Director Terry Gilliam is sick of talking about his latest movie The Man Who Killed Don Quixote. He reveals that in a new interview and proceeds to go on a long rant instead. Gilliam doubled down on his controversial thoughts on the #MeToo movement and even gets more into race, which he touched on when taking down Marvel’s Black Panther a few weeks ago. When it comes down to it, the director is “tired, as a white male, of being blamed for everything that is wrong with the world… I didn’t do it!”
Terry Gilliam worked for years to get The Man Who Killed Don Quixote made and now he doesn’t want to talk about it. “I’m so booored of talking about the film,” says the director. The former Monty Python member seems to be more into stirring the pot than promoting his art, which might be his point, but he also seems to be swinging for the fences in order to offend people. When talking about Angelica, a character in the movie played by Joana Ribeiro, he brought up the #MeToo movement. He had this to say.
“In the age of #MeToo, here’s a girl who takes responsibility for her state. Whatever happened in this character’s life, she’s not accusing anybody. We’re living in a time where there’s always somebody responsible for your failures, and I don’t like this. I want people to take responsibility and not just constantly point a finger at somebody else, saying, ‘You’ve ruined my life…’ Yeah, I said #MeToo is a witch hunt… I really feel there were a lot of people, decent people, or mildly irritating people, who were getting hammered. That’s wrong. I don’t like mob mentality. These were ambitious adults.”
Harvey Weinstein comes up in the interview, and while Terry Gilliam doesn’t particularly like the disgraced Hollywood mogul, he does think he has been treated rather unfairly. “Hollywood is full of very ambitious people who are adults and they make choices. We all make choices, and I could tell you who did make the choice and who didn’t,” says Gilliam. This leads the director down an entirely different rabbit hole, which includes the topic of race.
When the interviewer tries to talk about white men being born with certain privileges , Terry Gilliam disagrees and believes that the issue has been “simplified.” He goes on to ask, “When I announce that I’m a black lesbian in transition, people take offence at that. Why?” The interviewer takes the bait and they begin to banter back and forth before Gilliam goes on to make his main point. He explains.
“I don’t like the term black or white. I’m now referring to myself as a melanin-light male. I can’t stand the simplistic, tribalistic behavior that we’re going through at the moment. I’m getting myself in deeper water, so I have to trust you… I’m talking about being a man accused of all the wrong in the world because I’m white-skinned. So I better not be a man. I better not be white. OK, since I don’t find men sexually attractive, I’ve got to be a lesbian. What else can I be? I like girls. These are just logical steps. I’m just trying to make you start thinking. You see, this is the world I grew up in, and with Python, we could do this stuff, and we weren’t offending people. We were giving people a lot of laughter.”
Terry Gilliam finished up the interview by claiming that he’s “into diversity more than anybody, but diversity in the way you think about the world, which means you can hate what I just said.” When it comes down to it, the director doesn’t like the fact that in today’s culture, “You have to attack other people who are not like you.” Finally, Gilliam says, “I just love arguing. And if you’ve got a point, you should be able to argue your thing.” The full interview with Terry Gilliam can be read over at Independent U.K.
