The Man Who Was Almost Killed By Don Quixote

Terry Gilliam on the movie that took him three decades to make.

- Bilge Ebiri

Terry Gilliam doesn’t have an office; he has a lair. It sits atop the London Highgate home the Monty Python animator and director has lived in since 1985, and you reach it by climbing up four flights of narrow wooden stairs and through a pair of curtains. It’s the kind of magical space where you could imagine a character from one of his films living—a mad professor, maybe, or an exiled king. It’s embellished with Persian rugs and sculptures big and small, and there are books everywhere, on shelves, on tables, and stacked across the floor.

My eyes, however, are immediately drawn to the many props from Gilliam’s movies. There’s the black-shrouded Angel of Death from 1988’s The Adventures of Baron Munchausen hanging from the ceiling beside a model of a young Sam Lowry, armored with spread wings, from a dream sequence in 1985’s Brazil. On one table sits the helmet Sean Connery wore as King Agamemnon in 1981’s Time Bandits, and behind that is a miniature Crimson Permanent Assurance building, the pirate insurance firm from the opening scene of 1983’s Monty Python and the Meaning of Life.

At the center of it all is the scruffy, cheerful Gilliam himself, apologizing that he’s on his last day of antibiotics after a recent bout of pneumonia, though he seems quite energetic as he shows me around and points out the props hidden in nooks I might have missed—including the human-faced fish from Meaning of Life perched on a shelf high above us. “They just throw these away at the end of a movie,” he says, “so I try to keep as much as I can.”