GILLIAMESQUE: A PRE-POSTHUMOUS MEMOIR

When Terry Gilliam was a boy, a dog fell on his head. It’s exactly the sort of surreal happenstance you’d expect from one of his Monty Python animations (the ones that made heavy use of Ronnie Barker’s saucy Victorian postcard collection). And as recounted in this sprawling, richly illustrated memoir, it’s as good a starting point as any to show how formative experience might mould an artist’s vision.

This is less straight autobiography, however, than a fascinating delve into the director’s working methods, from Holy Grail to Zero Theorem, and his influences – including Grimm’s Fairy Tales, Michael Powell’s Thief Of Bagdad (which “scarred” him), and religion: for the guy who says of Life Of Brian, it “caused so much trouble, I was in heaven”, the King James Bible clearly proved creative rocket-fuel too – along with scatological images doodled in the margins of manuscripts by medieval monks. There are some great anecdotes: for Brazil, Robert De Niro insisted on sitting in on brain operations after Gilliam had described his character’s approach to plumbing as “surgical”.

Naturally, the events surrounding that infamously put-upon masterpiece make sobering reading, and if the director admits there are really two Gilliams – the crowd-pleaser vs the protective artist – it’s the latter iteration we’re more familiar with; the one whose occasional misstep we forgive, because, well, it’s Terry. And as he stresses, he likes and embraces the flaws anyway. Really, it just makes him all the more endearing.