PLUME: Do you see yourself being able to get back into a position that you were originally at with Quixote, where you had managed to secure that external financing?

GILLIAM: I don’t know… That I don’t know, because the world is a bit different right now. I mean, the German tax funds are not as strong as they used to be – there’s only a couple still going. Canal Plus in France has been practically destroyed by Messier and his buying Universal, and all that that went on. So the money outside the States is not great right now.

PLUME: And I hear Talkback Thames is starting to implode…

GILLIAM: Ughhh, god… It’s terrible. I’m beginning to think maybe I have to relocate Quixote to China and get some Chinese money, because there’s money out there.

PLUME: Well, it’s either you or an oil company…

GILLIAM: Yeah! (laughing). I’ve actually bumped into a couple of people, producers and directors from China, and that may be where the future lies.

PLUME: Second to Quixote, which unrealized project would you say is closest to your heart?

GILLIAM: Probably Defective Detective, because Richard LaGravenese and I wrote that right after we had made Fisher King, and it’s good stuff. We looked at it a few months ago and combined some of the drafts that we had at our fingertips. I don’t know… we’ll see how it goes. Unfortunately, that and Good Omens are quite expensive movies, and that’s why I look at MirrorMask – that’s why I want to see it, because I want to see if there’s ways I can approach these movies differently and do much more digital CG work. I was looking at Sky Captain. I just looked at it the other night – I hadn’t seen it – and visually it’s fantastic, it’s just that we’ve seen the movie a million times before.

PLUME: But visually, it made you buy into that world straight-off…

GILLIAM: Yeah. I got into it more and more – at first I was like, “Ehhhh…” It’s so much like a 1940’s film, and it’s so stylized – but then I started enjoying it. But ultimately, you’re slightly distanced from it. I was also really intrigued with Sin City, and I thought graphically it was fantastic stuff…

PLUME: And that was one of the reasons you cited that adapting Watchman would be such a pain in the a**…

GILLIAM: Yeah. The thing about Watchman was that it was never stylized, as far as a comic book – it was always fairly banal, in a sense. And that was what was so fantastic about it. You really do need a real world that’s believable. In a case like Defective Detective, there is the real world, and there is the child’s fantasy world – so once you’re in that, I keep thinking, “Well, maybe I can do half the movie digitally,” which would save a lot of money and get the budget down to something that might be more tempting for financiers.

PLUME: What abut the rumors and repeated mentions of a Time Bandits 2?

GILLIAM: That was for Hallmark. We did the script and we had it all there, and then 9/11 occurred. And it was interesting, because Hallmark was joining up with not only Chuck Roven’s company, but another company, and the Hallmark board – you know, greeting cards – decided that after 9/11, they didn’t want to put money into entertainment… Which was really a smart move, I thought. (laughing) And everything kind of collapsed, and then nothing has really happened. I was actually talking to Charles McKeown – who I wrote the script with – just yesterday, and we haven’t heard anything from them, so it seems it’s pretty dead.

PLUME: But if you’d like to go back to them with a pitch for a greeting card…

GILLIAM: Exactly!

PLUME: And I do have to make sure that I get you to renew your vow to do no more Python work…

GILLIAM: I’m sticking to that one! Actually, to be honest, we’ve just done something. Each of us has done sort of an hour-long show, our “personal best,” for DVD, and I had to do that last week, so I’m waiting to see the result.

PLUME: You sound thrilled…

GILLIAM: It was great. It took me about half a year to get into it, because I’m the last to do it. I really didn’t want to go back and even look at the Python stuff. I prefer to keep the memory of Python than the reality, and I was quite shocked at how cheesy the shows are! (laughing)

PLUME: Cheesy in which way?

GILLIAM: Just cheesy! They’re cheap, and there are no sets and no lighting, and even the animation is just covered with dirt and scratches and you can see the splices!

PLUME: I did hear the animator was a bit of a bum, so…

GILLIAM: Yeah, I think that must have been it! (laughing) It was sort of an instant classic, because the stuff looked like it was 60 years old when it was made.

PLUME: Well, you’re getting pretty damn close to it being that!

GILLIAM: (laughing) I saw a bit of what Mike did and I saw a bit of Terry Jones’s, and I think what will be intriguing about it is how each of us approaches it, because I think they’re all going to be very different.

PLUME: But that’s essentially what it’s become – it’s now, more than ever, 5 disparate voices doing their own thing and cashing checks…

GILLIAM: Well that’s it. Luckily, Eric has pulled off the success of Spamalot, so it’s been interesting to see how that’s been reinvigorating Python, at least as far as the media is concerned.

Continued below…

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