Levon Biss
Terry Gilliam isn't a fan of the real world. The 73-year-old director's movies are each an exercise in escaping it, whether through fantasy (2009's The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus), satire (1985's Brazil), or surrealism (pretty much all of Monty Python). His latest, The Zero Theorem—starring Christoph Waltz as Qohen, a reclusive computer savant working for an all-seeing British corporation—is Gilliam's flinching reaction to today's hyper-stimulating Internet culture. In a move away from typical dystopian dullness, his vision of London is a riot of colorful advertisements that stalk pedestrians down the street, balanced by a dreamy virtual reality that Qohen uses to escape the onslaught. The world may have changed since Gilliam started offering his scathing critiques, but not for the better—and he's as pissed off as ever.
Terry Gilliam's new film continues in the spirit of 12 Monkeys and Brazil. Levon Biss
Before we get started, is it OK if I record this?
Sure, sure. The NSA is, why shouldn't you?
That's a great place to start—The Zero Theorem seems to be very much about surveillance.
I think citizens actually love the fact that somebody is watching and listening to them. Everybody lives for their selfies and their tweets—to actually exist, somebody has to be talking to you or listening in on you. That's where The Zero Theorem started and ended. It became a focus for a lot of the things that were bothering me today, including this constant connection. Qohen just wants to be disconnected, wants to escape from the world that's out there, full of people just filling the Internet with pictures of the food they're eating.
You've done surveillance dystopias before, though. What's different about today's version?
Initially, Mancom, where Qohen works, was much more like the Ministry in Brazil. But I wanted to make a point that this body isn't governmental. That's something quite different now—corporations dominate, and the political side is almost secondary. The funny thing is, the film was supposed to be set in the near future—how near I didn't know. But by the time most of my “futuristic ideas” had been filmed, they were already in the past.
Your movies often combine elements of the familiar and the speculative.
When people do sci-fi films, they always seem to focus on futuristic technology. But the world is always a mixture of technologies. Like, I've got an iPhone, which is more powerful than the computer that put a man on the moon. It's extraordinary. At the same time, we've got leaky 19th-century plumbing.
http://www.youtube.com/embed/rae7_O_6EtU
The mainframe computer at Mancom seems like a step back in time—it's so massive.
As computers get smaller, the central computer gets bigger. And the NSA's new data center in Bluffdale is so vast—acres and acres and acres. So we modeled the Mancom computer after this huge blast furnace that we found in a steel mill. Maybe the future will need to be like that to deal with the amount of information we'll have.
You can do a lot more with a smaller budget today. Has that changed how you make movies?
Six years ago, when we first talked about doing this movie, the budget was $20 million, and we ended up making it for $8.5 million. There's probably $500,000 of savings in there in improved technologies—for example, Christoph and Mélanie Thierry recorded some new lines on their iPhones while he was in Berlin and she was in France, emailed them back to me, and they're in the film. We couldn't have done that a few years ago. But the rest is people working for scale, working their asses off, being very clever, and filming in Bucharest. And getting actor friends to come in and work—but I can't take advantage of all my friends next time.
Does that budget impact the audience you can reach too?
I don't really know how to think of an audience, because there are a million different audiences out there. It's more, how do you get the people that might like what you do—and they're not always fans yet—how do you get their attention? When the big studios have $80 million to spend on a campaign for a film, it's really hard to find room to put up your billboard or your poster. That's what I find difficult now.
A bunch of your fellow Monty Pythoners did a reunion show in July. Do you ever worry that Python's influence might have gone too far?
I look at my heroes, the ones who got me going, and I'm very proud to feel that we're heroes to somebody else. As we enter the last act, that feels pretty good. But the press is going absolutely apeshit over this Python show—they write about us as if we were the beginning of comedy. What about the Marx Brothers? Where's Buster Keaton? It's like it's all been forgotten. That's the part of the modern world that I really despise. There's no history—everything exists only in nanoseconds.
In The Zero Theorem, Christoph Waltz plays Qohen Leth, a computer genius struggling with existential angst in the form of a math problem. Courtesy of Amplify (The Zero Theorem)
