It's Terry Gilliam, it's Terry Jones and it's Graham Chapman.
It's John Cleese, it's Eric Idle, it's Michael Palin.
It's really what makes us laugh, I suppose.
It's a ragbag of sketches...
set at a lot of different times and in a lot of different places.
A lot of different countries, even. A lot of different cultures.
A lot of it's to do with the meaning of life.
On one level, it's very intelligent. On the other level, it's silly and infantile.
-No, no it wasn't! -I mean, what's it all about?
I wrote large bits of it, they still won't say what it's about.
Why are we here, what's life all about?
Is God really real or is there some doubt?
Well, tonight we're going to sort it all out
Tonight it's the meaning of life
-What is this one here? -That's philosophy.
Is that a sport?
No, it's more of an attempt to construct a viable hypothesis...
to explain the meaning of life.
That sounds wonderful.
Would you like to talk about the meaning of life, darling?
Sure. Why not?
Nobody's really quite certain how it all started.
Some people think it's amoeba, some think it's gasses coming together.
Nobody's really quite sure about it.
Do you mean the film? Sorry. Oh, the film.
The film The Meaning of Life.
I can't remember how it started at all!
I know so little about this film.
I'm the wrong person to be sitting in front of this camera.
I was delighted when I got a chance to see it...
because I realised the boys had been doing some good work.
I think that after Life of Brian...
there was probably a bit of a pause while we decided if we wanted to do another film.
Whether there was...
enough will and energy within the group to do another film because...
Holy Grail had been done.
It was a long wait before we got around to Life of Brian.
I think Life of Brian worked so well...
and it began to make a bit of money...
which is always a way of getting the Pythons together...
that there was a general feeling, "Let's have another go."
Dennis O'Brien, our business manager at the time...
said that if we made another movie extremely rapidly...
we would never have to work again, which seemed like a very reasonable offer.
Just tell Jones that he'll never have to work again and he's in!
No! We're doing it for a bet.
-God told us to do it. -To tell the truth, we are completely mad.
We're inmates of a Bengali psychiatric institution...
and we escaped by making this skin out of old used cereal packets.
We needed to look for a budget of $9 or $10 million.
It was obvious that we weren't going to raise that...
through private investors, which we had done heretofore.
We were going to need some studio to back us.
What we decided early on was that we didn't want their notes...
because nobody could tell us how to write a Monty Python film.
If we didn't know, how the fuck are they going to tell us?
So I'd wrote a little 12-line poem...
and John G. and I gave them the budget.
So there was the budget and the poem.
Thom Mount, to his eternal credit, said yes to that, which was fabulous.
I thanked him about a year ago.
I met him again and said, "l thought it was a fantastic job you did...
"okaying an entire movie from a poem and a budget."
He said, "Actually, it was really a sprat to catch a mackerel."
Because having got the Pythons, he was then able to sign up...
every other major comic in America to work for Universal...
purely on the strength that he got the Pythons.
So we started to work together on the next movie...
straight away after Life of Brian had come out.
I think it was a very major mistake because Life of Brian...
which I still think is the best film that we did...
we'd been working on it a long time...
and we needed to get away from each other and have some fresh ideas...
and maybe get together a year later...
and start seeing where we were going.
Instead of that, we sat down to write...
without having any idea what we were going to write about.
It took a long time for Meaning of Life to gestate because...
we had several other films in mind before it became The Meaning of Life.
At one point, we were going to do World War lll...
which was a pretty exciting idea...
because part of it would be a war where everybody wore...
Iike sportsmen or Formula 1 drivers with ads on everything.
We could have ads throughout the whole film.
It was a way where we could finance the film.
Sorry it's another clock, only there was a bit of a mix-up.
Walters thought he was buyin' a present...
and Spadger and l had already got the other one.
Well, it's beautiful. They're both beautiful.
So the idea was to try and find a subject and what we were going to do.
It didn't start off as The Meaning of Life at all.
It was going to be, I don't know, we were just sort of writing material.
I kind of had a feeling that it would be quite fun to do a sketch film...
because I didn't think we had ever successfully done a sketch film.
John Cleese was convinced that you couldn't possibly do a sketch film...
because sketch films wouldn't sustain...
for more than, I think his theory was 40 minutes or something.
You can do sketches up to about 45 to 50 minutes.
People are happy. After that you really do have to have a story.
We all started writing sketch material, basically...
and then hoped we'd be able to make some shape out of it.
I just have memories of a sketch...
that Mike and Terry wrote...
that involved handbags as prophylactics.
I can't remember the whole thing but I think it involved a lot of different...
strengths of socks, first, that failed.
Eventually it was a handbag that did the trick.
That's a real good idea.
I'm going to just empty out the contents of my bag...
and have a look through them, okay?
Great idea.
But we really didn't find that there was any theme emerging...
so we broke up and then got together a bit later...
and did another month of writing, and this went on for....
My recollection is quite a long time.
John wouldn't come along for the first year and a bit.
He would just occasionally contribute bits.
I remember him not being there a lot of the early time.
I just remember that I was doing a lot, and I began to feel...
a bit reluctant to suddenly commit another month of writing...
to something that didn't seem to me to be going anywhere.
I remember several things were going on in my life.
I was nearly about to marry an English girl.
Extraordinary, really...
because at that point I'd married nine or ten Americans.
I thought it'd be interesting to marry an English woman...
and probably get good press for a couple of months.
So I was sort of pursuing that relationship...
rather than going off and writing this stuff that wasn't going anywhere.
I associate Meaning of Life with an awful lot of bits of paper.
We had so many drafts and so much material.
And we were also writing from different directions...
to try and find something that would make the film.
We'd written quite a lot of material. It didn't seem to fit into any kind of order...
any kind of shape at all...
until, eventually, later on...
about a year and half or two years later after starting writing...
we all got together in Jamaica.
On the plane there, I think....
Everybody read the script that we had on the plane there...
and realised it just didn't work at all. It was a disaster.
So when we got to Jamaica...
instead of all having a film that was already shaped...
and all we had to do was titivate it over the next two weeks...
we sat down at the first meeting and said, "What on earth are we going to do?"
We swapped around the writing groups because, basically, I don't write.
I just do things.
I got stuck with John and Graham.
That was a great experience.
Once in your life is enough because John is so methodical and careful...
and Graham is not really there and I sort of work at a frenzied pace.
I don't think we achieved anything that day, except mutual hatred.
I just remember sitting outside...
around this table, writing the material.
A lot of these guys...
sort of traders and sellers of various knickknacks...
would go along the beach, we were quite close to the beach.
Most of the knickknacks were sort of these huge sculpted phalluses.
It's sort of a corny thing.
They do, actually, in Jamaica produce these huge phalluses...
which made us all feel frightfully inadequate.
It's a nice thing to bring home for the wife, an 18-foot mahogany dong.
Good evening. Here's a little number I tossed off recently in the Caribbean.
Isn't it awfully nice to have a penis
Isn't it frightfully good to have a dong
It's swell to have a stiffy It's divine to own a dick
From the tiniest little tadger to the world's biggest prick
So we went on and on accumulating material.
We still didn't have a centre to the film.
What's this film about?
What's it about? We've got to find some shape.
After about three days, I remember saying to the others something like:
"We're not coming up with this. Why don't we just abandon it...
"have a really good Caribbean holiday for 10 days...
"and then go back to London and say, 'God, we flogged ourselves...
"'and we just couldn't come up with anything at all.'"
I almost sold this idea to the others.
Jonesy came down the next morning and said, "l was thinking...."
I always feel it's somebody's life story.
But we could never agree whose life story.
At that point somebody, Eric or John, said, "lt could be anyone's life story."
And then someone else said, "lt could be seven ages of man.
"lt could be the meaning of life."
And, suddenly, we had it.
It's a dangerous business playing the Python game of who thought of what first.
As soon as I say, "l had the idea of the meaning of life"...
someone would say, "I'm outraged. It was my idea."
Then they all say, "No, it was my idea."
I can say honestly, "lt wasn't my idea."
I think I said that this should be about the meaning of life.
I came down to breakfast saying, "The meaning of life."
"Of course, the meaning of life."
Was it the Pythons that actually came up with it?
I thought it was a David Lean script that we had stolen.
I'm not sure exactly. These are the things we try to hide.
I think there's a statute of limitations on these things and we can reveal all now.
The Pythons stole from the best. They always did.
There was never originality in the group.
I won't name names, who are the least original...
but there were quite a few in the group.
The meaning of life just seemed a wonderful catchall...
a bit like Holy Grail was a wonderful catchall...
for all sorts of sketches, observations and slapstick and whatever.
Once we got that, I think the idea of this sort of portentous...
beginning, middle, end, life, death and all that...
gave us something to work against.
It was always good when Python had something slightly solemn to work against.
That was when most of our best material came out.
I am death.
Well, we have some people from America for dinner tonight--
-Who is it, darling? -A Mr. Death or something.
He's come about the reaping?
Good luck, everybody. One, two....
The main problem was that...
I had a lot of padding on and was dressed as a 60-year-old woman...
who had had 70 children, with a wig on.
That tends to undermine your directorial authority.
-Yeah. -Coming down on it?
Should we see the kids? We should be okay.
I think Terry's a better director when he's dressed up.
He's a little more timorous when he's wearing ordinary things.
When he's dressed up.... It's much more exciting...
to be directed by someone who's dressed completely stupidly...
or in an outrageous costume.
You've got to be out of your mind to try to direct Python.
I've always respected Terry for having the drive...
and the decency and the humanity to take on the job.
They have no respect for the director, basically.
I think The Meaning of Life is beautifully directed.
I think Jonesy is absolutely bang-on song in his direction.
It looks really fantastic. It's made very well.
I think he is the best shooter of music.
The Meaning of Life is actually a musical with eight or nine musical numbers.
It is in fact a disguised musical.
If a sperm is wasted
God gets quite irate
And I gotta say he did a very good job.
I admired him a great deal when he was doing Mr. Equator.
Or do I mean Mr. Creosote? His name's Mr. Creosote in the restaurant.
And directing the thing. I thought that that's....
He has extraordinary energy and dedication...
and I thought he did a wonderful job, actually, I really do.
Okay, stand by. We have three minutes before we shoot.
We filmed the whole thing in a wide shot...
with all these explosions going on behind us.
Something like 80 explosions in one sequence.
You knew you had to keep going and if it went wrong...
you had to start again and reset all the explosions.
It'd be another hour before you could get going.
So that was quite hairy and difficult.
It was dreadful and uncomfortable to lie there.
I had two lines and it took two days to shoot it.
I had a line each day, more or less.
Nasty, sharp, pointy, dirty stones.
Lying on our stomachs, extraordinarily uncomfortable...
unbelievably boring and extremely tedious...
and utterly out of order.
I think it was a happy set.
I remember I was pretty tired towards the end.
I remember coming back one day from shooting the sequence...
where the British soldiers find the very long tiger...
with Michael and Eric in it...
which I thought was a funny sequence.
I remember driving home and just feeling unbelievably tired.
That tended to happen to me.
I have lots of energy, but it tends to be energy in a burst.
Whereas one or two other people, Terry Jones in particular...
just seem to be able to go steadily over a lot of weeks...
without getting too tired.
It was perfectly pleasant. Acting's always been a joy.
Everybody knows exactly what to do.
It's like being a good soccer team.
I'll start again, it's like being a good football team!
Everybody knows where to run, into the gaps.
It was very well-oiled.
I don't think there was a lot of trouble or bitching...
or unnecessary back-slapping.
There was a gent from Actors' Equity who came down...
as they do, to check out that the actors are being treated fairly...
and decently and paid highly.
He was pissing and moaning...
complaining about the fact that we were putting actors out of work.
By doing all the parts, we were putting actors out of work...
and this had to stop.
He paid no attention to all the other actors and extras who were there...
and all the crew that were there.
I think all the Pythons actually do pull off good performances in the film.
One of my favourite performances...
which I think are some of the best things they've ever done...
is the Protestant family.
Look at them. Bloody Catholics.
Filling the bloody world up with people they can't afford to bloody feed.
What are we, dear?
Protestant, and fiercely proud of it.
The Protestant couple is as good as we ever got.
It's just brilliant.
Why do they have so many children?
Every time they have sexual intercourse they have to have a baby.
Jonesy was very generous, he gave me two great parts.
The Protestant couple, which Jonesy was convinced I should do...
Iast minute and it was very sweet. I enjoyed playing that part.
"We've had sex twice, we have two children!"
What do you mean?
I mean we've got two children, and we've had sexual intercourse twice.
The whole piece was shot as one take, without the cut-ins.
I mean, we do cut in a little bit close at one point.
They're so flawless in their performances and the characters are good.
Eric's character, the Protestant lady....
She's just wonderful.
John as the headmaster giving the sex lesson is brilliant, as well.
It's kind of effortless.
Before I begin the lesson, will those of you...
playing in the match this afternoon move your clothes down...
onto the lower peg immediately after lunch...
before you write home, if you're not getting a haircut...
unless you have a brother going out this weekend as the guest of another boy...
then collect his note before lunch, put it in your letter after your haircut.
Make sure he moves your clothes onto the lower peg for you.
I think that John, despite his dislike of it, and has stated...
he always puts it down, is actually rather brilliant throughout it.
Nothing beats his crusty headmaster giving the sex lesson.
Hello, dear.
Do stand up when my wife enters the room, Carter.
Sorry, sir.
Humphrey, I hope you don't mind. I told the Garfields we'd dine with them tonight.
Yes, well, I suppose we must.
Surprisingly unembarrassing!
I think it was something to do with the fact that it's our set.
One of the usual problems if you go into a movie is it's someone else's set...
and there's lots of people who've been on the movie for four weeks...
and here you are arriving on week five to do your bit...
and you don't know many of the faces and you don't know the style of the movie....
That first day on a movie can be a bit scary, 'cause you don't know what's going on.
You must rely on the director...
and what percentage of directors know what they're doing?
About 10% or 15%, I would assume from my experience.
So the problem is, it's strange and you don't know what you're doing...
There we are. That's better.
Now, Carter.
-Yes, sir? -What is it?
-It's an ocarina, sir. -Bring it up here.
The man now starts making thrusting movements with his pelvic area....
...whereas on the Python set, we'd been working together...
at that point, for 13 years.
All the people. We were there from day one.
All the people on the set were friends of ours...
and technicians that we liked and felt comfortable with.
So the sense of trust and comfort was very, very high.
So doing that scene...
remarkably, remarkably unembarrassing.
I think it was quite pleasant.
I remember one rainy day I was forced to share a dressing room with 36 girls...
just wearing panties and roller skates. It was just hell!
I can't tell you how awful that was.
It's a real lot of tits, which is good...
but probably not enough.
I think there are things in The Meaning of Life...
which we've done which, in outline, would probably sound totally outrageous.
How can you do this? But I think when you see them...
because of the execution, the way it looks, the performances...
really still come across very strongly and quite cathartic.
I think it's still a shocking film. I'm proud of it, it's kind of a punk film.
Some parts are just as nasty as you could wish, still, today!
They're as extreme and gross as....
Nobody's done Mr. Creosote exploding...
or the liver donors. It's just disgusting!
That's Gilliam, getting all that! It's Gilliam's art direction.
He's putting in all that blood and making it much more violent.
That wasn't so much about art direction.
That was about depth of character, we're talking about here!
Python just plays with these superficial cartoon-like creatures out there.
I went for something that nobody's ever attempted...
a Jewish Rastafarian!
-Yes? -Hello. Can we have your liver?
-What? -Your liver.
It's a large glandular organ in your abdomen.
You know, it's reddish-brown, sort of--
Yeah, yeah, I know what it is, but I'm using it.
The liver transplant, which is pretty gruesome.
I don't think you'd be able to persuade any Hollywood studio nowadays...
to do something like that.
It's wonderfully over the top...
with Terry hanging on to his liver as it's being taken out.
Terry and John have this sort of love affair in the background.
It's not literal, it's all slightly stylised but it enables you to do outrageous things.
And then suddenly you go into a lovely song.
Whenever life gets you down, Mrs. Brown
And things seem hard or tough
And people are stupid, obnoxious or daft
And you feel that you've had quite enough
Is something up?
Yes. During the night, old Perkins got his leg bitten, sort of, off.
Yeah. Been in the wars, have we?
Yes.
Any headache? Bowels all right?
Well, let's have a look at this one leg of yours, then.
A military sketch...
Iike the Zulu sequence, which has some of my favourite lines:
"Lost his leg. What should I do about it, sir?"
"When you play football, favour the other leg!"
Great lines like that are coming from another, different direction.
-Yes, well, this is nothing to worry about. -Good.
There's a lot of it about. Probably a virus. Keep warm, plenty of rest...
and if you're playing football or anything, try and favour the other leg.
The scene in the tent during the Zulu wars is just breathtaking.
The four: Mike, John, Graham and Eric...
it's just a four-shot and it's so wonderful.
And their performances are just brilliant.
-Thanks for the reassurance. -Not at all. That's what I'm here for.
Any other problems I can reassure you about?
No, I'm fine.
Jolly good. Well, must be off.
So it'll just grow back again, then, will it?
I think I'd better come clean with you about this.
John's legs are on the opposite way around to everyone else's.
Have you noticed?
Now John, I mean where everyone else's right leg is, is John's left leg.
And where most people's left leg is, is his right leg.
I've shared dressing rooms with him, so I've noticed this.
It's kind of weird, but I think it's part of his talent.
And his buttocks....
John's buttocks have no split in the middle.
They're just one whole buttock.
Again, you know, you get to know this from working with people.
That's pretty weird, I tell you!
I've worked with John, now....
'67, Frost Report. We're talking about nearly forty years.
I've never ever seen him go to the toilet.
Lucky man.
There were a lot of fish in The Meaning of Life...
because it is a fish film.
We kind of made it quite clear that it was a fish....
I mean it was a film for fish and about fish.
That's why there's a lot of fish in it.
It was a very fishy sort of....
It was just a fishy time in those days....
They're wonderful creatures, fish. Wonderful creatures.
Fishy, fishy, fishy, fish.
Fish, fish, fish....
"Fishy, fishy" is as bizarre as anybody's ever made on celluloid.
I think it's.... You're gonna feel....
It's impenetrably obtuse and yet it seems to be about something.
One of my favourite things we ever did was the fish-slapping dance.
I don't think it'd be funny if we'd been hitting each other...
with badgers or dogs or something like that, or armadillos.
It was really.... Fish-slapping dance worked...
because I hit John lightly on the edge of the face with two pilchards.
They were pilchards and I feel very important.
People say two fishes and they're two pilchards in oil.
I love playing the fish.
I loved that sequence...
the fish saying "good morning" as though they'd all just arrived in the office.
That sort of forced bonhomie. "'Morning." "'Morning."
-'Morning. -'Morning.
It was really funny and so nice that it turned out that they were in a tank...
watching one of their recent colleagues being eaten, I thought it was good.
-Howard's being eaten. -ls he?
Fish are quite mysterious and slightly inert...
and smooth and shiny.
They just swim and you don't know what they're thinking.
You wonder...
what's this thing about keeping fish around us in little tanks...
when they're in the sea, everywhere around the island, anyway.
I think it's because they don't have much....
Fish don't have an obvious character like cats and dogs.
You can be quite funny about cats and dogs.
They meow and look at you in a certain way, whereas fish just swim.
When you think about 60% of the stuff Graham Chapman and I wrote...
it seemed to be either about animals or food.
I'm thinking of the pet shop with the parrot and the cheese shop.
I don't know why those particular subjects always struck me as being very funny...
but they just seem to recur throughout our work.
-Good afternoon, sir, and how are we today? -Better.
-Better? -Better get a bucket. I'm gonna throw up.
Gaston? A bucket for monsieur.
One sketch that nearly didn't make it to the final script was the Mr. Creosote scene.
When Michael read it out...
it was just after lunch, I think.
We'd thought it was our best sketch...
so we kept it back to lead with after lunch!
Everybody just hated it and it went on the reject pile.
It was read out, I can't remember, I think by Michael...
possibly by Terry, but Michael usually read their stuff out.
I knew that Michael and Terry thought that it was an exceptionally funny piece...
and it completely laid an egg, it was very strange.
They were surprised, but it didn't get any laughs...
and it was just put to one side and we passed on.
It was part of that pile of material that wasn't good enough.
I think about a month later we got a telephone call from John.
John said, "I'll tell you what, little plum. This will bring a smile to your face.
"I've been reading that Mr. Creosote sketch, I think it'd be quite funny."
-Merci, Gaston. -I haven't finished.
I suddenly realised that that head waiter...
could be a wonderfully funny character and I said to Mike and Terry:
"Do you mind if Graham and I have a go at rewriting it?"
They said, "No, fine. Have a go."
We rewrote it and built it slightly more carefully.
The building of it was a bit more chaotic...
so we kind of piled it on, one disgustingness at a time.
Would monsieur care for an apéritif...
or would he prefer to order straight away?
Today, we have for appetizers.... Excuse me.
The worst bit was that John kept on corpsing...
when we were doing the wafer-thin mint.
It was quite a long take, actually.
The camera pulls out from Mr. Creosote.
It started off with me having a fish in my mouth.
The camera pulled out and then we had the wafer-thin mint.
Then it came back in and John always....
Towards the end of the scene, he just couldn't keep a straight face.
I think we did about 20 takes of it.
We couldn't do the fish anymore, because the fish....
I don't know what happened to it. It went off.
I started eating it or something.
We ended up having a bit of pineapple stuck in my mouth.
We finally got a take with John not laughing.
Finally, monsieur, a wafer-thin mint.
In order to create this vomit they used Heinz mixed-vegetable soup.
It had all gone off by the third day. So the place did smell kind of foul.
The funny thing, no matter how bad the quasi-vomit smelled...
at the end of the last sequence we did...
we had this big catapult...
which we filled with 14 gallons of this stuff.
It would hurl it across the restaurant and hit people.
All the extras wanted to be hit with it. I don't know why.
Bon appétit.
We did the final vomiting sequence...
and tons of minestrone soup thrown against the walls and vomited everywhere.
Then they had to clean it all up because the next day at 11:30 a.m...
there was a wedding in the same hall.
It's a wonderful idea!
The next morning these lovely people, the girl in white, getting married...
with this vomit that had just been scraped off all the walls.
I wonder if they know?
I love the idea of octogenarians...
who've been slaving away for years behind a desk...
suddenly throwing it all to the winds and setting off.
I'd drawn "Crimson Permanent Assurance" as a cartoon.
It was gonna be an animated piece, originally...
with buildings sailing around the place.
By the time we got around to making The Meaning of Life...
and reassembling as Python...
I'd been able to make a couple of films of my own...
and was bored with animation.
The whole idea of having to come back and be an animator...
was beyond tedious.
So I somewhat conned the others into letting me make...
what could have been an animated film, into a live-action film.
It allowed me to have my own sound stage with my own crew...
and my own actors, and I didn't need to hang around...
and do too many grotesque parts in the main part of the film.
Terry would always sketch while we were talking and meeting.
He did a beautiful picture of an office building...
with those things they put on when they're washing office buildings...
and under sail.
That was the whole leitmotif of this movie.
That was the idea.
It was gonna be a six-minute bit and some characters would recur in it...
and it would go on.
Of course, Terry being Terry...
once he got his own studio, his own people, and his own cameraman...
he was just off making his own film.
Good Lord!
The Crimson Permanent Assurance!
Absurd! We were making our film...
and next door this film was growing exponentially.
I think it was 14 minutes in the end, one stage and way over budget.
Ross! Get the readouts!
Terry always has the illusion that he brings things in under budget.
Well, not in fact so.
I don't know how much it cost. I'm told it was quite expensive.
But nobody ever told me to stop.
I expect the producers to come in and say:
I'm warning you.
"Get out." But nobody ever came and said stop.
I think there was a lot of resentment going on...
from the rest of the group doing the proper movie.
I had all the big, sweeping stuff.
No, I don't know.
I've risen above petty details like cost.
It's all tax-deductible We're fairly incorruptible
Sailing on the wide accountancy
He ended up having a bigger studio than we had.
We kept going, "How is he doing it on the budget?"
I thought, "Oh, fine."
Me, I was quite busy doing our film.
It was only occasionally when I went into his set...
and saw these vast sets that he'd got built and this cast of thousands...
all elderly men.
I was pretty impressed.
It was only later that I discovered how much he'd spent on the sequence.
It was a lot longer than five minutes.
The next thing I knew about it, he'd produced a sequence...
that lasted, I think, 31 minutes...
and which had gone $1 million over budget.
I think it was cut down to 23 minutes.
Of course, it stopped the movie...
'cause you can't come along with a series of sketches...
and then have a 23-minute thing.
It was just too long, too diverse, and it didn't fit in the play.
So somebody had the brilliant idea of making it the precursor film...
and showing it as an opening film, like a little short...
and that was a brilliant move because what happened was...
when we showed it at Cannes, it was entered in competition...
this whole Gilliam film opens it and it's shot beautifully...
and it's really original in look.
Of course, the big film snobs loved it. So we'd got them.
Before we'd even done the first sketch they were eating out of our hands.
Fantastique!
Cannes was becoming positively Pythonesque.
I retreated into the only haven of sanity, the cinema.
They were showing the official British entry:
Monty Python's The Meaning of Life.
I'm surprised they chose it. I really am.
I'm very surprised.
It's not Russian, or in French or anything, is it?
It's not particularly arty, really.
I mean, bits are.
No. I'm very surprised and a bit disappointed.
You've got to remember we were quite naive...
We were never part of the British film industry.
We didn't know how it worked.
We were just this little group that made all together four films...
and got nominated at BAFTA once...
which I remember was a nomination for costume design for Life of Brian.
That was the full extent of the recognition of the British film industry.
Extraordinary!
The contribution that we were making to British film humour.
We were always outside the film industry. We didn't know anything much about it.
We relied on one or two trusted people like John Goldstone...
to go off and talk to people and find out what the deal was.
-Best actor at the Cannes festival? -There's an award for best actor.
-ls there? -Yes.
No, I don't think so.
Terry Jones, you directed it. You've just reeled back from Cannes.
How much success is it enjoying there?
It seems to be quite considerable.
It's a bit embarrassing saying how successful it is...
but people seem to be enjoying it.
Let me say it for you then:
"Mel Brooks in style, but with more ideas."
"Gargantuan firework."
The critics like it. So are you in the running for a prize?
Yes, I believe the word....
It's a bit embarrassing, actually...
because I'm not sure how we feel about winning a prize.
With a bit of luck, we won't win one.
If we actually win one, I don't know what we're going to do.
What does an award like that mean?
A lot of money, I suppose. More glitter, more sex.
It's not a bad idea.
All I remember is John Goldstone calling me in the middle of the night and saying:
"You've got to get on a plane. They're going to give us the second prize. "
My wife and I jumped on a plane...
and whizzed down to Cannes for the ceremony of the awards.
John Goldstone and Terry Jones arrived at the airport...
and announced to the world's press that they knew we were going to win...
because we had bribed the jury.
That was a great big headline in the next day's Cannes papers:
"Python Bribes Jury."
Which is a very funny thing to do because in the end, we did win...
and Jonesy got on-stage and told them...
that the money was hidden under the gents' toilets in the building.
They didn't like that part of it. They thought it was a bit too much.
I thought it was a really funny and disarming thing to do.
The only thing was that John and l had to go up and collect the prize.
We got our wardrobe lady to put on our evening suits...
"Eat more pork" on the back.
That made us feel a little bit less like we were in an award ceremony.
I think the audience was laughing most of the time...
but there was always moments of gasping...
because the humour was pretty in your face, raw.
Winning the prize was a big surprise. I didn't expect to get anything like that.
Thank God Terry went...
because the rest of us had careers to think about.
The content of this film is very extreme.
Shameful, absolutely shameful.
Is it possible to go too far?
I don't think we ever set out to deliberately shock.
We just do what makes us laugh.
And then saying, "lt doesn't matter, we don't have any boundaries."
I think it's really other people...
going out of their way not to shock.
It's just we don't bother not to shock people.
It's quite a visceral film. It's quite bloody and quite nasty.
Right from the opening bit, with the child being born...
and the machines that go, "Ping!" and all that.
I think it's saying that's sort of what life is. It is mucky, it is dirty.
It is pretty smelly, it is pretty disgusting.
But that's what we're selling in this film.
I think people will still react and relate to that...
because no one has really done anything like that since.
The second audience reaction was when we were having previews in New York.
I think it was in Yonkers, which is a suburb of New York.
We saw all the kids coming in, and I said, "This looks like our audience."
All these youngsters, 16, 17, 18, coming in.
They showed it in this terrible cinema.
One of those places where they'd taken a big cinema...
and cut it in half, ruthlessly.
So if you were in the back of the cinema, you were a long way from the screen.
The film was out of sync if you sat in the back...
because the sound took longer to get to the back of the cinema.
Very literally, it was out of sync by 16 frames or something.
We stood around waiting, thinking, "This is going to be a great showing."
Then gradually they started leaving.
We had seats going up...
and a constant stream of people coming out of the cinema.
It was something like 1 20 people...
out of an audience of about 300...
walked out of the film.
It happened both nights that we tried it in Yonkers.
It was a bit of a shock to everybody.
Without the ability to defend one's own viewpoint...
against other more aggressive ideologies...
then reasonableness and moderation could quite simply disappear.
That is why we'll always need an army.
May God strike me down were it to be otherwise.
Then, of course, when the film actually opened....
I can't remember....
There wasn't a lot of protest about it, I don't think.
It did get banned, though.
I think it was in lreland it got banned.
I think that got banned....
Life of Brian had been banned in lreland...
and Meaning of Life was banned in lreland.
The next film I made, Personal Services, also got banned in lreland.
At that point, they had only ever banned four films in lreland...
and I'd made three of them.
None of you have got any balls.
-Can I ask you a question? -What?
How can we all have died at the same time?
The thing about Meaning of Life...
it's such an uneven film, but the good bits...
are the high points of Python humour and performance.
I think it had a lot to do with the fact that I wasn't around.
My feeling was that we were just missing one more process.
We should have got together for another two weeks.
We could have made it much more unified, by having the same boy...
it be about the same character.
So you see his birth, him going to school...
him going to the First World War. It would've been fine.
It doesn't matter what part of history he came in.
His age wouldn't matter, you could go back from World War l...
back to him being an older man on an expedition in Kashmir.
It wouldn't matter, as long as he became the central character.
I think that would have just nailed it.
You wouldn't have to stop-start with all the captions...
which tends to emphasise its sketch nature...
and doesn't disguise it.
Brian's a sketch film. Everything's a little sketch.
It's just been carefully ordered in such a way...
that there's a story and a progression through.
I think we just missed that. I'm going to blame John...
because he wouldn't come do any more writing.
So I think it's his fault entirely that it isn't the classic that he says it's not.
I think the film that came out was a typical sketch film.
The good stuff is good...
and the less good stuff, of which I think there's a fair amount...
is rather less good.
There's no goodwill going forward from the plot, no momentum.
There's no sense of what's going to happen next.
So every piece has to stand on its own.
Very hard to make that work successfully.
I'm sorry that I cut out some of the bits that I cut out.
On the other hand, after lots of experimentation...
the film seemed to play better as it's edited...
than in the other ways.
When I look at the scenes we cut out, I think, "It's a shame we cut that out."
But all I can say is, when we had them in, the film didn't play as well.
It is a long time since I've seen it.
But I have seen it.
And it's jolly good.
If anyone's thinking of buying the DVD of Meaning of Life, it's jolly good.
It's a good film and we're proud to stay behind it.
It's got very good stuff in it.
Very good stuff. Except for...
Martin Luther.
It's got my favourite bits in it.
I think some of the best Python scenes are in The Meaning of Life.
I think the film has really aged well. It's really funny.
In fact, the bits that I thought were utter crap...
were funny as well. I think its....
We've been lucky because the standard of comedy...
has sunk so low over the intervening years...
even our crap looks good now.
They haven't said much about the meaning of life so far, have they?
-Well, it's been building up to it. -Has it?
Yeah, I expect they'll get onto it now.
I am a philosophical man.
I found that the meaning of life is not dollars.
It's not much of a philosophy, I know.
I've discovered....
I haven't discovered the meaning of life.
-What was that? -What's he saying?
I think I've discovered, sort of...
certain of the rules and steps forward.
I'm not going to divulge them to you yet.
That's why I keep travelling.
I think I'll find somewhere a little stone which says:
"Meaning of life: open here."
If I don't find the meaning of life, I can always say, "Well, we did it in 1982."
That was the meaning of life.
You'll probably get the answer just as you're taking your last breath.
It suddenly becomes really clear. And you say, "Yes!"
And it's gone. Just like that.
I think we're designed that way.
John has small writing, so he could get the meaning of life on a Post-lt note.
Gilliam would only get the first two letters on a Post-it note.
But actually, I did see...
something attached to John's foot...
the other day when were both at a steam bath together.
It looked like a Post-it note. Either that, or it might have been a verruca.
Some problem with the sole of his foot. That could have been it.
There was some writing on it, definitely.
I think it said "left."
I wrote it on a bit of paper.
I wonder where it is?
I think it's something...
to do with fish.
I think.
Wait a tick. What the hell was it?
The meaning of life is....
I'm still working on it. I'll let you know if l....
If I come across the meaning of life...
I'll certainly record it on this DVD, personally.
Unless the DVD comes out first, before I discover it.
Still hoping to find out.
I think we should go on issuing "The Best Of"...
and "The Second Best Of"...
"The Third...." You know, indefinitely.
We should keep recycling the same material relentlessly...
always with slightly different packaging.
And rely on these...
gullible fools to buy it all.
It's available on Betamax, VHS and Super 8.