Feature: - Interview - Terry Gilliam's operatic directorial debut, The Damnation of Faust

Published: 02 June 2011
by JOSH LOEB

"TERRIFYING" is how Highgate-based film director Terry Gilliam describes his first foray into opera. 

There is still a chance to catch his critically acclaimed production of The Damnation of Faust, which draws parallels between the German legend of a scholar’s bargain with the devil and the horrors of German history in the first half of the 20th century. 

The animator and former member of Monty Python professed to be “surprised” at the positive reviews of the production when he spoke to the Camden New Journal soon after returning from a “recuperative period” in Italy this week.

He recently shot a short film, The Wholly Family, in Naples which he hopes will be on release in this country soon – but the man behind cult cinema classics including Time Bandits and Brazil revealed he had decided to experiment with a stage show in an effort to combat his “dotage”. 

“Believe it or not, I was pursued for 20-odd years by agents to do opera,” he said. “Suddenly I just thought: ‘I’m getting old. Maybe I need a jolt to get me through my autumn years. Let’s see if I can learn a new trick.’ Because I hadn’t worked in opera and I hadn’t done theatre before, I was a complete novice basically, but luckily the ENO supported me with really good people.”

These included movement designer Leah Hausman, who Gilliam said “understood how you deal with having 90-plus people on stage” and set designer Hildegard Bechtler, whose German origins meant she “understood exactly what I was getting at”. “It became a very collaborative experience,” he added.

Gilliam said that to begin with he had not been keen on staging Berlioz’s opera.

“It’s an odd one,” he said. “When it was first suggested to me, I listened to the music and thought: ‘This is undoable’.”

Asked if he now wanted to direct another opera, he said: “I would like it to be one that has not been seen before.” But he added: “That’s the terrible foolishness that arises after you pull something off and it works – you think you can do it again.”