Is Terry Gilliam an Auteur?

Auteur – a director who influences their films so much that they rank as their author

              

Terry Gilliam’s 12 feature films

Terry Gilliam is an American-born British screenwriter, animator, comedian, actor and film director however, he originally started his career as an animator and strip cartoonist. After being welcomed into the Monty Python comedy troupe (becoming the only member not born in Britain) he started animating and was also eventually given small acting roles. He was voted “most likely to succeed in high school” which was Proventil be true in the 1970s when he became a director going on to do 12 feature films including Time Bandits (1981), Brazil (1985), 12 Monkeys (1985), The Fisher King (1991), The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus (2009) and The Zero Theorem (2013) among others.

Terry Gilliam with the rest of the Monty Python team

After over 40 years in the directing business, Gilliam has become well known for having characters face dark and paranoid situations, his work also includes black comedy and tragicomedy elements with surprise endings, features that have grown to define his work. Many of his films express his opposition to bureaucracy and authoritarianism usually represented through a fight or struggle against a great power and most explore the theme of imagination; his co-writer Charles Mckeown once said “the theme of imagination, and the importance of imagination, to how you live and how you think and so on… that’s very much a Terry theme.”

“I really want to encourage a kind of fantasy, a kind of magic. I love the term magic realism, whoever invented it – I do actually like it because it says certain things. It’s about expanding how you see the world. I think we live in an age where we’re just hammered, hammered to think this is what the world is. Television’s saying, everything’s saying ‘That’s the world.’ And it’s not the world. The world is a million possible things” -Terry Gilliam

 

So is Terry Gilliam an Auteur? The answer is yes. Even in the beginning when he was starting his career as a co-animator for Monty Python his animation was mixed with his own art allowing him to express his thoughts and opinions through his work. He has often fought with studio executives to maintain his creative principles and incorporates a lot of recurring themes into his films. One of these themes, as I previously mentioned, is Imagination. He referres to his three films Time Bandits, Brazil and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen as “The Triology of Inagination”; all 3 movies focus on the struggles faced in our society and attempts to escape those struggles through imagination, Time Bandits is told in the point of view of a child, Brazil in the point of view of a middle aged man and Muchausen, an elderly man. For these reason among others it is more than fair to say the ‘auteur’ label is applicable for Terry Gilliam.