducking down.

TJ: I was about 50 feet up, hanging on this castle window with all this scaffolding. It was only hooked on the window. At the time, you don't mind really.

Q: A lot of the references are very English. Were you surprised that the film was so successful abroad?

TJ: It helps because in England if people don't find something funny they say, "Well, it's just not funny, is it?" But in America I think they say, "We don't understand it."

[Laughter]

When we were in America someone came up and said, "We really like the thing about rocking beans." And we didn't understand. And eventually we worked out that they meant Rottingdean. But somehow Rocking Beans created something else altogether.

Q: Did any of you have any fights during the filming?

TJ: There wasn't enough time.

[Laughter]

Q: Are you gong to finish any of the films you are making at the moment?

TG: No. I want them to remain as legendary films that could have been great if they had been finished.

[Laughter]

Unlike Stanley Kubrick's last one.

[Laughter]

Q: You wore a real suit of armour for one of your historical documentaries. What was that like? Did you moan about that too?

TJ: The real stuff is better, except it didn't fit. It was too tight. I couldn't bend my arms. I'd rather have real chain mail than woollen chain mail. It's also safer when people throw things at you, like arrows and spears.

[Laughter]

They tried woollen chainmail in the old days but it didn't stop any arrows

[Laughter]

Q: How much did Michael Palin have to pay you to do that scene with all those nubile young women?

TJ: Wasn't he lucky? He had to pay us a bit. But he never got lucky.

[Laughter]

Q: Have you kept anything from the film?

TG: No, I don't think I do.

Q: Who wrote the killer rabbit sketch?

TJ: I think it was Cleese and Chapman. They were into vicious animals. It was a little glove puppet, actually. There were actually several things. There was a real rabbit too. I remember being really embarrassed because the woman who owned it was terribly precious about it and didn't want it to get marked. I was talking to her and I could see Terry Gilliam pouring red paint over it.

[Laughter]

TG: That was the point. We wanted to distract her.

[Laughter]

TJ: I just worried what she was going to say when we gave it back to her.

Q: What's the story behind the rather enigmatic ending?

TJ: The idea came from Jacques Tati's Playtime, which I saw in Paris. At the end of that film all this traffic goes round and round a roundabout. Night falls and the music plays but the filming goes on. When I saw it they raised the lights while the film was still going on. You all left with this image going on. Then you walked out of this cinema near the Champs Elsyee and there was all this traffic going round. The idea was that the music was going to start and after ten seconds they were supposed to bring the lights up. So the music would carry on as you went out. We tried to put instructions in the can to make the projectionists do this. But it never happened. We could never get the projectionist to do it. I don't know why.

TG: But you could do that at home with the DVD. So you can see it the way we wanted.

[Laughter]

PJ: Thank you very much, Terry Gilliam and Terry Jones.

[Applause]