terry gilliam and salman rushdie

the believer has the transcript of a conversation between terry gilliam and salman rushdie that i found interesting.

at one point, gilliam's 'brazil' (imdb page) was my absolute favorite movie, but now, the reality of the american police state blunts the movie's expressivity and imagination -- what was once predicted and cautioned against (and laughed at) is now occurring with public permission and approval. in any case, it's still a great movie, as is 'twelve monkeys'.

TG: Well, I really want to encourage a kind of fantasy, a kind of magic. I love the term magic realism, whoever invented it—I do actually like it because it says certain things. It's about expanding how you see the world. I think we live in an age where we're just hammered, hammered to think this is what the world is. Television's saying, everything's saying "That's the world." And it's not the world. The world is a million possible things.

SR: And the world is about the way in which our dreams intersect with our real life. Endlessly, the world of the imagination changes the world.

TG: But the dreams that are being offered are just whiter teeth, or thicker toilet paper. Things like that. [Mimics TV voice] Dream of three-ply toilet paper. After a real bout of diarrhea... But these are the dreams that are being offered up to us. It's appalling. I just feel it's compressing and compressing. And then when you see sci-fi films they're not really doing it. They're not taking you to a place where you can really stretch your world. And I think that's one of the big problems with Hollywood dominating the world as far as cinema—it's slowly squishing it down everywhere. Except living outside the States, it's easier to rebel against.

also, watch as rushdie makes us all wish we had a fathwah placed on our head:




UPDATE: i forgot to put some things in the post, so here they are. via quadrantcrossing:
here's a highly political interview with gilliam in the onion's a/v page that you should definitely check out.

Fear And Loathing, in a strange way, was like that. It was interesting: When we made it, I felt the prime audience would have been college students, who were ripe and ready to consider new ideas—or old ideas, at least—of anarchy, or whatever. But the college kids, it didn't seem to work for them as I'd hoped. And I discovered that what seemed to be the prime audience... The ones who were really receptive were high-school students, who hadn't yet committed to their careers. College used to be about expanding your mind, and ideas, and now it seems to be just stage one of your career, and if you don't do well in college, you might as well just commit suicide, like Japanese students used to do in the old days. But the high-school kids were still open-minded and willing to consider things. A lot of college kids, the film seemed to worry them, I think because it was too anarchic for them. It's just a theory, though. I have no proof of any of this.