As soon as Gilliam entered the room for our scheduled interview, his childlike exuberance proved to be infectious. With a high-pitched cackle, he opened the conversation by recalling an appearance he made on a Texas radio station during the “Brazil” publicity tour. A gentlemen phoned in and said, “Aw, Mr. Gilliam, I saw your film, ‘Brazil.’ Wonderful film, Mr. Brazil. I giggled in awe.” That’s what Gilliam wants on his tombstone: “He Giggled In Awe.” When asked whether he still considers himself a member of Monty Python, Gilliam replied, “I dunno, I’m a black lesbian first.” Yet his answers were not comprised entirely of quips, such as when he reflected on the parallels between himself and Don Quixote.

“I think I’ve lost a lot of battles with windmills,” mused Gilliam. “My problem is that I don’t distinguish between reality and fantasy. That’s why I keep being knocked down. When I was younger, I thought everybody saw the world the same way I did. It was only as I got older that I realized my version of the world is very different from other people’s versions. All my films are about the battle between reality and fantasy. You want to be able to do anything in life. You want to be able to fly. The image I like the most is in ‘Brazil,’ where Jonathan Pryce is taking off with his big wings, and the pavement comes up and grabs him. For me, that’s the image of how I see life—those two things in battle. When I was 31, I had to prove to myself that I couldn’t fly. I was telling a friend, ‘I don’t fly very high. I fly about a meter off the ground.’ Somewhere there was a part of my body that was convinced it had flown, and I had to get down on the ground and prove that I couldn’t levitate. It took a while to convince myself. I don’t know if these are muscle memories from when you are a baby. If you play piano, you learn that your fingers have a memory of their own. If I’m playing a piece that I know, I have to go back to the beginning. I could never pick it up in the middle. If your dad is throwing you around in the air when you’re a kid, that must stick somehow in your mind, and it convinced me that I could fly. I hate being disappointed.”

“When I see a building with scaffolding up and tarpaulins flapping, and suddenly the wind catches them, it looks like the sails of a schooner,” Gilliam continued. “I’ll think, ‘Why doesn’t the building move?’ You may recall that there’s a little old building with a sail in ‘The Meaning of Life.’ I just play in my head a lot, and I’m aware that it’s just playing, it’s not real. But as an animator and filmmaker, at least now I can make it real in cinematic terms. When we were making ‘Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,’ there’s a scene early on where Benicio and Johnny are checking into the hotel. They look over and see a guy on the phone, and suddenly the carpet starts crawling up his leg. That’s not in the book, that was me just walking around the casino we were going to be working in and looking around at the carpets, which were very big with vegetal patterns—flowers and leaves—and I thought, ‘It could come alive really easily.’ I personally do not take drugs. When I finished ‘Fear and Loathing,’ I promised that I was going to take acid. I had never taken acid before in my life, and I just got bored with it. Marijuana makes me implode. Every time I’d come from London to Hollywood working on movies, I’d arrive in the late afternoon and there’s always a party. There was so much cocaine around, but I couldn’t stand the hangover the next day. After three nights of cocaine use, I said, ‘Never again.’”