‘I Said Goodbye to Heath Ledger at This Urinal’: A Walk Around Terry Gilliam’s Pivotal Places | film

DDown an alley in Covent Garden, in a building that used to be a banana warehouse, there’s a blue plaque. The inscription reads: “Monty Python, filmmaker, lived here, 1976-1987.” It’s easy to miss: the plaque is not at eye level as it usually is, but on the first floor, as if the Blue Plaque committee had lost confidence in their uncharacteristic joke. Or perhaps John Cleese put it forward.

Terry Gilliam arrives. I love his jacket. They appear to have been sewn together from pieces of blankets. “Me too,” he says. “I got it 30 years ago in a thrift store in New York.” We’ll drive around London and visit the places that played an important role in his career, as he approaches his 85th birthday.

The dates on the plaque are believed to be correct. After the success of 1975’s Monty Python and the Holy Grail, which Gilliam co-directed (with Terry Jones), they had money. So he, Michael Palin, and special effects expert Julian Doyle rented this building. On the ground floor, they recorded Monty Python albums. Upstairs was a studio where they did some effects on Brian’s life, such as a spaceship crash. “We went to the local magic shop, bought an exploding cigar, emptied the gunpowder, then broke a light bulb and put it on the wire.” Boom. Gilliam laughs at the memory. He laughs a lot, a naughty, childish laugh. I was half expecting a grumpy old man. “I’m home,” he admits. “This is a performance.”

The area is very prestigious. He tells me about a mother and son who used to set up a hot dog stand here, before moving it to Leicester Square. “They were dirty, quite Dickensian. I loved that place.” There was a gunsmith, who “made armor in the old fashioned way, and pounded the steel.”

truly? He seemed to remember scenes from his films, but I later checked and found a New York Times article from 1978 that also referred to the Covent Garden gunsmith. Now it’s all high-end cafes and hair salons. What was once a Python warehouse is now Neal’s Yard Remedies, and is currently being renovated. One of the workers notices Gilliam looking at the painting and asks who it is. “Terry Gilliam.” The man nods, but not knowingly. Wrong generation.

After arriving by boat from the United States in 1968, Gilliam’s career really took off with the comedy television show Monty Python’s Flying Circus. I wonder if he feels like an outsider? They all went to Oxford or Cambridge while he was, as he put it, “a monosyllabic farm boy in Minnesota,” albeit one with a talent for animation.

“I was in awe. They were so clever with words, and the performance was amazing. I was just this guy cutting up pieces of paper and doodling. But my sense of humor was the same as theirs, although mine was more visual. That’s what’s so special about Python: the chemistry between the six of us. We were different, we fought, but the combination produced an inexplicable chemical magic.” Who knew the only thing missing was a giant foot?

Originally credited as an animator by Gilliam, Python quickly became an integral part of the game, co-directing Holy Grail, creating a whole new chapter in his own filmmaking. This building we’re standing in outside is part of that chapter: here he cut his 1985 satirical Orwellian fantasy Brazil and cast Time Bandits, the predecessor to Brazil in the fantasy trilogy. We talk and walk. “Fortunately, I’m not as recognizable as Cleese or Palin,” he says. He likes to talk to people, and stops to chat with a woman at a key-cutting booth. “Keep cutting those keys,” he told her.

Gilliam has nominal aphasia, which means he has difficulty remembering the names of things. One time he couldn’t remember his wife’s name (she’s Maggie Weston – they met when she was a makeup artist on Monty Python). He says that much of aging is regressive. “I’m actually going back to the clay that God used to create Adam. What does Adam do when he goes? He has to name everything? I’m doing the opposite. I’m unnaming everything!” Nominal aphasia may be related to a recent stroke. Gilliam didn’t know it was a stroke at the time, and thought he was going blind. He tells an amusing anecdote about his run into an invisible man.

We’re at our next stop: the London Coliseum on St. Martin’s Lane. Our route is plotted around geography rather than along a timeline, so we jump to 2011, when Gilliam directed Berlioz’s The Curse of Faust here. “I don’t know anything about opera. I’ve probably seen one or maybe two at most in my whole life.” But he was persuaded to do so. He set Faust in Nazi Germany, although he had to tone it down when the production moved to Berlin. “They were very nervous about Faust in Hell, with Hitler featuring prominently.”

The security guard wasn’t keen on letting us in. It is perhaps unbelievable that this man with a rat-tail haircut and an old patched jacket once directed an opera here. While making phone calls, Gilliam says, “I can show you a good place to pee,” and disappears into another alley.

ew. Yes, it stinks. I’m happy to report that we’re not adding to the stench: Gilliam just wants to show me a little of the real London. It’s a stark contrast to the ornate Edwardian splendor inside the Colosseum when we’re finally allowed inside. Faust was a great success. “I was so proud – 41% of the audience had never been to an opera before. They were coming in jeans. My happiest moment was on the last day. In the ticket queue, a fight broke out! And I thought: ‘Yes, we’ve succeeded!’

On our way to the final stop, Gilliam says he sees his life as a fairy tale. “There’s the king and the knights doing their thing. There’s the beautiful, virtuous maid who gets kidnapped all the time, and the witches are waiting. It’s all there.”

His last film, The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, took 25 years to produce because he ran out of money. “Then my daughter met a lady who, late in life, had made a lot of money. She had been following my career – or lack thereof – and she gave us three and a half million euros, just like that. The Fairy Godmother came into our lives. You’re going to the party, Terry!”

We arrived not at a shindig, but at a pub, The Horseshoe in Clerkenwell, where, in 2008, Gilliam filmed a scene for The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus. The film follows a traveling theater troupe led by Christopher Plummer, who is wise and childlike and has more than a hint of Gilliam about him. Gilliam says he sympathizes more with Don Quixote. “The film is about a man who sees reality in a more noble and beautiful way. He constantly fails and breaks, but you keep getting back up. That’s the mission.”

Richard the owner greets Gilliam warmly, and has fond memories of when Dr. Parnassus’ exotic traveling theater came to town. But sadness hangs over the project. Heath Ledger also starred in the film, which was the last film he ever directed. Gilliam wants to show me where they had their last conversation and leads me to the men’s restroom. “So I’m here peeing, and Heath comes in and stands there.” He points to the other end of the urinal. “I’m happy to pee and he says ‘Terry.’ He turned around and he was wearing this ridiculous mask and clown makeup. “We have to stop meeting like this,” he says. What a place to say goodbye.”

Two days later, Ledger died, after taking an accidental overdose of prescription drugs in his New York apartment. He was 28, although Gilliam says he always looked much older. “Everyone who knew him said there was an old person inside this young body. There was no doubt that he would be the best actor of his generation. He had it all, and everyone loved him because there was such warmth about him. It was his charisma that worked on so many different levels. He was so intelligent and capable of everything you want from an actor.”

Later, Gilliam was in Vancouver filming scenes featuring the Imaginarium — a mirror through which people can step to explore their imagination — when he got a call about Ledger. “I just wanted to die,” Gilliam says. His immediate idea was to abandon the entire project, but he was convinced to continue. They ended up using footage they had already filmed of Ledger, but then enlisted the help of three actors they knew — Johnny Depp, Colin Farrell, and Jude Law — to play modified versions of his character. The film is dedicated to Ledger.

Not that he’s anywhere near it, but does Gilliam think about his death at all? “My death is something I don’t worry about at all. I think about it every day of course, but in pleasant ways. I don’t want anyone in my family to jump the line, that’s all. I’m out first, number one.” He has a plan, and it’s in his will. He says they have a house in Italy, located like a nipple on a breast-shaped hill in Puglia. “I want to be buried there with the best view. They put me in the ground in a cardboard coffin, then they brought an oak sapling and stuck it to my chest until it grew into an oak tree. It’s beautiful.”

It’s really beautiful. And perhaps a little inappropriate, appropriately so. Maybe a giant foot and then you step on it…