PLUME: Which begs the question, now that Michael has gotten this huge DVD set chronicling his journeys, where is the Terry Jones set?

JONES: That’s a good point, yeah. I mean, the one thing is whether the BBC can pull their act together. They didn’t put out a DVD of Medieval Lives. Maybe lump the two together, or something like that.

PLUME: In fact, the only thing that’s really been released of yours is Crusades…

JONES: Crusades, yeah. It’s that time. They are talking about that. Actually, we’re talking about at the moment, well they’re not quite sure what’s gonna happen in the States, but because it’s funny, we’re going to put over a new DVD of Erik the Viking.

PLUME: Which is a long time coming.

JONES: What’s happened over here is that an English company, Arrow Films… I happened to be doing the director’s commentary, and I was saying I’d really like to re-edit the film – because I was never happy with the edit – and they put up money to re-edit it.

PLUME: Who says complaining doesn’t get you anything?

JONES: Exactly. Unfortunately, all the original material is lost, so we can’t change the cut – we can reduce it, we can take things out and we can change scenes, but can’t sort of do the way the dialogue goes, because we haven’t got the materials, and we can’t put any other bits in. We can’t put in things.

PLUME: Where is all that material? Was it just destroyed over the years, or lost?

JONES: I think it’s just been junked by somebody. Whoever owned the library at some point said, “Well, we don’t need that.” But it’s this great pleasure – a threefold pleasure, because A, I’ve been wanting to do it for a long time; B, I was working with the best editor I’ve ever worked with; and C, it was my son. They’re re-releasing “The Director’s Son’s Cut.” It’s down from about 101 minutes to 77 minutes. It really gallops along. I think it’s a really good… it’s getting much more like the movie it was supposed to be.

PLUME: What are the elements that really niggled you about the original cut?

JONES: Well, it’s just too long. The whole thing had been cut… it was one of those things where… What had happened in the film was that for some reason, I thought – as an experiment, I think it was – I thought I’d keep out of the cutting room and just… and the editor was really keen to keep me out. And I go, “Let’s see what happens…” And I thought, “Oh, this seems to be easy…” Because I’ve always been very hands-on in the editing. I’ve always got really involved in it. And I’ve always edited myself, really – all the Python movies and everything. And it was only about two weeks before it was due to open over here, I said, “No, I really ought to put this on the screen and look at it myself,” and I did it, and as soon as I did it my blood ran cold, because it was just wrong. It was just long. And I could just see… I managed to take out about 10 minutes for the English release, but the American was already printing 250 copies or something, so they didn’t want to change or junk them. So the long version went out in the States and the shorter version went out over here. But I’d really like to change a lot of the way the dialogue’s shot. You know, it’s like, for some reason the editor always cuts off halfway through a line, so somebody starts a line and then it cuts to the person they’re talking to, and when you really start seeing it, you often miss crucial words. I mean, I’d really like to change the whole thing.

PLUME: It really didn’t seem like it was cut for comedy.

JONES: Well, I think that was the trouble. I mean, what I realized was that the editor didn’t cut in to leave gaps for the laughs. “Oh, what?”

PLUME: It undercut any of the satire and comedy you were trying to play in the situation. I mean, it’s interesting how certain themes recur in your work. You can see a lot of what you did in Erik the Viking, particularly with the Christian character, play out in the documentary work you’ve done since.

JONES: (laughing) He really was one of my favorite characters, I think. And for him to be a missionary…

PLUME: Oh, it was brilliant. Then so blind.

JONES: Saved at the end because he was blind.

PLUME: It’s odd – and obviously you can explain this – the fact that for the most part, that was your last fiction film…

JONES: I did the Wind in the Willows…

PLUME: Which was done for TV though, wasn’t it?

JONES: No, it was a feature film. It was released over here. But very badly. I’m really pleased with Wind in the Willows. I think that’s the best film I’ve made, in many ways. It’s a really lovely film. It’s won various awards in America, the Chicago Children’s Film Festival, and something else… I can’t remember what it was. It wasn’t distributed. It was just sort of… Disney never really wanted to do it, and they kind of had their arms twisted by Jake Eberts, who’d put the money up for it. And they didn’t really like it, and kind of deliberately lost it.

PLUME: I remember getting the VHS screener of that as a direct-to-video.

JONES: Oh yeah…

PLUME: I guess that would be around ’97.

JONES: Yeah. I think they called it Mr. Toad’s Wild Ridein America.

PLUME: Well, you have to make it like the theme park ride. Otherwise people won’t see it. I thought it was interesting that the one question you got from the audience on The Paul O’Grady Showwas someone asking you for a sequel to that.

JONES: Oh yeah. It’s a really lovely film, I think. On the big screen it really works. I just don’t know why they didn’t distribute it over here. What happened was, because it didn’t do anything here, because they didn’t put it out in afternoons, everywhere else, Columbia said the world said, “Well, it’s not gonna work anyway,” so nobody advertised it. What happened, I was in… I was actually doing one of the Ancient Inventionsprograms, I think. Or something else. I can’t remember. And I was in New York, and John Goldstone, my producer, rang up and said, “They’re showing Wind in the Willowsin a couple of cinemas in LA and New York.” And it turned out that Columbia, who had the rest of the world, had got the theatrical rights off Disney. Because they’d realized that some of their deals around the world had to have a theatrical distribution in the States first. Disney didn’t want the theatrical rights, anyway. They just gave them to Columbia for nearly nothing. And so Columbia put it out in a couple of cinemas in LA and a couple of cinemas in New York, with no publicity, really. So I rushed over to the cinema where it was, and it was one of those porno cinemas in Times Square with an awning, and it had Wind in the Willows–m or Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride, I can’t remember – put up in those letters. So I rushed off to get a camera, buy a camera to take a photo of it. By the time I got back, it was gone! (laughing)

PLUME: And yet oddly, it was replaced by a porno called Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride…

JONES: (laughing) And then it got reviewed, like, in The New York Times. It got the best review of any film I’ve ever done. They gave it a whole page. And then Varietygave it a review, and they had editorials two weeks running saying, “Why are Columbia TriStar dumping this lovely film?” But it didn’t do anything, because nobody had any intentions of actually releasing it. So it never got released again.

PLUME: So has it just been circumstantial that there’s only been two fiction projects in the past 16 years?

JONES: Well, you get disheartened, I suppose, by that. And, you know, I thought I’d made a really nice movie. With Erik, I’d taken my eye off the ball during the editing, stupidly, and with that one, I thought I’d saw it right the way through it. I relaxed when I thought that we’d made a good film, and I should have been pushing when it came to the distribution. I hadn’t really realized that’s what I needed to do. So anyway, then I sort of… I got involved with documentary projects, really. They all seemed very interesting. I guess maybe I didn’t have time to write anything. You can spend time writing things and nothing happens. But I wrote some things that are cooking at the moment. I hope to get some films going.

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