Director Terry Gilliam applies his gleefully demented visual brilliance to the hallucinatory world of Hunter S. Thompson's infamous counterculture myth.
Over the years, scores of accomplished directors have seen their names attached to prospective productions of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, but the project managed to elude Hollywood's finest for more than 25 years. The assignment to direct Hunter Thompson's book became an industry Grail of sorts, and many began wondering if this mirage would ever materialize on the silver screen.
The hunt finally ended in somewhat ironic fashion when the triumphantly eccentric Terry Gilliam (whose credits include, appropriately enough, the classic 1975 comedy Monty Python and the Holy Grail) signed up to bring Thompson's baroque visions to life.
Fear fans everywhere rejoiced at the announcement, since a more perfect marriage of director and material could hardly be imagined. A native of Minneapolis, Minnesota, Gilliam graduated from Los Angeles' Occidental College before embarking on a career in magazine illustration at Help!, a sister publication of Mad magazine. He soon burst into prominence by contributing hilarious cut-out animation sequences to the classic English burlesque series Monty Python's Flying Circus, earning a British Academy Award for graphics in 1969. Since then, Gilliam has served up a banquet of consistently fantastic fare as a film director: the aforementioned Holy Grail (which he co-directed with fellow Python member Terry Jones), Jabberwocky, Time Bandits, Brazil (which garnered Oscar nominations for Best Screenplay and Art Direction and earned Gilliam Best Picture, Director and Screenplay honors from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association), The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (which earned four Academy Award nominations, see AC March '89), The Fisher King (five more Oscar nominations) and Twelve Monkeys (see AC Jan. '96).
AC tracked down Gilliam as he was applying finishing touches to Fear and Loathing at a London recording studio, and found the director to be in a candid and jovial mood.
American Cinematographer: What was your reaction to Fear and Loathing when you initially read it?
Gilliam: I'd read the book back in 1971, when it first came out. It really captured the times with an attitude that I could identify with. I thought it was incredibly funny and outrageous, but I simply read the book, enjoyed it and then didn't think about it for years. Ralph Steadman, who illustrated the text, is a friend of mine, and over the years he kept making noises about me doing a film version. In 1989, a script turned up which briefly got me excited about the book again, but I was busy with another project and I ultimately decided that the script didn't capture the story properly.
Last year, however, I was working on a project that seemed to be stumbling, and I got a call from Laila Nabulsi, who was producing a film version of Fear and Loathing [with Patrick Cassavetti]. Alex Cox had been set to direct the movie, but he was no longer involved and they were looking for somebody else. She sent me a script, and it reminded me of how funny and good the book was. I didn't really care for the script, but it inspired me to go back and read the book again, which is when my involvement really began in earnest. I brought on Tony Grisoni [Queen of Hearts] to co-write a script with me: the trick was to try to condense the book into a 100-page screenplay. That meant throwing out an awful lot of the book, so we tried to work very fast, using a sort of Gonzo screenwriting technique. We just pushed forward, never looking back, while trying to grab onto the most compelling stuff in the story.
Did the book inspire any immediate visual ideas?
Gilliam: We started building in visual ideas as we went along. For example, we began thinking about how to show the bats that descend upon Raoul Duke in one of his hallucinatory states. Right at the start I thought, 'Well, we can't show them in the sky, we can only show them inside Duke's eyeball.' So in the film we push in really tight on one of his eyes, where you can see these reflections of bats flapping around. We then cut to a wide shot that shows Duke waving his arms at nothing. I wanted to somehow convey that this was an internal problem. [Laughs.]
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