‘Time Bandits’: Terry Gilliam Reflects On The Evolution Of Family & Fantasy Films Ahead Of Criterion 4K Release [Interview]

That’s more or less the underlying premise of YA literature and film like “The Hunger Games” and “Divergent.” In all these series, there’s a world in which the kids are smarter than the adults and have to save a world handed to them in ruin. It seems to me like “Time Bandits” presaged the rise of a market for that.
I think that kids have to try to change and save the world, and adults are meant to keep them from doing that. [laughs] Right? It’s a battle going on. I love that line we have when the Supreme Being and the Time Bandits are heading back to heaven, and Kevin is left behind. Fidget says come with us, and the Supreme Being says, no, he has to stay here and carry on the fight, whatever that fight might be.

I couldn’t help but draw a line between the ending of the film, where adults don’t listen to the child and blow up their house, and the fact that you recently directed a production of “Into the Woods,” which features the line “Children may not obey / but children will listen.” It feels to me like a demented B-side, where “Into the Woods” says, “Children Will Listen,” and “Time Bandits” says, “Parents Won’t Listen.”
[Laughs] I haven’t thought about it that way, but you may be right! That song at the end of “Into the Woods” is about being careful of what stories you tell your children. That, to me, is I would rather be telling my children stories that are more complicated and difficult, that do not always have a rosy, happy ending. There is danger out there.

What was your vision for the production itself? A lot of the production design looks very much in keeping with your overall aesthetic from filmmaking.
The idea was Pollocks Toy Theaters, a company that still makes these toy theaters that are basically cardboard, and you’ve got your thing to play. I was framing the whole show with a little girl at the beginning with this toy theater, and she is playing with her things. And I added another element to it, which is that the narrator and also the crazy man that goes through it … I conflated those characters into one. And that character turns out to be Death, a 19th-century undertaker. I just wanted to put this other level of death in there and a little girl playing. Because a little girl plays, and death is not a frightening creature to her. She doesn’t really have an understanding of it, and children don’t.

That’s why they’re bold and often quite brave. It’s normally the parents that are frightened. I remember when I first started having children with my wife, and it was the first time I felt real fear. I felt fear for them that they were in danger from rapists and pillagers and pedophiles roaming everywhere. It was the first time I actually was nervous about things. I had to overcome that and realize that children mainly survive. And I’ve been lucky enough that all mine have!

What were your encounters with Sondheim like? I understand that he gave this production his blessing before he passed away in 2021.
What I wanted to do was surprise Stephen, and then he went and died on me! I’ve never been able to surprise him. But in the beginning, when we were Zoom calling, I loved him because he was game for anything. When I first suggested these ideas, he just was curious to see this version I would do. He wasn’t protective of it or clinging to the way it had been done before. He wanted to see a new, exciting, different view of the whole show, and that’s the way we approached it. The main thing was to assemble a great cast, which we did, and then you start playing. But the main thing was that I really did want to keep this darker side of fairy tales very central to the thing that. And surprise, surprise, it was a big hit.

I saw the recent Broadway revival, which was a very interesting production because they stripped it down so much to focus on elevating the text and the lyrics. When you’re dealing with Sondheim, you can lose sight of the complexity in all the stagecraft.
I was busy trying to create a class system, basically. We had the step-family and Cinderella, they were upper class. The Baker and his wife were middle class. Jack and his Mom were poor. The friction between these different classes was very important to me. The Baker and his wife, it was very important how their relationship was working because they had not been able to create a child. I said in high school, she was the cheerleader, so full of life and bounce and everything. And he was the stud, the cool guy that all the girls fancied. In their failure to have a family and produce children, their relationship changed. He was getting the blame for it, forget about curses, for his inability to give her child. In the course of it, she becomes more embittered and rigid in the way she approaches him. In a strange way, he was kind of “un-manned,” you could argue, and became more dependent on her. She became more rigid, less motherly, and it made a much more interesting relationship … especially when she meets the prince in the woods.

On the note of Sondheim not being rigid with the text and with his own vision of it, maybe that provides an opportunity for us to segue into the “Time Bandits” series that’s being made right now for Apple TV+. Has that experience played into your relationship with the show at all?
I have no relationship to it, simple as that. For years, Handmade Films, which owned it, was still in our control because that was George Harrison and Monty Python. But eventually, it was sold to other companies that moved on. In the end, I lost control over it. I loved the idea of Taika Waititi doing it because I love “Jojo Rabbit.” I thought this is the guy to do it. And all I can say is that in the course of its development, I suddenly realized there was a major problem. There is, as I call it, a shortage of dwarves in the production. There are no dwarves involved, which was central to Michael Palin and my version of “Time Bandits.” The way we’d set it up with this little kid being the main character, I thought there was no way he could carry the whole film. So, I surrounded him with a gang of people the same size as him!

And what was wonderful about it, all these guys who had made their life being in Snow White and the Seven Dwarves pantomime, being in Ewok costumes, or, in the case of Kenny Baker, inside a tin can of R2-D2, suddenly, they were out. And they were now action heroes. They were the leads of the film. It was so exciting to see how they rose to the occasion and how they proved their worth as actors. The whole film had a very special quality because nobody had ever seen that before. I think was central to the success of the film. However, in the TV series, that is not to be. I don’t know why, but there you go.