Movie Connections

Knights, I bid you welcome to your new home.

Let us ride to...Camelot!

# We're knights of the Round Table

# We dance when ere we're able

We do routines and chorus scenes With footwork impecc-able

# We dine well here in Camelot

# We eat jam and ham and Spam a lot... #

There was always a feeling

that perhaps we could make a film together,

a really new, original film.

# ..We're knights of the Round Table Our shows are formid-able... #

We set out basically to make an ordinary film,

and we were saved from our own mediocrity by the lack of money.

# ..Diaphragm a lot! #

I often think about it as having a sort of quality

that Hard Day's Night has, which is about young men

not quite knowing what they're doing but making it work anyway.

# ..In war we're tough and able... #

I think we went into this movie not really understanding at all

that we'd probably cut off far more than we could chew.

# ..I have to push the pram a lot. #

On second thoughts, let's not go to Camelot. It is a silly place.

These days, Monty Python's silliness is part of the comic language.

Their TV sketches and movies are regularly voted

amongst the greatest comedy ever made.

Millions of fans can still quote Python chapter and verse,

and frequently do, and now a Python musical

is doing big business across the world.

But hard as it may be to believe now, the Pythons' illustrious status

as kings of comedy was not always certain.

Back in 1973, the team was beginning to fracture.

Things weren't looking good for Monty.

John in particular felt a bit restricted by the group,

felt we'd done as much as we could do.

He drifted off to start doing Fawlty Towers.

Python had taken my life over!

If we weren't doing a stage show, we were doing a TV series,

preparing for a film, making a record or doing a book.

I didn't want to do Python all the time.

The others were having such a good time it didn't bother them,

but I wanted to strike out in other directions.

And now for something completely different.

A couple of them were very cross with me for not wanting to do

any more, although I'd not really wanted to do the third series.

But I think that was mainly Terry Jones, who I remember

talked about betrayal, or some words like that,

and Graham Chapman was very critical.

Terry Jones and Terry Gilliam, in particular,

were anxious to do an original movie, always anxious to do that,

because they were interested in directing.

We'd all gotten a bit itchy to do something bigger,

and so the thought of doing a movie was quite intriguing.

There was never a question that I didn't want to do the movie

cos that interested me.

In a sense, making The Holy Grail was starting all over again,

something that we believed in and very few other people did.

Five of the future Pythons had met while at university,

and they all worked together for the first time

on the BBC's famed satirical show The Frost Report.

Chapman and Cleese were tempted across to ITV,

writing and performing At Last The 1948 Show,

while Palin, Idle and Jones

scripted and starred in the teatime kids hit Do Not Adjust Your Set.

Terry Gilliam first met John Cleese in New York,

and when he came to London,

Cleese put him in touch with the Do Not Adjust Your Set team.

So when the two shows finished, there were six talents on the loose,

seeking an outlet for their unique comedy tastes and ideas.

What else could they do apart from join forces

and call their collective effort...

Monty Python's Flying Circus.

The first series went out in October 1969,

and very rapidly, against all the odds at the time,

we were offered another series and a third series, and we did,

er...three series by 1972.

Also, during that time, we'd done various albums, we'd done two books,

and we'd done a film called And Now For Something Completely Different.

We decided somewhere along the line, maybe after the second series,

that we would write a movie,

we would do a movie which we would control and we would direct.

The Pythons' first film

had been designed to help them crack the US market.

It was overseen by Flying Circus director Ian McNaughton

and financed by the UK arm of Playboy.

But the team found themselves fighting for control of the movie

with the financiers, so for Holy Grail

they were determined to take control themselves and be able to go...

RASPBERRY

During the shooting of the television series, Terry and I

were both sort of convinced we could do it

better than Ian McNaughton or whoever else was directing.

I mean, we always railing at the fact that, "Oh, the light's not right!"

Everything was cheap, and especially at the BBC

comedy was treated rather shabbily.

Terry often got into fights with Ian McNaughton

about how the television series was being shot,

and he and Terry Gilliam both had much better visual senses

than I did, and they felt, I think quite correctly,

that they could do the visuals much better.

Get in! Get in!

They'd had a good look at television,

turned it upside down, turned it inside out,

and I think they were just restless for doing some more.

You know, maybe they needed to do their Sergeant Pepper

or their White Album.

The idea of doing a movie really appealed to us, and I think

both Terry and I were convinced we wanted to be movie directors,

and so basically we just proposed to the group,

"Anybody named Terry can direct," and the others agreed.

So the Terrys would be taking turns in the director's chair,

but there was still one question. What were they going to direct?

Terry Jones and myself had begun a sort of script about...

the Middle Ages and flying coconuts and all that -

it was actually the beginning of the film - and Arthur coming to the walls

and trying to talk to people who just went on about unladen swallows.

The first time we wrote it, it was sort of...

it was filled with sort of sketchy things. There was a lot of things

in Harrods, it was modern day. It vaguely was Graily.

We had no idea how to do narrative in a movie, and I don't think we do it

particularly well in Holy Grail, because we were sketch writers,

and we just wrote a lot of sketches. It took us an incredibly long time

to actually get to the script that you see on the screen.

It was perfectly clear that the most successful part of it

was about Arthur and the Grail, and so we junked all the rest of it

and said, "Well, let's write a movie

"about Arthur and the quest for the Grail."

And that's how it began, and people just started writing...

writing pieces, as we always did. I mean, Python was...

We'd have an idea of what we're doing, go and write, write, write,

and then start cramming it all together

and throwing out most of the good stuff and leaving the dross.

Can you give me a brief synopsis of the film?

Is that possible in the space of half an hour or so?

Well, I don't think it is, really. I don't think it is.

Well, try then in 30 seconds.

Right. It's about a search for the Holy Grail, you see,

which is a large sort of creature a bit like a dodo with a big beak.

There was a lot of fighting about the material all the way through Python,

but that was kinda good, 'cause a lot of it was creative tension,

which I think you have to have.

I think we must have been writing towards each of us playing a knight,

and John would be Lancelot and Michael would be Galahad

and I'd be Robin and Terry would be Bedevere.

And Terry Gilliam was Patsy, of course. So I think we must,

at a certain point, have realised we were all gonna play a knight each.

So with the knights all cast,

who'd be the man who would be king...

Arthur?

Woah there!

I think Graham must have read Arthur in some of the early read-throughs,

and he was terrific and had this sort of long-suffering gravity,

and he looked good.

There was something about Graham that just was...

not quite magisterial but aloof.

It is I, Arthur, son of Uther Pendragon,

from the castle of Camelot,

King of the Britons, defeater of the Saxons,

sovereign of all England!

Pull the other one!

I am!

One of the joys of Python was playing lots of different characters.

To give up the chance of doing a lot of characters

to be this regular, sort of rather straight figure

that goes all way through is quite a sort of sacrifice,

and Graham seemed happy to do it.

It was the smartest choice we made, because he was a brilliant Arthur,

and I think we also discovered, in that sense,

he became the straight...the centre around which the madness spun.

What's it like being a film star?

I'm not. I'm just a...just an extra, really.You're just an extra?

Yes. It's the crown and this that probably makes you...

Yeah, I was looking for Graham. Ah, yes, he's around somewhere. Is he?

Now the Pythons only needed one small thing to make the movie -

money. To help them find it, they turned to their industry contacts.

Mark Forstater first met Terry Gilliam in New York

and was now working in London as an independent film producer.

Together with the Pythons,

he approached theatrical impresario Michael White,

who had worked with Chapman and Cleese back in 1963.

White's colleague, John Goldstone,

had been at the recording of the very first Flying Circus.

As Python fans, they were interested in investing in the film,

but they seemed to be the only ones.

We were turned down by every financing source

because they didn't trust the new directors,

they didn't know what they would get,

um, so we basically couldn't raise

any finance from industry sources.

Python was too... dangerous, in a way, for them.

It was unconventional...and, um,

didn't indicate any kind of narrative form

that would convert into a film.

The Pythons had released their records on Charisma,

a label run by Tony Stratton-Smith,

and Stratton-Smith had some very good ideas

about who would be crazy enough to invest in the Pythons.

For bands like Genesis, Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd,

it was unlikely they'd see their hard-earned again.

You'd probably need to be on drugs to take that chance.

Luckily, some of them were.