Michael Palin, actor

Having done The Holy Grail and Life of Brian, we found ourselves with a much bigger budget for The Meaning of Life. This meant we could spend an entire week on things like the sketch with Mr Creosote [the monstrously fat diner]. The sheer amount of minestrone used in the vomiting sequence was only possible because we were with Universal. That part was filmed at Seymour leisure centre in Paddington. On the morning after the final scene, in which Mr Creosote explodes and thousands of gallons of vomit get hurled against the walls, the room was all cleaned up immaculately – and, within 12 hours, two people were married in there. I wonder if they ever knew what had happened hours before.

The sketches drew on what we were feeling at the time. The Miracle of Birth came from Graham Chapman, who was actually a doctor, noticing that hospitals were changing, getting lots and lots of machinery ("More apparatus please, nurse!"). This gave surgeons more and more time to just chat as a patient lay there, in our case a woman having a baby. But the most ghastly sketch and one I still find terribly funny was The Liver Donor. Someone comes to a man's door to take his liver and he says: "No, no, I'm not dead." And he's told: "Oooh, it doesn't say that on the form." That harked back to Python's love of bureacracy: you know, people coming round from the council, 10 of them, with different bits of paper.

'Meaning of Life had the best soundtrack' … Eric Idle prepares to sing The Galaxy Song. Photograph: Rex Features

The songs in the Python TV shows were always a little bit chirpy, done with our resident choir of about three people. So it was just nice to be able to do things properly and record them well. I think the soundtrack to The Meaning of Life is the best of all the Python movies.

With Every Sperm Is Sacred, which we turned into a lavish song and dance routine, we had to be careful with all the kids. Certain things had to be dubbed later. In the film, you hear Terry [Jones] telling the children: "He has to put a little rubber thing on the end of his cock." What he actually said was: "A little rubber thing on the end of his sock." The kids were either totally mystified – or they understood perfectly what was really going on.

Also, although it looked as if it was happening in a classroom full of pupils, the bit in Sex Education where John [Cleese] is "hard at work on the desk", had to be done without any children present at all. Indeed, I'd have liked it to be filmed without any grownups present, too! But there we go – we were contractually obliged to be in there.

I found it hard to keep a straight face in the scene where I was the back end of a tiger – which was OK, since you couldn't see my face most of the time. Terry [Gilliam] had to play this extraordinary character: a black African in a skin that peeled off to reveal a white man underneath. Poor Terry: it was a hot day and he just couldn't get this skin off. All we could hear was a little voice inside saying: "Oh fuck, oh shit. I can't get outta here." I thought there was something weird, wonderful and psychologically profound about this – a white man who couldn't get out of a black man's skin.

The writing process was quite cumbersome. An awful lot of material didn't get used. Holy Grail had a structure, a loose one: the search for the grail. Same with Life of Brian. With this, it wasn't so clear. In the end, we just said: "Well, what the heck. We have got lots of good material, let's give it the loosest structure, which will be the meaning of life."

Since we'd more money and weren't doing it for the BBC, we were more daring. It's a darker film than the others. There were a lot of gasps, as we had expected. But some scenes, like Every Sperm and Creosote, are unforgettable.

Wonderfully surreal … (from left) Terry Jones, Terry Gilliam, Michael Palin, John Cleese, Eric Idle and Graham Chapman. Photograph: Allstar/Cinetext/Sportsphoto

Terry Jones, actor and director

Douglas Adams phoned me up and said he'd just written a book called The Meaning of Liff. I said: "Oh no! Our film is going to be called The Meaning of Life." That's why in the titles, there's a tombstone saying: "The Meaning of Liff." And then some lightning turns the final F into an E.

It took me three hours to put the makeup on for Mr Creosote. John was bursting with laughter when he was doing the "waffa-thin mint" line. He just couldn't keep a straight face. The vomit was compressed soup, actually. We had canisters of it with lumps in – and a catapult to fling it. Everybody wanted some chucked at them. Although it became a food fight, we could only throw it at those extras who had not-so-decent costumes on.

We filmed Holy Grail in Scotland and Life of Brian in Tunisia, and we were all on set every day. But The Meaning of Life was more disparate: only the people who were acting that day would come in. So we didn't have the combined opinion of everybody. I missed that: the full burden of responsibility fell on me.

The film was banned in Ireland, just like Life of Brian had been. And another film I made, Personal Services, was banned there, too. They've loosened up a bit now, you know.

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