190. Terry Gilliam (filmmaker) - The impossible dream

190. Terry Gilliam (filmmaker) - The impossible dream

Author: Big Think / Panoply April 13, 2019 Duration: 51:18
Faith in anything is its own special form of madness. It’s a challenge to entropy, and entropy takes no challenge lightly. If there’s any better metaphor for this struggle than trying to make a big budget movie with even a shred of integrity, I haven’t found it. On the one hand, you’ve got this impossible dream. This faith in the beautiful thing that’s supposed to emerge at at the end of the process. On the other hand, the process is a hellish sausage-making machine of studio bosses, financing, and acts of god like four days of flash flooding in the middle of your big shoot. You might as well be Don Quixote, doing battle with a windmill. What kind of masochist would put themselves through that? My guest today, Terry Gilliam, is that very masochist. And we should be grateful, because his stomach for the fight has given us movies like THE FISHER KING, BRAZIL, 12 MONKEYS and MONTY PYTHON’s THE LIFE OF BRIAN. And now, almost 30 years after his first, biblically disastrous attempt to make it, THE MAN WHO KILLED DON QUIXOTE. Starring Adam Driver and Jonathan Pryce, the movie is as funny, thrilling, and unpretentiously deep as the best of Gilliam’s work. It’s also kind of like one of those Russian matryoshka dolls: a film inside a film inside a film, all of them metaphors for the holy folly of believing in anything at all. The Man Who Killed Don Quixote is out April 19th in select theaters and on demand video. Surprise conversation starters in this episode: Michelle Thaller on whether time is real or an illusion Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Imagine having just a few minutes with a brilliant thinker, but instead of asking them about their usual expertise, you steer the conversation somewhere entirely unexpected. That’s the core experience of Think Again-a Big Think Podcast. Host Jason Gots sits down with an extraordinary roster of guests-from Neil Gaiman and Margaret Atwood to Richard Dawkins and Bill Nye-and presents them with ideas and questions they aren’t prepared to discuss. The result is a series of spontaneous, revealing conversations that go far beyond typical interviews. You’ll hear authors, scientists, artists, and cultural icons like Alan Alda, Salman Rushdie, and George Takei thinking out loud, grappling with new concepts, and often surprising themselves. This podcast lives in the unscripted moments where curiosity meets expertise, covering a wide terrain of arts, culture, and societal questions. It’s about the joy of a mental detour, the kind that happens if you had ten minutes with Einstein and decided to talk about something other than physics. Each episode is an invitation to step off the well-worn path and discover what happens when great minds are asked to, well, think again.
Author: Language: English Episodes: 50

Think Again - a Big Think Podcast
Podcast Episodes
211. Etgar Keret (writer) – a tunnel dug under the prison floor [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 55:21
“A conversation is like a tunnel dug under the prison floor that you—patiently and painstakingly—scoop out with a spoon. It has one purpose: to get you away from where you are right now.” That is from the very, very weir…
210. one night in Istanbul, with chef Musa Dağdeviren [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 1:04:44
There’s a pattern that happens with any new thing. First it’s scary, then you settle in to a rhythm, then you hit your stride, then you get too attached to things being the way they are. For a while there I thought I cou…
209. a mixtape for 2019 [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 57:00
When I was a teenager and music was still on cassettes, a mixtape was an act of love. The selection and sequence of songs were a kind of message to the listener that left plenty of space for their own thoughts and feelin…
208. Antonio Damasio (biologist) – this incredibly rich machinery [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 40:07
Quick question. Answer without thinking too hard. Ready? Where is your mind? What is your mind? Ok, Raise your hand if you thought of your brain. If you did, you’re in good company. For centuries, Western science, cultur…