According to Sir Michael Palin, "I remember one day when we'd been doing a lot of crouching with the castle in the background and Terry Gilliam asked us to crouch once more because there was a lovely shaft of sunlight coming and catching John's helmet. John went absolutely berserk, saying 'You know, I'm not waiting for a shaft of light to strike my fucking helmet. We've been here for four hours, we've crouched and it's cold. What are you waiting for? The moon and the stars to arrange themselves around my head'." Terry Gilliam recalled, "When we did the scene where they are at the battlements and the cow is thrown over it was a matte shot and the only way to do it was to dig a hole in the ground and have them all on their knees. John was going apeshit because he was uncomfortable. I finally said, 'Fuck it. It's your sketch, you wrote it. I'm just trying to make it work. And this is a tricky shot here'. So I said, 'Fuck you', and went off in a snit and laid down in the grass, saying I'm not going to direct this."