Terry Gilliam

Will Gompertz meets Terry Gilliam - eventually

The chorus master was easy to spot - he was attired in orange and pink ("why don't more people dress like this?" he asked me).

Video: Film-maker Terry Gilliam directs his first opera

Terry Gilliam, who directed Hollywood films such as Brazil and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, is directing his first opera.

The opera, Berlioz's The Damnation of Faust, performed by the English National Opera, opens at the Coliseum in London on Friday.

Audio: Terry Gilliam, the man behind Python's animation

Terry Gilliam, who was the man behind the animations in Monty Python - the giant feet and open heads - recalls his Flying Circus days which began in October 1969 when the programme first aired.

Terry Gilliam loses Don Quixote backers

Terry Gilliam has said his latest attempt to make a film about Don Quixote has stalled after his financial backers pulled out.

Forty years ago this week, Nixon was withdrawing troops from Vietnam, Je T'Aime topped the charts and Concorde broke the sound barrier. And then for something completely different: the first episode of Monty Python's Flying Circus aired on BBC One. We never looked at comedy - let alone Spam, parrots or lumberjacks - in the same way again. This new film celebrates the anarchic troupe's Ruby Jubilee and marks the first time the surviving Pythons have come together for a project since 1983's The Meaning of Life. It's archly subtitled The Lawyer's Cut and those Beeb briefs have been busy because it's slimmed down from a six-hour series screened in the US (as Terry Jones says, "a record so complete and faithful to the truth that I don't need to watch it") to just 60 minutes. Directed by Alan Parker, it features new interviews with Jones, John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Michael Palin and Eric Idle, as well as archive chat from the late Graham Chapman. All tell the story of how they met at Oxbridge and The Frost Report, created trailblazing television, made the transition into films and ultimately became a British institution. Which, like the Spanish Inquisition, nobody expected.