Name:
Date of Birth:
Terry Gilliam
22 November 1940
Terry Gilliam played in 7 and created 10 movies in the Music, Comedy, Adventure, Musical, Documentary, Drama, Fantasy, Horror, Music, Family, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Thriller, Action, Romance genres.
Terry Gilliam got succeed with average imdb rating 7.9.
Terry Gilliam is a director frequently pigeon holed, but who remains most famous for a fantastical visual flare and a dystopian outlook. Whilst fantasy is a constant theme in his work, he does not exclusively make genre films, and many of his more realistic films hold an emotional depth and realism, a fact aided significantly by the A-List acting talent he can attract to films which, by Hollywood standard, are low budget.
Terry Vance Gilliam was born in Minnesota, USA in the 1940s, though since the 1960s he has lived in London and is now a UK national. A cartoonist and TV animator for a number of years, he came to prominence for the trademark cut out animation on television's Monty Python's Flying Circus between 1969 and 1974. Although left to his own devices initially, as the four series progressed he became more actively involved in the troupes output, and became the co-director of their first film "".
...
The success of Holy Grail and the burgeoning Monty Python "brand" helped him scrape together financing for , a mud splattered and decaying medieval adventure tale starring , which was more akin to Gormenghast than Lewis Carroll. His next film , where an optimistic boy finds himself part of a pessimistic group of time travelling dwarf robbers (co-written with ) proved more commercially profitable.
On the back of this success he made , an epic dystopian fantasy of a bureaucratic nightmare "somewhere in the 20th century". Universal, the US distributors of the film, had great difficulty in accepting such a downbeat and (for the 1980s) lengthy movie, resulting in a lot of public and private battles between Gilliam and the studio. As a result there was a very limited US release and various alternative versions were created at the time.
Gilliam's next film garnered just as much controversy, but this time for its scale rather than its subject. "The Adventures of Baron Münchhausen", a pure fantasy adventure based on German tall tales, cost twice as much as it was budgeted for, a fact that was laid at Gilliam's door by press coverage at the time despite him not being the producer. In terms of box office press coverage also decided it had under performed, but in the US at least it had a limited run.
"The Battles of " and the cost of Muchhausen have tarnished Gilliam's career ever since, making funding his own projects an increasingly difficult prospect. Aside from one attempt to film "" that was scuppered by a back injury suffered by , all of Gilliam's subsequently completed projects have not been originated by him, though some have been scripted by him. Every one of them have made money and most have garnered critical acclaim however - the academy award winning Fisher King, , , and .
2007 saw production started on the first Gilliam-originated film since Münchhausen - The Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus. After all exterior London shooting was completed its star, , was found dead at his apartment in New York. This tragedy - a personal one for Gilliam, a friend of Ledger since directing him in Brothers Grimm - has delayed but not stopped production on the movie. Various aspects of Ledger's character will now be played by , and .Read more Less
