Gilliamesque. Terry Gilliam

feel like home.

      Panorama City was not far from Stoney Point, which was one of the places where stock footage was filmed for Westerns and cowboy-themed TV shows. When you saw the standard shot of the posse running or the cavalry or someone shooting and someone else fall, that would often be where it was.

       The phantasmogoric WILDWEST wallpaper of my LA bedroom is a definite step on from Minnesota’s more austere domestic environment. Life there wasn’t about decoration, it was just about what you needed, whereas one we were in CALIFORNIA, cowboys became an option. This is GILLIAM in this Larval stage – a young boy newly arrived in LA in search of the Western experience . . . I was ready to RIDE.

      When you go somewhere for the first time thinking it’s going to be something it turns out not to be, that’s always disappointing, but the funny thing about Stoney Point was, we kept going there. It still had an allure. You’re at this place, and it’s not quite what you hoped for because it looked much more dramatic on film, but then you start looking at what is really there and your imagination starts making it interesting again. I suppose that junction – the place where reality and myth or fantasy meet – is where a lot of my films ended up being located.

      It wasn’t like I particularly needed an escape route. I didn’t have any problems adjusting socially to life in California. No one laughed at how we talked – we all spoke American. When you moved into a new community in the 1950s, the neighbours were there to welcome you, and going to the church a few blocks away was how you got to know everyone. We’d been Episcopalians or Lutherans in Minnesota – I can’t actually remember which – but the church we joined in LA was Presbyterian. It didn’t seem to matter too much.

      We were Protestants, that was the main thing. People weren’t zealots. They believed in the basic stuff, but nobody spent too much time thinking about how the Trinity actually functions. We didn’t buy transubstantiation – we had to draw the line somewhere. I mean, come on. The Catholic Church was the competition – they took their orders straight from Rome.

      The one thing that was truly different about arriving in California was that this was the first time I knew there were Jews in the world – not just in the Bible. Most of the people who lived near us in Minnesota had been of Scandinavian origin. But our new next-door neighbours were Jewish, and Jews were like magnets to me.

      They just seemed smarter and funnier than everybody else I knew. I don’t think I necessarily thought of them as more glamorous than my existing family and friends, just a bit more exotic and better read. I always used to complain about our own relatives when my parents suggested we go and see them: ‘Why? They’re not interesting.’ But I’d find any excuse to spend more time at my new Jewish friends’ houses. I’d got a whiff of something heady there that I definitely wanted more of. Looking back now, I suspect that ‘something’ might’ve been showbiz, as a lot of them seemed to have some connection – and even the vaguest pointer in that direction was a giant green ‘walk this way’ sign to me – to Hollywood.

      Here I am at the piano with siblings Scott and sherry. I had to go without Christmas presents for a year or two to help pay for this, but it was worth the wait. I loved (and still do love) the way that to play Scott Joplin you have to get the rhythm going with your left hand while your right hand does something completely different. I now have a Steinway Grand, which I bought from Rocky Horror Picture Show star Tim Curry (and he’d bought before that from Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters). You wouldn’t guess its illustrious pedigree if you heard me play it, though.

      Aside from putting on my magic shows and hammering away at my little blonde wood piano like an Aryan wannabe Fats Waller, I’d found one other reliable outlet for that instinct for showing off, which seemed to be so much stronger in me than my parents’ genes might have suggested. And that outlet was drawing.

      It started back in Minnesota after a school trip to the zoo. We’d been driven into Minneapolis by special bus, and when we got back to class the teacher told us to draw one of the animals from memory. I cheated and copied a bear from a book sneakily tucked on my lap beneath my desk and got a lot of praise for it. The pattern of my creative life was set.

      In the days before video games, comic books were the main corrupting influence on American youth. But they were also more part of the cultural furniture there than they ever were in Britain. You grew up with Superman and Batman, and a whole section of the newspaper was given over to strips like Terry and the Pirates, Mutt and Jeff, Dick Tracy, Dagwood and Blondie (an earlier generation thrived on The Katzenjammer Kids, Gertie the Dinosaur, Little Nemo and Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend). Trying to emulate the cartoonists was a large part of the pleasure of reading them from a very early age for me.

       I learned everything I know about drawing from this book. Talent borrows, cartoonists copy.

      You draw something and straight away it either works, or it doesn’t. That was (and indeed still is, on the ever rarer occasions when I get around to it) the delight of cartooning for me – the instant feedback. It’s not like making a film or writing a book, where you’ve got to work on it for years and then somebody’s still got to go to the cinema or buy a copy to see what you’ve done – it’s more like a kind of performance. Quick – do it – then, Boom! You get the hit of an audience, even if it’s only an audience of one, liking (or hating) it.

      I guess there’s always been a kind of smart-arse quality about me, where when someone says something I’ve got to come back with a quip that says, ‘I’m here, and I’m pretty clever.’ Maggie, my wife, still finds that pretty irritating, and I guess by doing it in the form of a drawing, I shift the whole transaction onto ground that I feel confident on.

       These are some of the earliest original cartoons I can’t remember doing, and I actually think they’re better than some of my much later stuff i did at college. They just seem more confident. I really like the two pupils in one eyeball, and those suction cup things are incredible.

       PICASSO had is blue period, bud my formative works were predominantly concerned with Hoover attachments. I guess that was tech paranoia of the fifties doing its deadly work. Once when I had scarlet fever as a kid I hallucinated that my parents went into the other room and the refrigerator blew up and killed them.

       The film THE WAR OF THE WORLDS might have been another key influence That came out in 1953, making me twelve or thirteen at the time I did this.

      never met my grandfather on my mother’s side. His and my grandma’s marriage had broken up after he got ripped off in a business deal and turned to drink, but I wasn’t encouraged to ask about that as a child, because it was perceived as such a disgrace to the family. Years later, when my mum gave me her journal to read, I found out that one of my grandpa’s other shameful accomplishments was running a cinema in Bismarck, North Dakota – which she initially tried to pass off as ‘a theatre’ (as if that made it more respectable!). So the cinematic gene was definitely in there somewhere.

      If we’re going to get into genetics, although I’m a bit of a neo-Lamarckian when it comes to the inheritance of acquired