As a writer and performer, John Cleese was a driving force behind two of television's most beloved shows: the seminal sketch-comedy classic Monty Python's Flying Circus, and Fawlty Towers, a perennial contender for the greatest sitcom of all time. Since then, Cleese has produced and starred in a series of business training films, co-written books on families and relationships, done extensive voiceover work, served on the faculty at Cornell, co-wrote a graphic novel about a British incarnation of Superman [Superman: True Brit], played Q's replacement R in a pair of James Bond movies, and recently signed on to produce a series of video podcasts.
Cleese also somehow found the time to write and act in cult classics like Monty Python And The Holy Grail, Life Of Brian, The Meaning Of Life, and 1988's A Fish Called Wanda, for which he earned an Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay. In connection with the "Immaculate Edition" DVD of Life Of Brian, The A.V. Club recently had a loose, freewheeling conversation with the comedy icon about the flaws in Monty Python films, roles accepted and rejected, James Bond, the shortcomings of organized religion and studio executives, and why he doesn't much care for film acting or film-going these days.
The A.V. Club: We've wanted to talk to you for a long time.
John Cleese: Good! Well, I hope it's not a disappointment. I've had one or two disappointments in my life. Like lunch with Peter Ustinov. You wouldn't believe how disappointing that was. I mean, I was such an admirer of him. I thought he was not just a talented man, which he obviously was, but that he was such a decent man, and such an interesting man. I was so excited to have lunch with him. But I made the mistake early on of asking him a slightly personal question. He'd once said in an interview that his career had really taken off at the moment when he started only to do things that really interested him. And that's very interesting, because it's the opposite of what you might think.
And as he talked, I began to feel tremendously uncomfortable. And this sense of discomfort absolutely took me over. My musculature became very tight. And it was this sort of feeling of "There's something not right here. Have I done something wrong? Have I said something I shouldn't have said, have I committed some social faux pas?" And this feeling went on for about 25 minutes, and I felt terrible. And then he launched into an anecdote. And I laughed, and the feeling just disappeared.
And for the rest of the lunch, he told anecdotes, and I had a wonderful time. Well, I spoke to Eric Idle afterward, he'd just done a television thing with him, Around The World In 80 Days. He said "Peter's lovely, but he's a hider, he doesn't want to reveal anything of himself." But it was a disappointment, because when you meet somebody like that, you actually want to talk to them, rather than hear anecdotes, you know?
AVC: Do people of that stature intimidate you?
JC: Not now. I think I was a little bit intimidated. I remember filming with David Niven once in Rome, in the '70s. And I felt a little bit awestruck, but then he was so nice, you see, he was so kind.
NR: One of your first major film experiences was working on the screenplay for The Magic Christian for Peter Sellers, another seminal figure.
JC: That's right. You see, I was never intimidated by Sellers, because [Graham] Chapman and I got to know him quite well. We were asked to fix a script for him, or fix up a few scenes, I can't remember which it was. But he liked what we wrote and started recommending us. And we then wrote a version of a novel called Special Bookings, about a travel agency. And then he brought us in on the Terry Southern [adaptation]. We came in on about the 12th draft, when it was absolutely nowhere. It was a terrible mess, and Graham and I, I think, made quite good sense of it. And then they brought Terry Southern over to put the final touches on it, and gave him two or three cases of bourbon, and I thought he totally fucked it up. [Laughs.]
We were such young and inexperienced writers that we were not allowed to say anything, of course! So we went away, and were slightly disappointed, because a lot of crap went back into that script. We'd come up with some really good scenes. I still remember some of them in my mind's eye as though they'd been shot. Anyway, I liked Sellers, but again, he was terribly nice to me. He invited me to stay at his villa once, when he was filming on Cyprus. So when big figures are as kind as that, the awesomeness begins to fade away fairly fast.
AVC: Do you think he had a sense of you and Monty Python as being the next generation of comedy?
JC: Well, believe it or not, this was before Python. What connected us was that he was really funny, and he also loved to laugh. I think once you start to really shake with laughter with people, an awful lot of that ego—"he's so much bigger and more important than I am"—begins to fade away. A wonderful thing about true laughter is that it just destroys any kind of system of dividing people. There've been two or three examples where, just really laughing, it all goes away. I remember David Niven taking me out to dinner with Connie [Booth], my first wife. And we were sitting in the open air, drinking pinot grigio in the middle of Rome. There was an editor there, a really nice editor, but being British, he had terrible teeth—Americans have never seen teeth that bad, unless they read National Geographic. And David told us, "He'll smile a lot, but he'll never laugh." Every time David made us howl with laughter, we glanced at the editor, who was roaring with laughter, trying to keep his lips together. Um, so what I'm saying is that when you've laughed like that with someone, it connects you at a humanity level.
AVC: Did you get to know Terry Southern at all working on The Magic Christian?
JC: No, never set eyes on him.
AVC: Do you think The Life Of Brian is the best of the Monty Python films?
JC: Yes, I do. And it's very interesting, because there's a big difference of opinion between the English and the Americans. The Americans all love The Holy Grail, and the English all love Life Of Brian, and I'm afraid on this one, I side with the English. I think that the first 45 or 50 minutes of Holy Grail is terrific. Really, really good. I'm very proud of it. But then I think in the middle, there's a scene with a three-headed giant that I think is always weaker than anything else. And I think that some of the sequences in the middle are not as strong. And then the ending—we sort of get away with the ending, but I don't think the ending is great. Whereas I do think that Life Of Brian—there's about two points when the story just sort of jumps the rails. The way Brian falls out of a house that's being searched by the centurions, and lands, and has to start pretending that he's delivering sermons, or prophecies—that's not done well. And I think there's one other one, but otherwise, as a story, it works much better than anything else the Pythons ever did. The jokes are terrific, and it's about something really important.
AVC: It has a through-line, which is important when you're doing something that's episodic by nature.
JC: We were used to writing sketches. That came back again in Meaning Of Life, where we could never figure out what that movie was really about. We just found a framework on which to hang various funny bits of material. But I actually think we did very, very well. Very well indeed on Life Of Brian. So far as the story goes, I think it's the only time we did.
AVC: You've said that you never really enjoyed the Meaning Of Life, that you thought the entire film was "a bit of a cock-up." What did you mean by that?
JC: I just never felt it was quite right. It didn't have a storyline, and the framework was kind of artificial. It was very ingenious of Terry Jones to come up with it. Without it, the film would never have been made, but it never, never felt artistically satisfying to me. And I remember that for some reason, I did not particularly enjoy the shooting process. I don't know why that was, perhaps because it went on for so long. And it was also excessively uncomfortable. I'm an old man who liked his comforts, even in my 40s, you know? Filming takes a lot out of you. It really does. It's immensely demanding, and you have to put the rest of your life in the icebox until you do your final shot. And I don't mind doing that if there's that feeling of believing in something. It's awfully hard to do it when you don't quite believe in it, you know?
AVC: You've gravitated toward smaller roles over the past decade.
JC: Well there aren't any bigger parts, by and large. For 48 hours, I was offered something that was very interesting. There was a marvelous movie that was done a long time ago, and Michael Douglas and Albert Brooks did a remake of it. The In-Laws. God, that's a funny movie. For two days, I thought I might be doing that. Which was quite exciting, 'cause that was a very good part. But apart from that and one or two terrible bits of writing, I haven't seen a good big part for years. And that doesn't surprise me. I'm too old! And in any case, if they want somebody who's older, then they can get somebody really good, like Gene Hackman or Donald Sutherland, you know.
AVC: Gene Hackman isn't acting much these days. He's semi-retired.
JC: Lucky old man. I mean, I don't like filming, essentially, because it does take your life over too much.
AVC: You turned down the role that eventually went to Bruce Willis in The Bonfire Of The Vanities.
JC: Oh my God, yes, you're absolutely right. I did.
NR: Beyond common sense and good judgment, what was the thinking behind that?
JC: I liked Brian De Palma's thrillers. I thought they were fantastic. But I'd never seen any sign of comedy in them. You might love those Bourne movies, but you wouldn't necessarily want to run off and do a comedy with their director. So I thought that was a bit risky. So I did turn that down. How'd you know that?
AVC: There's a website called notstarring.com where they list roles actors have passed on.
JC: How interesting. What I would like to have done was co-star with Steve Martin in Dirty Rotten Scoundrels. I was offered the Michael Caine role, but it came immediately after six weeks' publicity for Life Of Brian. [Since this was a 1988 movie, we think he means another movie, but we're not sure which one. —ed.] I was absolutely flattened. It was something extraordinary—I did 27 different cities to publicize Life Of Brian, and I thought, "I can't go straight into another major movie." Though it was directed by Frank Oz, who's one of my favorite people. I do regret that. That was a question of timing. I'm also sorry in a way that we didn't make the Don Quixote film that was on the cards, with Fred Schepisi, and Robin Williams doing Sancho Panza. But I think the script wasn't right.
AVC: Terry Gilliam also ran into a whole lot of trouble trying to make a Don Quixote movie. Was that entirely coincidental?
JC: Totally coincidental. Also, he wasn't really doing Quixote, he was doing some sort of take on it. He was coming at it from some angle that I never quite understood, and I don't think it's fully explained in the Lost In La Mancha documentary.
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