Gilliamesque: A Pre-posthumous Memoir

Being a Monty Python fan and also a fan of Gilliam's movies, I came to this book with a positive mindset. Gilliam's work on Python meant that his animations held the screen but he didn't appear in person, so he was something of a mystery for a long time. This memoir fills out a certain amount of that mystery. From his childhood in the US to his work with Mad magazine to manipulating his excursion through the military to his adopting of England as his home, this is an overview of the story of the man.

He also traverses many of his movies with anecdotes of their making and reception. The difficulties of bringing his weird Pythonesque humour to the US market get a lot of air as he struggled to be taken seriously as a movie maker. The illustrations in the book increase through this portion of his story and his story board pics show something of his visual process.

He speaks of how his daughter was instrumental in keeping him on track when the US market wanted to trim down his more outrageous ideas, and to continue through a disaster such as when Heath Ledger died while filming Dr Parnassus. I think she was also the push for him to get this book completed. We owe her a beer next time we see her in the pub.

Afterthought. One of the funny things is how the book ends. He acknowledges 'all the people along the way who pushed me forward...' and he lists about a thousand actors over several pages. Yep, I counted them. Well, I copied them all into a word processor and halved the word count.