The Life of

‘The Life Of Brian’

During a promotional tour in America for ‘The Holy Grail’, Eric Idle was asked by a New York journalist what the Python’s next film project was set to be. ‘Jesus Christ: Lust For Glory’ came the swift response, which, as Idle proudly notes, ‘got a big laugh’. And thus the film was born…

“When we got back to London, people were taking the idea seriously,” says Idle, “and what attracted us was the freshness of the subject – nobody had made a biblical comedy film. Of course, it became clear early on that we couldn’t make fun of the Christ since what he says is very fine ( and Buddhist ), but the people around him were hilarious and still are. So it really is an attack on Churches and pontificators and self-righteous assholes who claim to speak for God, of whom there are too many still on the planet.” Hurrah! said the rest of the gang, the opportunity to make a film about imperialism, messiah-fever, and religion’s sticky points being too much to resist, particularly one where Idle would be stuck playing an anarchist called Loretta. So they busied off to a hired house in Barbados in 1977 to write the final draft of the script. As you do. “I remember being a little bit cautious about whether could write in such a paradise,” admits Michael Palin, “I had a sort of Granny-ish view about these things. But it turned out to be a very successful writing period.” This point of view can be vouched for by Barry Spikings, then running EMI with Michael Deeley, just happened to be in Barbados at the same time, and so got to hear about the film. Having read the script, and declared it the funniest thing he’d ever read in his life ever, EMI agreed on a deal with producer John Goldstone which allowed the Python’s total artistic control, even over the final cut. But. The chairman of the board of EMI, Lord Bernard Delfont, was told that the film was blasphemous by another board-member. As a consequence, EMI pulled out. Shooting was delayed. Goldstone scuttled off to America to try to find funding, and, with the help of Eric Idle, managed to secure the backing of George Harrison, a personal friend and lifelong fan of the Pythons. Harrison set up Handmade Films just for this venture, and allowed the Pythons to film in Tunisia with the bigger-budget they needed, in stark contrast to their soggy Scottish filming for ‘The Holy Grail’. As Idle gleefully reminisces, “We had a bit more money [ on ‘…Brian’ ] so we could afford a hotel room each.”

With Beatle-money behind them, and the promise of total artistic control, more meaty decisions could be made. Such as who was going to direct. For example. As it turned out, Terry Jones ended up directing ‘The Life Of Brian’ by himself. He says it was because Gilliam didn’t want to share directorial responsibilities, having just made ‘Jabberwocky’ single-handed. “And I was quite keen to do it, too.” Terry Gilliam pretty much agrees, happily praising Jones’ instinct for directing, and his boundless energy, even describing him as ‘the right director for Python’. Added to which Gilliam got to play at being the designer on ‘…Brian’ though, so creative input was maintained, albeit slightly frustrated input at times. ( “I don’t mind if you don’t want to put the camera there,” Gilliam rambles, “but if we built all that stuff and spent all that money, put the camera there!” ) Gilliam wasn’t the only one to meet with frustration on this film; John Cleese had desperately wanted to play the part of Brian. For a reason he himself declared to be wholly simple. “By that point I had reached the ripe old age of thirty-eight and had never had the experience of playing a role the whole way through a film. And I was fascinated by the idea of doing it.” He does, however, concede that the casting working out in the way which it did was, in retrospect, wholly positive. “I was disappointed for about forty-eight hours when they basically said, ‘Well, Graham has to be Brian.’ And they were right because I was funnier in the other roles than Graham would have been, and Graham was very, very good as Brian.” Other roles were far more cut and dried when it came to the actors who should embody them. From the way it sounds, the wery much inbwed and wuling cwaass Pontius Pilate, for example, was destined to be Michael Palin’s. And destined to speak in the way that he did. “I felt that I had to play Pilate as somebody who, if he was aware of the way he spoke, he wouldn’t have chosen the words that he did.” Palin thinks about it for a moment. “I suppose it’s the sort of paper-thin division between being powerful or being ridiculous. Ceausescu, for instance, was this amazingly powerful man in palaces; overnight, he’s suddenly just a frightened man who ends up lying in a yard with a bullet through him.” He, however, never suffered a six-hundred strong crowd wailing with laughter at him, which Palin feels has at least the same effect as if they were all screaming abuse. “That’s why people in positions of power don’t like comedy, because it’s essentially subversive, and that was a subversive use of laughter in the Pilate scene for all to see. We all know ( long before he does ) that he’s been made to look a complete idiot; but he carries on, and so does Biggus Dickus.” The Pontius Pilate scene was also one of Terry Jones’ favourites during filming, although not for the strength of the comedy. Instead, it was because of the crowd. Five hundred extras had been hired for the scene, and a Tunisian comic to make them laugh, although the reactions he met with were not what Jones intended. Eventually, he told his interpreter to tell the crowd to just ‘do what he did’, and then preceded to lie down on the platform in front of the crowd, laughing hysterically as he waggled his legs in the air. “And of course, they all went down on their backs, absolutely hysterical with laughter. It was the most wonderful sight, and the dust rose, and all these Tunisians were just so abandoned, lying on their backs, kicking their legs in the air. And of course we weren’t turning over [ the camera ], because we were just telling them what to do! That was quite heartbreaking. Of course, then they had to do it again, they did it quite well, but it was never quite as good as that first moment when they all went over.”

Another key sequence in ‘The Life Of Brian’ is when Graham Chapman, having fallen from a tower, is whipped off in a spaceship. Although Terry Gilliam cannot remember whose idea it was ( but is perfectly content to take the credit for it ), he can in some way explain That Alien Sequence, where a spaceship filled with Cyclops balls of slime kidnap Brian, thus saving him from immediate peril, and then before he can worry too greatly about his new perilous situation, fling him back into some more peril. “I wanted to show we could do a Star Wars sequence for five quid!” Gilliam, despite his only previous experience in model animation being from a cow-flinging scene in ‘The Holy Grail’, was still ridiculously excited about this sequence. “I think it was my desperate bid to escape from being the animator, escape from that role.” Because of budget restrictions, and their own relative inexperience, Gilliam’s method of bringing this scene to life was a little, well, unorthodox in its creativity. “We didn’t have any special effects people so we went down to the local joke-shop and bought all these exploding cigars. Emptied the gunpowder out; took a light-bulb, broke the glass part and using the filament as a sparking device made the explosion.” All this, and he got to work with slime. Marvellous.

For many, it is the final sequence in the film which is the most memorable – following Brian’s resolute non-rescue by either his girl-friend, his mum, or his friends, the group crucifixion suddenly turns into a giant musical number. “We knew we had this end sequence to shoot,” says Jones, “and we said it’d be great to do a song a dance routine on the crosses.” Although, at that point, they didn’t have a song. ‘Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life’ was penned weeks into the Tunisian shooting, and was originally performed ‘straight’ by Eric Idle. He knew however, that there was something wrong with it, and decided to revocalise his rendition, in the style of his Mr. Cheeky character. That it might offend never seemed to occur to him, although it did the others. “If we said we’re going to have somebody doing a song on the cross, we started [ off thinking ], ‘We just can’t do that, it would offend so many people,” admits Michael Palin. But… “Once we had a reason for doing that, then it suddenly became like the ‘Undertaker sketch’ – it had a truth to it. You can quite easily argue that, at that time, there must have been some people who just dealt with this in a non-reverent way. I mean, the stained glass windows is what has been imposed later on all these events.” Since, ‘Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life’, has, if nothing else, taken on a life of its own outside of the film. In May of 1982, during the Falklands/Maldives War, the HMS Sheffield was struck by an Exocet Missile, and as the crew awaited rescue onboard their sinking vessel, they started to sing. Idle has been told that it was sung by pilots in the Gulf shortly before they attempted their low-flying sorties, and in the early Nineties Gary Lineker was able to ring him up to tell him that the record was being sung on the terraces. “The success of this song has brought me great joy and it seems now to be a classic.” One supposes, also, that the singing of it did help to cheer up the cast, stuck on the crosses on a windy hill in Tunisia, during filming. “Each cross had to be designed so that the distance between your crotch and your arms was correct,” reminisces Gilliam. “It was all planned perfectly. On the day, Terry changed his mind, and started shifting people around, so everybody ended up on the wrong cross. So the pain was genuine. And it was freezing cold.” So cold, in fact, that not all the cast were prepared to undergo filming wearing little more than a loin-cloth and a wig. “If you look at the sequence,” Terry Jones happily points out, “you can see that John – who I may say was the last up on the cross – was also wrapped in a blanket.” Cheeky devil. Though through all of this adversity, the finished sequence is worth it, as Terry Gilliam himself feels. “I think it’s really a tribute to our professionalism that that isn’t on film, it’s a joyous occasion.”

Although the film ended cheerfully, the reception which it met was not universally a smiling one. Religious groups attempted ( and in some places ) succeeded to have the film banned, with protests still being made in some places across the world. “One of the themes in the film is ‘Do make up your own mind about things and don’t do what people tell you’,” notes Cleese, wryly. “And I find it slightly funny that there are now religious organisations saying, ‘Do not go and see this film that tells you not to do what you are told’.” The blasphemy worries expressed by the board of EMI prior to shooting became the worries expressed by the ‘moral majority’ across the globe, upon the film’s actual release. The Python team however, remain stoic in their assertion that it was not intended as an offensive satire, more a reminder that neither religion nor spirituality should be left in the hands of a powerful few. And, that um, people should be careful who they pick as Messiah. “Oh yes, I remember when we were writing it, thinking some loony might take potshots at us, something like that,” admits Jones, when asked if they were aware of the reaction the film could generate. “I thought it would be controversial. Having said that, the controversy surrounding it usually came from people who hadn’t seen the film, people who just didn’t like the sound of it.” So is it blasphemous? Is it buggery… “It’s not blasphemous because it accepts the Christian story; in fact, the film doesn’t make sense unless you take the Christian story.” Added to which it is about a boy called Brian. Not Jesus, who is himself only peripheral to the plot. As Eddie Izzard has himself noted, “‘Jesus’ is a very different spelling to ‘Brian’”. John Cleese agrees. “What we are is quite clearly making fun of the way people follow religion, but not religion itself, and the whole purpose of having that lovely scene at the start when the Three Wise Men go into the wrong stable is to say Brian is Not Christ, he just gets taken for a Messiah. And that’s a very important point.” One which was missed by a large proportion of the religious body of both the USA and Britain, it would seem. Umbrage was taken, Palin feels, because the Monty Python team had a history of irreverence – their TV serieses had attacked the police, judges, the working man and even accountants, by making them appear in some way ridiculous. There were even two towns in Surrey without cinemas which banned the film. It was taken as read that the same treatment would have been meted out to Jesus and his lifestory within ‘The Life Of Brian’, and even some of those who had seen the film refused to believe otherwise. On one British chat-show, an eminent Bishop described the film as ‘the sort of thing the Footlights did on a damp Tuesday afternoon’, or something he would have expected from giggling group of school-boys from the Lower Fourth.

Consequently, Palin recalls feeling inordinately pleased at hearing of the reactions of certain churchmen which tended towards the positive. The members of the church in St John’s Wood, he remembers, were shown the film by their priest, discussed it afterwards, and generally felt the entire event to have been ‘terrific’. However, it was the vehement protests which led to the soaring popularity of the film – where it had opened nationwide in just 200 cinemas, it was soon playing to packed houses in 600, a situation which tickles Cleese. “They have actually made me rich! I feel we should send them a crate of champagne or something.” Although the ‘controversy’ upset Palin at the time, he can now afford to share Cleese’s rosy-retrospect view. “In the end, we’d been through all the possible dangers of people dismissing it and I think we’d come out with something intellectually defensible, so I quite enjoyed the reaction. Because it many ways it made us what Python is about really, the reaction from the sort of people who were the inspiration for Python: the petty little local officials who close the cinemas for hygiene because they don’t like the comedy film about the Bible story.” Essential year round viewing, then ( although particularly entertaining over Easter ) - it should provoke a leetle more in its audience than just laughter.

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Last revised: 31/03/03