Iain Banks

Since Python, Terry Gilliam has developed into one of the world's more adventurous and imagistically gifted film directors, producing, in films like Jabberwocky, Time Bandits, Brazil and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, a unique mixture of black humour, wild grotesquerie, cauterisingly memorable visions, and a sort of tarnished but still weirdly noble atmosphere of heroic moral sense. His films are infused with a phantasmagoria as rich, dense, and allegorical as a Bosch or a Brueghel; the screen bursts with Gilliam's love of the well-oiled wheels, cogs, springs and teeth of surreal machinery, clocks and toys.

Similarly, Gilliam's battles with hordes of film accountants and armies of studio heads take on a near-mythic quality often as epic and nightmarish as the films themselves.

Gilliam took out a full-page ad in Variety to save his cut of Brazil from US distributors. He threatened to burn the negative of Time Bandits when a cut of the rat-eating scene was suggested. And the much-publicised difficulties surrounding his last film, the lavish and ambitious Munchausen - shooting halted, budget over by at least £12 million, Gilliam threatened with dismissal - have only added to his controversial reputation.

Gilliam's new film, The Fisher King, contains some elements well known from his earlier works, but it might shock his more purist fans by its surface orthodoxy. Set in a Manhattan that appears familiar and surreal, workaday and mythic by turns, The Fisher King is essentially a story of two men, one suffering from trauma-induced madness, the other from a guilt-induced fall from dubious grace. It's also about their relationship with each other and with the women they are - or dream about being - involved with. The chance of a sort of collusive redemption for at least one of them is the engine of the film, while the fuel is provided by the acting of its four leads (Robin Williams, Jeff Bridges, Mercedes Ruehl and Amanda Plummer).

For someone who's taken on the baroque monster of Hollywood directly - and won - and been challenging it directly throughout his career, Gilliam comes over as surprisingly unhaunted and cheerful. His face is lived-in but fresh-looking, with an expression that slides easily into a wide grin. His voice is animated and versatile, and prone to gigglish outbursts that tell you that despite all the problems he's encountered, this is a man who still thinks that life is basically a hoot.

And for all the antipathy that exists between Gilliam and those in power in the film world, Gilliam actually grew up in Hollywood's backyard, moving to the San Fernando Valley, just north of Los Angeles, from Minneapolis when he was eleven years old. He studied in Los Angeles, moved to New York, where he worked as an illustrator for a number of magazines including Mad, and arrived in London in 1967. After a period spent writing and animating for the late Marty Feldman, Gilliam met up with a Python quintet fresh from the Cambridge Footlights.

He has lived in England ever since.

Picture, then, the 51-year-old director of these visionary films wearing a startlingly multi-coloured shirt, looking cool and comfortable in an anonymous boardroom in Soho, talking to a hirsute, mumbling, sporadically intelligible Scotsman.

IB: The Fisher King seems a considerably more orthodox movie than we are used to from you; there seems less of you in it.

TG: There is; because I didn't write it. It was written by a young New York screenwriter called Richard LaGravenese. After Munchausen I was knackered; I hated films, I felt burnt out. Then this script arrived. It had been around for a long time and nobody thought it would ever get made, but it really made me laugh. I liked the characters, I understood them all, and I just wanted to see if I could make a film without all my toys. It was more about the fact of seeing whether I could be a film director, really. Before, I wasn't a film director; I was this guy that made these things, from scratch. And it's actually been the most enjoyable film I've ever made. It was a breeze.  I suddenly realised how all these other directors have such an easy time.

IB: What about that sublime part - it illuminates the film - where everybody in Grand Central Station suddenly starts dancing?

TG: Ah, that's my bit. That wasn't in the script, but really it was an exercise to see how controlled I could be. And it's spoiled me forever now; I don't ever want to do those complicated films again. What is odd about the film is that there are familiar areas all the way through it, and yet they always twist; it never takes you where you think it's going.  Though it is more American in its sensibilities than any other film I've made.

IB: And it seems quite affectionate towards New York.

TG: It is. Brazil was about New York too, but it was sort of all my bad memories of living there. But somehow being back this time it felt vital as a city, and I suppose that came across in the film. Basically I was trying to turn it into a fairytale.

IB: Yes: Jack (Jeff Bridges) says at one point that there is no magic any more. And Parry (Robin Williams) seems to play a certain role I've seen in other - if you like - fairytale films by you: the children who've got the moral core while the adults around them - in Time Bandits, and Munchausen especially - rush around being crazy and adventurous, but rather irresponsible.

TG: Parry does have that; he's the fool, the innocent. He's pure because of his madness.

Indeed. And it's tempting to see Gilliam in a similar light; an extravagantly gifted, almost accidentally, vastly ambitious nutter careering around coaxing wonderful acts from those with talents on a par with his own. Quite apart from the fact you have to be pretty determined, persuasive, methodical and just plain smart to put movies together the way Gilliam has, he also possesses that air of affectionate but wary wit found in those who know it's the world that's off its head, not them. And laughing hard at its cruel idiocies is perhaps the best way of dealing with it. This, I'd contend, is proof not of madness but of a kind of broad-based, open-eyed sanity that shouts from all Gilliam's films.

Still, madness, not to mention ignorance, can work wonders. I mentioned my microscopically humble part in Holy Grail.

TG: I don't know how we made that film; it took a total of five weeks, cost... £200,000?…it's pretty amazing what you can do when you don't know better. We were all aspiring to mediocrity, but we were held back by lack of funds.

IB: I guess all the ex-Python people have been trying to get away from the programme for the rest of their creative lives.

TG: Well, the rest of my work is the great escape from Python. I found that Python became very limiting, because everything was about being funny. From the beginning, when I did Jabberwocky, I was trying to pull away from Python. But it was a rather perverse way of doing it; another medieval film, immediately after Holy Grail, with three Pythons in it, and a great amount of comedy. And I expected it not to be compared with Python!

IB: Brazil seemed like the turning point for you in getting away from Python. But the worth of the film was almost overshadowed by its history; the fights over the ending, and releasing it.

TG: It's calmed down over the years; the film has its own life now, but yes, all my films have had some strange battles associated with them; some more public than others... I don't know; it's probably me.  Certainly that's the one element that's consistent through all this. I end up having fights with people in authority: producers, studio heads, insurance people, completion guarantors - people I have a deep distaste for because I don't think they're in film for the right reasons.  I have a deep suspicion of them; they don't actually know anything about films, but they're in this position of power.

Gilliam's eyes light up; you sense he finds this both infuriating and fascinating. He doesn't in any way identify with Hollywood denizens, but in some weird way he understands them and all the glossily repellent charm of Tinselsuburb.

TG: There are moments when those in power do get excited, but they start pulling back from it almost immediately. The Fisher King was interesting because it came in during the changing of the guard, but it had Robin Williams attached to it, and you don't say "No" to a Robin Williams movie, not this year, next year, ever. Brazil got caught in a changing of the guard too, which hurt it, and Munchausen was begun under Puttnam, then he went and I was caught with another crowd in there, and it was even more bizarre because they were trying to sell the company to Sony. As an accounting exercise all the Puttnam films were written off. Munchausen wasn't alone in all this; we were just the most obvious film. I can't believe my strange sort of luck with these changing-of-the-guard films, but I think The Fisher King is going to be the happy one. It's proved to be a good experience.

Well, quite. And on we wittered in the Soho boardroom, exploring the whole rococo crimson edifice of it all; how to briefly and spookily become like the Hollywood accountants in order to make your films; how to become a studio head and sabotage your predecessor's films, your successor's films and - even more cunningly - your own; talking about Watchmen (Alan Moore's graphic novel, soon to be a movie), comic novelist Bill Sienkiewicz and American SF writer Philip K Dick.

There were many questions left to ask; could that have been a homage to Rafelson's King of Marvin Gardens at the beginning of The Fisher King? Just what was the deconstructed meta-linguistic significance of the line "We've got lumps of it round the back" in Life of Brian?  We may never know the answers.

Meanwhile, we are left with The Fisher King, wondering whether this is a Hollywood movie with flashes of Gilliam, or a Gilliam movie with the more eccentric edges knocked off.  And I still forgot to ask why we were all chanting "Betty Marsden" on that Scottish hillside seventeen years ago.