the facts behind the film that makes Ben-Hur look like an epic....
Films and Filming, December 1974
The six regulars of the Monty Python gang have collaborated in writing and performing their second cinema film, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, which according to the advance blurb 'makes Ben-Hur look like an epic'. Of these six, four held forth for films and filming on the matter of art-plus-life and suchlike, including Terry Gilliam who co-directs the film, and then additionally they roped in the genial Neil Innes who provided the score. A whelming collection - neither over nor under but just pleasantly right and doing their best not to barrack one another in the course of such individual interviews as were held in the relaxed environment of Graham Chapman's house where the refrigerator holds, among other things, some cans of Fosters Lager, doubtless to fortify those devilish down-under accents which this group of Oxford and Cambridge graduates can summon up with more exactitude than any other English strolling players I've ever heard trying it. Since Chapman portrays King Arthur in this neo-Camelot essay, it is with him we ought logically to begin. So let's.
Concerning Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Graham Chapman says: "This terrible-or-marvellous King Arthur figure goes through the lot, with terrible things happening in the background. To a large extent, he's immune from it - from the peasants who are trying to eat earth, literally scrabbling around in huge piles of turds. When you look at the way people lived in the past, and not at the wa the history books told you they lived, when you actually dicover the condition of the common people, it's really revolting. It really was a matter of searching for scraps in a heap of dung.
So a lot of that is in the film. And a lot of the violence of the age is in the film...people getting their arms and legs chopped off. It happened then. It happens now but we don't notice - why don't we notice? It's reported on television but it has no effect on people."
Essentially he is in sympathy with Arthur's pacifist aspirations. "I've always been a pacifist myself, and I've found that it's a very good thing because when someone attacks you physically - and it's happened to me quite a few times - if you behave passively and just say, 'Oh, go on and do it,' they can't do anything. They're just unable to commit actual physical violence against you. It happened to me, for example, in a pub. I was being a bit show-offy I suppose, talking to a strange guy's girl friend, and he got a bit uppity about it, and he started bashing my head on the wall. But I offered no resistance and he couldn't carry on with the act of violence.
It's best just to succumb and lie on your back like little dogs do. If a big dog comes around and gets aggressive, the little one just lies down on its back and puts its paws up in the air and everything's all right: the big one won't bite him."
Chapman allows, though that he has an aggressive streak in him, too - or, as he put it after a longish pause to find the exact phrase he wanted, "I'm aggressively humble. On location for this Holy Grail film when we were in Scotland I went into a pub where there was a crowd of the regulars of that place: young people, old people, quite a mixture. And I thought they were all a bit uptight, becasue they were all out with their wives and girl friends having nice drinks. And I'm afraid there's a trait in me that's rather aggressive in that I try to split that up and make them think again, because I know basically unhappy most of them are. So I decided to kiss the entire pub. I went round, man and woman, boy and girl, trying to kiss the lot, and succeeded mostly, except that one particular person was very annoyed and I got thrown out.
The next day I decided that the only thing to do was to go back to the same place and not be frightened. So I went back. Met the same bloke. Immediately I walked in the door he said, 'Oh, I suppose you're going to kiss everybody again tonight, are you?' That got a bit of a laugh from his friends. I took no notice, went up to the bar, bought myself a drink, and then went and sat down right next to him and said, 'I think you're rather boring, and you're probably the kind of person that only talks about cars and the number of girl friends you've had.' And the girl who was sitting next to him suddenly said, 'You're right. He does. That's all he does.' And other people started joining in. 'That's all he talks about. Nothing but that.' He went bright red. It was a lovely moment. But it doesn't always work out. Sometimes you get your head bashed in."
Chapman studied medicine at Cambridge and would probably have gone into pyschiatry, except that he feels it's "an awful job. A lot of people in medicine are conservative because they come from conservative backgrounds. They're usually sons and daughters of doctors. That's one of the things that has held psychiatry up for so long. People who are doing it are incapable of looking into other people's minds because they don't know what normal people are like - not normal - average, one could say - all these words are horrible. But psychiatry students are theorising about their own thoughts. The way they're made at the moment has very little to do with real people. It has to do with getting a medical degree and then deciding to specialise in psychiatry. But during that time the student has met no average people. He's been in a medical school - an ivory tower. Psychiatrists, as we loosely call them, should be living in the society they are trying to help. It's a bloody difficult job."
I wondered if his Python work, whether writing or performing, served incidentally to get something out of his system that needs to be gotten out. He thought maybe so. "Certainly in terms of writing. You get the argument from a lot of people that you're supposed to write to make people laugh. That's true. But also everything you do is written from something in your own experience. Nothing is written from outside the universe. You can't do a good situation comedy about stones. It's got to be animate. It has to be about human beings. Writing is theraputic for me because - as you say - it gets something out of my system, some frustration, some anger. You almost have to be angry to write, I think. If you're angry about something, then you can always put something down on paper. If you're not, if you're just totally happy - and I don't actually know anyone in the whole bleeding world that is - you wouldn't be able to write a single thing. But if you're angry about something, it's possible to be witty, possible to be interesting, possible to write."
With half a dozen Python men credited as writers of the screenplay, I asked Chapman how the collaborative process worked? "Well, we don't actually collaborate," he said at once. "What we do is to write little bits in separate groups. Two of us will go off and write something, and another two will be writing somewhere else. Then we read it out to each other. And we're capable now of being very critical and saying, 'That's rubbish.' Then we rewrite; one person will take something that Eric has written and go away with Eric and work on it. Or maybe something that John Cleese and I worte would subsequently be pushed over to Michael Palin and me."
This leads to no feeling that a loss of identity has taken place. "We haven't got one."
The point would come up again on another occasion when I met John Cleese.
Michael Palin says of the Grail job, "We decided to make a cinema film which would be very different in style from the first one we did, And Now For Something Completely Different, which in fact turned out to be something completely similar. It was bits of the TV shows, made for America primarily, and I felt it was a bit of a con on the British public because they'd seen most of the things before, and there was no new material. Some of the sketches that we refilmed worked better, others worked worse. So now we decided to do a completely new kind of film.
The thing that we hadn't done on the telly series, but that we were starting to develop, was the idea of doing a story. And so we thought we'd try and write the plot for a film - but that didn't quite work out. Everybody was writing different little sketches. And one of the sketches began with a scene between King Arthur and some sentries on a wall...as simple as that. This was read out at a meeting and we thought we'd keep it in. And then the film became half mediaeval, based on this King Arthur character, and half present-day. In fact we had the knights in mediaeval times having counterparts in the present-day. Galahad became a solicitor who lived in Surrey and had so much money that he couldn't get it in his house. There was money everywhere, and he was saying, 'Sorry about this damned cash.' And he pronounced his name G'had. But then, that seemed again to be ordinary Python territory. So about a year ago we decided to rewrite the script and make it entirely mediaeval. Within that we've still got the range to develop little Python characters who would normally be in present-day garb - and yet it has the unity of being an historical film."
John Cleese recalls how the television show's offbeat title evolved. When they first went to the BBC they were taken in hand by comedy advisor Barry Took, whose advocacy of the idea led at first to it being loosely described as "Barry Took's Flying Circus" because there was a general feeling that it would be a matter of six blokes doing strange things and looking untidy. "We quite liked the label, and we thought we'd keep the latter part of it but then we wondered whose Flying Circus. We all have a hostility to the kind of people who put their names up - the Jim Smith Show, kind of thing. Everybody does that. So we thought we'd dream up a name we all liked. When we finally came up with Monty Python it made everyone laugh for about five minutes. It touched a communal nerve. Monty had connotations of people with seedy little moustaches trying to pretend that they'd had something to do with war in the desert. And then the Python was all the treachery of a musical agent type, you know."
The bunch is invariably alluded to as the "Monty Python team" in line with the current-affairs TV ethos of hopeful team-essential to such set-ups as football teams but in other spheres might limit a person's oneness. Cleese agrees that it could imply a deprivation of the spirit, but in the case of the Python lot he feels that the "team" is usefully integrated nevertheless. "All of the material - except to a degree, the animation - is vetted by everyone at every stage."
Still each keeps a distinctive personality and becomes identified with one or two specific quirks of invention. Cleese, for example, is the man with the erratic long legs from "The Ministry of Silly Walks" with its put-down of bureaucracy and its favourable-funny acceptance of eccentricity. The idea developed from notions shared by Cleese and Graham Chapman. "We had the idea that there should be a Ministry of Something, like perhaps a Ministry of Anger, where everyone was just routinely angry with each other, whether they were just discussing whether they wanted tea or whether the morning post had arrived - which I still quite like as an idea: maybe it could be done one day. But when we mentioned it, Mike and Terry reacted positively and then at the next meeting they'd come up with the thought that it should be silly walks. I liked it, but not amazingly so. Although it's probably the best-known of all the things I've done, it's by no means my favourite, not by a very long chalk But when we went out to film it for the TV series, I was aware that it was funny. My favourite moments in it are a couple of lines, which when we did it in our live show at Drury Lane you never heard because the audience was laughing too much anyway. Thre's one line to the effect that 'last year the government spent less on silly walks than it did on industrial organisation' - wihch I say in the course of explaining all the problems I have running the ministry on a limited budget. I always loved that line, but I'm sure nobody's ever heard it. At Drury Lane I didn't even bother to say the lines: I used to discuss the weather with Michael Palin, because on account of the physical joke of the walk itself, nothing I said could be heard."
Cleese considers the script of Monty Python and the Holy Grail to be "markedly different from anything we've ever done. In fact I think it's probably the only real step forward that we've taken in the last two-and-a-half to three years. When we started out we developed for a couple of years, and then I think we sat and worked out the other variations without progressing. But here there is a continuous storyline."
He would concede, too, that the TV audience is virtually one or two people in front of a single set - many more over the nation, of course, but in terms of performer-to-spectator an exceedingly intimate thing - whereas cinema has a collective and at the same time more captive public, unlikely to wander out at any given moment in search of a cup of tea or something. Plus, of course, the fact that the screen is bigger - "but that's a technical thing which I don't understand the implications of. Occasionally I have the intuitive feeling that for cinema I should be doing something differently from TV - but that is almost instinctive: it's not based on any understanding of theoretical principles.
I remember when Bedazzled came out, I saw it in New York, and I was extremely jealous because I thought it was so good. And Peter Cook and Dudley Moore told me that when it had come out in England everyone had said they had not made the transition from the small screen - because in England they were known as TV people. But there was no mention ever of that in the States in all of the 60 or 70 different reviews - because they didn't know Pete and Dud worked also on TV. And I believe that people get a preconceived idea."
Cleese, of course, has appeared briefly in sundry previous cinema films: The Statue, The Best House in London, Interlude among them. "And I did realise that it was different from TV - because there, by the time we'd done about four Monty Pythons it was like playing at home, football-wise. We knew the camera crew's faces, we knew the studio, we knew the make-up girls, we knew the feel of the place. And when you are working in a team with whom you generally work, thre's an enormous sense of security. You don't have to go through all this business of getting to know people, as you would in a play or a cinema film.
When I went into the film of It's a 2' 6" Above-the-Ground World, in which I was very bad, it was a long time since I'd worked on my own, out of the context of a team. And I suddenly realised how difficult it was to walk in and meet the director and shake him by the hand, and sit down and discuss it, and then forty minutes later to be doing a first take."
For all that, there can be occasions within the "team" when one person is not en rapport with the rest: "Oh, absolutely. Michael Palin has kept a diary which I would dearly love to see in years to come. It would probably make a fascinating study for a psychiatrist - rather like the history of the Balkan States in 1870 to 1910, by which I mean the varying of people's relationships, the movements of alliances - how so-and-so and so-and-so get on very well for a time, and then something happens and they become slightly resentful of each other. I don't want to create the impression that there has been continual warfare or anything like that, because I think as a group of remarkably different individuals, we got on very well over five years. But I was fascinated a great deal of the time - since I was part of the process as well; I'm not suggesting I was standing in an Olympian way outside it - I was fascinated to see the way that friendships changed. I don't suppose there has been any moment when any one member of the team has not been thoroughly sick of another one. There were six of us involved, so we each had five relationships, so that's thirty relationships. With the possible exception of Michael Palin, who is such an extraordinarily nice man - I think one or two of us never got sick of Michael.
When I talk like this, people may think what an awful thing. But if they actually examine what happens in their office or wherever over a period of five years, it is true that you go through periods of getting on very well with people and you go through other periods when people rub you up."
Team membership, however, has been full of advantages for Cleese. "These advantages were very obvious at the start. Then there were a number of disadvantages which became more obvious the longer we went on. I'm quite a good team man in the short run, but not in the long run. Whether it's to do with being an only child or not, God knows. But I don't like the feeling of being tied down too much. And the trouble when you are one of a team of six is that you finish up having not much say in your own life.
It's been a difficult thing to say that I didn't want to do any more television with the group, because I felt that I had done all that I was going to enjoy and I was getting bored - especially with the sheer mechanics of having to be out filming, and all the time-wasting that that involves, and the rehearsing. I didn't find it very satisfying latterly. This is why I'm not in the new television series. They've gone ahead with my blessing and good wishes - in fact, I think they've got some of my material which I wrote with Graham in the first show, and I'm glad about that.
I think I want to spend much more time now writing. Because the lovely thing about writing is that nobody says you've got to be anywhere at any time. All they want is a script, at a particular point, but how you do it and when you do it is almost irrelevant. The other thing I've found is that it's enormously time-consuming, and I really do want to have more time to pursue the things that I enjoy. I suppose in the last five years of Python I have worked many more weekends than I've had off. And in the end you think 'For what?' On the other hand, I enjoy writing, although I find it very hard as anybody who's any good always does...he said with incredible arrogance. But I've only ever met two people who said they found writing was easy, and neither of them was very good.
But there'll be time now for enjoyment, too. And I enjoy just finding out about things, because there is so much about that is interesting and exciting which I've never seemed to have time for in recent years. Working for the series, and taking on occasional other commitments, you tend to think when you're out at dinner that you have to get up at a quarter to eight the next morning. You cease to enjoy your spare time, because ninety per cent of your time is occupied by work. Another thing is that I don't find it terribly easy to relax. It's an almost pathological fear of being bad - I think you ought to relax and realise that we're all going to do bad work sometimes. The right to fail, you know."
Neil Innes, who declares modestly that he "only writes the music" for the Grail film and for Python activities by and large, had been going his own way until the group encompassed him. "First I started working on their record albums when they wanted tnes to go with fairy-tale things, or there was an atrocious football song they wrote which I set to music. And then we went on tour, and for the stage show my own music fitted in with what they were doing. We were obviously of a like mind and I'm getting more and more involved with them"
At London University, Innes studied fine art: "That really offered no hope of a sensible job, because all you can do with the eventual qualification is teach other people fine art. And I just wasn't interested in that. So when I left college I joined the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, writing and also playing keyboards. It lasted five or six years and then finished up."
Now for the Pythonise Arthurian period where does he seek his inspiration? "Well, one obviously looks at mediaeval styles of music, and in doing so you find it's not that far removed from modern-day formats of pop records. There's about three or four chords in it, and then just repeat a theme. Having read the script and appreciated the basic feeling behind the film, it is a kind of anachronism of a present-day situation. In a way it's a parody of life today, and it's made more real because it's set in an olden age and one sees the cruelty more easily because they were more overtly cruel. That's in the film, but it's still funny.
So I've hovered between two ways of doing the score. I wrote more music for it than could possibly be used, but half of it could point certain heroic moods or terrifying moods, and some of it is semi-boring here-we-go-again kind of music and it's catchy. And I'd like the score to be catchy."
Monty Python and the Holy Grail has two directors, Terry Gilliam and Terry Jones, and I talked with the former. Gilliam did the bemusing animation of the tele-series (as he has also done for Grail) and occasional walk-on parts. I asked him how it is possible for two people to direct a film: a situation not unique but nevertheless uncommon.
"Perhaps it's not possible," Gilliam allows. "The difficulty in our case was that we're two very similar peple. We both operate on adrenalin, which doesn't make for coherent direction. It's like everybody running around with their heads chopped off.
After the first couple of weeks of that, however, we subdued ourselves. I think if your abilities don't match up quite as well as Terry's and mine do, it wouldn't be possible to get through it. But we did, and we're still speaking to one another. But I think it would have been better if one had been the outgoing person and the other had been very quiet and introspective. But in fact both of us are large-type people.
But you don't really direct Python. I think all we really did was organise a few things, like deciding that the camera ought to be pointing over there, or people ought to be wearing certain kinds of costumes - because Python directs itself really."
What the team-members seemed to feel was that Gilliam was the guy with the visual sense whereas Jones was better suited to bringing out the emotive stuff from the performers. Gilliam is an American who was educated at a small liberal arts college in Los Angeles: "Most of the graduates become insurance salesmen. I studied political science, mainly because it's easier to major in than art."
As him to name his favourite directors and Gilliam mentions Kubrick, specifically for Dr. Strangelove and Paths of Glory, but he cleaves to the opinion that what counts is not the director but the film. Thus he has a fondness for Truffaut's Stolen Kisses, for The Sugarland Express and for La grande bouffe - "one of the great films of all time. A film that we should have made. I would be very proud if Python could make a film as outrageous as that." He would condede, too, in addition to his enthusiasm for the outrageousness, that La grande bouffe has a lot to say about life as it is lived today - whereas Monty Python and the Holy Grail "has a lot to say about life as it was lived in the 13th century, which I'm sure has a great deal in common with today."
Chapman agrees instantly, "Quite right. Because we haven't progressed one bleeding jot - not one iota."