drilling a hole and plonking your line down.
Look at the wisdom in this child’s eyes. And that’s obviously a nice man standing behind him. My dad died in 1982, and what still intrigues me about him is that even though he was always doing things, and his work was normally very physical, he was incredibly kind and gentle. He wasn’t pushy and aggressive and ambitious, like me, whereas my mother was the controlling and organising force. You can see there’s real power in her, and she was definitely the disciplinarian of the house. If I had to be whipped – which I did sometimes (let’s say if I was defending my tree house with a bow and arrow, and someone inadvertently got hit in the eye King Harold-style) – my dad would do it, but it wouldn’t be his idea. I don’t ever remember feeling that I’d been punished unfairly; getting spanked with a belt every now and again was just what happened. It wasn’t just locking you in your room – what would be the point of that? There had to be something physical. I think there’s something a little crazy about the age we live in now where you’re not supposed to smack a kid or even shout at them. Maybe this is more true of boys than girls, but the need for physical limitations is very strong when you’re growing up, because you’re always pushing at them.
Of course, the ice brought its own hazards. When you were out sledding and went over a bump, it was so cold that if your tongue touched the metal it would get frozen stuck. You’d have to walk all the way home holding the sled up to your face and hopefully get some hot water to get the thing off. That was some horrible shit, but it was absolutely standard.
Luckily, the dog falling on my head was more of a oneoff. In winter, when the snow ploughs would come down the road outside and heap the snow and ice up onto the side, we would tunnel into it to make a cave to play in. One day a dog climbed up on top of it and took a piss, and the piss melted the snow and suddenly the whole thing – dog plus piss – came down on my and my friends’ heads. It was all quite elemental, but the great thing about growing up in the country is that you can’t avoid learning about the functions that our bodies have, and the fact that animals have insides, and that we eat them and they die. Frogs’ legs were a great local delicacy in Minnesota – you hold him by the back legs, then whack him with a knife or an axe as he tries to jump, and you’ve got a nutritious snack. Food is immediate. There’s a living creature, there’s a dead creature, and there’s a full creature slightly higher up the food chain. This is knowledge that has served me very well creatively.
Sometimes we’d go to a relative’s farm on Sundays, and we’d see chickens get their heads cut off and still be running around afterwards. As a kid there is nothing more entertaining than that, because you are actually seeing life after death. These youthful farmyard experiences don’t make you callous, they just give you a respectful understanding of how cruel nature can be. One of my clearest – and most upsetting – childhood memories is of a mother garter snake being run over by a car, and me finding its belly split open and all these baby snakes swarming out across the road to their inevitable doom. Clearly this particular snake was trying to evolve into a mammal as it crossed the road.
I’ve always wondered how city kids learn these things. Obviously nature’s still there underneath all the tin cans and the breeze blocks, but its workings are harder to discern when cats and dogs are the only animals you come into regular contact with.
I like how confident I am in the saddle here - you can see it’s not the first pig I’ve ridden.
An ambivalence about the relationship between the rural and the urban has been a major underlying theme of the films I’ve made. On the one hand, I love cities for their architecture and as hothouses of culture and art. On the other, I hate them as man-made excrescences conspiring to obscure our view of the natural world.
I’ve tried to do my bit over the years to bridge that gap. While we were making Jabberwocky, I wanted to find some actual animal tissues for the skin of the monster, so I went to visit an abattoir near Shepperton in West London. When you’ve watched a big old cow walk in there on four legs, very much alive, there’s something really shocking about the moment when it’s given the bolt to the head, and this thing with all its muscles and its energy just turns to dead weight. To add to the fun, it was a small family-run abattoir – what Americans call a ‘mom-and-pop operation’. So when the carcass was hoisted up in the air and all the intestines were coming out, who was there to clear up but this kid of ten or eleven who was home on his school holidays? Watching him scoop up all the slops and the blood, I did think that anyone who eats meat (as I do) should spend a few hours in a place like that at some point in their lives, just to understand the process you’re part of.
It’s crazy how isolated the Western world has become from reality. Apart from anything else, nothing sets your imagination free like a direct connection to the planet you actually live on. When I think back to the landscape I grew up in, I know that across the dirt road passing in front of our house was a big swamp, and further down the road was a terribly frightening wood with a house in it that was sort of ruined and no one was exactly sure who lived there. Straight away, the mind goes flying. The swamp was magical too, because one year they cut down a load of trees and piled them up along the edge of the road, and if you crept down among the trunks you’d find all these wonderful mossy spaces to hide out in.
In 1966, my mum began to assemble a retrospective diary of family illnesses (in later years I have sometimes wondered if my relative freedom from health-related anxiety can be attributed to the fact that Beatrice Gilliam did all my worrying for me). In the entry for 1948, when I was seven years old, she wrote as follows: ‘Terry had a number of terrible sieges with the croup. His temperature would be very high and he would see horrible creatures on the ceilings and walls and think they were after him. I was so frightened that his mind wouldn’t come out of these hallucinations . . . ’
At one with nature in a summertime Minnesotan variant of the Garden of Eden.
And then again, sixty years later, by a Spanish waterfall with Johnny Depp, trying - and ultimately failing - to film DONQVIXOTE. (This was just before the moment in the documentary Lost in La Mancha where Johnny’s got the fish in his trousers and he ad libs the line ‘You’re a fish – I’m a man.’) How did I get from one place to the other? If you look closely at the first photo, you can see I’m actually standing by a tombstone, so maybe it wasn’t so very far after all.
Some might argue that these fears were not without foundation in the long term, but I have no memory of those particular hallucinations. I think she may have conflated my troublesome outbreaks of coughing with a recurring nightmare I started to have after seeing Alexander Korda and Michael Powell’s The Thief of Bagdad at around this time. Cineastes will tell you what proportion of my films contain images inspired by that landmark of Arabian adventure, and I suspect more do than don’t. The spider in it loomed so large in my dreams that I’d wake up in the night with my bedclothes strangling me like a suffocating web.
Luckily, not all my formative cinematic experiences were so traumatic. I’d go to the cinema and see Snow White or the bad boys’ world in Pinocchio and think, ‘This is a world I want to be a part of.’ As a kid, once you’ve had your first taste of Robin Hood or ‘cowboys and Indians’ on celluloid, that’s it, it’s done – you just want to be on your horse, outspeeding the Sheriff of Nottingham or hunting down that Redskin (or Native American as you will later more respectfully come to know him).
I also read an enormous amount. My favourite books tended to be by a Scottish author called Albert Payson Terhune, who seems to be more or less unknown in Britain these days, perhaps because while he wrote a lot of excellent stories about loyal dogs, someone else wrote the most famous one – Greyfriars Bobby.