Terry Gilliam isn’t dead yet.

We need to underline this, because there’s been some confusion. Last year about this time, the Monty Python stalwart and filmmaker (Brazil, Time Bandits) seemed to be about as lively as a certain Norwegian Blue parrot.

Ditto for his epic new film, The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, which has been more than a quarter-century in the making due to casting and production snafus. It’s getting a one-day-only release on Wednesday — yet another hurdle for it to overcome. Further screening days may follow, if Wednesday does well.

American-born Briton Gilliam, 78, and his movie sparked drama during last year’s Cannes Film Festival debut when both suddenly appeared to be not just pining for the fiords, but joining the bleedin’ choir eternal — Gilliam through a stroke and the film through legal bollocks.

The film made its Cannes premiere, and so did Gilliam, although he teased everybody first with a shot of himself in his garden doing a yoga pose, sporting a T-shirt reading, “I’m not dead yet.”

And here he is on the line from London, to explain that rumours of the near-demise of himself and his film have gotten almost as silly as the Pythons’ famous “Dead Parrot” sketch.

Take this business of the stroke, for example, which he insists wasn’t really a stroke, if you follow his logic — which is never all that logical. It was actually two stroke-ish things masquerading as strokes.

“I had a few symptoms that my daughter thought was a stroke, but it wasn’t. Once it got into the news, it was easier to say ‘stroke’ than the other. Actually, I had one proper stroke, but it was just dealing with my optic nerve. It wasn’t getting me drooling or anything like that,” he says.

“And so I just lost a little bit of my left vision, which I find is ironic for a visionary director, which apparently I am. And the second one wasn’t actually a stroke. It was something a bit harder to say, a perforated medullary artery.”

That sounds like it has something to do with the heart — Google says it’s the neck — but his heart requires work, too. He needs an artery-valve replacement much like the one Mick Jagger just got.

“I’ve got one of those things waiting to pop in my left artery, but it’s not necessary yet,” Gilliam says, not at all fussed by this.

“I’m not as physically active as Mick is on stage. We’re all just becoming more and more bionic, you know. We just go in and change the muffler and spark plugs. I think I thrive on these things.”

He’s also itching to talk about The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, which stars Adam Driver, Jonathan Pryce, Stellan Skarsgard and Olga Kurylenko, and which is based on Miguel de Cervantes’ classic novel, Don Quixote, about the adventures of a windmill-battling knight-errant and his savant sidekick, Sancho Panza:

Q. What made you so determined to stick with this movie after all the hassles, including Johnny Depp dropping out of the lead role? You literally almost killed yourself making this picture. Don Quixote even defeated Orson Welles, who failed at his own movie attempt.

A. Once you take on a subject matter like Don Quixote, you’ve just got to do whatever it demands. Quixote just has a history of making itself very difficult to be turned into a film, and so once I start something, I really feel I have to finish it somehow. Anyway, I thought it’s one thing I could probably do that Orson Welles failed to do, which is to finish Quixote. Hahah!

Q. There’s so much happening on the screen in The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, as in all of your films, it makes me wonder if anybody has ever approached you to make a superhero movie or maybe a Fast & Furious sequel. Ever been tempted to do a franchise movie?

A. Nope! Not at all. That’s factory work, and I don’t want to work in a factory. Those things are so big. I mean, something like The Brothers Grimm was the biggest budget I had had; that was like $72 million. At a certain point, it doesn’t keep the adrenalin flowing in the way it does when you’ve got a budget of half of what you need. That’s the main thing: I’ve got to be really possessed by the ideas to go through the whole nightmare of making movies. I don’t find it the greatest train set a boy’s ever had; I find it hard work. Fulfilling hard work, but it’s hard work.

Q. It’s funny how you finished The Man Who Killed Don Quixote about the same time as the Welles estate finally put together his final film, The Other Side of the Wind.

A. Yes, and I wish they hadn’t finished it for him! I saw it and thought, ‘Orson, this is not good!’ It’s the thing that always worries me about getting to be a certain age. If your time passed, should you stop now? Before you make a fool of yourself? But I was told by some people who saw some of the scenes cut by Orson before he died, and what was done in the film as they finished it, that they changed the cuts in certain scenes. So I don’t know if they made them better or worse, but people who had seen both said the final version was not as good as what Orson was working on. We don’t know.

Q. I’m impressed by your casting for The Man Who Killed Don Quixote. Most people wouldn’t think of Adam Driver, Jonathan Pryce, Stellan Skarsgard and Olga Kurylenko as a likely combo for a Don Quixote movie.

A. Yes! That’s the fun part, putting a gang together of people that don’t normally work together. But they’re all smart, funny, talented people and that’s what I like. I kind of cast that way. It’s got to be people that I’m going to want to work with, that seem to have a similar attitude towards work or what we’re doing. I don’t sit there and think that much; I just respond very quickly. Adam and I had one lunch together and at the beginning of the lunch, he said a couple of words that made me think, “This is the guy.”

Q. The bounds of reality are certainly challenged in your movie, to say the least. What advice do you have for your audience?

A. Remain awake, hahah! Just go in with no preconceptions and trust me to get them through. Kids always like what I do, even though some of the films seem to be much more profound or more intelligent. They just get it because they’re open-minded.

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I think so many people, as they get older in life, they put blinkers on, or they put structural patterns up there as to what a film is supposed to be like, and I say, fuhgeddaboudit ... Follow these characters. It’s Adam and Jonathan. Hang in there with them and see where it goes.

Q. Last time we spoke, in 2014, you were in the midst of doing a series of Monty Python reunion shows, which went extremely well. Any chance of another reunion of the Pythons?

A. No. Two of them are basically gone. Graham (Chapman) is dead and Terry (Jones) is suffering from serious dementia. The (remaining) four of us wouldn’t be the same. It took all six of us to do what Python did. What’s interesting right now, this year, is our 50th anniversary, and there’s going to be a re-release of Life of Brian, sometime this year. The film would be perfect for this world we live in now, because it is going to bother a lot of people!