The Terry Gilliam reference article from the English Wikipedia on 24-Apr-2004
(provided by Fixed Reference: snapshots of Wikipedia from wikipedia.org)

Terry Gilliam

For thoughtful child sponsors
Terence Vance Gilliam (born November 22 1940 in Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA) is a film director.

Terry Gilliam started off as an American animator and strip cartoonist, one of his early photographic strips featured John Cleese. Moving to England, he animated features for Do Not Adjust Your Set and later became a member of Monty Python's Flying Circus, and principal artist-animator of the surreal cartoons with which it was frequently interspersed. He also appeared in several sketches and played parts in the films. Terry Gilliam has gone on to become a film director. Gilliam's Brazil is known among cineastes as a drastic example of things that can go wrong when a director does not have final cut and the studio steps in to "take control" of a situation it sees as spiralling out of control; Gilliam's battles with the studio are notorious and well documented.

In many projects, he tries to show his sharp opposition towards the bureaucracy and administrative regimes. Also tries to make the difference between higher and lower layers of society visible with a disturbing and ironic style. His movies usually features a fight or struggle against a great power which may either be an emotional situation or a human-made idol or even the person him/her-self. Mostly, the struggle does not end happy. There is usually a paranoid and dark atmosphere and unusual characters who once were a normal member of the society. As well as adding dark and disturbing touches to the scripts, he also achieves to create a dark sense of humour which is a heritage of Monty Python team.

His films have a distinctive look, often recognizable from just a short clip. There is often a baroqueness about the movies, with, for instance, computer monitors in one film equipped with magnifying lenses, and in another a red knight covered with flapping bits of cloth. He also is given to incongruous juxtapositions, say of beauty and ugliness, or antique and modern.

Gilliam is a graduate of Occidental College in Los Angeles and was the only American member of Monty Python.

Films directed:

Gilliams' unsuccessful efforts to film The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, based on Miguel Cervantes' Don Quixote, was the subject of the documentary Lost in La Mancha.