23 Thoughts on 12 Monkeys

23 Thoughts on 12 Monkeys

BY G.B. BAILEY

www.gbbaileyauthor.com

SPOILER ALERT This article discusses the surprise ending of the 1995 film 12 Monkeys.

The 1995 film 12 Monkeys is one of my all-time favorites. Better than any other movie, it holds the viewer in a state of ambiguity about whether Bruce Willis’s character, James Cole, is delusional or not. This movie had a huge influence on my novel, Never Wake a Serial Killer, as one of my original objectives was to write a story that maintained a similar level of ambiguity about the protagonist’s state.

12 Monkeys was released on December 29, 1995. In celebration of its 25th birthday, here are 23 observations from the DVD commentary track by the film’s director, Terry Gilliam, and its producer, Chuck Roven. It provides interesting background on some of the actors and great insight into the creative process.

ON THE AMIBIGUITY

• The film starts with a title card that says:

“…5 BILLION PEOPLE WILL DIE FROM A DEALY VIRUS IN 1997…

…THE SURVIVORS WILL ABANDON THE SURFACE OF THE PLANET…

…ONCE AGAIN THE ANIMALS WILL RULE THE WORLD…”

-Excerpts from interview with clinically diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic.

April 12, 1990 – Baltimore County Hospital.

Terry and Chuck give the background on the title card. They felt that viewers accepted the future scenes of the world as real but Terry Gilliam felt that the idea of ambiguity whether the future was real or was all in Cole’s mind was important and was being lost. Feedback from early screenings indicated that viewers struggled to get into the time and place of the futuristic underground world. But if they made it too clear for viewers to understand what was going in, then the ambiguity would be lost. So Terry came up with the idea of the title card and it was put on at the last minute.

• Terry talks about how he felt pressured to create a sub-textual romantic story-line between Bruce Willis and Madeline Stowe. Test audiences didn’t go for it. So they wanted to nix it. This involved not changing any of the film but more changing the music that seemed to force the romance. Ultimately this seemed to work as the ambiguous music with the existing footage gave the audience a more realistic sense of romance between the characters rather then feeling like it was being forced on them by the music.

Chuck, the producer, believes, “When we had music that was telling you how to feel, it was doing what no other part of the film was doing. No part of the film really gave you any kind of answers until the very end. And even in the ending of our film, there is a lot of ambiguity about what could or could not be going on.”

Terry picks up, “And what that does is though is that every member of the audience is having a slightly different experience. I think when you telegraph with music and everything, they are all having the same experience. This one, everybody is making their own choice of what is happening and deciding what is happening. And one of the enjoyable things about the film is after it’s all over, and people come out, they are all arguing about really what this meant and what happened there. To me, that is important. I love that.”

ON BRUCE WILLIS

• Terry says that Bruce “has no ego” and refers to his willingness to drool, to handle a spider, etc. Terry met Bruce originally for The Fisher King.

• In the scene where Bruce and Madeline go into the FAA store, Bruce pulls out a gun and ties up the kids with shrink wrap, Terry comments that Bruce had to leave for a few days to do re-shoots on Die Hard and he felt that Bruce had resumed the role of John McClain in this scene. Many parts had to be reshot.

ON THE OTHER ACTORS

• Brad Pitt was initially interested in playing Cole. It was felt that he was too young and the filmmakers thought an older Cole would be ideal in order to spread out the age from the older Cole to the young Cole so that the memory and dreams would be more unclear.

• Gilliam talks a couple of times about how he works with actors. He says that he tries to create a safe environment so that they become comfortable enough to take risks. He even comments that Bruce Willis for the first time in his career allows himself to really let go in a scene.

• Terry says he prefers to not do re-shoots because there is a certain intensity gained from the actors and the crew when they know that this is their only shot.

• Gilliam talks about his selection of Christopher Plummer for his part. He talks about wanting an actor “with some weight” which serves as a red herring: when the audience sees such a substantial actor in such a small part, they wonder if he is the villain. They psychologically wonder if the part has more weight in the story because of the actor’s weight.

• Terry Gilliam says that the part of the boy in the dream was down to two actors. He picked one with the better looking eyes as they would be prominently featured. His producer kept the other child on as an extra in case things didn’t work out. Sure enough, the boy with the big eyes didn’t work out and they were lucky to have the second place finisher around as a back-up.

ON THE VISUAL IMAGERY

• The plastic suite Cole wears when he goes to the surface of the future world was chosen to look like a condom. They felt that condoms presented imagery and themes consistent with what they were trying to achieve: infection, viruses, fear, defense against others and protection against the environment.

The condom-suit idea was collaborative. Terry tries to work against the tendency for departmentalization. Interaction among people leads to ideas. Terry says “Basically, I become a filter and I say “yes” and “no.” The good ideas go through and the bad ones I stop and in the end, I take credit for all of them” and then laughs.

• Terry makes references to the cages and says he wanted the people in cages to seem like animals being experimented on which is also present in the film. Terry says, “These things constantly are referring to other aspects of the film. Nothing sort of stands on its own. Everything is a reference to something else.”

• Gilliam says that the World War I scenes and the book signing were an homage to Kubrick’s Paths of Glory.

ON THE BUDGET

• Because of the budget, they were not able to make their own sets from scratch. So they found power stations that had a basic look that was similar to what they were trying to achieve.

• Gilliam says he instructs his crew to spend frugally at the start and to leave money in the budget for later growth in the film. He sees the film processes as an organic one: things are not perfectly planned out from the start, they develop and change as things unfold.

ON HIS FILM MAKING STYLE

• Gilliam talks about his use of the wide angle lens as due to his “greediness” to include more information in the scene. He notes that the wide angle lens is more difficult to work with because it is harder to hide the lights and the composition is more complicated. Yet, he says the wide angle lens allows for the inclusion of extraneous detail which forces the viewer’s eyes to work to see what is important and what is extraneous. This process of trying to determine what is really important to be what we experience in life. In particular, he likens the effect to be similar to the mental process of Cole who has come from a limited world to our world and he is must figure out what things are important and what are not.

• After sharing an anecdote about how a long scene was shot, then broken up and re-shot, but eventually the long scene was used in the final version. Gilliam attributes it to something in the tension in the longer version. He also says, “This keeps happening in films. There’s this tendency for people to sort of try to believe that the director, you know, knows what he is doing all the time and he’s the man in control. The reality is, you are constantly losing confidence in things, events take place that make you change things, you are not certain. In the editing, you have that moment of trying to pull it all back together and make sense of it. Sometimes you find you end up going back to the shot you were convinced, you certain—positive—it wouldn’t work. It’s the one that does it. It’s very hard. I don’t think there are any rules, when it comes to making films, on how you achieve things.”

• Chuck comments on how Terry had told him that the deeper he gets into making of the film, the more what the film is about begins to take place in the production experience of the film. Terry says, “The making becomes the same as the movie itself…what it is about.” He describes making this movie as “painful” and comments on how the experience was “kind of like a nightmare” as they kept getting “lost in time.” As this is discussed, Terry talks about his tendency to get emotionally caught up with the film’s protagonist. He elaborates that when he is the writer of the film, his tendency to identify with the lead is due to the autobiographical content of the story. “It’s like when you are doing a painting or writing a bit of music, you’ve got to become the thing. That’s the only way you really get it.”

• Terry says he is obsessed with detail, putting little things in to surprise the audience, things that someone will notice in years to come. He compares his movies to archeological digs and says he likes making movies that people will watch more than once and can find new things each time. He enjoys things that are ironic or quirky.

• Terry resents the director’s cut version films that get released later. “If you put your name on the film, you’re the director’s and that’s your cut.”

• Terry chooses the mansion location for its spiral staircase. He describes himself as “obsessed” with it. He says it was perfect because it was like a double-helix DNA strand and it fit with the nightmarish part of the scene where Bruce learns he is the one responsible for the virus. He also says that the way the spiral staircase fits with the 12 monkeys carousel in the credits, the way everything is turning in on itself in this scene, and the way it is reminiscent of Hitchcock’s Vertigo, which comes up later in the movie, is all going on in his subconscious mind and he is making these connections at an unknown level.

• When Bruce Willis comes back to the future and is celebrated by the scientists and given a pardon, this serves to raise the stakes for him. If he was still treated as a prisoner in the future, he would not be risking anything when he goes back to 1996 to be with Madeline Stowe. Now, however, he is gone from prisoner to hero and is giving that up to make the choice to follow his heart.

ON THE ROLE OF COINCIDENCE

• Terry and Chuck talk about the efforts they made to shoot the movie in Baltimore and Philadelphia. Terry wanted to maintain the integrity of the script and show respect for the writers who cast the story in these two cities. Yet, later he learned that the writers had no actual connection with the cities, had never even been to either city, and had no reason for setting the story there. In fact, the actual distances between the cities did not really fit in the story. Yet, these cities turned out to be the right places. They would not have been able to finance the film and create the look of the futuristic world without the power stations and they claim that these are the only two cities which have such power stations.

• The final parking lot shot is discussed. Terry says he tried to come up with as expensive a shot as he could—with two cranes and a large, full parking lot—in order to get the shot nixed because he didn’t want to do it. Yet, the producer gave the green light even after seeing the expensive bill and it turned out to work. Of the final shot, Terry says, “It’s wonderful and it worked but it was done for the wrong reasons. It was done out of an attempt to stop the shot.”

GB Bailey is the author of Never Wake A Serial Killer. For more information, visit: www.gbbaileyauthor.com