Jeff Simpson, Ben Timlett and Bill Jones discuss Monthy Python and Cameron Diaz
As we prepare for the release of A Liar’s Autobiography: The Untrue Story of Monty Python’s Graham Chapman, we were fortunate to sit down with the trio of directors behind the factually incorrect animation, as Jeff Simpson, Ben Timlett and Bill Jones (son of original Python member Terry), answered our questions.
Out on Friday 8th – the picture focuses on the somewhat upsetting (and in this case surreal) life of Graham Chapman, and the three filmmakers discuss the contrasting animated styles as well as the use of 3D, while also delving into the intricate life of the late Monty Python member – predominantly known for his title role in The Life of Brian. Oh, and they tell us how Cameron Diaz came to be involved…
How did the film come into fruition?
Jeff: It was back when I was a child in 2007, I was a documentary maker and I was interested in making a movie about Graham Chapman. I was interested in the fact he was a man who was openly gay, but secretly alcoholic, an interesting tension. I went up to see David Sherlock, who was Graham’s ex-partner, I drove all the way up to North Wales hoping he might have some materials, home movies or something to base the documentary on. He didn’t have any assets – as well call them – but he did mention the existence of these audio tapes and that set me on a journey to track those down because when I got hold of the tapes I realised that we could actually do a documentary with Graham narrating it from the beyond the grave. That was sadly turned down by the BBC.
Ben: Not sadly…
Jeff: No, in the end it was happy. But in the meantime, we had looked at the audio tapes and thought about what we were seeing when listening to the tapes, so we commissioned some animators to go over the audio, and I had these taster tape material, and that’s when I walked into Bill and Ben – looking for a home for this material.
Bill: In 2009 we were just doing a documentary on the 40th anniversary of Monty Python, so we were doing six one-hour episodes called Almost The Truth.
Jeff: An Emmy nominated documentary series.
Bill: A double Emmy nominated documentary series. Double losers. But yeah, we were a bit unsure about coming out of this and doing another documentary about Graham Chapman, we didn’t really want to get involved in something like that. But then we had this idea about doing animated Graham Chapman, and that sounded brilliant, so we thought, why don’t we do a whole film?
Ben: Originally it was interviews with bits of animation.
Jeff: But then they said “How much of this audio tape stuff have you got?” and we said “Two and a half hours of it”. The other thing was, the other python’s wouldn’t have wanted to sit down and do more talking head interviews, but the idea of them coming in and doing voice-overs.
Ben: Mainly it’s an adaptation of Graham’s book, that he wrote. That was also what was really exciting, to adapt the story. Then we had to find the money.
Jeff: That was easy.
Ben: Oh yeah, that was easy.
What do you think this version basically adds to the whole book?
Ben: For people who can’t read, it’s great.
Bill: People don’t want to read, they want to see the film.
Ben: The book itself is brilliant but obviously being a literary thing, it takes you on a journey. But I loved the idea of trying to get animators to interpret 80 minutes inside his head. So that was something that really excited all of us.
Bill: Hopefully more people will see it, and also will then go back and read the book. If you can get people to read that would be great.
Ben: So far, Graham has not had much of a life, being that’s he’s dead. Whereas the rest of them have all gone on to do other things in their own right. Basically, Python gave them all the ability to do what they wanted – it opened doors for them to do things that they were genuinely interested in, and Graham didn’t have that opportunity. So it’s nice to think that people are talking about him again.
Jeff: In terms of what the film adds to the book, of course it’s more of an experience, but also what I quite like is that occasionally those little interview clips that are dropped in – in some way the remnants of the original documentary idea – it also reminds you that he was a real person as a lot of times he writes about himself as if he’s a fictional character, and writes comedy scenes about himself, but when you see him on Parkinson you realise, oh yes, he is actually a real person. That’s interesting to experience that as well.
Given you’re covering Graham Chapman’s life, the film does have to delve into relatively serious themes, seeing as he was gay, his relationship with parents and the fact he was an alcoholic. Was it difficult to express those themes within a comedic environment?
Ben: I wouldn’t say the film is a comedy to be honest. Was it difficult to go into those dark areas?
Bill: Not really, the switching in tone was his style, his thing of jumping around from one thing to another. Having serious bits intermixed just highlights the diverse personality that is Graham Chapman.
Ben: Structurally, we moved things around. The alcoholism is at the start of the book but we realised that we liked the idea of that creeping up on the audience, so to begin with he’s getting pissed, shagging around, having a good time, and then bang, no, hang on a minute, there is something quite severely wrong with him. I get a sense that’s what really happened. It all just crept up on him.
Jeff: In those days getting drunk was a badge of honour and a laugh, and that’s how we played it in the film – until you realise it’s a serious problem.
Ben: Hopefully the audience will go along with it, this severe switch.
There are a lot of different animation styles in the film, how did you select who would animate the different sections, and allocate particular stories to match the styles?
Jeff: We had a wonderful guy called Justin Weyers who was our animation producer and he looked at about 50-60 companies and put us in a room without about 20-30 different companies, so we’d seen their show reels, we’d seen their styles, we knew what we were interested in at that point. Some companies it was really obvious that their style would match a particular section – like George Sander-Jackson and the drying out sequence; the very visceral, glass thing. That was obviously something we immediately spotted and it worked well for George’s style. As for the others, the animators pitched for sections and then would end up doing another, and it was kind of like a dating process. A 3D dating process.
Ben: It was organic I suppose because at times in certain sections we knew exactly what we were looking for, we had an idea in our heads that was coming off the page for us, and then in other things we got surprised by what people pitched and they would usually pitch on two sections…
Bill: We had this one guy who pitched on these two sections and we were knew we had another company that were good for one section, and someone else who were great for the other – but the pitches were the see-through characters, and he pitched for the Ibiza stage and we were just sitting there thinking, actually, that’s great.
Jeff: What we had in our head was to do the LA section with cut-out photographs, because that’s what Graham describes, but as Bill says, when we saw Matthias Hoegg’s style – he came up with the production line with the cut-outs hanging out of those meet hook things.
Bill: It’s wonderful because you’ve got the flat cut-out people, and then you’ve got the real people who are also flat.
Ben: Some animators you could tell straight away from their work that they got the emotion, the comedy timing…
Jeff: The average age of our animators is 28 – a lot of them are two or three years out of college and have only made short films, and for a lot of them this is the first feature film they have worked on, and at that point it was just a matter of giving them a free reign really.
Bill: Going back to the nightmare scene, the drying out section by George – he’d been out of college for three or four years but we saw his college film and that is the thing that we loved. He wasn’t able to do this all on glass technique since college because no-one could afford to pay him for that amount of time that he’d have to spend to do it – but when we presented it to him, he was just like “Oh yes, I can get back into it” and do that style that he really loved. The techniques of doing these animation styles in 3D just hadn’t been done before.
Why did you do it in 3D? At what point did you decide to do so, and what was the creative thinking behind it?
Bill: It was the great thinking of “Lots of people want to commission 3D programmes, so we may actually get funded if we do it 3D”.
Ben: There was another one of me watching Avatar at the IMAX, and I thought, the best bits are the credits. They’re really great, the way the 2D credits just sit off the thing, I love the textures. So that was part of it. So that’s basically what I was thinking – if you take beautiful 2D animation and creature those textured layers, you can do something really interesting that I’ve not seen before. So those are the ridiculous reasons.
Jeff: Of course the credits to Avatar cost more than our whole thing. But it was certainly, in its first instance, envisaged as a marketing aspect, a marketing gimmick, but when it came to the storytelling we discovered we had another tool to play with, and even in flat-drawn animation, first of all it just adds a little more depth to the world and it feels a little more immersive. We certainly didn’t want to play with the 3D, we didn’t want things jumping out at you, we didn’t want that kind of gimmicky 3D, but we just wanted enough to give a little more depth and immersion into that world. I don’t there’s any jumping, probably once or twice there’s some jumping out of the screen.
Ben: We did try to use it creatively within a scene, how certainly, for me, I think it works beautifully in the scene where he’s wrestling himself. Then we go into the puppet world, that weird theatre, and it starts to really feel that 2D puppet thing. With 3D you get that depth, you actually could be in a puppet theatre. And when he goes to see the doctor and the doctor prescribes him pills, what we do, we realise that when we come out of that pill scene where you see all the pills coming in, he’s throwing up and he’s taking things in, listening to Terry Gilliam’s weird doctor, we realised we could reverse it, so your eyes could flip.
Bill: Basically the things that were set behind, the idea was that things that were in-front of something else is actually set behind it in 3D. It’s very quick.
Jeff: It’s the only place where we mess with it. It’s also part o the emotional storytelling. THe scene where they’re cycling up a hill and they’re in Ibiza, and Graham’s horizons are about to broaden significantly as he goes in search of love, we were able to stretch the horizon, we turn the 3D up to the max there as he looks out over the hill. He’s been in this very enclosed world of London and suddenly he goes out to the wider world.
Ben: Whether anybody gets that.
Jeff: I keep mentioning that so people go “ooh”.
Ben: It should be a subliminal thing too.
Bill: But you don’t have to watch it in 3D.
Cameron Diaz as Sigmund Freud, how did that come about and did anyone dare put logic into it?
Bill: Well, I think it came about because Ben wanted Al Pacino. And I was like ‘Don’t be stupid, we’re not getting Al Pacino”.
Ben: I just wanted a gratuitous guest star performance, like the money saying ‘This is far too fucking niche, art-house, you’ve got to have someone big in it’. That’s why we gave her the credit at the front, gratuitously. I forgotten, we wanted a ‘ka-ching’ on it. That was the idea, and then the idea of approaching someone with it. But I was thinking of Al Pacino in his own voice would be funny. Just the worst piece of acting you could ever imagine.
Jeff: Although he’s a very good actor.
Ben: Then Bill came into the office, when we did the documentary series we wanted to do an interview with her because we heard she was just a ridiculous Python fan, that she watches it in her trailer, but we couldn’t. Our schedule and her schedule, so I was like ‘what about her’ and we wrote her an e-mail.
Jeff: And she got it as well, we did put in the e-mail ‘we realise that playing the founding father of modern psychoanalysis might be a bit of typecasting for you, you may be fed up of playing that type of character, but if you would just make an exception in this case’ and she got it. She turned up in a studio in Tampa, Florida, and we saw her over Skype.
As a directing trio, what was the dynamic with that? Were there separate jobs or did you all just develop it together?
Ben: It developed. We did have a rule, very simple. Two versus One wins, quite useful with three in a general kind of sense.
Bill: Two of us would have an argument about something, then we’d stop and turn to the other one and go, ‘so, what do you think’?
Jeff: And it was often me, because I found myself signing up to this two to one situation, but these two have known each-other since they were kids, so I thought this was simply a way of overruling and overriding me in my decision. SO I signed up to it anyway, as it turns out, because they grew up together they’re actually really competitive, so quite often one would have one idea and the other would have another idea, and I found myself in the deciding vote. Apparently, films that are directed by two people, they end up falling out because no-one could mediate.
Ben: Other than the Coen Brothers.
Jeff: I’m thinking of the Two Terrys on The Holy Grail. But two against one is a very simple system.
Ben: As it developed, obviously writing a script. Well, the first thing we did was we edited the audio with our voices in the parts as we didn’t have the Pythons in yet, and wrote the script at the same time.
Jeff: We’ve all got slightly different backgrounds which is helpful. Bill is an editor by training, and Ben I see more as a producer figure, with the big overview. I’m a documentary maker by trade, but I was more interested in Graham as a person than as a Python. So we were all coming in from slightly different angles. In practice that meant we got Bill cutting the audio, I’m writing here, Ben’s coming in and saying ‘No, you need to do it like this’.
Ben: As we got to the animation it was quite interesting, when we chose our animators, when we got their animatics, there was probably a point, because we realised that the three of us arguing in front of them wasn’t that beneficial to the project and they were looking at each-other thinking ‘what have I signed up for?’, so we realised that we’d have to split up the roles of who would actually speak. Who would be the main point of contact with each animator, go in to talk to them then come back to the guys and talk about what they’re doing. But that was fun, because we all had our favourites, so who got who…
Jeff: I’ll trade you.
Bill: I was very lucky with that because my favourite was Biggles, and no-one else was laying claim to it.
Did you guys ever get to met Graham, any favourite memories?
Ben: I never met him, but you [Bill] can’t remember.
Bill: Yeah, my dad is Terry Jones, so… I can’t quite remember him, but I do remember his memorial which was also the 20th anniversary of Python. Partly because that was the first time I ever got pissed. Slightly fitting. I’m in the audience.
Ben: He wasn’t around your dad, really. The ones I remember were Gilliam, Palin.
Bill: My dad’s best friend is Michael P, he lived close by, but Graham was in LA, or sometimes around Kent.
Jeff: It’s certainly been fascinating to meet a lot of people who knew Graham, his partner David Sherlock, we interviewed his brother, who actually revealed a lot of the incidents that happened in the book actually happened. Like the air-crash with the body parts, that’s a real scene from Graham’s childhood, but one of the interesting ones for me was one of the ladies from the Hollywood crowd. I got to interview her for the documentary, and one of the reasons she likes the film is that she knew at least six different Graham Chapmans, that there was the party animal, the serious guy, the wit. All these different characters and that’s why she liked the idea that there were different styles of animation to reflect those sides of his character. She said when he passed away she had to replace him in her life with at least six different people to fill all those gaps. Multiple personalities as much as styles.
Ben: We made a documentary called “Anatomy Of A lair” which is the story behind the story.
Jeff: Which is on the DVD available at the end of February.
Ben: We interviewed all his friends, and they take you through the scenes.
Bill: It’s a dissection of the film through people who knew Graham talking about the scenes.
Ben: His brother also gave us this amazing, which we found out later, his home movies, 8mm home movies, and there he is filming the Queen Mum. We’ve got it on film, him filming the Queen Mum when she arrived, and she’s wearing the same outfit in the same colours as the animators who never saw it.
Bill: And then there’s him in LA.
Ben: His mum in the pool, she appears in the pool in our film.
Jeff: He had a guiding hand in the film.
What do you hope the audience’ll take away from this?
Bill: That he was a WACKY guy!
Jeff: I think it’s a chance to put Graham back, people remember all of the members of Monty Python, but if Mike Palin walked down the street, people would say ‘travel’, John Cleese, people remember his film career or Faulty Towers, but they all have this second life as a result of what Python got them, and Graham never really had that second life because he died young. So it’s really just a chance to remind people what kind of person he was, and that he was part of Monty Python.
Ben: For me, hopefully it’s entertaining and you just get 80 minutes inside his head. For me it’s an experience more, it’s his story told by him, but essentially, there’s no context there. Half non-factual, it’s the experience of maybe spending 80 minutes inside his brain.
Bill: To steal a line from Michael Palin, it’s good to see Graham back, abusing audiences again.
Ben: That’s why we did it in 3D.
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A LIAR’S AUTOBIOGRAPHY: THE UNTRUE STORY OF MONTY PYTHON’S GRAHAM CHAPMAN OPENS ON FRIDAY