“For my stupid birthday I asked for only one thing: magic mushrooms,” Gilliam said of his one birthday wish, now pretty much impossible due to the pandemic. “I’ve never tried them. The idea was to load my whole family on a plane and go celebrate in the house we have in Umbria. At the moment we can’t, but I could fly all the way to Italy.” Gilliam also added that he would take a private plane “with the help of mushrooms.”
Gilliam also talked about his limited drug experience, and the fact that he was averse to acid even in Los Angeles in the 1960s “when practically everyone did it.” (Regardless, he seems to have recreated the experience of LSD well in “Fear and Loathing,” in which people turn into lizards and eels before a drugged-out Johnny Depp’s eyes.) “I smoked marijuana once in college and didn’t like it,” Gilliam said. “LSD terrified me. When I moved to London and occasionally had to fly to Hollywood for work, I came back with a ferocious jet lag. At parties, someone was offering cocaine, because it was the ’80s and coke was everywhere, and a couple of times I said yes. I was tired, I couldn’t stand. But the hangovers were horrible and so I said to myself: never again.” Gilliam, right now, doesn’t have a new project officially in the works, though back in July, he said he was working on fleshing out a Stanley Kubrick idea before lockdown hit. “There was a script and I had a cast, but the lockdown has ruined everything,” he said. IndieWire spoke to Gilliam at length last awards season about his much-beleaguered last film, “The Man Who Killed Don Quixote,” as well as his thoughts on Marvel movies and cancel culture. Check out that interview here. Sign Up: Stay on top of the latest breaking film and TV news! Sign up for our Email Newsletters here.
