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THE TERRY GILLIAM FILES // "TWELVE MONKEYS" (1995) |
Filming TWELVE MONKEYS |  |
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Dangling in mid-air, the bald man works diligently, sifting through clues to a monumental puzzle, piece by piece. Across one wall of a forbidding 21st century archive he has pasted the headlines of newspapers and magazines from around the world, dated 1996-97, announcing the deaths of 5,000,000,000 people from a ravaging plague. The mutated virus, origin unknown, had left the surface of the planet uninhabitable. "Sealed-suit" excursions into the outside air, or transportation back in time, are the only avenues for obtaining the information needed to create a cure and rescue what remains of humanity. This scenario could presage the last gasp of civilization as we know it. Or it could be the distorted, "mentally divergent" vision of a violence-prone lunatic, James Cole, being held for psychiatric evaluation at a Baltimore institution in 1990. Cole (played by Bruce Willis) believes he is an emissary from the future, charged with discovering the source behind this epochal event, which he suspects may be the mysterious "Army of the Twelve Monkeys." Directed by Terry Gilliam, TWELVE MONKEYS is a comical romantic thriller about madness and apocalyptic visions. It was inspired by Chris Marker's 1964 short LA JETEE, a classic rumination on memory, time travel, and a vision of death. Also starring in the film [scheduled to open in the U.K. in April] is Brad Pitt, as the certifiably crazy son of a noted genetic scientist, and Madeleine Stowe as a psychiatrist who first treats Cole, and who begins to question her own rational, science-based view of reality. The script by David Peoples (BLADE RUNNER, UNFORGIVEN) and his wife Janet plays with the point of view of Cole, who perceives past, present and future as a jumble of faces, voices and places that overlap, or exist in more than one context. Adding to Cole's tortured psyche is a vivid dream of a young boy at an airport, which portends both freedom and murder. But Cole's disjointed perspective only heightens his yearning for freedom, as he searches for a time in which he can exist not as a prisoner or mental patient, but on his own terms. Like the protagonist, Gilliam may feel himself a bit out of his time (or out of his mind), having been away from feature filmmaking since 1991, only to find himself working with two Hollywood mega-stars, shooting in the industrial wastelands of Baltimore and Philadelphia, on a tidy though un-Munchausen-like budget of $30,000,000. "The weirdest thing is just starting up again after a long hiatus," he says, on his way to the set on a brisk late April morning. "Four years of doing other things, such as playing with Hi-8 cameras, which are fast, you get — I'm not sure lazy is the word, but you have to get back in the rhythm of shooting, which is very different from imagining films." He professes that this material (elliptical though it may be) is straighter than anything he's done before. But Gilliam can't seem to keep from going to extremes with his imagery, using wide-angle lenses and brutal closeups to make Cole's visions and his surroundings even more hellish and claustrophobic. Indeed, scenes shot in the decayed Eastern State Penitentiary in Pennsylvania, built by Quakers in the 1820s and turned into a mental hospital by Gilliam's crew, exude an almost suffocatingly disturbing air. And this being a Terry Gilliam film, that's really saying something.
Yet old habits die hard. When one walks into the shell of the decommissioned Westport Power Plant where they are shooting, a stone's throw from the Patapsco River in Baltimore, one cannot help but think that you have just walked into the Ministry of Information in BRAZIL. The acrid aroma of light-diffusing smoke (a standard presence on Gilliam's sets) mixes with the mildewy smell of the shuttered plant. At the time of its construction in 1906, this was the largest reinforced concrete power station in the world. An industrial dinosaur, its belly now holds yellowing, tattered and Rube Goldberg-esque set decor that fits in quite nicely, as if it's always been here — it is at one with the grime. This, the primary set for scenes designated "Eternal Night," is a futuristic interrogation/debriefing centre in which the mentally unstable Cole has his brain picked. Embraced by sweeping tin walls, the cavernous "Engineering Room" is festooned with industrial detritus — electrical meters, manual typewriters and dentist's drills — along with more routine science fiction props like video screens and people wearing lab coats covered in plastic. [A sterile environment, and in another context a clean conscience, is on most characters' minds in this story.] Ventilation units made out of old airplane parts resemble iron lung machines as they "breathe" clean air into this underground habitat. "It just seems I have this German-Expressionistic-Destructivist-Russian-Constructivist view of the future," Gilliam shrugs. "It's really hard not to do some of BRAZIL," says Beecroft, when discussing Cole's subterranean refuge. "[But] if the world stopped today, and you can only take things down below now, what could you find down there? These people put all this stuff together, and then had to kind of make up things, jerry-rig machines together, so they're hydraulic and steam-driven. In terms of lasers and all that stuff, we could have gone that way, but it's not as fun."
A huge apparatus resembling a globe outfitted with more than a dozen video screens hangs on a gimbal as if awaiting its cue. This "Video Ball" projects the discombobulated, half-faces of the inquiring scientists, and the director himself fusses with a live video feed camera, producing an excruciatingly unflattering close-up of one of his actresses. Once the camera rolls, the ball swoops and dips in and out of shot, approaching Willis (who is strapped into a chair twelve feet above the stage) with the menace of a coiled viper. Scattered throughout the Westport plant are other futuristic sets, in whole or parts. An air lock — a long, hollow tube about 6 feet in diameter that looks like it's bleeding rust — rests near the plant's entrance not far from the caterer's stash of pretzels and trail mix. And a contraption dubbed the Chrysallis (a gurney wrapped in plastic that gets hoisted up into the air) serves as a time machine, squeezing Willis like toothpaste into the past. Yet despite the sci-fi trappings of time-travel and mutating viruses, the story is primarily a search for redemption amidst a crazy, unfeeling world. This notion of the rugged individualist standing tall against a crushing society that more often than not casts painful judgments runs parallel to the image of Gilliam himself: a visionary filmmaker standing tall against a crushing industry that more often than not produces lousy movies.
It didn't quite work out that way.
The timing of TWELVE MONKEYS's arrival on Gilliam's plate was therefore propitious, in particular because the themes in the script resonated strongly within him. "The thing is so varied: the places we go, the times we go in. It's a chance to do a little bit in the future, a little bit in the past, and the tone of the thing is very odd. It plays with the same old things — time, reality, madness — so I was intrigued. And it was romantic. "I think the thing I liked most about it was the rantings of Jeffrey Goines, the character that Brad Pitt plays, because David and Janet were saying the kinds of things that Richard LaGravenese and I were trying to say in our script, only they were clever to put all these things that we all feel but are terrified to say into the mouth of a madman. Suddenly they became funny, rather than the way we were working on it." Madness of course has been an integral trait of characters found in Gilliam's work, whether it is their mental illness, or the sheer hubris of Man trying to battle the superior forces of Nature. In Gilliam's films, madness may serve the dramatic function of an escape, a weapon against authority, or a key to spiritual enlightenment, but it is usually played out as one man's fantasies against the world, with the audience siding with the individual. In TWELVE MONKEYS, however, the filmmakers force the audience into a trickier situation: Since Cole's perception is what the audience is allowed to see, we as viewers have to decide if what we see is the truth or a crazily distorted vision of one man's gravest fears. It would be easy enough to write off his strains of logic and jumbled notetaking as those of a loony. But despite Cole's fragile state of mind, we see his intrinsic humanity, and so we want to see him heal, to be well. But if the audience is rooting for Cole to be sane, that means accepting that he is telling the truth and, ergo, that we are all doomed to perish by the billions. This is not your standard material for a comfortable, audience-pleasing tale — which is why Gilliam is doing it. TWELVE MONKEYS is also a rare Gilliam piece that he has not developed and written himself. "It's one thing to get lost in your own madness," he says, "but to become lost in somebody else's madness is weirder." And unlike his experience on FISHER KING, where LaGravenese was on the set throughout the shoot to confer with the director, Gilliam does not have the writers with him, and so is prone to mistrust his interpretation. "I'm not certain that I'm totally comfortable with taking somebody else's idea or script and trying to work with it. And the words are really good. I mean, this is in some ways more serious than anything I've done. That was intriguing, but also very unnerving, because I was never certain whether I'm being boring because everything's straight; yet I don't want to juice it up with weirdness that gives it away. "I start worrying that my images are distracting from the story, drawing attention to me being clever as opposed to the characters playing out the scene. I know one scene I just made much more bold and beautiful. It could have been very simple, and it may have been bold just keeping it simple. So my need to elaborate is rearing its ugly head." Curiously, TWELVE MONKEYS is being paid for and released throughout most of the world by Universal, whose prior management once stirred such ire in Gilliam over its handling of BRAZIL. Even more curious, producer Charles Roven is the husband of Dawn Steel, former head of Columbia Pictures, whom Gilliam had in the past publicly vilified as the woman who drove the stake into MUNCHAUSEN's heart. "I think that the irony of it was too much for Terry to resist," says Roven.
As the crew treks to the parking lot for some pick-up shots, meant to match exteriors filmed several weeks earlier about 100 miles away, Gilliam muses on the size of the operation he leads: "Smaller would be fun. My problem always is my ideas are just big and expensive. By Hollywood terms we're not a big movie; we're under $30 million, with three big stars in it — that's pretty amazing. So we're doing a cheap movie by those standards. [Still], it's hard to control all of it; everybody is doing things and you can't be everywhere at once. Look at the circus we're carrying around with us. I know we're supporting the Teamsters and their families, and I think that's a wonderful thing." Not to mention the local ice manufacturers. On this sunny spring afternoon, hundreds of pounds of cracked ice have to be unloaded and strewn across the asphalt for shots of Cole climbing out of an underground passage onto the virgin snows of a desolate, future Philadelphia. Watching the wintry landscape being spread into place reminds one of an old Python sketch, in which a film crew transforms the beaches of Paignton into the Antarctic, through the use of paint and 28,000 cubic feet of white foam rubber ("which actually on screen looks more like snow than snow"). Unlike that sketch's gushing producer, Gilliam is less impressed by the effort here. "The script originally was to be set in autumn," he said. "[It got] pushed later and later, came to be Christmas, and then the decision was, well, do we go for snow or no snow? The first week we were going back and forth, depending upon how the [weather] went, and the weekend we started it snowed. An omen! So we went with snow. And it's never snowed since! So we've been going on like this." Fingers poke out from beneath the carefully swept faux-snow, wriggle through tiny holes in the surface, and push aside a manhole cover, whereupon out climbs Willis, tossing out a specimen case and torch. He is adorned in his sterile suit, a plastic-shrouded costume not unlike the deep-sea diver's outfits in a Jules Verne epic, which he wears over a latex body stocking. "A human condom," Gilliam quips. During a break, Willis helps a young visitor scrape off her lottery ticket, before retreating to his solitary stage on a mission to capture specimens. Coming upon a rusted car, he retrieves a Madagascar hissing cockroach (according to the film's animal wrangler), then reels back in reaction to the loud bellow of a grizzly bear, filmed weeks earlier.
Gilliam says, "One of the reasons [for doing TWELVE MONKEYS] was taking Bruce and putting him into situations and asking of him things I don't think he's ever done before or that people haven't seen him do maybe done privately but he's not done it publicly. And that's pretty interesting, and with Brad Pitt it's the same thing. Brad is pretty laconic in some ways. Suddenly he's a blabbermouth, jabbering away at high speed. I love doing that, playing with the public's perception of that star; otherwise, it wouldn't be fun. "It's a very different experience working with stars. I'm not used to the American system, that allows stars incredible latitude. They're just not used to working the way we used to work in England, where we're just more matter-of-factly getting on with it. Here, people are frightened with the success of successful people. It's much more hierarchical, there's more fear in the air. It's odd." TWELVE MONKEYS may prove to be Gilliam's most intimate film; despite its disturbing imagery and doomsday subtext, Cole's struggle for mental clarity and his bonding with Stowe's psychiatrist are powerful elements in the script. But the focus upon characterizations, as opposed to fantastic opticals, hasn't necessarily made Gilliam's job easier. "There actually hasn't been any technical challenge on this, it's all been me avoiding technical challenges. I've tried to do this thing without getting caught in all the tricks I've done in the past — blue screen, all those things. In BRAZIL when we did the driving shots we had cloth backgrounds we were pulling around. "[This time], I thought I wanted to do things just like everybody else does, the way they do it in a real movie. But when you're towing a vehicle or putting it on the back of a low loader, you can't be in there with the actors. And they get distracted; it's hard to get good performances. Now when you're doing it [in the streets] the senses are being battled; the wind's blowing, everything's banging, crashing, it's very exciting! Then you look at it on film, and the performances are not what they should be, so what the fuck are we doing? It's a great waste of time. "So we're reverted to using all these old tricks, going with blue screen and a car on a stage, and the performances are really good now. I had thought it was the complicated way of doing things; in fact, it's the more intelligent way of doing things."
copyright 1995, 1996, 2009 by David Morgan | |||||||||||||
Gilliam and production designer Jeffrey Beecroft (DANCES WITH WOLVES,
THE BODYGUARD) both strenuously sought to avoid designing and shooting in
a style that calls to mind an earlier Gilliam film. Just as LA JETEE's haunting
static images uniquely evoked a place outside of time, the freshness of TWELVE
MONKEYS's script (they felt) deserved its own visual trademark. Much of their
inspiration, at least for those scenes employing Cole's haunted P.O.V., comes
from the sadness of Josef Sudek's photography, as well as the fantasies of
illustrator Lebbeus Woods, whose radical architectural designs have never
been built because they wouldn't stand up.
Actually, the lack of high-tech futuristic gadgetry reinforces the idea that the world is spun from what Cole knows and finds familiar; images, props and decor from one "time" reappear in another context,
forcing him (and the audience) to question exactly how this information should
be processed.
While his script work on an adaptation of DON QUIXOTE was giving him fits, THE DEFECTIVE DETECTIVE (a comedy/fantasy co-written with Richard LaGravenese, screenwriter of FISHER KING) was put into turnaround, and A TALE OF TWO CITIES (announced with Mel Gibson as the star) fell apart. Gilliam also learned from a press release (!) that he was to direct A CONNECTICUT YANKEE IN KING ARTHUR'S COURT, for a producer who never did get it before the cameras. "It reached a point where I went crazy," he said.
While it is a physically demanding role for Willis, the character
is unusual for him. More often seen playing a heroic figure seeking to assert
control while chaos reigns around him, Willis here plays a mentally unstable,
ill-at-ease cipher who feels completely powerless, at the mercy of others.
He accepts his helplessness (Cole rejects one doctor's suggestion in 1990
that his destiny is to prevent the 1996 plague, saying "Save you? How can
I save you? It already happened!"). But from his weakness, and his questioning
of his own sanity, Cole learns to act proactively toward shaping his
destiny.
