The book's major themes nonconformity, political incorrectness, shaking up the Establishment seem to be a perfect fit with the worldview that you've expressed through your own work. With the end of the millennium nearly upon us, did you see the movie as an antidote to the prevailing social climate of political correctness?
Gilliam: The script was sent to me at the end of the 1980s, and I was a bit drawn to the idea of making the film right then, because I thought to myself, 'Right, let's start the Nineties properly!' I was hoping the movie would sort of clear the air and allow us to start off a more interesting decade. I think the same intent is there today. I keep referring to the film as a 'cinematic enema for the Nineties.' [Big laugh.] Hopefully it will help to blow away some of the societal angst that's constricting us so much; everyone has become so cautious, careful, and frightened. We live in a very restrictive era: if you say anything that's deemed 'out of line,' you've suddenly got a dozen lawyers litigating against you.
Do you think that people today can still be stirred up by the book's message? Did you set out to outrage and provoke viewers?
Gilliam: Oh, yeah, that's the point of the book, and hopefully that's what we'll achieve with the movie. In fact, one of the things that's been worrying me is whether or not we've been outrageous enough we wanted to live up to the effect of the book. I hope that the right people will get angry.
What kinds of visual inspirations did you draw upon? Ralph Steadman's sketches and the garish trappings of Las Vegas would seem to be the obvious places to start.
Gilliam: Ralph's drawings are brilliant, and they really capture the book, but trying to translate two-dimensional pen-and-ink images into 3-D just doesn't work. I've been inspired by Ralph's work for many years, but it's so deep inside me that my first instinct was to throw it all away and not make specific references to his illustrations. For example, I didn't feel that we had to make our 'lounge lizards' look exactly like his drawings of them. I just approached the story from the storehouse of stuff I've got inside of me.
Did you reference any other sources for the film's visual style? When we've spoken in the past, you've mentioned that you often draw inspiration from art books or paintings.
Gilliam: We did reference the work of Robert Yarber, who paints these pictures of people inside hotel rooms in really fluorescent colors. His work is very strange and extraordinary, and the colors he uses are extremely vibrant. We used him as a guide while mixing our palette of deeply disturbing fluorescent colors. We really went all-out in terms of our color scheme and also our production design, which was headed up by Alex McDowell. We chose extreme colors that you wouldn't normally use.
Did you storyboard a lot of the movie?
Gilliam: Yes. I don't always do that, but I did on this film, particularly for scenes involving car shots or effects that needed to be integrated. For the car chase with the California Highway Patrolman, we had to have a second unit, so I storyboarded that sequence very carefully in order to give them a guide to work with.
What was the most difficult challenge of re-creating Las Vegas?
Gilliam: I think the most difficult part of it was having to actually work there! When we were shooting in the casinos, we were constantly restricted to very limited areas. We couldn't shut down the casinos, so we were typically given about six tables that we could put extras around. To make it worse, we had to have the extras gambling with real money! If they lost, the casinos got the dough!
Of course, we had to try to re-create Vegas in the early Seventies, and hardly any of that landscape remains today. That was one of the difficult things about the project, because we made this movie for very little money somewhere in the neighborhood of $18.5 million. One of the reasons I made the film was to push myself and see if I could still work the way I used to: fast, furiously and cheaply. We made the film in Hollywood and Vegas with fully union crews, but we still managed to come in on a relatively low budget, which is incredible. We shot for about 56 days, which was pretty amazing considering what we had to do.
For instance, one of the book's key sequences takes place at the Circus Circus [hotel/casino], but for obvious reasons they wouldn't allow us to film there. Instead, we had to create our own casino called the Bazooko Circus. Our first night of shooting was in front of the Stardust [hotel/casino], where we had to wheel in this 20'-high clown's head. It would have been impossibly expensive to build the kind of neon canopy you see in Vegas, so we had to take advantage of what existed there and then add to it with our clown head. Luckily, we had won over the parking attendant in front of the casino! There were four lanes where cars came in and out, and we were allowed only two lanes at any given time. We found ourselves dancing around cars that were coming and going, and we could only use half of the casino's entrance to do our clown thing, while gamblers and tourists were using the other half. It was absolutely nightmarish to work that way, but somehow we pulled it off.
There are only a few casinos that have the period look we were after, and we often had to finish our shooting at a given location in one night. During one evening in particular, we had to go from the Plaza Hotel, where we did some exterior shots with a car, to Binion's Horseshoe, for a scene where the characters are registering at the Mint Hotel. That was part of a nightmare stretch covering three nights; on the first night, at the Stardust, we got an enormous amount of work done, but we were so exhausted by the next night that we could barely stand, and on the third night we were just the walking dead.
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