Terry Gilliam‘s movies are often described as trippy, but despite that and how he used to work a lot with George Harrison and everyone at Monty Python, some fans may be surprised to learn that the filmmaker had never tried hallucinogenics, until now.
In an interview with la Repubblica, Gilliam talks about his very simple birthday wish. “For my stupid birthday I asked for only one thing: magic mushrooms,” Gilliam said. “I’ve never tried them. The idea was to load my whole family on a plane and go celebrate in the house we have in Umbria. At the moment we can’t, but I could fly all the way to Italy.” When asked if he would take a private plane there, Gilliam answered “with the help of mushrooms.”
Gilliam reiterates that he’s never taken drugs, and confesses he’s always been afraid of taking acids, even in Los Angeles in the late ’60s, “when practically everyone did it,” as the filmmaker puts it. “I smoked marijuana once in college and didn’t like it. LSD terrified me. When I moved to London and occasionally had to fly to Hollywood for work, I came back with a ferocious jet lag. at parties, someone was offering cocaine, because it was the 80s and coke was everywhere, and a couple of times I said yes. I was tired, I couldn’t stand. But the hangovers were horrible and so I said to myself: never again.”
The interview describes Gilliam as feeling depressed during lockdown, not producing much except for his work on an upcoming book about his storyboards. When asked about Trump, Gilliam said he doesn’t “understand how, despite having no direct influence on my life, he managed to make me feel so depressed.”