'They are so quick verbally'

Terry Gilliam has revealed how he still feels intimidated by the quick verbal wit of his Monty Python colleagues.

The director and animator also admitted he struggles to write dialogue – and poured scorn on his reputation as a creative auteur.

He was speaking at an event at London's South Bank Centre last night to launch his new book Gilliamesque: A Pre-Posthumous Memoir, where he told BBC arts editor Will Gompertz: 'Even now, the reason there are no other Pythons here is because I'm intimidated. They are so quick verbally, and I bang around.'

The 74-year-old admitted his relationship with his fellow Pythons 'started with difficulty' when he first collaborated with Eric Idle, Terry Jones, and Michael Palin on the children's TV show Do Not Adjust Your Set.

He recalled:'I arrived [from the States] in a sheepskin coat that I'd painted a sun on to. I was exotic, especially to Eric. Mike and Terry were huddled in the corner with their nasty rodental teeth…' Mike, Terry and I are now the closest in the group, but it started with difficulty.'

Gilliam pioneered his distinctive cut-out animation style when, on another show, We Have Ways of Making You Laugh, writer Dick Vosburgh was stuck for ideas of how to present a collection of DJ Jimmy Young's cheesy puns that he had compiled.

'I convinced him I was an animator,' Gilliam said, and given the time and budget constraints 'the only way I thought how I could do them was to do cut-outs. No one in England had seem this don before.'

Gilliam had previously met John Cleese in New York, when he recruited him for a 'fumetti' photo strip for a counterculture magazine he was working on, Help!

'I was on the lookout for cheap actors,' he said. 'We paid $15 a day. And John was in town with the Cambridge Footlights, I forget the name of the show. In his photo story he had a fixation on – and had sexual congress with – his daughter's Barbie doll, a blonde Barbie. Now I don't want to say anything about any John's four wives…'

Gilliam said that his outsider status with the Pythons was put to good use at the meetings where the team would read out their sketches in a bid to get them into the show. He called the sessions 'a political moment… John was very good at trying to strategise when best to pitch his scripts. But I was the one who laughed instinctively and loudly. And they thought "If Gillam found it funny, anyone would find it funny' – you didn't have to be educated.'

Gilliam writes more about his outsider status in his book, saying: 'There was no doubt in either my or their minds as to who was the barbarian at the gates and who were the superior beings. It was their use of language that gave them power over me, especially the ones from Cambridge.

'They had this really well-honed banter, which I was in awe of. It began with being at university together and by the time I came into their orbit, they'd had years of writing together in various different combinations to sharpen it up still further'

'Some of the violence in my Monty Python animations would come from my frustration at not being able to express myself as clearly as everyone else, and some of it evolved naturally from the limitations of the technique itself.'

During last night's event, Gilliam confessed of the Python shows: 'They were very uneven – there was a lot of crap in there, but there's enough that's good too. We were give the freedom to do seven episodes and if it worked well we might be allowed to make more.'

He says he fellow Pythons 'didn't understand what I did' – while he finds it difficult to do what they did.

Explaining why he called on Michael Palin to work on the script of Time Bandits, he said: 'I'm not a very good writer. I can come up with stories and characters but I can't write dialogue, so I always work with people who do.'

And he said collaboration had been at the heart of his film-making, ever since a prop master gave him advice on how to shoot a scene, so now he invites suggestions from anyone on the cast and crew, and filters out the best. 'People think I'm an auteur,' he joked. 'I'm not, I'm a filteur.'

In an entertaining show lasting almost two hours, Gilliam also spoke about his cheeky and very public battle with Universal chief Sid Sheinberg about getting Brazil released in the States; the trouble Hunter S Thompson caused on his one day filming a cameo on Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas; and his difficulties envisaging a possible replacement for John Hurt in his long-stalled pet project The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, after the actor was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and became uninsurable for the role.

He also described how having only radio as a link to the outside world a child was 'an important way of developing a sense of imagination' compared to today when 'there's so much available, it's very hard to focus' – and told of college pranks; including assembling a Model T Ford in the bedroom of one fellow student's room, leaving it there to greet him with its engine running when the victim returned from a weekend away.

• Gilliamesque: A Pre-Posthumous Memoir is out now, priced £30. Click here to order from Foyles.

Published: 8 Oct 2015